Statistical Analysis of the Performance Data of Central and Eastern European Water Utilities - International Benchmarking Network for Water and Sanitation Utilities (IBNET)

A Világbank az 1990-es évek végén egy nagyszabású, nemzetközi teljesítmény-értékelési programot indított a víz- és szennyvíz-szolgáltató vállalatok körében. Az International Benchmarking Network for Water and Sanitation Utilities (IBNET) elnevezésű kezdeményezés keretében a szolgáltatók egy szabványosított kérdőíven információt adnak meg működésükről. Az egyedi, cégszintű adatokból egy adatbázis készül, mely lehetővé teszi a vállalatok működésének összehasonlító elemzését, amit teljesítmény-értékelésnek (benchmarking) is szokás nevezni. A programról és eddigi eredményeiről angol nyelvű információ a www.ib-net.org honlapon található. A felmérést eddig több, mint 70 országban végezték el, köztük Magyarországon is. Itthon a REKK kapott megbízást a feladat végrehajtására. Az adatgyűjtésen túl az adatbázisra alapozva Közép és Kelet-Európa országainak víziközmű cégeiről statisztikai elemzést végeztünk az alap adottságok és a költségek összefüggésének feltárására

Energy Efficiency Analysis of Water and Wastewater Utilities Based on the IBNET Database

A víz- és szennyvíz-szolgáltató vállalatok működési költségeinek jelentős hányadát teszi ki a villamosenergia-költség. Elemzésünk az IBNET (International Benchmarking Network for Water and Sanitation Utilities) adatbázisa alapján vizsgálja a közép-kelet-európai és a FÁK országokban működő víziközművek energiahatékonyságát. Többváltozós statisztikai elemzés segítségével tárjuk fel a különböző működési jellemzők energiahatékonyságot befolyásoló hatását. A Világbank által kezdeményezett IBNET programról bővebb információ a www.ib-net.org oldalon található, angol nyelven

The effect of the owner’ s personality on the behaviour of owner-dog dyads

We describe the relationships between dog owners’ personality attributes (assessed via questionnaire), their behaviours and the dog’s behaviours observed during brief dog-owner and dog-stranger interactions (N = 78). Interactions comprised the owner commanding the dog to sit, and the stranger showing a ball to the restrained dog and then hiding it. Owners scoring higher on neuroticism and openness used more commands (gestural and verbal) when asking the dog to sit, and the dogs of owners higher on neuroticism obeyed with a longer latency and spent more time looking at the stranger. More extraverted owners praised their dog more, and it took longer for their dogs to look at the stranger but they spent more time looking at the stranger, whereas dogs of more agreeable owners spent more time looking at the ball. Based on these results we conclude that some aspects of owners’ personality appear to be tied to their dog’s attentional concerns

Velünk játék a tanulás = Learning is A Game with Us

A cikk címe ("Velünk játék a tanulás") a 2015 szeptemberében zárult GEOMATECH projekt egyik képzésének a címe volt, azonban szellemiségében az egész projektet áthatotta ez a megközelítés. A GEOMATECH egy élmény alapú, interaktív, digitális tananyagokra épülő rendszer, mely lehetőséget ad a kísérletezésre, felfedeztető tanulásra, játékos megoldásokra. Kiemelt szerepet kap az élményközpontú megközelítés. A cikkben a GEOMATECH projekt célkitűzéseibe, annak megvalósításába, illetve az általam kidolgozott képzési rendszerbe nyerünk bepillantást, kiemelve a játékos elemeket

Voice-sensitive regions in the dog and human brain are revealed by comparative fMRI

During the approximately 18–32 thousand years of domestication [1], dogs and humans have shared a similar social environment [2]. Dog and human vocalizations are thus familiar and relevant to both species [3], although they belong to evolutionarily distant taxa, as their lineages split approximately 90–100 million years ago [4]. In this first comparative neuroimaging study of a nonprimate and a primate species, we made use of this special combination of shared environment and evolutionary distance. We presented dogs and humans with the same set of vocal and nonvocal stimuli to search for functionally analogous voice-sensitive cortical regions. We demonstrate that voice areas exist in dogs and that they show a similar pattern to anterior temporal voice areas in humans. Our findings also reveal that sensitivity to vocal emotional valence cues engages similarly located nonprimary auditory regions in dogs and humans. Although parallel evolution cannot be excluded, our findings suggest that voice areas may have a more ancient evolutionary origin than previously known

Differences in dogs’ event-related potentials in response to human and dog vocal stimuli; a non-invasive study

Recent advances in the field of canine neuro-cognition allow for the non-invasive research of brain mechanisms in family dogs. Considering the striking similarities between dog's and human (infant)'s socio-cognition at the behavioural level, both similarities and differences in neural background can be of particular relevance. The current study investigates brain responses of n = 17 family dogs to human and conspecific emotional vocalizations using a fully non-invasive event-related potential (ERP) paradigm. We found that similarly to humans, dogs show a differential ERP response depending on the species of the caller, demonstrated by a more positive ERP response to human vocalizations compared to dog vocalizations in a time window between 250 and 650 ms after stimulus onset. A later time window between 800 and 900 ms also revealed a valence-sensitive ERP response in interaction with the species of the caller. Our results are, to our knowledge, the first ERP evidence to show the species sensitivity of vocal neural processing in dogs along with indications of valence sensitive processes in later post-stimulus time periods.publishedVersio

Humans assess the emotional content of conspecific and dog vocalizations on similar acoustical bases

Compared to other mammals, humans are extremely vocal. Using language highly eases the expression of inner states, but there is an evolutionarily more conservative set of vocalizations, the non-verbal vocal bursts (or calls) that play an important role in human emotion expressions. We can draw homologies between some of these calls with mammalian vocalizations: e.g. based on its acoustics, the evolution of human laughter can be derived from pleasure vocalizations of the apes. Humans are also good at recognizing the emotional states of conspecifics based solely on these vocal bursts. Moreover, they can perform surprisingly well in assessing inner states of other species. Several studies showed, for example, that human listeners can attribute probable inner states to dog barks. Dogs are a good source of emotion expressing calls, due to their rich and variable repertoire and the fact that they live with humans for more than thousand years. It is not known, however, whether human listeners use the same acoustic cues to assess emotional content in conspecific and non-conspecific vocalizations. Here we aimed to compare how human listeners rated the emotional content of dog and human non-verbal vocalizations, and also to explore what acoustical parameters affected their responses. To test this, we compiled a pool of 100-100 various types of dog and human non-verbal vocalizations from diverse social contexts, and designed an online survey, in which every sound sample could be rated parallel along two dimensions: emotional valence (ranging from negative to positive) and emotional intensity (ranging from not aroused to maximally aroused). The sound samples were presented in random order for each subject (N=39). We calculated the mean of the valence and intensity scores for each sound sample. We also measured the average length of bursts within each sample (call length), the fundamental frequency (f0) and the harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR). Comparisons of these acoustic measures showed that on average, dog vocalizations had shorter call lengths and were noisier, but their overall f0 did not differ from the human vocalizations. Valence ratings did not differ across species, but human vocalizations were rated less intense. Importantly, linear regressions revealed similar relationships for human and dog vocalizations between acoustic features and emotional ratings. Call length had a significant effect on valence: both dog and human sounds with shorter call lengths were rated as more positive. F0, in contrast, influenced the intensity scores mainly: both higher pitched human and dog sounds were rated more intense. We also found some species-specific relationships between acoustics and perceptual scores: dog vocalizations with a shorter call length or with a higher harmonics-to-noise ratio were rated less intense. In sum, acoustical parameters affected humans’ emotional ratings independently from the source species of these vocal expressions, despite the acoustical and emotional differences between human and dog vocalizations. These findings suggest that humans utilize the same mental mechanisms for recognizing conspecific and heterospecific vocal emotions