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Renewing climate planning locally to attend the 11th Sustainable development goal in the tropics
No full textIn the last seven years, tropical cities with a climate plan have tripled compared to the previous seven years. According to the 11th United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal, climate planning should significantly increase by 2030. The Sendai framework for disaster risk reduction (2015) and the New urban agenda signed in Quito (2016) indicate how to achieve this goal through analysis, categories of plans and specific measures. This chapter identifies the main obstacles to the significant increase in tropical human settlements with a climate plan and the possible solutions. First of all, the distribution and trend at 2030 of tropical human settlements are ascertained. Then local access to information on damage, hazard, exposure, vulnerability and risk, and the consideration of these aspects in the national guides to local climate planning are verified. Lastly, the categories of plans and climate measures recommended by the United Nations are compared with those that are most common today, using a database of 401 climate plans for 338 tropical cities relating to 41 countries. The chapter highlights the fact that the prescription for treating tropical cities affected by climate change has been prepared without an accurate diagnosis. Significantly increasing climate planning must consider that small-medium human settlements in the Tropics will prevail at least until 2030. And most effort will be required from Developing and Least Developed Countries. The recommendations of the United Nations concerning the preliminary analyses ignore the fact that local authorities usually do not have access to the necessary information
Tracking climate change vulnerability at municipal level in rural Haiti using open data
No full textIn least developed tropical countries, vulnerability to climate change (CC) at local scale follows an indicator-based approach and uses information gathered mainly through household surveys or focus groups. Conceived in this way, the vulnerability assessment is rarely repeatable in time, cannot be compared with those carried out in other contexts and usually has low spatial coverage. The growing availability of open source information at municipal level, routinely col-lected, now allows us to switch to vulnerability tracking (continuous, low cost, consistent with global monitoring systems). The aim of this chapter is to propose and verify the applicability of a VICC-Vulnerability Index to Climate Change on a municipal scale for Haiti. The chapter identifies open source information on na-tional, departmental and municipal scale, selects the information on a municipal scale on the basis of quality, identifies the indicators, evaluates the robustness of the index and measures it. The index consists of 10 indicators created using infor-mation relating to monthly precipitations, population density, flood prone areas, crop deficit, farmers for self-consumption, rural accessibility, local plans for CC adaptation, irrigated agriculture and cholera incidence. This information is gath-ered for the 125 mainly rural municipalities of Haiti. The description and discus-sion of the results in followed by suggestions to improve the index aimed at do-nors, local authorities and users
Sensing soil moisture and vegetation using GNSS-R polarimetric measurement
No full textGNSS-Reflectometry is an efficient tool for remote sensing and plays a key role in several applications. The estimation of soil moisture and vegetation in the land field is attracting widespread interest in hydrology, climatology and carbon cycles. In order to investigate the scattering polarization properties from different types of surface environments, an airborne measurement was performed, equipped with a new 4-channel prototype for collecting the direct, reflected left-hand circular polarization (LHCP) and right-hand circular polarization (RHCP) signals. Both the reflected LHCP and RHCP signals were acquired at the same time by a dual polarization antenna. A data averaging procedure was used to reduce the incoherent part of the received power and two reflected signals were normalized by direct signals obtained from each front-end (FE). Then three polarimetric observables were used to analyze vegetation biomass and soil moisture fluctuations. It was concluded that the polarimetric ratio (PR) is sensitive to soil moisture content (SMC) and considerably independent of roughness and vegetation biomass. The trunk component is confirmed to be the most important factor affecting the amplitude of scattering polarizations. Furthermore, the measurement results showed that the PR variation between different elevation angles was affected by roughness and biomass. The PR variation in forests with big biomass shows the least amount of changes when compared to other geographical environments. The results show another possibility of further geophysical parameter evaluations employing polarimetric applications in GNSS-R
ISO 9001 certification and corporate performance of Italian companies
No full textPurpose - The purpose of this paper is to verify a possible relationship between quality management system certification according to ISO 9001 standard and risk of failure of Italian companies. Design/methodology/approach - A synthetic index which summarize the most crucial economic/financial aspects of the studied companies is assumed as the response variable of a statistical model for studying the effects of four specific factors: certification, company size, regional development and manufacturing sub-sector. The analysis is conducted on a sample of Italian companies belonging to different manufacturing sub-sectors. The used data are obtained from the database Aida® by Bureau van Dijk and from the database of the Italian accreditation body Accredia. The study is based on analysis of variance (ANOVA) and contingency tables. Findings - Preliminary results of ANOVA show that only company size, regional development and manufacturing sub-sector can be considered fully significant. Furthermore, the major conclusion from the analysis of contingency tables is that ISO 9001 certification is connected to the legal status (active, not active) of a company only for a portion for the studied manufacturing sub-sectors. Hence, the scenario is quite variegated and a significant positive interaction between certification and corporate performance is not always confirmed. Research limitations/implications - Although the research shows some interesting results, it is liable to extensions and improvements. In particular, at the current exploratory level, it is limited to a specific period of time and considers only the Italian sector, but it could be extended to a wider number of years and to European and international level. Practical implications - The study opens a way for a number of important questions about the meaning, usefulness and effectiveness of ISO 9001 certification. In particular, it may be time to ask whether the paradigm of certification actually needs a radical rethink. Originality/value - This work represents a first exploratory attempt to correlate the risk of failure with the achievement of ISO 9001 certification. There are several similar works in literature which, however, focus mainly on sectorial aspects of the corporate background
In vitro biocompatibility of a ferrimagnetic glass-ceramic for hyperthermia application
No full textFerrimagnetic glass-ceramics containing magnetite crystals were developed for hyperthermia applications of solid neoplastic tissue. The present work is focused on in vitro evaluation of the biocompatibility of these materials, before and after soaking in a simulated body fluid (SBF). X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, atomic absorption spectrophotometry, X-ray photoelectron spectrometry and pH measurements were employed in glass-ceramic characterisation. The free-radical mediated reactivity of the glass-ceramic was evaluated by Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) spin trapping. Cell adhesion and proliferation tests were carried out by using 3T3 murine fibroblasts. Cytotoxicity was performed by qualitative evaluation of human bone osteosarcoma cells U2OS cell line. The results show that almost two times more 3T3 cells proliferated on the samples pre-treated in SBF, compared with the untreated specimens. Moreover a decrease of confluence was observed at 48 and 72 h for U2OS cells exposed to the untreated glass-ceramic, while the powder suspensions of glass-ceramic pre-treated in SBF did not influence the cell morphology up to 72 h of exposition. The untreated glass-ceramic exhibited Fenton-like reactivity, as well as reactivity towards formate molecule. After pre-treatment with SBF the reactivity towards formate was completely suppressed. The concentration of iron released into the SBF solution was below 0.1 ppm at 37 °C, during one month of soaking. The different in vitro behaviour of the samples before and after SBF treatment has been correlated to the bioactive glass-ceramic surface modifications as detected by morphological, structural and compositional analyse
A planar leaky-wave antenna offering well designed leakage on the 2D aperture using printed width modulated microstrip lines
No full textA novel planar leaky-wave antenna (LWA) based on quasi-periodic width-modulated printed strips is investigated. Each single strip is obtained by a repetition of several unit cells with different lengths and modulations in order to keep the desired value of the phase constant when changing the attenuation along the line. The overall antenna surface consists of an arrangement of 9 such transversely periodic printed strips. Therefore, the radiated field can be fully controlled geometrically. This results in backward radiation by the n = − 1 spatial harmonic; i.e., the pointing angle θP = −19° in the E⊘(φ = 0°) plane is realized by a proper design of the periodic sequence of the proposed array of unit cells enabling aperture control. A numerical example with an incident surface-wave excitation demonstrates the validity of the method
Advanced Programming and Problem-Solving Strategies in C. Part IV: Exam-Based Problems
No full textPrevious parts provide a comprehensive introduction to the C language syntax, and the modern study of computer algorithms and data structures. Following those parts, this book presents many solutions to problem-based examinations using the C language. Problems are extracted from examination tests of the "Algorithms and Programming" course delivered within the Computer Engineering Bachelor-level degree at Politecnico di Torino. The text is intended primarily for use in undergraduate or graduate courses in algorithms and data structures. The content of the previous parts should be considered as prerequisites for reading this book. We have attempted to make every problem accessible and interesting. We also provide careful explanations of the main mathematical and algorithmic issues. The volume is divided in two chapters. The first one includes only completely solved examination-based problems. Those correspond to 16 examination tests, i.e., 16 standard and 16 simplified examination tests, for a total of 64 completely solved exercises. The second chapter includes only suggested problems, taken from 10 mock examination-based tests, again each one including a standard and a simplified section, for a total of 40 suggested problems. As in the examination of "Algorithms and programming", those exercises mainly include the following topics: Sorting, static and dynamic data structures, recursion, abstract objects, collections of objects and abstract data types (ADTs), trees, symbol tables (such as Binary Search Trees, BSTs, and Hash Tables), and graphs. Simplified exercises target the guided development of the solution to a problem, with only a small emphasis on design and problem-solving skills and more emphasis on the ability to use advanced C features (pointers, dynamic allocation, recursion) and on the knowledge of basic data structures and algorithms. For those simplified problems, only the code required by the examination specification is reported in the text, i.e., clients, data definitions and data initialization are often not reported in the book for the sake of space. Standard exercises target the design and development of a program in C to solve a problem, the main emphasis being on the algorithm and data-structure adopted, and on problem-solving and design skills. Exercise and solution style follow the ones introduced in previous volumes by the same author. C syntax is somehow restricted to the minimum set of constructs, avoiding useless or redundant ones. Solution design is maintained as simple as possible, keeping in mind asymptotic time and memory costs. Each solution can be mono or multi-file. In this last case, book sub-titles specify the file name to correctly follow the inclusion of header files and type definitions. Solutions are usually introduced by short descriptions, illustrating the main philosophy and core ideas behind them. Simplified specifications (but sometimes even standard ones) may be followed by more than one solution, illustrating the main logic possibilities to reach the same final target. The book is also covered by online material, as all source codes are available on the editor web page. We would sincerely appreciate any comments, criticisms, corrections and suggestions for improving the text. Please address all correspondence to: [email protected] or visits the following web page: http://fmgroup.polito.it/quer
Assessment of the Theoretical Net Relief Drilling Rate for Conductor Pipes
No full textThe following paper deals with the prediction of the theoretical net drilling time for a conductor pipe (CP) of offshore platforms when it plugs. The CP is driven to prevent the looser surface layer from caving in and obstructing the wellbore, because the shallow section of most wells on- and offshore is drilled in unconsolidated sediment. Due to the small CP diameter, the CP plugs very often. Normally the material is drilled out by using jetting, normal drill rigs and sometimes jack-up rigs. As offshore operations time is very important, this paper tries to assess the theoretical net time needed to excavate within the CP as a relief drilling operation, by means of Nishimatsu and Evans cutting theories. The results are compared with publicly available TBM excavation rates and then theoretical drilling rates for different unconfined compressive strength values for CP diameters of 700, 900 and 1000 mm are suggested. The results are considered for drag bits, however, they are only theoretical assumptions and cannot be applied for commercial projects with the same geotechnical properties