Future prospects in OA in Europe and the world, with respect to product diversification and markets

The presentation illustrates the status of organic agriculture and markets in Europe, indicating the growing role of supermarket chains, the motivations of consumers, the prospects for small and large producers, also within the framework of rural development (employement and added value

Organic olive oil and rural development: which services are required and who can supply them?

The paper deals with the different types of services which are required by organic producers of olive oil (training, advice, information, support for credit application, certification, marketing, etc., in the broader context of diversification of rural economies

Organic agriculture and olive oil production in the Southern Mediterranean Countries

This presentation illustrates data from several researches, about present situation and prospects for OA in the south of the Med, and then focuses on organic olive management, production and trends

Marketing issues in organic agriculture

The presentation deals with marketing channels and points of consumption, with data about Italy and Europe, to stimulate the debate about which marketing strategies could be more appropriate in a given environment

Strengthening Construction Management in the Rural Rehab Line of Business

The Five Key ObservationsObservation#1: Rural rehab success emanated from positive thinking and persistent implementationObservation #2: Almost every RHRO would benefit from a substantial increase in the per unit funding available, especially in light of the forthcoming HUD HOME requirement to establish written rehab standards in ten subcategories.Observation #3: A smartphone and tablet with 20 to 40 apps is the rehab specialist's Swiss Army knife. They are our, GPS, calculator, spec writer, office lifeline in case of danger, camera, clock, cost estimator calendar and a hundred other single-purpose but very important uses.Observation #4: NeighborWorks® Rural Initiative could provide a clearinghouse for success techniques targeted to rural rehab. Each month it might focus on a specific aspect of rehab management; inspection checklists in January, green specs in February, feasibility checklist in March, contractor qualification questionnaires in April and so on.Observation #5: Even with most components of in-house contractor success formula in place, per the Statistic Research Institute 53% of construction firms go out of business with in the first 4 years. It remains a very risky model that requires significant; funding, staff experience, administrative support and risk tolerance.Three Rehab Production Models And Their AlternativesThis middle section restates the introduction and methodology and offers a detailed review of the Traditional Rehab Specialist, Construction Management Of Subcontractor and the In-House General Contractor production models .for each model the article provides: definition and staffing pattern, design roles and tasks for each major player, benefits and challenges, alternative models and finally recommendations for successful implementationFocus TopicsDuring our interview process, three ideas surfaced that were best served with a mini discussion of the topic rather than being embedded in the already large middle section.The three topics are; software and technology, management of community relations – marketing and quality control, and budget solution

Cyber situational awareness: from geographical alerts to high-level management

This paper focuses on cyber situational awareness and describes a visual analytics solution for monitoring and putting in tight relation data from network level with the organization business. The goal of the proposed solution is to make different security profiles (network security officer, network security manager, and financial security manager) aware of the actual network state (e.g., risk and attack progress) and the impact it actually has on the business tasks, making clear the relationships that exist between the network level and the business level. The proposed solution is instantiated on the ACEA infrastructure, the Italian company that provides power and water purification services to cities in central Italy (millions of end users

Slow crack growth : models and experiments

The properties of slow crack growth in brittle materials are analyzed both theoretically and experimentally. We propose a model based on a thermally activated rupture process. Considering a 2D spring network submitted to an external load and to thermal noise, we show that a preexisting crack in the network may slowly grow because of stress fluctuations. An analytical solution is found for the evolution of the crack length as a function of time, the time to rupture and the statistics of the crack jumps. These theoretical predictions are verified by studying experimentally the subcritical growth of a single crack in thin sheets of paper. A good agreement between the theoretical predictions and the experimental results is found. In particular, our model suggests that the statistical stress fluctuations trigger rupture events at a nanometric scale corresponding to the diameter of cellulose microfibrils.Comment: to be published in EPJ (European Physical Journal

Vapor phase surface functionalization under ultra violet activation of parylene thin films grown by chemical vapor deposition

Various reactive gas phase treatments have been investigated as surface functionalization dry processes with the goal to improve the wettability of parylene C films, keeping good optical properties in the visible range. The films were grown on different substrates by chemical vapor deposition with thicknesses ranging from 300 to 1630 nm. The polymer surface was treated under ultra violet (UV) irradiation at 254 nm in reactive atmospheres including He, H2O, H2O2, O2 and ambient air. The UV/O2 treatment is the most efficient since the water contact angle decreases from 100° to 6° while the transmittance is maintained at 90% in the visible wavelengths. Furthermore it exhibits long life stability. The functionalization mechanism is discussed in relation with previous reports

An Optimisation-Driven Prediction Method for Automated Diagnosis and Prognosis

open access articleThis article presents a novel hybrid classification paradigm for medical diagnoses and prognoses prediction. The core mechanism of the proposed method relies on a centroid classification algorithm whose logic is exploited to formulate the classification task as a real-valued optimisation problem. A novel metaheuristic combining the algorithmic structure of Swarm Intelligence optimisers with the probabilistic search models of Estimation of Distribution Algorithms is designed to optimise such a problem, thus leading to high-accuracy predictions. This method is tested over 11 medical datasets and compared against 14 cherry-picked classification algorithms. Results show that the proposed approach is competitive and superior to the state-of-the-art on several occasions