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The HF-GKBA offers an approximate numerical procedure for propagating the two-time non-equilibrium Green's function(NEGF). Here we compare the HF-GKBA to exact results for a variety of systems with long and short-range interactions, different two-body interaction strengths and various non-equilibrium preparations. We find excellent agreement between the HF-GKBA and exact time evolution in models when more realistic long-range exponentially decaying interactions are considered. This agreement persists for long times and for intermediate to strong interaction strengths. In large systems, HF-GKBA becomes prohibitively expensive for long-time evolutions. For this reason, look at the use of dynamical mode decomposition(DMD) to reconstruct long-time NEGF trajectories from a sample of the initial trajectory. Using no more than 16\% of the total time evolution we reconstruct the total trajectory with high fidelity. Our results show the potential for DMD to be used in conjunction with HF-GKBA to calculate long time trajectories in large-scale systems.

Due to subjectivity in oral assessment, much concentration has been put on obtaining a satisfactory measure of consistency among raters. However, the process for obtaining more consistency might not result in valid decisions. One matter that is at the core of both reliability and validity in oral assessment is rater training. Recently, multifaceted Rasch measurement (MFRM) has been adopted to address the problem of rater bias and inconsistency in scoring; however, no research has incorporated the facets of test takers’ ability, raters’ severity, task difficulty, group expertise, scale criterion category, and test version together in a piece of research along with their two-sided impacts. Moreover, little research has investigated how long rater training effects last. Consequently, this study explored the influence of the training program and feedback by having 20 raters score the oral production produced by 300 test-takers in three phases. The results indicated that training can lead to more degrees of interrater reliability and diminished measures of severity/leniency, and biasedness. However, it will not lead the raters into total unanimity, except for making them more self-consistent. Even though rater training might result in higher internal consistency among raters, it cannot simply eradicate individual differences related to their characteristics. That is, experienced raters, due to their idiosyncratic characteristics, did not benefit as much as inexperienced ones. This study also showed that the outcome of training might not endure in long term after training; thus, it requires ongoing training throughout the rating period letting raters regain consistency.

Cet article est un des articles consacres au dialogue, sujet d’actualite au XXIeme siecle sans nier que le dialogue des cultures est un sujet aussi vieux que le monde. Le dialogue des cultures a toujours existe. Preuve en est l’existence de nos cultures actuelles. Aucune culture ne peut pretendre qu’elle s’est formee toute seule, « en autarcie ». Toute culture refusant le dialogue tout en pretendant de se suffire a elle-meme sous pretexte de vouloir preserver une certaine nation, une certaine race ou un certain parti, signe « son arret de mort » car le mouvement de l’histoire mondiale va tout simplement la negliger. C’est ce qui s’est passe avec la culture des nazis puis du marxisme-leninisme. L’importance que doit accorder chaque partenaire a sa propre identite est un axe important que nous avons egalement aborde dans cet article car sans identite, meme un simple dialogue entre deux ou plusieurs personnes devient impossible. L’impact de la mondialisation et de la communication produit une mutation des societes. Dans ce monde ou tout devient accessible par le biais magique d’Internet et ou la « culture de l’image » remplace la culture de la reflexion. Les jeunes generations risquent de perdre leurs reperes. Voila pourquoi il faut leur montrer l’importance de sauvegarder leur identite. Identifions enfin les ennemis du dialogue interculturel afin de les garder sous controle pour rendre praticable toute tentative de dialogue. Ils sont

Due to the continuously increasing demand for fresh water in the desert and remote areas, the development of non-conventional water resources in Egypt is essential. The most advanced and promising desalination system is the reverse osmosis (RO) system. In this paper, a 5000 m3/day RO desalination plant in the city of Nuweiba in Sinai, Egypt is taken as a case study. The measured data of the plant are recorded during 5 years of its normal operation. Also, experimental tests are carried out on site to investigate the influence of the main design and -operating parameters on the plant performance. The RO system is found to be sensitive to the variation in the feed water temperature, pressure and salinity. The used maintenance schedule is also seen to be suitable for the plant, since the change in plant performance during the operation period is not noticeable. On the other hand, a cost analysis is carried out on the RO plant components. The major factors affecting the cost of product water of this plant are the power consumption and capital cost. Surprisingly, the chemical treatment cost is one of the lowest in percentage. In this case, the power consumption cost is 35.1% and the capital cost is 33.6% and that of maintenance and repairs represent only 4.9% while the chemical treatment represents 10.6% of the total cost.

Trigona honey (TH) is well known for its therapeutic characteristics. To date, the study of Trigona honey as a prophylactic or immune booster prior to the bacterial infection of the invivo model is not well covered. This study aims to investigate anti-inflammatory and immune activities in Wistar rats infected with respiratory infection following with Trigona honey. 25 Wistar rats were assigned to possitive groups, negative control group, positive control group was fed TH (5 g / kg body weight) orally, the untreated group was infected with Staphylococcus aureus to induce respiratory infection, the treated group has been infected with S. aureus followed by treatment with TH at a dose of 1.5 ×108 CFU / mL and the preventive group ingested TH one week before S. aureus infection. Blood was obtained for biochemical analysis. Lung tissues have been collected for molecular examination. The results showed a significant decrease in serum levels of ALT, AST, urea and creatinine in the preventive and treated groups, serum IgG increased significantly (P

An individual’s consumption shapes their identity, it reflects their character and how they want to be seen (Shankar et al., 2001; Lin et al., 2017). Consumption is often influenced by changes in trends, i.e. sustainability and veganism (Pekkanen, 2021; Beck & Ladwig, 2021), public opinion, social movements (Sullivan, 2020), and even wars (Nelson, 2021). As a result of social movements like Black Lives Matter (BLM), societies consumption habits may alter towards new or different or a resistance towards certain consumption (Schaefer & Crane, 2005; Lee et al., 2009;2011). Consumption has changed dramatically over the past year (Jarry, 2021). This study sought to understand if and how consumption of white consumers has changed as a result of the BLM movement. This study builds upon the theory of White Fragility, which refers to the emotions and attitudes that white people experience when confronted with the topic of racism (DiAngelo, 2016). White Fragility is the state whereby even a small amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering several emotional or behavioural reactions that restore racial comfort (DiAngelo, 2018).

This study investigated the incongruence theory for selling products of FMCG brands online. The investigation was carried out on women aged 25-35 living in Auckland and Wellington. They were asked of their views to purchase Harraways Oats��� single sachets via three separate channels, namely, supermarket, online shop, and online subscription plan. The study employed an online in-depth interviewing methodology to collect response to questions pertaining to the channels, presented on Facebook posts to separate groups of women. This was done to preserve the data from contamination and any form of influence. The responses were separately analysed for topics using text mining. The analysis showed there was reasonable support for purchasing this product as an online subscription plan. As online shops and subscription plans are both incongruent to FMCG products, the results provided an early indication for suggesting the incongruence theory for selling FMCG brands online as a subscription plan.

The integration between marketing and technology has given brands unprecedented opportunities to reach accurate customer data and competence to change customers’ behaviour. Technology has generated a transformation within brands from traditional branding to algorithmic branding. However, brands have utilised customers data in non-cognitive programmatic targeting. This algorithmic persuasion may be effective in reaching the targeted audience. But it may encounter a moral conflict simultaneously, as it might not consider our social principles. Moral branding is a critical topic; particularly, with the increasing interest in commercial settings to teaching AI-machines human morals, e.g., autonomous vehicles and chatbots; however, it is understudied in the marketing literature. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the recent moral branding literature. Furthermore, applying human-like mind theory as initial framing to this paper explores a more comprehensive concept involving human morals, machine behaviour, and branding.

Through-out human history, people have a tendancy to rely on trustworthy sources in their interactions and when exchanging information such as scholars, government representatives or organisation icons. However, this is no longer the case as the digital era has emerged. Currently, individuals tend to virtually trust other people at the other end of their screens, the main commonality between them is that they use both the internet and certain social platforms (Keib et al., 2018). Social networking websites are hugely impacting individuals’ opinions according to the current stream of opinions and news.

The Gyrokinetic Toroidal Code at Princeton (GTC-P) is a highly scalable and portable particle-in-cell (PIC) code. It solves the 5D Vlasov-Poisson equation featuring efficient utilization of modern parallel computer architectures at the petascale and beyond. Motivated by the goal of developing a modern code capable of dealing with the physics challenge of increasing problem size with sufficient resolution, new thread-level optimizations have been introduced as well as a key additional domain decomposition. GTC-P's multiple levels of parallelism, including inter-node 2D domain decomposition and particle decomposition, as well as intra-node shared memory partition and vectorization have enabled pushing the scalability of the PIC method to extreme computational scales. In this paper, we describe the methods developed to build a highly parallelized PIC code across a broad range of supercomputer designs. This particularly includes implementations on heterogeneous systems using NVIDIA GPU accelerators and Intel Xeon Phi (MIC) co-processors and performance comparisons with state-of-the-art homogeneous HPC systems such as Blue Gene/Q. New discovery science capabilities in the magnetic fusion energy application domain are enabled, including investigations of Ion-Temperature-Gradient (ITG) driven turbulence simulations with unprecedented spatial resolution and long temporal duration. Performance studies with realistic fusion experimental parameters are carried out on multiple supercomputing systems spanning a wide range of cache capacities, cache-sharing configurations, memory bandwidth, interconnects and network topologies. These performance comparisons using a realistic discovery-science-capable domain application code provide valuable insights on optimization techniques across one of the broadest sets of current high-end computing platforms worldwide., Comment: submitted to International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications

This document has been superseded by: UPC++ Programmer’s Guide, v1.0-2018.9.0 (LBNL-2001180) https://escholarship.org/uc/item/02r988n6 UPC++ is a C++11 library that provides Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. It is designed for writing parallel programs that run efficiently and scale well on distributed-memory parallel computers. The PGAS model is single program, multiple-data (SPMD), with each separate thread of execution (referred to as a rank, a term borrowed from MPI) having access to local memory as it would in C++. However, PGAS also provides access to a global address space, which is allocated in shared segments that are distributed over the ranks. UPC++ provides numerous methods for accessing and using global memory. In UPC++, all operations that access remote memory are explicit, which encourages programmers to be aware of the cost of communication and data movement. Moreover, all remote-memory access operations are by default asynchronous, to enable programmers to write code that scales well even on hundreds of thousands of cores.

This paper presents a case study of the operation and maintenance of 2000 m 3 /d desalination plant erected in 1995. The results have been obtained over 6 years of operation. The plant consists of four units with a capacity 500 m 3 /d each. The results obtained are used to evaluate and develop the optimum plant operating pressure and temperature. The daily feed salinity, temperature and pressure were recorded, and finally the total cost for product of potable water was calculated. Recommendations were issued regarding the optimum operating conditions and the most pertinent operating problems. A technoeconomical analysis is undertaken in order to evaluate the cost of the water produced and technical reliability of the technology. The objective is to present field results of the reverse osmoses plant operation in order to evaluate the reliability of this technology in comparison with other technologies.

Chlorinated benzoic acids (CBA) have been intentionally released to the environment due to their use in agriculture as herbicides or pesticides, or unintentionally because they are common metabolites in the aerobic transformation of many chlorinated pollutants. The biodegradation of 3,4-dichlorobenzoic acid compound was investigated by using Corynebacterium jeikeium bacteria, which was isolated from Petra wastewater plant in Jordan. 3,4-dichlorobenzoic acid compound (3,4-DCBA) was used as a sole carbon and energy source in minimal salt media (MSM). 3,4-DCBA was the most degradable compound among the Chlorobenzoic acid compounds tested by this bacteria. Different conditions such as substrate concentration, temperature, pH, agitation rate, carbon starvation and carbon adaptation were used to obtain optimal Biodegradation. The optimal conditions for the biodegradation were 3mM as substrate concentration and the culture conditions were also showed a significant impact on the ability of these cells to remove 3,4-DCBA. The optimum solution, temperature and agitation rate were 7.5, 37 °C and 150 rpm, respectively. Adaptation of the cells to 3,4-DCBA for 24 hr and 48 hr and cells starvation for 24 hr and 48 hr increased the initial degradation rate. The degradation ability was monitored through disappearance of the substrate from the medium and the measuring the accompanying chloride release. Corynebacterium jeikeium dioxygenases were physiologically induced by 3,4-DCBA compound. They were analyzed for both ortho or meta ring-cleavage of this aromatic compound. Only 1,2-dioxygenase activity was detected which mean that the cleavage is through the ortho pathway. This microorganism can be a valuable and promising candidate for use in the biotreatment of wastewater samples contaminated with 3,4-DCBA.

The development of non-conventional water resources in Egypt is a must in order to respond to the continuously increasing demand. The present paper presents the results of an investigation undertaken in order to evaluate technically and economically the installed desalination units in Sinai. The available water resources were evaluated. Forecast study was undertaken in order to evaluate the expected shortage. The future need for desalination units was identified. The main objective of this work is to identify the potential sites for desalination project implementation.

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) are a fast growing technology that many governments and automobile manufacturers are investing in to provide not only safer and more secure roads, but also informational and entertainment-based applications for drivers. The applications developed for VANETs can be classified into multiple categories (safety, informational, entertainment). Most VANET applications, regardless of their category, depend on having certain vehicular data(vehicular speed, X position and Y position) available. Although these applications appear to use the same vehicular data, the characteristics of this data (i.e., amount, accuracy, and update rate) will vary based on the application category. For example, safety applications need an accurate version of the vehicular datawith high frequency, but over short distances. Informational applications relax the data frequency constraint as they need the vehicular data to be reasonably accurate with less frequency, but over longer distances. If each of these applications shares the vehicular data with only its peers using its own mechanism, this behavior will not only introduce redundant functionalities (sending, receiving, processing, etc.) for handling the same data, but also wastefully consume the bandwidth by broadcasting the same data multiple times. Despite the differences in the data characteristics needed by each application, this data can be still shared. Vehicular networks introduce the potential for many co-existing applications. If we do not address the problem of data redundancy early, it may hinder the deployment and usefulness of many of these applications. Therefore, we developed a framework, cluster-based accurate syntactic compression of aggregated data in VANETs (CASCADE), for efficiently aggregating and disseminating commonly-used vehicular data. CASCADE is architccted as a layer that provides applications with a customized version of the vehicular data, based on parameters that each application registers with CASCADE. Additionally, the framework performs the common data handling functionalities (sending, receiving, aggregating, etc.) needed by the applications. This dissertation makes the following contributions: (1) a lossless data compression technique based on differential coding that is tailored for the characteristics of vehicular data; (2) a syntactic data aggregation mechanism that can represent the vehicular data in a 1.5 km area in one IEEE 802.11 frame; (3) a light-weight position verification technique that quickly detects false data with very low false positives; (4) a probabilistic data dissemination technique that alleviates the spatial broadcast storm problem and effectively uses the bandwidth to disseminate data to distant areas in a short amount of time inaddition to having less redundancy and more coverage than other techniques. (5) a mechanism for recovering from the communication discontinuity problem inshort time based on the traffic density in the opposite direction; (6) an investigation of the possible data structures for representing the vehicular data in a searchable format; (7) a parametric mechanism for matching the vehicular data and providing a customized version of the data that satisfies certain characteristics based on the parameter value. CASCADE through its four major components, local view, extended view, data security and data dissemination, provides an efficient solution for the problem of scalability for VANET applications.