Amadeus (Spain)

BackgroundClimate vulnerability in sub-Saharan Africa, including Nigeria, has heightened concern about household energy transitions and associated health and economic impacts. Despite clean fuel initiatives, uncertainty remains regarding household expenditure patterns, health expenditures, and socioeconomic drivers of adoption.ObjectivesTo examine (1) household cooking-energy and respiratory healthcare expenditures, (2) descriptive expenditure ratios comparing energy costs with respiratory healthcare spending including benefits of transitioning to cleaner energy solutions, and (3) the socioeconomic determinants that influence households’ willingness to transition to cleaner cooking practices.MethodsA cross-sectional household survey was conducted in Alimosho (Lagos State) and Ado-Odo Ota (Ogun State) in southwest Nigeria. Using a multistage cluster sampling approach, 292 respondents from 200 households were surveyed on cooking-energy expenditures, respiratory healthcare costs, and willingness to adopt clean fuels. Expenditure patterns were compared descriptively, and a model-based cost-utility analysis was performed to estimate the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio in US dollars per disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) averted. A multivariable logistic regression model was used to examine socioeconomic predictors of willingness to adopt clean cooking.ResultsClean-fuel (liquefied petroleum gas or electricity) households reported higher annual cooking-energy expenditures than polluting-fuel households (US25.08vsUS16.27), as well as higher respiratory healthcare expenditures (US112.50vsUS50.64). The healthcare-to-energy expenditure ratio was also higher among clean-fuel users (4.48 vs 3.11). In adjusted analyses, tertiary education was associated with higher willingness to adopt clean cooking, while larger household size and urban residence were associated with lower willingness. In the model-based economic evaluation over a 1-year horizon, clean cooking was cost-saving (dominant) across plausible DALY-averted scenarios.ConclusionsExpenditure differences by fuel type likely reflect underlying socioeconomic conditions and variations in healthcare access, rather than causal effects of fuel choice. The model-based cost-utility analysis suggests that clean cooking could be cost-saving or highly cost-effective under plausible assumptions. Policies that address affordability and supply constraints, alongside stronger longitudinal evidence, are needed to support equitable and sustained clean-cooking transitions in Nigeria and across sub-Saharan Africa.

Oil palm fibres have contributed to the economy by providing bioenergy, sugars, and reinforcement to other building materials. Research and development have introduced new technology to improve the durability and aesthetics of buildings and other infrastructures. Using plaster of Paris (POP) in buildings has generated health concerns; hence, reinforcement has been made possible by adding oil palm mesocarp fibre (OPMF). The reinforcement of POP has improved the density, tensile strength, specific heat capacity, thermal conductivity, and water absorption of the POP. The frequent use of OPMF is unsafe, considering the generation of greenhouse gases, foul odour, and environmental degradation it causes. The OPMF and POP composite could exert strong deleterious environmental and health effects. The OPMF effluent pollutes the environment by eutrophication and the release of acidic gases. In this review, we have suggested measures such as the conversion of the OPMF to sustainable products. Conversion of the OPMF into other valuable products, such as manure and antibiotics, and proper education of individuals on the health implications of OPMF exposure will assist in ameliorating the challenges. The implementation of the safety measures will reduce the effects experienced by users, oil millers, and processors. It will provide a long-term plan and protect our health and the environment.

Residential IP Proxy (RESIP) providers represent a growing threat when used for web scraping and other malicious activities. RESIPs enable their customers to hide behind a vast network of residential IP addresses to perpetrate their actions. This helps the customers to evade detection. Thanks to two new large datasets of RESIP connections, we reveal new insights into RESIP inner functioning and modus operandi. We present the similarities and differences of the ecosystems associated with four RESIP providers (geographic distribution, types, management and amount of machines used). Moreover, we display how two of the providers have striking similarities and we propose a specific detection method to identify them. Furthermore, we show how to build a list of suspicious /24 blocks of IP addresses and use it to mitigate the actions of malicious parties behind RESIPs.

Customers have become accustomed to a highly streamlined and personalized experience when shopping online. While tech giants such as Apple, Amazon, and Netflix are experts in using customer information and shopping context to deliver relevant offers, airlines are falling behind in this regard with their static content and one-size-fits-all retailing approach. To meet the growing expectations of their customers, the airline industry has expressed a vision for dynamic offer creation, which will allow airlines to dynamically bundle and price a set of offers that is customized to the context of the shopping request. Realizing this vision requires significant advancements in both distribution and science. On the distribution side, these advancements will come with the adoption of the New Distribution Capability. On the science side, which is the focus of this paper, little progress has been made despite years of research. In particular, airlines still lack a tractable scientific model to dynamically create and price offer sets at scale. In this paper, we present a novel approach to solve the airline dynamic offer creation problem using a Markov chain choice model. Our model displays attractive qualitative properties—the resulting offers and prices are chosen in such a way as to discourage purchases of unprofitable offers and nudge customers towards more profitable ones. Our model naturally proposes offers that are relevant to the customer, as including irrelevant offers in the offer set leads to a reduction in revenue and ancillary purchase rates. In a simulation study with two customer segments, we find that our model significantly increases ancillary revenue over a naïve, unsegmented pricing model that mimics current state-of-the-art practice. While our studies are conducted under several idealized assumptions, they demonstrate a substantial revenue potential from dynamic offer creation in both unsegmented and segmented applications.

Amandus Polanus from Opava, later professor of theology at the University of Basel, visited Prague several times. In his diary, preserved in the University Library in Basel, he describes his visit to Prague in August 1591 in considerable detail. The diary entry informs us that Polanus stayed at Prague Castle at the inn of Hans Turek. He had a thorough tour of the castle with all its buildings and gardens, and he even had the opportunity to see Emperor Rudolf II coming out of the cathedral. Polanus also paid attention to the two royal game reserves, Stromovka and Hvězda. His descriptions of the Imperial Mill, which was being built at the time, and its surroundings are very useful for art-history research.

Para a coerente compreensão do problema é preciso entender as diferenças normativas na regulamentação das telecomunicações, das redes e da internet no Brasil. Necessária a diferenciação entre rede e internet. Aos olhos do leigo, a grande maioria dos usuários, a web é a parte que se acessa para os conteúdos veiculados na internet. O desconhecimento da área digital leva os juristas a apoiar a elaboração de novas leis. Ocorre que os algoritmos permitem que os sistemas cada vez mais aumentem em complexidade. É possível modelar uma arquitetura impulsionada pelo Estado e pelo mercado no sentido de uma regulamentação eficaz. Há de se adotar cautela ante a possibilidade de ameaças às liberdades.

This is the preprint version of our work: "Properties of Nanocrystalline Silicon Probed by Optomechanics"

This article describes a project that seeks to generate innovative ideas about the future of travel. It aims to present key elements of an interview process that seeks to anticipate future needs. This method is based on the confrontation of interviewers with a description of human activities before, during and after the trips. Applied to 14 experts, this ideation interview counted 106 new ideas. 33 were selected by the company, 6 scenarios for future use were written and tested on target users. Finally, on a theoretical point of view, the notion of prospective expertise is discussed.

portuguesRousseau nunca aceitou a sociedade do seu tempo, e um dos motivos e precisamente o fato dela ser, pelo menos para ele, uma sociedade sem liberdade e sem a igualdade entre seus membros, pois seu fundamento encontra-se alicercado em um pacto de submissao e nao de associacao. Para Rousseau, portanto, e necessario pensar uma nova sociedade formada atraves de um verdadeiro pacto que preserve a liberdade dos seus associados. O objetivo deste artigo e apresentar, analisar e discutir essa nova sociedade como imaginada por Rousseau. EnglishRousseau never accepted the society of his time, and one of the reasons is precisely the fact that she's, at least to him, a society without freedom and without equality between their members, because its Foundation is based on a Pact of submission, not Association. For Rousseau, therefore, it is necessary to think about a new company formed through a real pact to preserve the freedom of its members. The purpose of this article is to present, analyze and discuss this new society as imagined by Rousseau.

Business rule management is the task of storing and maintaining company-specific decision rules and business logic that is queried frequently by application users. These rules can impede efficient query processing when they require the business rule engine to resolve semantic hierarchies. To address this problem, this work discusses hierarchical indexes that are performance and storage-conscious. In the first part of this work, we develop a tree-based hierarchical structure that represents client-defined semantic hierarchies as well as two variants of this structure that improve performance and main memory allocation. The second part of our work focuses on selecting the top rules out of those retrieved from the index. We formally define a priority score-based decision scheme that allows for a conflict-free rule system and efficient rule ranking. Additionally, we introduce a weight-based lazy merging technique for rule selection. All of these techniques are evaluated with real world and synthetic data sets.