Centralized Processing Research Articles

Enabling circular economy by N-recovery: Electrocatalytic reduction of nitrate with cobalt hydroxide nanocomposites on copper foam treating low conductivity groundwater effluents

Fertilizers play a vital role in the food-energy-water nexus. The traditional method of artificial nitrogen fixation to produce ammonia is a high-energy intensive centralized process that has caused an imbalance of the N-cycle due to the release of N-species to water. Electrocatalytic nitrate reduction (ENR) to ammonia is a promising N-resource recovery alternative that can enable the circular reuse of ammonia in decentralized settings. However, the primary challenge is identifying selective and affordable electrocatalysts. Identifying electrodes that rely on something other than platinum-group metals is required to surpass barriers associated with using expensive and endangered elements. In this study, an earth-abundant bimetallic catalyst, Cu/Co(OH)x, prepared and optimized by electrodeposition, demonstrates superior ammonia production. Under environmentally relevant conditions of 30 mg NO3−-N L−1, Cu/Co(OH)x showed higher ammonia production than pristine Cu foam with 0.7 and 0.3 mmol NH3 gcat−1 h−1, respectively. The experimental evaluation demonstrated direct reduction and catalytic hydrogenation mechanisms in Cu/Co(OH)x sites. Leaching analyses suggest that Cu/Co(OH)x has outstanding stability with negligible metal concentration below the maximum contaminant level for both Cu and Co. These results provide a framework for using earth-abundant materials in ENR with comparable efficiency and energy consumption to platinum-group materials.

Practical issues in pragmatic trials: the implementation of the Diuretic Comparison Project.

The US Department of Veterans Affairs Point of Care Clinical Trial Program conducts studies that utilize informatics infrastructure to integrate clinical trial protocols into routine care delivery. The Diuretic Comparison Project compared hydrochlorothiazide to chlorthalidone in reduction of major cardiovascular events in subjects with hypertension. Here we describe the cultural, technical, regulatory, and logistical challenges and solutions that enabled successful implementation of this large pragmatic comparative effectiveness Point of Care clinical trial. Patients were recruited from 72 Veterans Affairs Healthcare Systems using centralized processes for subject identification, obtaining informed consent, data collection, safety monitoring, site communication, and endpoint identification with minimal perturbation of the local clinical care ecosystem. Patients continued to be managed exclusively by their clinical care providers without protocol specified study visits, treatment recommendations, or data collection extraneous to routine care. Centralized study processes were operationalized through the application layer of the electronic health record via a data coordinating center staffed by clinical nurses, data scientists, and statisticians without site-based research coordinators. Study data was collected from the Veterans Affairs electronic health record supplemented by Medicare and National Death Index data. The study exceeded its enrolled goal (13,523 subjects) and followed subjects for the 5-year study duration. The key determinant of program success was collaboration between researchers, regulators, clinicians, and administrative staff at the site level to customize study procedures to align with local clinical practice. This flexibility was enabled by designation of the study as minimal risk and determination that clinical care providers were not engaged in research by the Veterans Affairs Central Institutional Review Board. Cultural, regulatory, technical, and logistical problems were identified and solved through iterative collaboration between clinical and research entities. Paramount among these problems was customization of the Veterans Affairs electronic health record and data systems to accommodate study procedures. Leveraging clinical care for large-scale clinical trials is feasible but requires a rethinking of traditional clinical trial design (and regulation) to better meet requirements of clinical care ecosystems. Study designs must accommodate site-specific practice variation to reduce the impact on clinical care. A tradeoff thus exists between designing trial processes tailored to expedite local study implementation versus those to produce a more refined response to the research question. The availability of a uniform and flexible electronic health record in the Department of Veterans Affairs played a major role in the success of the trial. Conducting Point of Care research in other healthcare systems without such research-friendly infrastructure presents a more formidable challenge.

Advanced producer services in Germany: a relational perspective on spatial core–periphery structures, 2009–19

ABSTRACT This paper challenges the traditional perspective of a territorial core–periphery pattern as an organizing principle of space by introducing a relational perspective through an empirical approach. We study spatial processes of knowledge creation among advanced producer services in Germany between 2009 and 2019. We use a unique longitudinal dataset to analyse if German regions have become more integrated into the intra-firm location networks nationally and globally, and how this translates into the processes of centralization and peripheralization. The current conceptualization of core–periphery in Germany is too static and does not reflect the economic development of the regions. We find that there is no trend of urban areas becoming more integrated and peripheral areas less integrated into these networks. Instead, our research finds a discrepancy between the federal territorial classification and the functional orientation of German regions. Regions classified as peripheral have not generally decreased in connectivity to other regions. In contrast, some have increased their connectivity and have become more central in relational terms. Overall, we identified peripheralization and centralization as a relational process with dynamic, overlapping and trans-scalar networks.

Words on Fire: Eloquence and Its Conditions, by Rob Goodman

Words on Fire: Eloquence and Its Conditions, by Rob Goodman

Main Political and Ideological Views of the SRs: Formation and Character

The article examines the key components of the political doctrine of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, which represented the populist trend in Russian socialism in the late 19th - first quarter of the 20th centuries. The diversity of ideological and philosophical directions in the ranks of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party is shown, which ensured internal democracy, but hampered the process of consolidation and centralization of the party. The stage of formation of party programmatic, long and sharply debatable, is characterized. The features of the nature of the programmatic views of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party on the main socially significant points, including state-legal and agrarian ones, are revealed. The classical populist attitude of the Socialist-Revolutionaries to the issue of the social structure and stratification of Russia is noted — with the recognition as a progressive class of the entire “working people”, including workers, the working peasantry and the working (socialist-minded) intelligentsia. The Socialist-Revolutionary Party was assessed as an organization that adhered to the principles of democracy and pluralism in its political practice.

Evolutionary Analysis of Knowledge-Based Networks of the Electronic Information Industry from a Dual Innovation Perspective

It provides specific theoretical guidance to enhance the enterprise’s independent innovation capabilities by studying the knowledge utilization and the evolution of innovation under different innovation strategies and revealing the law of innovation path. Based on the data of invention patents of 579 electronic information enterprises from 2010 to 2019, this paper constructs a knowledge-based network based on social network analysis to study the evolution process of density, centrality, and structural holes of knowledge. The evolution analysis of 3360 knowledge-based networks shows that the electronic information industry’s overall knowledge integration capacity is in the middle and lower reaches. The widespread knowledge reliance in the electronic information industry is small, the industry is out of the ‘capacity traps’, and diversified development has gradually become a trend. At the same time, cross-domain knowledge reorganization is increasing. The results show that the overall knowledge reliance degree of enterprises applying an exploitative innovation strategy is deeper than that of enterprises applying an exploratory innovation strategy. The knowledge integration capabilities and cross-domain knowledge reorganization capabilities of enterprises applying exploratory innovation strategies are higher than those of enterprises applying exploitative innovation strategy.

Optimising sustainability: Circular pathways for Scotch Whisky distillery co-products

The use of co-products for animal feed can potentially have a higher greenhouse gas (GHG) emission and water scarcity offset compared to bio-energy (bio-electricity/fuel) production. We cluster 136 Scotch Whisky distilleries and evaluate the co-product pathways for the production of animal-feed and/or bio-energy at centralised processing facilities. Production of animal feed, and the subsequent displacement of imported animal feed, offered the most significant GHG offset, which was between a factor of c.a. 2.5 to 8 times greater than the bio-electricity/fuel and bio-energy/feed scenarios. This offers significant potential from a global net-zero carbon emissions perspective. However, this comes at a cost to local energy security potential. Bio-electricity produced in the electricity intensive scenarios was 481 GWh per year. This would significantly increase Scotland's bio-energy production and equates to c.a. 5% of Scotland's non-commercial electricity needs.

Research on Edge Detection Model of Insulators and Defects Based on Improved YOLOv4-tiny

Edge computing can avoid the long-distance transmission of massive data and problems with large-scale centralized processing. Hence, defect identification for insulators with object detection models based on deep learning is gradually shifting from cloud servers to edge computing devices. Therefore, we propose a detection model for insulators and defects designed to deploy on edge computing devices. The proposed model is improved on the basis of YOLOv4-tiny, which is suitable for edge computing devices, and the detection accuracy of the model is improved on the premise of maintaining a high detection speed. First, in the neck network, the inverted residual module is introduced to perform feature fusion to improve the positioning ability of the insulators. Then, a high-resolution detection output head is added to the original model to enhance its ability to detect defects. Finally, the prediction boxes are post-processed to incorporate split object boxes for large-scale insulators. In an experimental evaluation, the proposed model achieved an mAP of 96.22% with a detection speed of 10.398 frames per second (FPS) on an edge computing device, which basically meets the requirements of insulator and defect detection scenarios in edge computing devices.

ПЕРІОДИЗАЦІЯ УКРАЇНСЬКОЇ ДИРИГЕНТСЬКО-ХОРОВОЇ ШКОЛИ В КОНТЕКСТІ ІСТОРІЇ МУЗИЧНО-ОСВІТНІХ ПРОЦЕСІВ

ntroduction. It was determined that the Ukrainian conducting and choral school was historically formed in the context of the development of national musi-cal culture, artistic, in particular musical, education as paradigms of the spirituality of the Ukrainian nation, its worldview and mentality -artistic and pedagogical. The author's historical periodizations of music-pedagogical education, focused on the interpretation of national history in the aspect of understanding the role of music as a means of learning andeducation, are ana-lyzed, illustrated by a powerful panorama of historical artistic and educational facts. The purpose of the article is to justify the periodization of the Ukrainian conducting and choral school in the con-text of the history of musical and educational processes.The research methodology is based on systemic, his-torical and cultural approaches.Summary. The author's periodization of the formation of the conducting and choral school in the context of the history of musical and educational processes is substan-tiated, in which two periods are distinguished: the first is the formation of the conducting and choral school in Ukraine (initial stage, 10th -18th centuries; cumulative stage, the end of the 18th century -to the beginning 20th century), the second is the development of the modern conducting and choral school in Ukraine (catalysis stage, 1910’s –1950’s, mature stage, 1960’s –2020’s). It has been proven that the first period (10th -beginning of the 20th century) is characterized by the birth of the Ukraini-an conducting and choral school, the growth of the spir-itual and formative influence on the society of choral art and education, and the accumulation of the main features of the phenomenon. The analyzed second period (1910’s –2020’s)is characterized by the activation of creative and pedagogical achievements of choral culture and pedagogy figures. The catalytic stage (1910’s –1950’s) is singled out, during which the processes of national cultural crea-tion and centralization of the system of national musical education are accelerated. The mature stage (1960’s –2020’s), characterized by the processes of de-russification, national self-identification, regionalization, and Europeanization, is analyzed.Conclusion. It has been proven thatthe existence of the conducting and choral school in Ukraine over a long historical period is characterized by: the complication of the system of national schooling based on the artistic and mental unity of regional traditions; the growth of national and regional symbiosis; increasing influence of the activi-ties of representatives of the national school on the artistic process of post-postmodernism, scientific-pedagogical resource and artistic-mental experience of the school, expressive creative-pedagogical self-identification of re-gional artists, reflection on the development of conducting and choral art in the culture of post-postmodernism, Euro-pean integration processes in the performing-pedagogical sphere.

Ethiopia: the Experience of an Independent State in the Conditions of the Colonial Partition of Africa

The article discusses the reasons explaining the phenomenon of preserving the independence for almost two millennia of the oldest Christian state of Tropical Africa — Ethiopia. These reasons include the awareness of itself as an “island of true faith in the sea of Islam and paganism”, the traditions and mentality of feudal Ethiopian society, its military organization, and most importantly, the completion of the process of centralization of the country, which allowed Emperor Menelik II to use the entire state economic and military potential of the country in the war against Italy, which tried to enslave Ethiopia during the “scramble for Africa” at the end of the 19th century.

THE HISTORY OF THE ONE LABORATORY

The article provides information about the history, state and prospects of development of the laboratory service of the Kostroma region. The laboratory service of Kostroma originates from a laboratory organized in the Provincial Zemstvo Hospital of Kostroma in the early twentieth century. Over the years, the laboratory staff has constantly improved the range of research and put modern tests into practice. The author gives a list of specialists in charge of the laboratory from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present time. Since 2016, the process of centralization of the laboratory service of the city of Kostroma, the Kostroma region and partially the Kostroma region has begun. By 2018, the laboratory began to serve 35 medical organizations in Kostroma and the Kostroma region. The laboratory has a Laboratory information System integrated into the regional medical information system, which allows specialist doctors to see the results of laboratory tests at the workplace within a few hours after the biomaterial arrives at the laboratory and the entire research archive. Patients have the opportunity to receive research results by e-mail. The range of laboratory research is increasing every year. The laboratory conducts more than 450 different types of research, performs more than 6,000,000 laboratory studies per year - this is more than half of the research of laboratories in the entire region.

ДИНАМИКА СИСТЕМЫ МЕСТНОГО САМОУПРАВЛЕНИЯ В РЕГИОНАХ ЮГО-ЗАПАДНОЙ СИБИРИ: ТЕРРИТОРИАЛЬНО-ОРГАНИЗАЦИОННЫЙ АСПЕКТ

The development of the institution of self-government in Russia in previous decades faced numerous systemic problems of resource, organizational and social nature, which led to the dependence of it on the state power. Further integration into the unified system of power in the Russian Federation was secured by the constitutional amendments of 2020. However, at the regional level, particularly in the regions of Southwestern Siberia, the process of centralization began earlier, starting as early as the mid-2000s. Indicators of this trend were the abandonment of the election of the majority of local government officials, the merger of municipalities, and, more recently, the transition to municipal districts.

Theoretical and legal structure of working control

The article examines the theoretical and legal structure of workers’ control through the prism of institutions such as workers’ meetings and factory committees, trade unions and Councils that used workers’ control as the main tool in the struggle for power. The author proves that conferences of workers’ committees, charters of factory committees, circulars and instructions regulating the functionality of the meeting of workers and factory committees played a significant role in the regulatory provision of work control. Taking into account the declarative nature of the regulations on factory committees (FPC) on the part of the government, the detailing of the relationship of the FPC with the administration of enterprises took place on the basis of precedents, generalization of the practice of the activities of the FPC of large enterprises in the country and the creation of standard forms of charters and instructions for the FPC. The author focuses on the means of implementing working control, such as constant interaction with the use of verbal and documentary means, with the administration of enterprises and their obligation to investigate the violations identified, which was the beginning of systematic working control over administrative and economic activities with a set of specific control functions and tasks. In addition, the process of centralization of the activities of the Federal Labor Committee is shown, which has become the next step in strengthening and developing working control in the state. The author consistently argues the hypothesis that the enterprises actually had dual power and double subordination. In the current situation, there is a natural need for a centralized document regulating the essence and content of working control.

Insights into Multi-Model Federated Learning: An Advanced Approach for Air Quality Index Forecasting

The air quality index (AQI) forecast in big cities is an exciting study area in smart cities and healthcare on the Internet of Things. In recent years, a large number of empirical, academic, and review papers using machine learning (ML) for air quality analysis have been published. However, most of those studies focused on traditional centralized processing on a single machine, and there had been few surveys of federated learning (FL) in this field. This overview aims to fill this gap and provide newcomers with a broader perspective to inform future research on this topic, especially for the multi-model approach. In this survey, we went over the works that previous scholars have conducted in AQI forecast both in traditional ML approaches and FL mechanisms. Our objective is to comprehend previous research on AQI prediction including methods, models, data sources, achievements, challenges, and solutions applied in the past. We also convey a new path of using multi-model FL, which has piqued the computer science community’s interest recently.

Experimental state rescaling, goal-oriented governance, and urban transformation in China: The case of Lanzhou

This study views decentralization and centralization as complementary strategies for balancing state control and local autonomy, with the goal of exploring effective governance under authoritarian regimes. We examine the governance framework the central government employs to balance “encouraging local autonomy” and “protecting the centrality of regulation,” analyzing urban development and the central-local interaction under this governance framework. We believe that goal-oriented governance with information transmission at its core is the key to reaching such equilibrium, accompanied by two critical governance techniques: hierarchical planning systems and decentralized experimentation. The hierarchical planning system, with the auxiliary evaluation mechanism, passes down national goals and provides administrative guidance to local governors. Meanwhile, the procedural and experimental nature of plan formation has encouraged local policy innovation and bottom-up information feedback. Under goal-oriented governance and manageable experimentation, urban development decisions are formulated, and urban transformation takes place. The study deepens our understanding of the tentative nature of China's state rescaling, i.e., the search for a balance between state control and local autonomy to defuse governance problems at a given time. It also broadens our understanding of China’s policy-making and urban governance as a wavering multi-level interaction rather than a dichotomous process of centralization and decentralization.

Theoretical design of decentralized auction framework under mobile crowdsourcing environment

With the rapid popularization of mobile devices, the mobile crowdsourcing has become a hot topic in order to make full use of the resources of mobile devices. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to design an excellent incentive mechanism to encourage more mobile users to actively undertake crowdsourcing tasks, so as to achieve maximization of certain economic indicators. However, most of the reported incentive mechanisms in the existing literature adopt a centralized platform, which collects the bidding information from workers and task requesters. There is a risk of privacy exposure. In this paper, we design a decentralized auction framework where mobile workers are sellers and task requesters are buyers. This requires each participant to make its own local and independent decision, thereby avoiding centralized processing of task allocation and pricing. Both of them aim to maximize their utilities under the budget constraint. We theoretically prove that our proposed framework is individual rational, budget balanced, truthful, and computationally efficient, and then we conduct a group of numerical simulations to demonstrate its correctness and effectiveness.

Outcomes of parastomal hernia repair after national centralization.

In 2010, it was decided to centralize parastomal hernia repairs to five specialized hernia centres in Denmark to improve outcomes. The aim of this nationwide cohort study was to evaluate whether centralization of parastomal hernia repairs has had an impact on outcomes. Specifically, readmission, reoperation for complication, and operation for recurrence were analysed before and after centralization. By merging clinical and administrative outcome data from the Danish Hernia Database with those from the Danish National Patient Registry, all patients undergoing parastomal hernia repair in Denmark from 1 January 2007 to 31 December 2018 were included. Centralization was defined as having at least 70 per cent of procedures were performed at one of the five national centres. Readmission, reoperation, and recurrence rates for emergency and elective repairs were evaluated before and after centralization. In total, 1062 patients were included. Median follow-up was 992 days. Overall, the centralization process took 7 years. For elective repairs, the readmission, reoperation, mortality, and recurrence rates were comparable before and after centralization, but more patients overall and more patients with co-morbidity were offered surgery after centralization. For emergency repairs, there was a significant reduction in rates of reoperation (from 44.9 per cent (48 of 107) to 23 per cent (14 of 62); P = 0.004) and mortality (from 10.3 per cent (11 of 107) to 2 per cent (1 of 62); P = 0.034) after centralization. Centralization led to more elective operations and better outcomes when emergency repair was needed. Centralization of parastomal hernia repair led to more patients receiving elective repair and significantly improved outcomes after emergency repair.

Dynamic de/centralization in Brazil, 1889–2020: The prevalence of punctuated centralization

ABSTRACT This article employs the methodology of the Why De/Centralization in Federations project to assess dynamic de/centralization with a focus on state autonomy throughout Brazil’s republican life (1889–2020). The results reveal diverse patterns for the spheres observed. Institutional autonomy had a trajectory closely associated with regime type, unlike the two other politico-institutional dimensions. Legislative authority over policies and the fiscal dimension experienced an underlying process of centralization, punctuated by waves of decentralization. The administrative dimension of policy autonomy showed the most stable pattern, oscillating around a mean that indicates the dominance of the centre. The evidence contradicts the assumption that cycles of centralization and decentralization offset each other in Brazil. It supports the hypothesis that democratic transitions with increased political autonomy of states at the initial stages lead to broader decentralization. The data also show that regime change made de/centralization moves more frequent, in transitions to or from democracy.

Tracing sustainable production from a degrowth and localisation perspective: A case of 3D printers

An emerging commons-oriented mode of production that combines globally accessible knowledge with distributed manufacturing has recently been presented as a better fit for sustainable degrowth and localisation, compared to incumbent practices. To tentatively test this potential we select the case of 3D printers. The production of 3D printers varies within a spectrum from proprietary and industrially produced to open-source and locally manufactured. We compare different 3D printers within this spectrum, adopting a values-based life cycle analysis tool that allows for a critical evaluation of the sustainability of 3D printers from a degrowth perspective. An emphasis on the prospects for sustainable localisation is given at each life cycle stage. We find significant advantages of open-source 3D printers in terms of education, experimentation and maintenance, and enhanced conviviality in case parts of their manufacturing is localised. Still, to a large extent their manufacturing process remains a highly centralised process, hindering additional benefits, and coherence with sustainable degrowth and localisation. We conclude with insights on how openness in terms of materials production and proper documentation of the manufacturing process, as well as a multi-level organisation for local production could lead to more sustainable practices.

Procurement procedures: centralization and categorization

Centralization and categorization of procurement are currently extremely popular and popular ways to improve the efficiency of economic activity, both in private and public organizations. Optimization of procurement activities, centralization and categorization help to reduce the costs of the enterprise by obtaining economies of scale, strengthening the negotiating position and increasing the transparency of procurement, which is reflected in the reduction of the likelihood of corruption and fraud during their conduct. The authors analyzed in detail the processes of centralization and categorization, as well as the advantages of a centralized procurement system, proposed approaches to the centralization of the procurement system, focused on the specifics of the functioning of an economic entity.