Sažetak: Autori u radu analiziraju položaj stečajnog upravitelja prema novom Zakonu o stečaju u Federaciji Bosne i Hercegovine koji je stupio na snagu 15. srpnja 2021. godine. Stečajni upravitelj kao operativno tijelo u stečajnom postupku ima središnju ulogu i od njegovog postupanja ovisi i učinkovitost stečajnog postupka. Položaj stečajnog upravitelja je specifičan jer u sebi objedinjuje dvije funkcije. On je tijelo stečajnog postupka s javnim ovlastima i zastupnik je dužnika po zakonu. Zbog tog specifičnog položaja je iznimno bitno i na koji način je reguliran njegov rad i nadzor nad njegovim postupanjem. Radi jačanja povjerenja u pravosudni sustav izbor i imenovanje stečajnih upravitelja trebao bi biti transparentan. Iako su nove zakonske odredbe unaprijedile sveukupan položaj stečajnih upravitelja, autori daju kritički osvrt na pitanja koja su ostala neregulirana i koja bi stečajni postupak učinila transparentnijim i učinkovitijim. Ključne riječi: stečaj, stečajni postupak, privremeni stečajni upravitelj, stečajni upravitelj, povjerenik

Biological carbon sequestration is considered an important strategy to mitigate climate change. The energy crop Miscanthus × giganteus has great sequestration potential. The objective of this study was to determine: a) the dry matter yield and carbon content in aboveground and belowground biomass; b) the total carbon balance in the plant and soil pool. The study was conducted in continental Croatia (N 45°51′01.32″; E 16°10′35.85″) by the destructive harvesting of five-year-old Miscanthus × giganteus stands established by rhizomes (MxgR) and seedlings (MxgS) in the spring of 2021. The soil sampling was conducted in 2016 and 2022. The average amount of carbon in the aboveground biomass of MxgR and MxgS is 11.51 t/ha and 9.87 t/ha, respectively, and in the belowground biomass it is 13.18 t/ha and 14.90 t/ha, respectively. The carbon balance in the plant pool of MxgR is three times lower (1.67 t/ha) than that in the plant pool of MxgS (5.03 t/ha). The total soil carbon content increased by 8.7 t/ha under MxgR and by 14.8 t/ha under MxgS during 2016–2022. Therefore, under the studied agroecological conditions, seedlings should be preferred over rhizomes in the selection of planting material. The obtained data represent valuable input data for sequestration modeling.

We propose a control protocol based on the prescribed performance control (PPC) methodology for a quadro-tor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Quadrotor systems belong to the class of underactuated systems for which the original PPC methodology cannot be directly applied. We introduce the necessary design modifications to stabilize the considered system with prescribed performance. The proposed control protocol does not use any information of dynamic model parameters or exogenous disturbances. Furthermore, the stability analysis guarantees that the tracking errors remain inside of designer-specified time-varying functions, achieving prescribed performance independent from the control gains’ selection. Finally, simulation results verify the theoretical results.

Family VIII esterases present similarities to class C β‐lactamases, which show nucleophilic serines located at the S‐X‐X‐K motif instead of the G‐X‐S‐X‐G or G‐D‐S‐(L) motif shown by other carboxylesterase families. Here, we report the crystal structure of a novel family VIII (subfamily VIII. I) esterase (EH7; denaturing temperature, 52.6 ± 0.3 °C; pH optimum 7.0–9.0) to deepen its broad substrate range. Indeed, the analysis of the substrate specificity revealed its capacity to hydrolyse nitrocefin as a model chromogenic cephalosporin substrate (40.4 ± 11.4 units·g−1), and a large battery of 66 structurally different esters (up to 1730 min−1), including bis(2‐hydroxyethyl)‐terephthalate (241.7 ± 8.5 units·g−1) and the mycotoxin T‐2 (1220 ± 52 units·g−1). It also showed acyltransferase activity through the synthesis of benzyl 3‐oxobutanoate (40.4 ± 11.4 units·g−1) from benzyl alcohol and vinyl acetoacetate. Such a broad substrate scope is rare among family VIII esterases and lipolytic enzymes. Structural analyses of free and substrate‐bound forms of this homooctamer esterase suggest that EH7 presents a more opened and exposed S1 site having no steric hindrance for the entrance of substrates to the active site, more flexible R1, R2 and R3 regions allowing for the binding of a wide spectrum of substrates into the active site, and small residues in the conserved motif Y‐X‐X containing the catalytic Tyr enabling the entrance of large substrates. These unique structural elements in combination with docking experiments allowed us to gain valuable insights into the substrate specificity of this esterase and possible others belonging to family VIII.

Objectives To assess the severity of symptoms, duration of infection and viral loads of health-care workers (HCWs) who tested positive for Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) during Omicron’s prevalence, in regard to vaccination and previous infection. Methods During 2 weeks of highest rate of COVID-19 cases in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the positive nasopharyngeal swabs were analysed in 141 HCWs by reverse transcription quantitative PCR, targeting four different genes: RdRp, E, N and nsp14. Uniformed questionnaire was used to collect relevant sociodemographic and epidemiological data from HCWs divided into four groups: unvaccinated/not previously infected (group 1); unvaccinated/previously infected (group 2); vaccinated/not previously infected (group 3); and vaccinated/previously infected (group 4). Results We observed that occurrence of fever and smell or taste loss were more frequent in group 1 (86.4% and 25%) and group 3 (76.9% and 19.2%), in comparison to group 2 (64.4% and 6.7%) and group 4 (69.2% and 3.8%), ( p  = 0.023 and p  = 0.003). Although statistically not significant, group 2 (61.9%), group 3 (65.4%), and group 4 (70.8%) experienced negativization within 7 days of positive RT-qPCR test, whereas 51.2% of HCWs from group 1 tested negative later on. There is no significant difference between all four groups regarding Ct values of analysed genes. Conclusion During Omicron’s prevalence, the vaccination had less substantial effect on symptomatic disease among HCWs, while fever and loss of smell or taste were considerably less likely to occur upon reinfection. Since viral loads and negativization periods do not seem to significantly vary, irrespective of pre-existing immunity, systemic vaccination and mask-wearing should still be considered among HCWs.

The increasing integration of renewable energy resources (RERs) such as wind and solar onto the electric power grid through power electronic interface is challenging safe and reliable grid operation. Particularly, the high penetration of the inverter-based RERs (IB-RERs) may drive the grid towards weak grid conditions, which may cause grid stability issues. Grid strength assessment is helpful to identify these weak grid issues. However, it is challenging to assess grid strength while considering the impact of uncertain renewable generation. This paper presents an approach for quantifying the probabilistic characteristics of grid strength under uncertain renewable generation based on the probabilistic collocation method, which is a computationally efficient technique to reduce the computational burden without compromising the result accuracy compared with traditional Monte Carlo simulation. The efficacy of the proposed approach is demonstrated on the modified IEEE 9-bus system.

This study aims to ascertain the significance of the basketball game parameters which discriminated between winning and losing teams in matches played. The study sample comprises matches played at the men’s basketball tournament at the XXXII Olympic Games in Tokyo. Four regression models were formed. Due to the size of the sample, the number of explaining variables was reduced using factor analysis, followed by stepwise regression to ascertain the statistical significance of the obtained models summarily, which were then broken down into individual parameters. This study indicates: (1) one of the four set regression models was summarily highly statistically significant; (2) out of the remaining models, two were eliminated due to the presence of multicollinearity, and one model did not exhibit high statistical significance; (3) the final score was most influenced by the variables of two- and three-point shot percentages, number of three-point shots, turnovers, defensive rebounds, and true shooting percentage. The results of the study corroborated the results of other studies which were carried out in recent years, that the game of basketball is trending towards three-point shots and lay-ups, reduction of turnovers when passing, and defensive rebounds have been confirmed to be greatly significant.

Sustainable irrigation expansion over water limited croplands is an important measure to enhance agricultural yields and increase the resilience of crop production to global warming. While existing global assessments of irrigation expansion mainly illustrate the biophysical potential for irrigation, socioeconomic factors such as weak governance or low income, that demonstrably impede the successful implementation of sustainable irrigation, remain largely underexplored. Here we provide five scenarios of sustainable irrigation deployment in the 21st century integrated into the framework of Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, which account for biophysical irrigation limits and socioeconomic constraints. We find that the potential for sustainable irrigation expansion implied by biophysical limits alone is considerably reduced when socioeconomic factors are considered. Even under an optimistic scenario of socio-economic development, we find that additional calories produced via sustainable irrigation by 2100 might reach only half of the maximum biophysical potential. Regions with currently modest socioeconomic development such as Sub-Saharan Africa are found to have the highest potential for improvements. In a scenario of sustainable development, Sub-Saharan Africa would be able to almost double irrigated food production and feed an additional 70 million people compared to 2020, whereas in a scenario where regional rivalry prevails, this potential would be halved. Increasing sustainable irrigation will be key for countries to meet the projected food demands, tackle malnutrition and rural poverty in the context of increasing impacts of anthropogenic climate change on food systems. Our results suggest that improving governance levels for example through enhancing the effectiveness of institutions will constitute an important leverage to increase adaptive capacity in the agricultural sector.

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is expected to provide low-latency computation service for wireless devices (WDs). However, when WDs are located at cell edge or communication links between base stations (BSs) and WDs are blocked, the offloading latency will be large. To address this issue, we propose an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted cell-free MEC system consisting of multiple BSs and IRSs for improving the transmission environment. Consequently, we formulate a min–max latency optimization problem by jointly designing multiuser detection (MUD) matrices, IRSs’ reflecting beamforming vectors, WDs’ offloading data size and edge computing resource, subject to constraints on edge computing capability and IRSs phase shifts. To solve it, an alternating optimization algorithm based on the block coordinate descent (BCD) technique is proposed, in which the original nonconvex problem is decoupled into two subproblems for alternately optimizing computing and communication parameters. In particular, we optimize the MUD matrix based on the second-order cone programming (SOCP) technique, and then develop two efficient algorithms to optimize IRSs’ reflecting vectors based on the semi-definite relaxation (SDR) and successive convex approximation (SCA) techniques, respectively. Numerical results show that employing IRSs in cell-free MEC systems outperforms conventional MEC systems, resulting in up to about 60% latency reduction can be attained. Moreover, numerical results confirm that our proposed algorithms enjoy a fast convergence, which is beneficial for practical implementation.

—For a continuous-input-continuous-output arbitrarily distributed quantum channel carrying classical information, the channel capacity can be computed in terms of the distribution of the channel envelope, received signal strength over a quantum propagation field and the noise spectral density. If the channel en-velope is considered to be unity with unit received signal strength, the factor controlling the capacity is the noise . Quantum channel carrying classical information will suffer from the combination of classical and quantum noise. Assuming additive Gaussian-distributed classical noise and Poisson-distributed quantum noise, we formulate a hybrid noise model by deriving a joint Gaussian-Poisson distribution in this letter. For the transmitted signal, we consider the mean of signal sample space instead of considering a particular distribution and study how the maximum mutual in- formation varies over such mean value. Capacity is estimated by maximizing the mutual information over unity channel envelope.