The combination of reinforcement learning and deep learning has shown some remarkable results in many scientific fields. Deep reinforcement learning algorithms are particularly good at understanding and modeling adaptive decision-making in dynamic environments. In recent years, this concept has been successfully applied to smart grids. In this paper, we provide a brief introduction to the concepts of reinforcement and deep reinforcement learning to the power system engineers and present research progress and prospects in the field. Additionally, we identify smart grid engineering domains that need extensive pattern-based modeling as being particularly suitable for deep reinforcement learning.

The detonation properties of nonideal explosives are highly dependent on charge diameter and existence and properties of confinement. In this study, the effect of different confinements on the detonation velocity of ANFO explosives was experimentally determined along with the results of the plate dent test. ANFO explosive was selected as one of the most commonly used nonideal explosives. Following the measurement results, we found that the detonation velocity increased with increasing wall thickness, and the velocity increase was different for different confinement materials. A strong correlation existed between the ratio of the mass of confiner and explosive (M/C) and the detonation velocity (R = 0.995), and between (M/C) and the depth of the dent (δ) (R = 0.975). The data presented in this paper represent preliminary findings in developing a confinement model required for reliable numerical modeling of nonideal explosives.

Ghrelin, a stomach-produced hormone, is well-recognized for its role in promoting feeding, controlling energy homeostasis, and glucoregulation. Ghrelin’s function to ensure survival extends beyond that: its release parallels that of corticosterone, and ghrelin administration and fasting have an anxiolytic and antidepressant effect. This clearly suggests a role in stress and anxiety. However, most studies of ghrelin’s effects on anxiety have been conducted exclusively on male rodents. Here, we hypothesize that female rats are wired for higher ghrelin sensitivity compared to males. To test this, we systematically compared components of the ghrelin axis between male and female Sprague Dawley rats. Next, we evaluated whether anxiety-like behavior and feeding response to endogenous or exogenous ghrelin are sex divergent. In line with our hypothesis, we show that female rats have higher serum levels of ghrelin and lower levels of the endogenous antagonist LEAP-2, compared to males. Furthermore, circulating ghrelin levels were partly dependent on estradiol; ovariectomy drastically reduced circulating ghrelin levels, which were partly restored by estradiol replacement. In contrast, orchiectomy did not affect circulating plasma ghrelin. Additionally, females expressed higher levels of the endogenous ghrelin receptor GHSR1A in brain areas involved in feeding and anxiety: the lateral hypothalamus, hippocampus, and amygdala. Moreover, overnight fasting increased GHSR1A expression in the amygdala of females, but not males. To evaluate the behavioral consequences of these molecular differences, male and female rats were tested in the elevated plus maze (EPM), open field (OF), and acoustic startle response (ASR) after three complementary ghrelin manipulations: increased endogenous ghrelin levels through overnight fasting, systemic administration of ghrelin, or blockade of fasting-induced ghrelin signaling with a GHSR1A antagonist. Here, females exhibited a stronger anxiolytic response to fasting and ghrelin in the ASR, in line with our findings of sex differences in the ghrelin axis. Most importantly, after GHSR1A antagonist treatment, females but not males displayed an anxiogenic response in the ASR, and a more pronounced anxiogenesis in the EPM and OF compared to males. Collectively, female rats are wired for higher sensitivity to fasting-induced anxiolytic ghrelin signaling. Further, the sex differences in the ghrelin axis are modulated, at least partly, by gonadal steroids, specifically estradiol. Overall, ghrelin plays a more prominent role in the regulation of anxiety-like behavior of female rats.

During the Covid-19 health emergency, telemedicine was an essential asset through which health systems strengthened their response during the critical phase of the pandemic. According to the post-pandemic economic reform plans of many countries, telemedicine will not be limited to a tool for responding to an emergency condition but it will become a structural resource that will contribute to the reorganization of Healthcare Systems and enable the transfer of part of health care from the hospital to the home-based care. However, scientific evidences have shown that health care delivered through telemedicine can be burdened by numerous ethical and legal issues. Although there is an emerging discussion on patient safety issues related to the use of telemedicine, there is a lack of reseraches specifically designed to investigate patient safety. On the contrary, it would be necessary to determine standards and specific application rules in order to ensure safety. This paper examines the telemedicine-risk profiles and proposes a position statement for clinical risk management to support continuous improvement in the safety of health care delivered through telemedicine.

The study empirically explores the relationship between OFDI and the home country’s institutional quality by employing a panel of 23 European emerging countries between 2000 and 2019. In doing so, the study employs the VECM estimation procedure. The key findings of this research indicate that the rate of adjustment to reach long-run equilibrium in European post-transition countries is lower than in European transition countries. In conclusion, there is evidence, for the period being investigated, of causality between the home country’s institutional quality and OFDI in both regions. Also, most of the transition countries are still in the process of building the institutional environment, with many institutional voids and different starting points of their internalization process. In fact, most of the countries, especially European transition countries, are in stage 2 or stage 3 of their investment development path (IDP) development, where IFDI stock still remains higher than OFDI stock.

A modernidade tem trazido mudanças efetivas na sociedade. Com o advento da globalização e o avanço tecnolígico na área de comunicação as profissões sofrerão fortes mudanças no modus operandi ao longo do tempo e as legislações não tiveram essa mudança brisca respeitando essa mesma velocidade. Dado a isso, na área do transporte de passageiros não se furtou a isso, além dos conhecidos taxis, surgiram várias empresas de transporte de pessoas por aplicativo, onde motoristas disposibilizam seus carros para o transporte terceirizando seu serviço para operadoas desses aplicativos, Dentro desse viés a legislação vigente fala de responsabilidade subsidiada, porém a ausência de uma lei específica, a falta de jurisprudência atua e atualizada deixam lacunas nas leis para a tomada de descisões sobre a relação emprego e prestação de serviços desses motoristas de aplicativos. Sobre essas grandes mudanças não coabitaram com as novas demandas surgidas no campo trabalhista gerando confusão nas decisões e até mesmo trazendo certas dificuldades aos juristas nas decisões da criação de jurisprudência.Portanto, é preciso uma revisão bibliográfica, de forma a percepção de pareceres, um novo olhar legislativo, observando as nuances das escritas a fim de traçar parâmetros interpretativos para estabelecer conceitos sobre essa relação de emprego, onde não está claro o posicionamento de ambos, nem se quer o posicionamento da ordenação jurídica a esse respeito.

The purpose of a network intrusion detection (NID) is to detect intrusions in the network, which plays a critical role in ensuring the security of the Internet of Things (IoT). Recently, deep learning (DL) has achieved a great success in the field of intrusion detection. However, the limited computing capabilities and storage of IoT devices hinder the actual deployment of DL-based high-complexity models. In this article, we propose a novel NID method for IoT based on the lightweight deep neural network (LNN). In the data preprocessing stage, to avoid high-dimensional raw traffic features leading to high model complexity, we use the principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm to achieve feature dimensionality reduction. Besides, our classifier uses the expansion and compression structure, the inverse residual structure, and the channel shuffle operation to achieve effective feature extraction with low computational cost. For the multiclassification task, we adopt the NID loss that acts as a better loss function to replace the standard cross-entropy loss for dealing with the problem of uneven distribution of samples. The results of experiments on two real-world NID data sets demonstrate that our method has excellent classification performance with low model complexity and small model size, and it is suitable for classifying the IoT traffic of normal and attack scenarios.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the influence of foliar application of a biostimulative fertilizer on some of the elements of raspberry fruit quality of the Polka variety. The research was conducted in 2015, according to the system of controls and treatment. Slavol VVL, a foliar fertilizer with biostimulating effects was applied for treatment. A total of 12 quantitative and qualitative properties were analyzed depending on the influencing factor, namely: total sugar content, reducing sugars, invert sugars, sucrose, water content, dry matter, total acidity, vitamin C, total phenols, total flavonoids and antioxidant capacity, and fruit weight. After the completed analyzes, it can be concluded that raspberry plants treated with Slavol VVL were characterized by the highest values ​​of total acidity (2.07%), dry matter (14.86%), and vitamin C content (25.15 mg/100 g of fresh weight).

The paper analyzes the normative-formative framework that denotes the connection between memory and identity as a crucial origin of conflicts. In addition to concerns about memory politics, historical revisionism and ethnonational identity collectivism, the paper dissolves the connection between phenomena highlighting outcomes of the peace process, transitional justice, and its ethical/moral connotations. The study argues that Western Balkan’s sociopolitical stability depends on declining conflicting and contradictory memory order within radical sociopolitical processes. The revisionist contention memorializes conflicts and wars as the fundamental concept of ethnicity/religion/nation. It overlaps with the neoliberal and neoconservative reduction of all competitive relations, in which only the stronger have the right to existence. Discarding dominant ethnopolitical narratives is essential for conflict transformation and transitional justice for all ethnoreligious communities. The Balkan historical events and conflicting memory (WW2, Yugoslav wars) caused sociopolitical dominion shaping the collective behavior of ethnic groups. The damaging ethnic/religious practice of genocide denial and honoring war crimes within people’s social lives can become a matrix for future conflicts. Placing memory politics with radical populism is a critical condition of collective identity politics in the former Yugoslavia. Scientific rationality can provide a solid path through the anomalies in the form of political ideologies.

Quantification and scientific observations of the fate and transport of dissolved strontium in water systems, particularly cold climate water systems, are severely lacking. In this work, in an experiment conducted at a temperature of 6 °C, the observation of strontium precipitation along with calcium carbonate minerals from cold wastewater is investigated. ICP-MS is used for metal analyses where the distribution of the species and saturation state of minerals along with a surface complexation model was performed using the public-use USGS geochemical modeling software, PHREEQC (PH Redox Equilibrium (in C language)). Sample media were analyzed using XPS and Raman spectroscopy. The results suggest that the loss of strontium from natural waters is via the process of co-precipitation with calcite, a calcium carbonate polymorph. The observations and findings are intended to be useful to quantify the loss of 90Sr from the water, in the case of an unplanned release from a nuclear reactor-operated facility. The results indicate that the precipitation model is a robust and reliable approach to predicting and monitoring the behaviour and transport of strontium that may occur in natural environments as a result of an accidental nuclear release.

In this work, I analyze Nietzsche’s concept of the affirmation of life as one of the main concepts of his philosophy in general. To overcome the pessimism and decadence modern culture has fallen into, Nietzsche construes the concept of the affirmation of life as its main goal and imperative. Hence, for each individual, it is necessary to affirm life by achieving their own autonomy, i.e. pathos of distance. Only by achieving genuine pathos of distance, would human beings be able to overcome pessimism.

In this research the aim was to determine differences in morphological characteristics between 11 tomato accessions from the Gene Bank of the Republic of Srpska. The experiment was conducted and analysis was performed during the 2018 and 2019 seasons. A total of 16 morphological characteristics (9 quantitative and 7 qualitative) were analyzed according to International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRI) descriptors for tomato. The results showed that polymorphism (diversity) was present in all quantitative characteristics and in 6 qualitative characteristics, while only one qualitative characteristic was monomorphic (no differences between accessions). Thereby, polymorphism was present in 93.75% of morphological characteristics. Out of a total of 9 quantitative characteristics, a highly significant difference (p 0.01) was found in all characteristics except for the 1000-seed weight since this characteristic had only one value per accession measured according to the IPGRI tomato descriptors. The accessions from the Gene Bank of the Republic of Srpska have shown high diversity in all qualitative characteristics except in plant growth type, which was indeterminate in all analyzed accessions. This research provides a new insight into the research area of diversity of tomato landraces from the Republic of Srpska, which is important for further promotion and sustainable use of germplasm not only for scientific research purposes but also for national rural farmers, who are the key to preserving traditional knowledge and skills related to the cultivation and use of traditional varieties and tomato landraces.

Abstract Background Specialty training in plastic, reconstructive and aesthetic surgery is a prerequisite for safe and effective provision of care. The aim of this study was to assess and portray similarities and differences in the continuing education and specialization in plastic surgery in Europe. Material and Methods A detailed questionnaire was designed and distributed utilizing an online survey administration software. Questions addressed core items regarding continuing education and specialization in plastic surgery in Europe. Participants were addressed directly via the European Leadership Forum (ELF) of the European Society of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgery (ESPRAS). All participants had detailed knowledge of the organization and management of plastic surgical training in their respective country. Results The survey was completed by 29 participants from 23 European countries. During specialization, plastic surgeons in Europe are trained in advanced tissue transfer and repair and aesthetic principles in all parts of the human body and within several subspecialties. Moreover, rotations in intensive as well as emergency care are compulsory in most European countries. Board certification is only provided for surgeons who have had multiple years of training regulated by a national board, who provide evidence of individually performed operative procedures in several anatomical regions and subspecialties, and who pass a final oral and/or written examination. Conclusion Board certified plastic surgeons meet the highest degree of qualification, are trained in all parts of the body and in the management of complications. The standard of continuing education and qualification of European plastic surgeons is high, providing an excellent level of plastic surgical care throughout Europe. Zusammenfassung Hintergrund Die Facharzt-Weiterbildung für Plastische und Ästhetische Chirurgie ist eine Grundvoraussetzung für sichere und effektive Patientenversorgung. Ziel der vorliegenden Studie war die Darstellung von Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschieden in der Weiterbildung für Plastische Chirurgie innerhalb von Europa. Materialien und Methoden Ein internetbasierter Fragebogen wurde mit Hilfe eines kostenlosen Formularerstellungstools erstellt und verteilt. Die Fragen betrafen Kernpunkte der Weiterbildung für Plastische Chirurgie in Europa. Die Teilnehmer wurden direkt über das European Leadership Forum (ELF) der European Society of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgery (ESPRAS) kontaktiert. Alle Teilnehmer hatten weitreichende Kenntnisse über die Organisation und Struktur der plastisch-chirurgischen Weiterbildung in ihrem jeweiligen Land. Ergebnisse 29 Teilnehmer*innen aus 23 europäischen Ländern nahmen an der Umfrage teil. Die Weiterbildung für Plastische Chirurgie beinhaltet grundlegende Prinzipien und Techniken zur Wiederherstellung von Form und Funktion innerhalb der verschiedenen Säulen der Plastischen Chirurgie, sowie in allen Körperregionen. In den meisten europäischen Ländern ist eine Rotation in der Intensiv- und Notfallmedizin und die Behandlung kritisch kranker Patienten obligatorisch. Voraussetzung für die Facharztbezeichnung ist die mehrjährige, national organisierte Weiterbildung, der Nachweis einer festgelegten Anzahl selbstständig durchgeführter Operationen, sowie die mündliche und/oder schriftliche Abschlussprüfung. Schlussfolgerung Fachärzte für Plastische und Ästhetische Chirurgie sind hochqualifiziert und auch im Umgang mit Komplikationen geschult. Der Standard der Weiterbildung der europäischen Plastischen Chirurgen ist hoch, so dass innerhalb Europas eine hohe Qualität plastisch-chirurgischer Versorgung gewährleistet ist.

Background: In last 2 decades, there have been substantial changes in the utilization patterns of antihypertensive medicines following new clinical trials and the introduction of new treatment guidelines. The aim of this study was to analyze utilization and prescribing patterns regarding antihypertensive medicines in the Republic of Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina during an 11-years follow-up according to national and European treatment guidelines. Methods: In this retrospective, observational study, medicine utilization data were analyzed between 2009–2019 period using the ATC/DDD methodology and expressed as the number of DDD/1,000 inhabitants/day (DID/TID). The medicine utilization 90% (DU90%) method was used for determine the quality of prescribing. Results: During the observed period, the use of antihypertensive medicines increased more than 3-times (125.97 DDD/TID in 2009 vs 414.95 DDD/TID in 2019), corresponding to a rise in the prevalence of hypertensive patients from 91.7/1,000 to 186.3/1,000 in the same period. This was mainly driven by increased use of angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors with 241.69%, beta blockers with 146.87%, calcium channel blockers with 251.55%, and diuretics with 178.95%. Angiotensin receptor blockers were the fastest growing group of antihypertensive medicines in this period and their utilization increased nearly 40 times. Conclusions: The overall antihypertensive medicines utilization was largely influenced by national and ESH/ESC guidelines and strongly corresponded to the positive medicine list of the national health insurance fund. Antihypertensive medicines utilization is comparable with medicine utilization trends in other countries.

The growing penetration of renewable resources such as wind and solar into the electric power grid through power electronic inverters is challenging grid protection. Due to the advanced inverter control algorithms, the inverter-based resources present fault responses different from conventional generators, which can fundamentally affect the way that the power grid is protected. This paper studied solar inverter dynamics focused on negative-sequence quantities during the restoration period following a grid disturbance by using a real-time digital simulator. It was found that solar inverters can act as negative-sequence sources to inject negative-sequence currents into the grid during the restoration period. The negative-sequence current can be affected by different operating conditions such as the number of inverters in service, grid strength, and grid fault types. Such negative-sequence responses can adversely impact the performance of protection schemes based on negative-sequence components and potentially cause relay maloperations during the grid restoration period, thus making system protection less secure and reliable.