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This work presents a novel technique for the determination of soil moisture obtaining 2-D Soil Moisture (SM) information with a single instrument. Both the instrument and the retrieval algorithm used, which is based on inferring the reflection coefficient of the terrain by direct and forward scattering polarimetric measurements of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) Signals, are briefly described. Some preliminary results of a field campaign performed on La Pobla de Mafumet (Tarragona, Spain) are presented. This instrument and retrieval algorithm can be used for different applications, such as, an input for the irrigation algorithm (Smart-Irrigation) or forest fire prevention among others. Peer Reviewed

This dissertation aims to analyze the social perception about the Technical Course in Agroecology in the technical schools of Sao Bento do Una and Sao Jose do Belmonte in the State of Pernambuco. Even though cities with economies totally focused on agriculture and livestock, it was noticed that the course of agroecology has a low demand, since, historically, education focused on agrarian sciences is associated with conditions of backwardness and little social valuation. The understanding of the perception of the community, students and teachers regarding the operation of the technical course in agroecology in the years 2016-2017 was carried out through a qualitative exploratory approach and analytical orientation, through the application of questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and document analysis . Also the methodological framework composes the content analysis proposal (BARDIN, 2011) used to analyze the course plans of agroecology and agriculture. This comparison was fundamental to verify that, even though the agroecology course is of the same technological axis, its characteristics are peculiar to its philosophy. During the analysis of the interviewees' discourses, even if the perception of the rural area and its economic and social impacts indicate positive and favorable understandings of the rural identity, it is still possible to detect inclinations of resistance to the encouragement, valorization and diffusion of the professions directed to the environment of the field.

A purpose of this paper is to present verification of the consistency of unfiltered radiances measured by CERES instruments over their mission 2000-2016. The FM1 scanner on Terra, designated as the climate instrument, is used as a benchmark. The degradation modeling while the instruments on Terra and Aqua were operating in the RAPS mode is being revised, and the rate of the monthly degradation is shown to be 0.03%. The focus of this paper is on consistency between Terra CERES scanners, and it is a part of a broader investigation. Results of comparing FM2 and FM1 are reported for all-sky condition and selected scene types for shortwave and long-wave radiances based on Edition 4 ERBE-like (ES8) data product. Some scene type based results are also verified using an SSF product that contains imager (MODIS) information.

Background We examined the associations of family size and birth order with atopy prevalence in rural Poland at two time periods. Methods Two cross-sectional surveys were conducted in the same villages and a small town of lower Silesia at an interval of 9 years. In 2003, 1700 (88% of eligible individuals), and in 2012, 1730 (86%) inhabitants aged 5 years or more completed a questionnaire and had a skin prick test for atopy. Results There was an inverse association between family size and atopy in the village population in 2003; the prevalence of atopy was the highest for those with no siblings (15.2%) and decreased to 5.4% for those with three and more siblings (OR = 0.22; 0.07–0.66). In contrast, there was little or no such protective effect in the town population where the prevalence of atopy was much higher (7.3% in the villages, 20.0% in the town). Nine years later, the prevalence of atopy had increased in the village to be similar to that in the town (19.6% and 19.9% respectively), and the protective effects of family size and birth order in the villages were much weaker (OR = 0.64; 95% CI 0.33–1.27 for three or more siblings). Both protective effects were strongest among children. Conclusions The protective effects of family size and birth order on atopy were much stronger in children than in adults and among those living in a village. They largely disappeared with the steep increase in atopy prevalence at all ages; this followed environmental changes on the village farms.

Having a significant economic impact in country's GDP and being a major workforce, construction industry is yet characterized by low production rate, low technological advancement, minimum automation and robotic usage, and so on. With the visionary idea of Industry 4.0 that focuses on digitization of the value chain of a product and improving productivity through a variety of technologies and automated manufacturing environment, this research aims to develop a framework to adopt Construction 4.0 within a construction company. Current state of the art of the technologies in construction associated with the notion of Industry 4.0 (e.g., Building Information Modelling, virtual reality, augmented reality, Drone, etc.) is explored through extensive literature studies. The proposed framework incorporates current technological advancement related to construction industry, legislative requirements, barriers, enterprise transformation requirements and so on. Construction 4.0 would make a great impact in construction industry through improved value chain of construction projects, productivity improvement, and safe and sustainable construction. Indeed, the proposed framework would contribute to the advancement of new knowledge in the worlds' construction companies and provide potentials of new research focuses.

International audience; Anthropogenic radioactivity generated by nuclear or chemical events results in the liberation of quadrillions of Becquerel and tons of materials to the environment. These events include nuclear accidents, nuclear weapon experiments, and high levels of generated radioactive and chemical waste. Po-210 is a high-energy alpha emitter that presents in the environment at extremely low concentration. It is considered as one of the highly toxic elements and is estimated to contribute about 7% of the total effective dose equivalent to humans from ingested natural internal radiation. The assessment of Po-210 activity/concentration in the environment could be used as an indicator of the level of anthropogenic radioactivity. The Po-210 concentration present in the most frequently sold cigarette produced in Lebanon was assayed using alpha spectrometry after a radiochemical separation and spontaneous deposition of Po on a copper disk. Although the geographical nature of Lebanese land is an extension of Syrian territory, the polonium activity concentration obtained is 8.8 times higher and attributable to the excessive use of phosphate fertilizers in agriculture. The individual committed effective dose was estimated to be equal to 219 +/- 17 mu Sv/year of cigarette smoking.

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is considered as an added-value to various application domains. Supply chain and cargo tracking are a few to name. However, the security of the IoT transactions and integrated devices remains one of the key challenges to the IoT application’s success. Recently, Blockchain technology and its consensus protocols were promoted as a solution to many information security problems. This paper discusses the advantages of integrating Blockchain technology into IoT platform to improve security since it provides a distributed transaction ledger that cannot be tampered with or controlled by a single entity. The objective of this paper is twofold, first providing an overview of existing literature on the topic of integrating Blockchain and IoT platforms in a connection-less environment; Second, presenting the proposed traceable cargo system based on Blockchain and IoT.

The Internet of Things enables physical objects to be first class citizens of the digital world. The various Internet of Things technologies give physical objects the ability to provide information and react to external instructions. Geographical Information Systems provide analytics to spatial data. The use of GeoHashes creates a partnership between the Internet of Things and Geographical Information Systems which can provide a competitive advantage to businesses. This paper describes a Design Science Research project to create an artifact which enables geographical intelligence gathering and analytics in order to better compete in the business environment.

As mass devices access to network in the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), the network access control becomes more important. Traditional authentication mechanisms are no longer suitable for IoT devices with limited physical and computational resources because of their complexity. This problem can be solved by the device fingerprinting, which can identify devices only by their traffic characteristics. However, existing device fingerprinting technologies cannot accurately identify devices' type from the same manufacturer which equips these devices with similar hardwares and softwares. Therefore, we proposed the TSMC-SVM algorithm which introduced the cosine similarity into the SVM for improving the identification accuracy of these similar devices described above. Experiments illustrate that the average identification accuracy of the TSMC-SVM reaches 93.2%.