This study examines the economic feasibility of the environment-friendly farmland use policy to improve water quality. Conventional highland farming, polluting the Han River basin in South Korea, can be converted into environment-friendly farming through land acquisition or application of pesticide-free or organic farming practices. We estimate the welfare measures of improvement in water quality and the costs of policy implementation for economic analysis. To estimate the economic benefit of improvement in water quality experienced by the residents residing in mid-and-downstream areas of the Han River, the choice experiment was employed with a pivot-style experimental design approach. In the empirical analysis, we converted the household perception for water quality grades into scientific water quality measures using Water Quality Standard to estimate the value of changes in water quality. To analyze the costs required to convert conventional highland farmlands into environment-friendly farmlands, we estimated the relevant cost of land acquisition and the subsidy necessary for farm income loss for organic agricultural practice. We find that the agri-environmental policy is economically viable, which suggests that converting conventional highland farming into environment-friendly farming would make the improvement in water quality visible.
In this study, the authors propose a method that combines CNN and LSTM networks to recognize facial expressions. To handle illumination changes and preserve edge information in the image, the method uses two different preprocessing techniques. The preprocessed image is then fed into two independent CNN layers for feature extraction. The extracted features are then fused with an LSTM layer to capture the temporal dynamics of facial expressions. To evaluate the method's performance, the authors use the FER2013 dataset, which contains over 35,000 facial images with seven different expressions. To ensure a balanced distribution of the expressions in the training and testing sets, a mixing matrix is generated. The models in FER on the FER2013 dataset with an accuracy of 73.72%. The use of Focal loss, a variant of cross-entropy loss, improves the model's performance, especially in handling class imbalance. Overall, the proposed method demonstrates strong generalization ability and robustness to variations in illumination and facial expressions. It has the potential to be applied in various real-world applications such as emotion recognition in virtual assistants, driver monitoring systems, and mental health diagnosis.
Since the Industrial Revolution, there has been an evolution in the paradigms under which the industrial worker is perceived and dealt with. These paradigms can be briefly listed in the order of their evolutionary stage as: the food-gatherer, the economic man, the social man, the resourceful man, and the enterprising man. Each of them is a combination of two basic paradigms in different proportions, namely, the outsider paradigm and the partnership paradigm. Obviously, the paradigmatic perspectives of management about their workers will have a significant influence on how they treat their workers, which may become especially conspicuous during recessions and other kinds of hard times. It was in this context that we designed a study to understand the human resource strategies of companies during a period of recession. Data for this study was collected through the content analysis of 46 published cases, wherein we developed the ratings of two sets of variables, namely: the external and internal environments of the company and the strategic actions taken by the respective managements. A surprising finding of the study is that the correlations between the environmental factors and the strategy factors were small and non-significant; moreover, the correlations involving the external environment were smaller than those involving the internal environment. Hence, it may be inferred that strategic actions are influenced primarily by the paradigmatic perspectives of management rather than environmental factors. In order to identify the different types of paradigmatic perspectives, we have further carried out a cluster analysis to develop a taxonomy of paradigms. The results showed that there are five sub-paradigms, which are: (1) Pacifiers, constituting 35% of the sample; (2) Modifiers, constituting 22%; (3) Molders, constituting 17%; (4) Enhancers, constituting 15%; and (5) Exploiters, constituting 11%. The limitations of the study and the implications of the findings are discussed in the concluding part.
The main purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of environmental transformational leadership on organizational citizenship behavior through the mediating role of perceived meaningful work in Tehran District 22 Municipality. The study population in this study is the employees of the municipal district of District 22 of Tehran. The number is about 400 people, and the sample size was obtained according to Cochran’s 196 formula. The research method in the present study is applied in terms of purpose and descriptive in terms of implementation method. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was used to test the normality of the data, which proved with 95% confidence that the variables had an abnormal distribution. Therefore, due to the abnormality of the data distribution, Pls software was used to analyze the data. The results showed that environmental transformational leadership has an effect on organizational citizenship behaviors.
Plastic products are items that we use every day around us, and their replacement speed are very fast, so that to recycle waste plastic has become the focus of environmental problems. This study has proposed an optimized circular design for the recycle plant of waste plastic, therefore, and our proposed strategy is to build a new tertiary recycling plant to reduce the total generation amount of the derived solid plastic waste from ordinary and secondary recycling plants and the semi-finished products from secondary recycling plant. Results obtained from a real recycle plant has showed that to recycle the tertiary waste plastic in a tertiary recycling plant, the finished products produced from a secondary recycling plant accounts about 27% of ordinary waste plastic, and the semi-finished products that mainly is scrap hardware accounts about 1% of ordinary waste plastic. Other derived solid plastic waste accounts for 6% of ordinary plastic waste. Therefore, if the ordinary, secondary and tertiary recycle plant can be set all-in-one, it can reduce the total generation amount of derived solid plastic waste from 34% to 6%, without and with a tertiary recycling plant, respectively. It can also increase the operating income of the secondary recycle plant and the investment willingness of the new tertiary recycle plant.
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