Is the Hyporheic Zone Relevant beyond the Scientific Community?

Rivers are important ecosystems under continuous anthropogenic stresses. The hyporheic zone is a ubiquitous, reactive interface between the main channel and its surrounding sediments along the river network. We elaborate on the main physical, biological, and biogeochemical drivers and processes within the hyporheic zone that have been studied by multiple scientific disciplines for almost half a century. These previous efforts have shown that the hyporheic zone is a modulator for most metabolic stream processes and serves as a refuge and habitat for a diverse range of aquatic organisms. It also exerts a major control on river water quality by increasing the contact time with reactive environments, which in turn results in retention and transformation of nutrients, trace organic compounds, fine suspended particles, and microplastics, among others. The paper showcases the critical importance of hyporheic zones, both from a scientific and an applied perspective, and their role in ecosystem services to answer the question of the manuscript title. It identifies major research gaps in our understanding of hyporheic processes. In conclusion, we highlight the potential of hyporheic restoration to efficiently manage and reactivate ecosystem functions and services in river corridors. View Full-Tex

M-commerce perceptual quality of service

Copyright @ 2003 CAiS

A user perspective of quality of service in m-commerce

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2004 Springer VerlagIn an m-commerce setting, the underlying communication system will have to provide a Quality of Service (QoS) in the presence of two competing factors—network bandwidth and, as the pressure to add value to the business-to-consumer (B2C) shopping experience by integrating multimedia applications grows, increasing data sizes. In this paper, developments in the area of QoS-dependent multimedia perceptual quality are reviewed and are integrated with recent work focusing on QoS for e-commerce. Based on previously identified user perceptual tolerance to varying multimedia QoS, we show that enhancing the m-commerce B2C user experience with multimedia, far from being an idealised scenario, is in fact feasible if perceptual considerations are employed

Interaction between suspended and settled solid particles in cassava wastewater

Cassava (Manihot Esculenta, Crantz) is a very important staple food in most developing countries. During its processing into cassava flour or garri, wastewaters are generated and are indiscriminately discharged into the public sewers or into the environment and in some cases; the fermented wastewater is usually poured into latrines with the aim of degrading sewage. This study is aimed at finding out the interaction between the suspended solids and settled solids of cassava wastewater. Cassava wastewater was collected from a cassava processing plant at Ogige main market in Nsukka town and monitored for 14 days. Half of the samples collected were left unstirred and the other halves were continuously stirred. The parameters monitored include biochemical oxygen demand (BOD5), suspended solids, coliform, cyanide and pH. Results showed that there was a 73.4, 27.5 and 99.9% reduction in the settled solids for BOD5, suspended solids and coliform bacteria respectively, for the stirred samples while there was a 97.8, 44 and 99.9% reduction in the settled solids for BOD5, suspended solids and coliform bacteria respectively, for the unstirred samples. Overall, the unstirred samples performed better than the stirred samples with respect to BOD5 and SS removal. The result of this work will guide sanitary engineers in the selection of influent parameters for the effective design of treatment units

Terminology Extraction for and from Communications in Multi-disciplinary Domains

Terminology extraction generally refers to methods and systems for identifying term candidates in a uni-disciplinary and uni-lingual environment such as engineering, medical, physical and geological sciences, or administration, business and leisure. However, as human enterprises get more and more complex, it has become increasingly important for teams in one discipline to collaborate with others from not only a non-cognate discipline but also speaking a different language. Disaster mitigation and recovery, and conflict resolution are amongst the areas where there is a requirement to use standardised multilingual terminology for communication. This paper presents a feasibility study conducted to build terminology (and ontology) in the domain of disaster management and is part of the broader work conducted for the EU project Sland \ub4 ail (FP7 607691). We have evaluated CiCui (for Chinese name \ub4 \u8bcd\u8403, which translates to words gathered), a corpus-based text analytic system that combine frequency, collocation and linguistic analyses to extract candidates terminologies from corpora comprised of domain texts from diverse sources. CiCui was assessed against four terminology extraction systems and the initial results show that it has an above average precision in extracting terms