WaterWorks: a decision support tool for irrigation infrastructure decisions at farm level

Increasing water scarcity, climate change and pressure to provide water for environmental flows urge irrigators to be more efficient. In Australia, ongoing water reforms and most recent National Water Security Plan offer incentives to irrigators to adjust their farming practices by adopting water saving irrigation infrastructures to match with soils, crop and climatic conditions. WaterWorks is a decision support tool to facilitate irrigators to make long and short term irrigation infrastructure investment decision at the farm level. It assists irrigators to improve the economic efficiency, water use efficiency and environmental performance of their farm businesses. The WaterWorks has been tested, validated and accepted by the irrigation community and reachers in NSW. The interface of WaterWorks is user-friendly and flexible. The simulation and optimisation module in WaterWorks provides an opportunity to evaluate infrastructure investment decisions to suit their seasonal or long-term water availability. The sensitivity analysis allows substantiating the impact of major variables. Net present value, internal rate of return, benefit cost ratio and payback period are used to analyse the costs and benefits of modern irrigation technology. Application of WaterWorks using a whole farm-level case study indicates its effectiveness in making long term and short term investment decisions. The WaterWorks can be easily integrated into commercial software such as spreadsheets, GIS, real time data acquisition and control systems to further enhance its usability. The WaterWorks can also be used in regional development plannin

Freshwater biology and water supply in Britain

This paper is designed to give a general account of freshwater biology as it bears on waterworks practice. Most water that is used for consumption will commonly go through a storage reservoir. Here special reference is given to the biological relations in standing waters, the biological control of water supplies, methods of plankton estimation, the biology of slow sand filtration and the use of algicides

Ownership and financing of infrastructure : historical perspective

The authors summarize the rich and varied experiences of private and public provision of urban services in France, Great Britain, and the United States over the past 100 years. Their main focus is on experiences in the United States and on shifts back and forth between the public and private sectors. A few of their observations: (i) The values of politically important actors as well as the working of government, political, and legal institutions have shaped decisions about infrastructure development, the sorts of public goods demanded, and the roles played by private firms. (ii) The range of choices that has historically been made with respect to the ownership, financing, and operation of different infrastructures has been far too varied to be encompassed by simple distinctions between"public"and"private."(iii) Throughout the world, many infrastructures owned and operated by governments have been built by private firms. (iv) In the United States, private firms and property-owners associations of various sorts have owned outright both toll roads and residential streets. Private firms have also collected solid wastes and provided urban transport under a range of franchise, contracting, and regulatory arrangements. The situation with mass transit has been similar in Great Britain. Although water works facilities in France are predominantly government-owned, private firms operate and manage most systems under an array of contracting and leasing arrangements. (v) Even when facilities have been owned by private firms, direct competition has been of limited importance in the provision of many kinds of infrastructure. But market discipline can arise from other sources. (vi) Privatization can get government bureaucracies out of the business of performing entrepreneurial activities for which they may be poorly suited. When market forces are weak, however, and important public interests are at stake, strengthening government institutions may be a prerequisite for successful privatization. (vii) In the electric utility industry, private firms played a far greater role in U.S. electric utilities than in Great Britain, in part because of different views about appropriate roles for government in providing essential services. For similar reasons, the state played a much larger role in furnishing telecommunications services in France than in the United States. (viii) Beliefs about the"publicness"of different goods and services have helped shape the character of regulatory franchise, and contracting arrangements. When a good is seen as mainly private, it is easier for private service providers to be compensated mainly by user fees and for most decisions about price, output, and quality, no matter what the role played by private firms in actually providing services. (ix) Goods defined as"public"have often been provided free to users, even though it would have been easy to exclude nonpayers. Examples in the United States include interstate highway systems, public parks, public libraries, and police and fire protection. Free services have been provided because it is believed that in these domains market relationships should not apply - and that denying nonpayers the public services would be a denial of rights. (x) In Great Britain and the United States, the contracting out of public services has been both supported and opposed because of its potential to break the power of public sector unions and to cut workers'pay. In the United States, privatization has also come under attack on the grounds that opportunities for minority employment may be reduced.Regional Governance,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Decentralization,Public Sector Management and Reform,Urban Governance and Management,Public Sector Management and Reform,Urban Governance and Management,Regional Governance,Town Water Supply and Sanitation,Public Sector Economics&Finance

Heterogeneity in the Relationship between Disinfection By-Products in Drinking Water and Cancer: A Systematic Review.

The epidemiological evidence demonstrating the effect of disinfection by-products (DBPs) from drinking water on colon and rectal cancers is well documented. However, no systematic assessment has been conducted to assess the potential effect measure modification (EMM) in the relationship between DBPs and cancer. The objective of this paper is to conduct a systematic literature review to determine the extent to which EMM has been assessed in the relationship between DBPs in drinking water in past epidemiological studies. Selected articles (n = 19) were reviewed, and effect estimates and covariates that could have been used in an EMM assessment were gathered. Approximately half of the studies assess EMM (n = 10), but the majority of studies only estimate it relative to sex subgroups (n = 6 for bladder cancer and n = 2 both for rectal and colon cancers). Although EMM is rarely assessed, several variables that could have a potential modification effect are routinely collected in these studies, such as socioeconomic status or age. The role of environmental exposures through drinking water can play an important role and contribute to cancer disparities. We encourage a systematic use of subgroup analysis to understand which populations or territories are more vulnerable to the health impacts of DBPs

Potential for using climate forecasts in spatio-temporal prediction of dengue fever incidence in Malaysia submitted

Dengue fever is a viral infection transmitted by the bite of female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. It is estimated that nearly 40% of the world’s population is now at risk from Dengue in over 100 endemic countries including Malaysia. Several studies in various countries in recent years have identified statistically significant links between Dengue incidence and climatic factors. There has been relatively little work on this issue in Malaysia, particularly on a national scale. This study attempts to fill that gap. The primary research question is ‘to what extent can climate variables be used to assist predictions of dengue fever incidence in Malaysia?’. The study proposes a potential framework of modelling spatio-temporal variation in dengue risk on a national scale in Malaysia using both climate and non-climate information. Early chapters set the scene by discussing Malaysia and Climate in Malaysia and reviewing previous work on dengue fever and dengue fever in Malaysia. Subsequent chapters focus on the analysis and modelling of annual dengue incidence rate (DIR) for the twelve states of Peninsular Malaysia for the period 1991 to 2009 and monthly DIR for the same states in the period 2001 to 2009. Exploratory analyses are presented which suggest possible relationships between annual and monthly DIR and climate and other factors. The variables that were considered included annual trend, in year seasonal effects, population, population density and lagged dengue incidence rate as well as climate factors such as average rainfall and temperature, number of rainy days, ENSO and lagged values of these climate variables. Findings include evidence of an increasing annual trend in DIR in all states of Malaysia and a strong in-year seasonal cycle in DIR with possible differences in this cycle in different geographical regions of Malaysia. High population density is found to be positively related to monthly DIR as is the DIR in the immediately preceding months. Relationships between monthly DIR and climate variables are generally quite weak, nevertheless some relationships may be able to be usefully incorporated into predictive models. These include average temperature and rainfall, number of rainy days and ENSO. However lagged values of these variables need to be considered for up to 6 months in the case of ENSO and from 1-3 months in the case of other variables. These exploratory findings are then more formally investigated using a framework where dengue counts are modelled using a negative binomial generalised linear model (GLM) with a population offset. This is subsequently extended to a negative binomial generalised additive model (GAM) which is able to deal more flexibly with non-linear relationships between the response and certain of the explanatory variables. The model successfully accounts for the large amount of overdispersion found in the observed dengue counts. Results indicated that there are statisti�cally significant relationships with both climate and non-climate covariates using this modelling framework. More specifically, smooth functions of year and month differentiated by geographical areas of the country are significant in the model to allow for seasonality and annual trend. Other significant covariates included were mean rainfall at lag zero month and lag 3 months, mean temperature at lag zero month and lag 1 month, number of rainy days at lag zero month and lag 3 months, sea surface temperature at lag 6 months, interaction between mean temperature at lag 1 month and sea surface temperature at lag 6 months, dengue incidence rate at lag 3 months and population density. Three final competing models were selected as potential candidates upon which an early warning system for dengue in Malaysia might be able to be developed. The model fits for the whole data set were compared using simulation experiments to allow for both parameter and negative binomial model uncertainty and a single model preferred from the three models was identified. The ‘out of sample’ predictive performance of this model was then compared and contrasted for different lead times by fitting the model to the first 7 years of the 9 years monthly data set covering 2001-2009 and then analysing predictions for the subsequent 2 years for lead time of 3, 6 12 and 24 months. Again simulation experiments were conducted to allow for both parameter and model uncertainty. Results were mixed. There does seem to be predictive potential for lead times of up to six months from the model in areas outside of the highly urbanised South Western states of Kuala Lumpur and Selangor and such a model may therefore possibly be useful as a basis for developing early warning systems for those areas. However, none of the models developed work well for Kuala Lumpur and Selangor where there are clearly more complex localised influences involved which need further study. This study is one of the first to look at potential climatic influences on dengue incidence on a nationwide scale in Malaysia. It is also one of the few studies worldwide to explore the use of generalised additive models in the spatio-temporal modelling of dengue incidence. Although, the results of the study show a mixed picture, hopefully the framework developed will be able to be used as a starting point to investigate further if climate information can valuably be incorporated in an early warning system for dengue in Malaysi

Water Consumption and Long-Run Urban Development: The Case of Milan

Analyses of long run consumption series are rare in literature. We study the evolution of water consumption in Milan in the twentieth century. The objective is twofold: on one side, the univariate analysis tries both to assess the impact of relevant socio-economic and environmental changes on water consumption in Milan and verify if consumers have deeply rooted consumption habits. On the other side, the multivariate analysis is used to identify the socio-economic factors that are relevant in explaining consumption evolution. Results indicate both that water users have well entrenched consumption habits and that population, climate and economic structure behave more similarly, in Euclidean terms, to water consumption than to other economic and social variables.Urban consumption, Long-run, Development, Environmental changes

Experimental study of the flow field in patient specific lower airways

In this study Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) is used to visualize and measure airflow in the lower airways. Using Rapid Prototyping Manufacturing (RPM) technology, a hydraulic in vitro model was developed and constructed. Preliminary 2D PIV measurements compared successfully to Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) results