An overview of irrigation system performance on the island of Malta

The island of Malta has a typical Mediterranean climate with an annual precipitation of circa 500mm spreading over the October to March period. The semi arid environment has always provoked the indigenous population to develop and adopt techniques that would maximise water harvesting and distribution efficiency. Within the nine year span (1991-2000), the agricultural land in Malta decreased by an estimated 1,164 hectares, reaching a total land base of 10,738 hectares. Despite this loss, the National Statistics Office registered an increase of 420 hectares in irrigated land. This could be interpreted as 1) water availability has increased or 2) efficiency in water distribution has increased. Furthermore, protected cropping through the use of greenhouses and cloches equipped with drip irrigation systems are now increasing in use and popularity. The use of treated sewage water was a key factor in stimulating agricultural development in the south region. Irrigation efficiency may be measured using a variety of indicators, such as: area under irrigation, amount of produce marketed, volume of water storage, and deterioration of ground water resources. A review of irrigation under a Maltese context is presented.peer-reviewe

Broad expertise retrieval in sparse data environments

Expertise retrieval has been largely unexplored on data other than the W3C collection. At the same time, many intranets of universities and other knowledge-intensive organisations offer examples of relatively small but clean multilingual expertise data, covering broad ranges of expertise areas. We first present two main expertise retrieval tasks, along with a set of baseline approaches based on generative language modeling, aimed at finding expertise relations between topics and people. For our experimental evaluation, we introduce (and release) a new test set based on a crawl of a university site. Using this test set, we conduct two series of experiments. The first is aimed at determining the effectiveness of baseline expertise retrieval methods applied to the new test set. The second is aimed at assessing refined models that exploit characteristic features of the new test set, such as the organizational structure of the university, and the hierarchical structure of the topics in the test set. Expertise retrieval models are shown to be robust with respect to environments smaller than the W3C collection, and current techniques appear to be generalizable to other settings

Discovery of Raman-scattered lines in the massive luminous emission-line star LHA 115-S 18

LHA 115-S 18 is a very peculiar emission-line star exhibiting the B[e] phenomenon. Located in the Small Magellanic Cloud, its spectrum shows features of an extremely wide range of excitation and ionization stages, extending from highly ionized atomic lines (Si IV, C IV, He II) in the UV and optical regions to molecular emission bands of CO and TiO in the optical and IR regions. The most distinguishing spectral characteristic of LHA 115-S 18 is the high variability detected in the He II {\lambda}4686 emission line, which can be a very conspicuous or completely invisible feature. In this work, we report on another peculiarity of LHA 115-S 18. From high-resolution optical spectra taken between 2000 and 2008, we discovered the appearance and strengthening of two emission features at {\lambda}6825 \AA, and {\lambda}7082 \AA,, which we identified as Raman-scattered lines. This is the first time these lines have been detected in the spectrum of a massive luminous B[e] star. As the classification of LHA 115-S 18 is highly controversial, we discuss how the discovery of the appearance of Raman-scattered lines in this peculiar star might help us to solve this puzzle.Comment: Letter accepted for publication in MNRAS. 5 pages, 3 figure

Detection of curved lines with B-COSFIRE filters: A case study on crack delineation

The detection of curvilinear structures is an important step for various computer vision applications, ranging from medical image analysis for segmentation of blood vessels, to remote sensing for the identification of roads and rivers, and to biometrics and robotics, among others. %The visual system of the brain has remarkable abilities to detect curvilinear structures in noisy images. This is a nontrivial task especially for the detection of thin or incomplete curvilinear structures surrounded with noise. We propose a general purpose curvilinear structure detector that uses the brain-inspired trainable B-COSFIRE filters. It consists of four main steps, namely nonlinear filtering with B-COSFIRE, thinning with non-maximum suppression, hysteresis thresholding and morphological closing. We demonstrate its effectiveness on a data set of noisy images with cracked pavements, where we achieve state-of-the-art results (F-measure=0.865). The proposed method can be employed in any computer vision methodology that requires the delineation of curvilinear and elongated structures.Comment: Accepted at Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns (CAIP) 201

The Discovery of a Twelfth Wolf-Rayet Star in the Small Magellanic Cloud

We report the discovery of a relatively faint (V=15.5) early-type WN star in the SMC. The line strength and width of He II lambda 4686 emission is similar to that of the other SMC WNs, and the presense of N V lambda 4603,19 emission (coupled with the lack of N III) suggests this star is of spectral type WN3-4.5, and thus is similar in type to the other SMC WRs. Also like the other SMC WN stars, an early-type absorption spectrum is weakly present. The absolute magnitude is comparable to that of other (single) Galactic early-type WNs. The star is located in the Hodge 53 OB association, which is also the home of two other SMC WNs. This star, which we designate SMC-WR12, was actually detected at a high significance level in an earlier interference-filter survey, but the wrong star was observed as part of a spectroscopic followup, and this case of mistaken identity resulted in its Wolf-Rayet nature not being recognized until now.Comment: Accepted by PASP (November 2003 issue

A Search for Wolf-Rayet Stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud

We conducted an extensive search for Wolf-Rayet stars (W-Rs) in the SMC, using the same interference filter imaging techniques that have proved successful in finding W-Rs in more distant members of the Local Group. Photometry of some 1.6 million stellar images resulted in some 20 good candidates, which we then examined spectroscopically. Two of these indeed proved to be newly found W-Rs, bringing the total known in the SMC from 9 to 11. Other finds included previously unknown Of-type stars (one as early as O5f?p)),the recovery of the Luminous Blue Variable S18, and the discovery of a previously unknown SMC symbiotic star. More important, however, is the fact that there does not exist a significant number of W-Rs waiting to be discovered in the SMC. The number of W-Rs in the SMC is a factor of 3 lower than in the LMC (per unit luminosity), and we argue this is the result of the SMC's low metallicity on the evolution of the most massive stars.Comment: Accepted by Astrophysical Journal. Postscript version available via ftp.lowell.edu/pub/massey/smcwr.ps.gz Revised version contains slightly revised spectral types for the Of stars but is otherwise unchange

VLT spectroscopy of blue supergiants in IC 1613

We present multi-object spectroscopy of young, massive stars in the Local Group galaxy IC 1613. We provide the spectral classification and a detailed spectral catalog for 54 OBA stars in this galaxy. The majority of the photometrically selected sample is composed of B- and A-type supergiants. The remaining stars include early O-type dwarfs and the only Wolf-Rayet star known in this galaxy. Among the early B stars we have serendipitously uncovered 6 Be stars, the largest spectroscopically confirmed sample of this class of objects beyond the Magellanic Clouds. We measure chemical abundances for 9 early-B supergiants, and find a mean oxygen abundance of 12+log(O/H)=7.90 +/- 0.08. This value is consistent with the result we obtain for two HII regions in which we detect the temperature-sensitive [OIII]4363 auroral line.Comment: 17 pages, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journa

Pyogenic granuloma as a surrogate indicator of deep seated foreign bodies: a case report

Although pyogenic granulomas are often clinically associated with foreign bodies or recurrent traumatic injury, this association is not well documented. We report a case of a recurrent, intractable pyogenic granuloma due to a missed foreign body. An extensive search retrieved no previous literature reporting this association. This lack of evidence bases may hinder the hand surgeon from extending the wound incision and thorough exploration. Recurrent pyogenic granulomas should lead the hand surgeon to entertain the possibility of a missed foreign body

Characterization Of oil/ gas flow pattern in vertical pipes using electrical capacitance tomography

Electrical Capacitance Tomography provides the opportunity to visualize the contents of a process of many applications such as pipeline and obtain information on the flow configuration. Multiphase flow is an extremely complex field of fluid mechanics; the characteristics of the operations of many equipmentin different areas of industry such as oil and power generation are determined by the nature of flow of two phase or multiphase. In this study, a twin plane Electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) electrode was designed, fabricated and used to image and characterize oil/gas flow in 67 mm pipe. The experiments were carried out in inclinable facility in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Nottingham University, UK. Conditions used are gas superficial velocities of 0.05 to 5.52 m/s and liquid superficial velocities of 0 to 0.54 m/s. The cross-section averaged void fraction and its variation in time were measured using electrical capacitance tomography. Also, Probability Density Functions are demonstrated and the structure velocity of flow is presented as well. In this project, Bubbly, slug, and churn flow configurations was observed. In addition, high speed video images of flow were obtained simultaneously and compared with tomographic images of the ECT system

Pape satan aleppe

Ġabra ta’ poeżiji u proża li tinkludi: Qniepen idoqqu ta’ W. Gulia – Wara l-laqgħa ta’ Dun Abbondju mal-bravi ta’ Dun Pawl – Il-poeżija tiegħi ta’ Ġużè Chetcuti – Tfajjel sajjied ta’ Vincent Caruana – Huma kollox! ta’ Ġer. Azzopardi – Dun Mikiel Xerri ta’ Ġino Muscat-Azzopardi – Quddiem għalqa tal-bittieħ ta’ A. Buttigieg – Montecatini ta’ A. Cremona – Bluha ta’ mument ta’ Jos. Cassar Pullicino – Pape satan aleppe ta’ Albert M. Cassola.N/