Determination of the Suitability of Arkansas River Water for Municipal, Industrial and Agricultural Use: Volume 3 Treatability Study

Volume III of the overall report for the project to determine the suitability of the Arkansas River for municipal, agricultural and industrial water supplies contains the treatability data. These data include the results of the granular activated carbon, ozonation and packed tower aeration studies. The research project was conducted under contract with the Arkansas Soil and Water Conservation Commission. Funding was provided by the Corps of Engineers, the Environmental Protection Agency, the City of Little Rock, Rockefeller Foundation and the Ozark Society. Additionally, the U.S. Geological Survey contributed financially by matching the cost of sample collection. The City of Little Rock provided funding for sampling the Little Rock site. Funding for the Lee Creek site was provided by the Environmental Protection Agency

Development of the cryogenic system of AEgIS at CERN

The AEgIS (Antimatter Experiment: Gravity, Interferometry, Spectroscopy) experiment is located at the antiproton decelerator complex of CERN. The main goal of the experiment is to perform the first direct measurement of the Earth’s gravitational acceleration on antihydrogen atoms within 1% precision. The antihydrogen is produced in a cylindrical Penning trap by combining antiprotons with positrons. To reach the precision of 1%, the antihydrogen has to be cooled to 100 mK to reduce its random velocity. A dilution refrigerator is selected to deliver the necessary cooling capacity of 100 μW at 50 mK. The AEgIS cryogenic system basically consists of cryostats for a 1-T and for a 5-T superconducting magnet, a central region cryostat, a dilution refrigerator cryostat and a measurement cryostat with a Moiré deflectometer to measure the gravitational acceleration. In autumn 2012, the 1-T cryostat, 5-T cryostat and central region cryostat were assembled and commissioned. The apparatus is cooled down in eight days using 2500 L of liquid helium and liquid nitrogen. During operation, the average consumption of liquid helium is 150 L∙day-1 and of liquid nitrogen 5 L·day-1. The temperature sensors at the Penning traps measured 12 K to 18 K, which is higher than expected. Simulations show that this is caused by a bad thermalization of the trap wiring. The implementation of the sub-kelvin region is foreseen for mid-2015. The antihydrogen will be cooled down to 100 mK in an ultra-cold trap consisting of multiple high-voltage electrodes made of sapphire with gold plated electrode sectors

Identifying predictors of suicide in severe mental illness : a feasibility study of a clinical prediction rule (Oxford Mental Illness and Suicide tool or OxMIS)

Background: Oxford Mental Illness and Suicide tool (OxMIS) is a brief, scalable, freely available, structured risk assessment tool to assess suicide risk in patients with severe mental illness (schizophrenia-spectrum disorders or bipolar disorder). OxMIS requires further external validation, but a lack of large-scale cohorts with relevant variables makes this challenging. Electronic health records provide possible data sources for external validation of risk prediction tools. However, they contain large amounts of information within free-text that is not readily extractable. In this study, we examined the feasibility of identifying suicide predictors needed to validate OxMIS in routinely collected electronic health records. Methods: In study 1, we manually reviewed electronic health records of 57 patients with severe mental illness to calculate OxMIS risk scores. In study 2, we examined the feasibility of using natural language processing to scale up this process. We used anonymized free-text documents from the Clinical Record Interactive Search database to train a named entity recognition model, a machine learning technique which recognizes concepts in free-text. The model identified eight concepts relevant for suicide risk assessment: medication (antidepressant/antipsychotic treatment), violence, education, self-harm, benefits receipt, drug/alcohol use disorder, suicide, and psychiatric admission. We assessed model performance in terms of precision (similar to positive predictive value), recall (similar to sensitivity) and F1 statistic (an overall performance measure). Results: In study 1, we estimated suicide risk for all patients using the OxMIS calculator, giving a range of 12 month risk estimates from 0.1-3.4%. For 13 out of 17 predictors, there was no missing information in electronic health records. For the remaining 4 predictors missingness ranged from 7-26%; to account for these missing variables, it was possible for OxMIS to estimate suicide risk using a range of scores. In study 2, the named entity recognition model had an overall precision of 0.77, recall of 0.90 and F1 score of 0.83. The concept with the best precision and recall was medication (precision 0.84, recall 0.96) and the weakest were suicide (precision 0.37), and drug/alcohol use disorder (recall 0.61). Conclusions: It is feasible to estimate suicide risk with the OxMIS tool using predictors identified in routine clinical records. Predictors could be extracted using natural language processing. However, electronic health records differ from other data sources, particularly for family history variables, which creates methodological challenges

The Bathypelagic Biome of the Atlantic Ocean: Character and Ecological Discreteness of the Fish Fauna

Recent global synthetic analyses have revealed that marine taxonomic inventories are far from complete, nowhere more so than in the deep-pelagic ocean. At over a billion km3, it is the largest biome on Earth, yet only a tiny fraction of the biogeographic records include the bathypelagic fauna. This data gap served as the impetus for recent deepwater surveys, many of which have altered our perceptions of pelagic ecosystems. Here we examine data from four deep-pelagic (0-5000+ m) sampling programs in the Atlantic (60°N-25°S) in order to assess the character of bathypelagic fish communities with respect to faunal distinctiveness and ecological connectivity. Regions studied include the Gulf of Mexico, Sargasso 702 Sea, eastern North/South Atlantic, and mid-North Atlantic. Quantitative analyses give contrasting pictures with respect to faunal composition and ecosystem operation. The discreteness of the bathypelagic zone is exhibited faunistically by the suite of ―holobathypelagic‖ species found only below 1000 m, most of which are highly modified morphologically. Geometric abundance class analyses reveal that the character of relative species abundance distributions between the meso- and bathypelagic zones is fundamentally dissimilar; the former exhibit a much higher proportion of common species, while the latter exhibit a much higher percentage of rarer species. From a community energetics perspective, however, the bathy- and mesopelagic zones are highly interconnected. Approximately 70% of fish species collected below 1000 m are also found in the mesopelagic zone, and in the far North Atlantic, are also found in the epipelagial. These species comprised 66 to \u3e90% of individuals collected below 1000 m in the regions sampled. In the mid-North Atlantic, these species contribute to the unexpected water-column biomass maximum observed between 1500-2300 m. Thus, the ―transient‖ taxa (primarily mesopelagic migrators and spanner taxa) add considerably to the ichthyofaunal diversity of the world ocean below 1000 m, and appear to be the vectors that support the diverse array of holobathypelagic fishes whose taxonomic composition is dominated by piscivores. Data from the four regions studied suggests that classic pelagic biogeographic boundaries do not apply to bathypelagic realm, as shared species are the rule rather than the exception. Last, cumulative species curves suggest we are far from understanding the true complexity of the bathypelagic zone

Interactions Between Zooplankton and Karenia brevis in the Gulf of Mexico.

Blooms of the toxic dinoflagellate K. brevis are common in the Gulf of Mexico, yet no in situ studies of the interactions between zooplankton and K. brevis in the Gulf of Mexico have been conducted. Zooplankton numerical abundance, biomass and taxonomic composition of nonbloom and K. brevis bloom stations within the ECOHAB study area were compared. At nonbloom stations, the most important determinant species were Parvolcalanus crassirostris, Oithona colcarva and Paracalanus quasimodo at the 5-m isobath and P. quasimodo, O. colcarva and Oikopleura dioka at the 25-m isobath. There was considerable overlap between the 5 and 25-m isobaths, with 9 species contributing to the top 90% of numerical abundance at both isobaths. Within K. brevis blooms Acartia tonsa, Centropages velificatus, Temora turbinata, Evadne tergestina, O. colcarva, O. dioika, and P. crassirostris were consistently dominant. Variations between non-bloom and bloom assemblages were evident, including variations in numerical abundance and biomass and the reduction in numerical abundance of 3 key species. Calculated grazing pressure proved insufficient to terminate K. brevis blooms, despite occasional grazing hot spots

Annihilation of low energy antiprotons in silicon

The goal of the AE$\mathrm{\bar{g}}$IS experiment at the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) at CERN, is to measure directly the Earth's gravitational acceleration on antimatter. To achieve this goal, the AE$\mathrm{\bar{g}}$IS collaboration will produce a pulsed, cold (100 mK) antihydrogen beam with a velocity of a few 100 m/s and measure the magnitude of the vertical deflection of the beam from a straight path. The final position of the falling antihydrogen will be detected by a position sensitive detector. This detector will consist of an active silicon part, where the annihilations take place, followed by an emulsion part. Together, they allow to achieve 1$$ precision on the measurement of $\bar{g}$ with about 600 reconstructed and time tagged annihilations. We present here, to the best of our knowledge, the first direct measurement of antiproton annihilation in a segmented silicon sensor, the first step towards designing a position sensitive silicon detector for the AE$\mathrm{\bar{g}}$IS experiment. We also present a first comparison with Monte Carlo simulations (GEANT4) for antiproton energies below 5 MeVComment: 21 pages in total, 29 figures, 3 table

Polar opposites? NGOs, left parties and the fight for social change in Nepal

In the early 1990s, when NGOs were rising to prominence as an ostensible force for social change in Nepal, the Maoists were also beginning to organise, and denounced NGOs as agents of imperialism. The Maoists came to prominence by fighting a People’s War launched in 1996, with the intention of improving life for the poor peasant and working-class majority. But after a decade-long struggle, the Maoists became incorporated into the parliamentary system. While Nepal’s first democratic revolution in 1990 met formal, popular political demands, which were consolidated in a subsequent revolution in 2006 overthrowing the monarchy and bringing the People’s War to an end, there was little socio-economic progress for the vast majority. The argument advanced in this article is that this lack of progress relied on the interplay of two phenomena: an anti-Maoist alliance consisting of the international community, the domestic ruling elite and NGOs, and a fundamental ambiguity at the heart of the Maoists’ political theory

Women and citizenship post-trafficking : the case of Nepal

The research for this paper was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council – ESRC Res-062-23-1490: ‘Post Trafficking in Nepal: Sexuality and Citizenship in Livelihood Strategies’. Diane Richardson would like to acknowledge the support provided by the award of a Leverhulme TrustMajor Research Fellowship, ‘Transforming Citizenship: Sexuality, Gender and Citizenship Struggles’ [award MRF-2012-106].This article analyses the relationship between gender, sexuality and citizenship embedded in models of citizenship in the Global South, specifically in South Asia, and the meanings associated with having - or not having - citizenship. It does this through an examination of women's access to citizenship in Nepal in the context of the construction of the emergent nation state in the 'new' Nepal 'post-conflict'. Our analysis explores gendered and sexualized constructions of citizenship in this context through a specific focus on women who have experienced trafficking, and are beginning to organize around rights to sustainable livelihoods and actively lobby for changes in citizenship rules which discriminate against women. Building from this, in the final section we consider important implications of this analysis of post-trafficking experiences for debates about gender, sexuality and citizenship more broadly.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Measuring the free fall of antihydrogen

After the first production of cold antihydrogen by the ATHENA and ATRAP experiments ten years ago, new second-generation experiments are aimed at measuring the fundamental properties of this anti-atom. The goal of AEGIS (Antimatter Experiment: Gravity, Interferometry, Spectroscopy) is to test the weak equivalence principle by studying the gravitational interaction between matter and antimatter with a pulsed, cold antihydrogen beam. The experiment is currently being assembled at CERN's Antiproton Decelerator. In AEGIS, antihydrogen will be produced by charge exchange of cold antiprotons with positronium excited to a high Rydberg state (n > 20). An antihydrogen beam will be produced by controlled acceleration in an electric-field gradient (Stark acceleration). The deflection of the horizontal beam due to its free fall in the gravitational field of the earth will be measured with a moire deflectometer. Initially, the gravitational acceleration will be determined to a precision of 1%, requiring the detection of about 105 antihydrogen atoms. In this paper, after a general description, the present status of the experiment will be reviewed