53 research outputs found

    An evaluation of metal removal during wastewater treatment: The potential to achieve more stringent final effluent standards

    Get PDF
    This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2011 Taylor & Francis.Metals are of particular importance in relation to water quality, and concern regarding the impact of these contaminants on biodiversity is being encapsulated within the latest water-related legislation such as the Water Framework Directive in Europe and criteria revisions to the Clean Water Act in the United States. This review undertakes an evaluation of the potential of 2-stage wastewater treatment consisting of primary sedimentation and biological treatment in the form of activated sludge processes, to meet more stringent discharge consents that are likely to be introduced as a consequence. The legislation, sources of metals, and mechanisms responsible for their removal are discussed, to elucidate possible pathways by which the performance of conventional processes may be optimized or enhanced. Improvements in effluent quality, achievable by reducing concentrations of suspended solids or biochemical oxygen demand, may also reduce metal concentrations although meeting possible requirements for the removal of copper my be challenging

    Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

    Get PDF
    Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

    The vitamin B<SUB>6</SUB> group : VIII. Biological assay of pyridoxal, pyridoxamine, and pyridoxine

    No full text
    This article does not have an abstract
    corecore