Evidence of traffic-related pollutant control in soil-based Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS)

SUDS are being increasingly employed to control highway runoff and have the potential to protect groundwater and surface water quality by minimising the risks of both point and diffuse sources of pollution. While these systems are effective at retaining polluted solids by filtration and sedimentation processes, less is known of the detail of pollutant behaviour within SUDS structures. This paper reports on investigations carried out as part of a co-ordinated programme of controlled studies and field measurements at soft-engineered SUDS undertaken in the UK, observing the accumulation and behaviour of traffic-related heavy metals, oil and PAHs. The field data presented were collected from two extended detention basins serving the M74 motorway in the south-west of Scotland. Additional data were supplied from an experimental lysimeter soil core leaching study. Results show that basin design influences pollutant accumulation and behaviour in the basins. Management and/or control strategies are discussed for reducing the impact of traffic-related pollutants on the aqueous environment

Medium-term performance and maintenance of SUDS:a case-study of Hopwood Park Motorway Service Area, UK

One of the main barriers to implementing SUDS is concern about performance and maintenance costs since there are few well-documented case-studies. This paper summarizes studies conducted between 2000 and 2008 of the performance and maintenance of four SUDS management trains constructed in 1999 at the Hopwood Park Motorway Service Area, central England. Assessments were made of the wildlife value and sedimentation in the SUDS ponds, the hydraulic performance of the coach park management train, water quality in all management trains, and soil/sediment composition in the grass filter strip, interceptor and ponds. Maintenance procedures and costs were also reviewed. Results demonstrate the benefits of a management train approach over individual SUDS units for flow attenuation, water treatment, spillage containment and maintenance. Peak flows, pond sediment depth and contaminant concentrations in sediment and water decreased through the coach park management train. Of the 2007 annual landscape budget of £15,000 for the whole site, the maintenance costs for SUDS only accounted for £2,500 compared to £4,000 for conventional drainage structures. Furthermore, since sediment has been attenuated in the management trains, the cost of sediment removal after the recommended period of three years was only £554 and, if the design is not compromised, less frequent removal will be required in future

Impact cratering and the Oort cloud

We calculate the expected flux profile of comets into the planetary system from the Oort cloud arising from Galactic tides and encounters with molecular clouds. We find that both periodic and sporadic bombardment episodes, with amplitudes an order of magnitude above background, occur on characteristic timescales ~25-35 Myr. Bombardment episodes occurring preferentially during spiral arm crossings may be responsible both for mass extinctions of life and the transfer of viable microorganisms from the bombarded Earth into the disturbing nebulae. Good agreement is found between the theoretical expectations and the age distribution of large, well-dated terrestrial impact craters of the past 250 million years. A weak periodicity of ~36 Myr in the cratering record is consistent with the Sun's recent passage through the Galactic plane, and implies a central plane density ~0.15 M_Sun pc^(-3). This leaves little room for a significant dark matter component in the disc

Talking about weight talk : primary care practitioner knowledge, attitudes and practice

Background: Primary care practitioners (PCPs) have a vital role in patient weight management. This study investigates knowledge, attitudes and practice of UK PCPs regarding patient weight management. Methods: A cross-sectional questionnaire assessed PCP perceived knowledge, self-reported practice, attitudes towards overweight/obesity and actual knowledge regarding overweight and obesity management. Practitioners from NE Scotland were invited to participate. Results: Participants comprised 107 PCPs. Most participants viewed management of overweight and obesity as core to their roles and 75% reported discussing weight with overweight/obese patients. Management techniques included discussion and advice provision. Behavioural change techniques (BCTs) were reported infrequently, despite perceptions that patients lacked motivation to lose weight. A quarter of participants reported a lack of training and a third reported inadequate skills to manage overweight/obese patients. Mean percent correct for knowledge questions was approximately 53%. Barriers to patient weight management included lack of specialists for referral and limited time. Conclusions: This study confirmed a primary care role in managing weight in overweight/obese patients. Our finding that most participants reported discussing weight with their overweight or obese patients is unsupported by previously published research, however, a more comprehensive sample of practitioners is required to scrutinize this disparity. Incongruence exists between practitioners’ perceptions of difficulties associated with patient weight loss and the tools they use to address them. Inclusion of training in BCT, the provision of weight care specialists, or referral on to commercial weight loss organizations may provide more effective pathways for PCPs to assist weight loss for overweight/obese patients in primary care.PostprintPeer reviewe

Speech, text and performance in John Eliot's writing

John Eliot (1601-1690) was one of the first English missionaries to settle in the New World. Over the past four centuries his life and missionary work with the Algonquian Indians of Massachusetts Bay, New England, have been documented in various forms including biographies, poems, fiction and children's stories. In addition to his active missionary work, Eliot was also a profile writer and translator: he contributed to many promotional pamphlets, authored one of the most controversial commonwealth treatises of the seventeenth century, published fictional dialogues of Algonquian Indians, composed language and logic primers to help in the translation of Massachusett into English and vice versa. His most ambitious and famous publication is his translation of the Bible into the Massachusett dialect of Algonquian. Throughout the twentieth century, Eliot's reputation as a missionary and a translator has received much critical attention, especially from historians of the colonial period. However, given recent moves to expand the canon of colonial literature, it is surprising that there is no book-length literary analysis of his work. In order to redress this balance and consider Eliot's work from a literary rather than a historical perspective, this thesis considers the written records of direct speech, conversations, speeches, dialogues and deathbed confessions of Algonquian Praying Indians, in order to investigate the use and manipulation of written and spoken communicative strategies. By considering Eliot's work in terms of speech, text and performance, this thesis traces the performative nature of cultural identity through the emergence and inter-dependence of English, New English, Indian, and Praying Indian identities

A Case Study on Artefact-based RE Improvement in Practice

Most requirements engineering (RE) process improvement approaches are solution-driven and activity-based. They focus on the assessment of the RE of a company against an external norm of best practices. A consequence is that practitioners often have to rely on an improvement approach that skips a profound problem analysis and that results in an RE approach that might be alien to the organisational needs. In recent years, we have developed an RE improvement approach (called \emph{ArtREPI}) that guides a holistic RE improvement against individual goals of a company putting primary attention to the quality of the artefacts. In this paper, we aim at exploring ArtREPI's benefits and limitations. We contribute an industrial evaluation of ArtREPI by relying on a case study research. Our results suggest that ArtREPI is well-suited for the establishment of an RE that reflects a specific organisational culture but to some extent at the cost of efficiency resulting from intensive discussions on a terminology that suits all involved stakeholders. Our results reveal first benefits and limitations, but we can also conclude the need of longitudinal and independent investigations for which we herewith lay the foundation

Culture matters: using a cultural contexts of health approach to enhance policy-making

This is the final version of the report. Freely available online from WHO via the link in this recordThis policy brief has been developed in response to the increasing awareness among policy-makers and the public health community of the important relationship between culture and health. By exploring the three key public health areas of nutrition, migration and environment, the policy brief demonstrates how cultural awareness is central to understanding health and well-being and to developing more effective and equitable health policies. Consequently, it argues that public health policy-making has much to gain from applying research from the health-related humanities and social sciencesWorld Health Organisatio

Chandra Observation of the Globular Cluster NGC 6440 and the Nature of Cluster X-ray Luminosity Functions

As part of our campaign to determine the nature of the various source populations of the low-luminosity globular cluster X-ray sources, we have obtained a Chandra X-ray Observatory ACIS-S3 image of the globular cluster NGC 6440. We detect 24 sources to a limiting luminosity of ~2 times 10^31 erg/s (0.5-2.5keV) inside the cluster's half-mass radius, all of which lie within ~2 core radii of the cluster center. We also find excess emission in and around the core which could be due to unresolved point sources. Based upon X-ray luminosities and colors, we conclude that there are 4-5 likely quiescent low-mass X-ray binaries and that most of the other sources are cataclysmic variables. We compare these results to Chandra results from other globular clusters and find the X-ray luminosity functions differ among the clusters.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, accepted by ApJ, minor changes, added table of clusters' physical parameter

A Search for Molecular Gas in GHz Peaked Spectrum Radio Sources

We present searches for molecular gas (CO, OH, CS, and Ammonia) in six GHz Peaked Spectrum (GPS) radio sources. We do not detect gas in any source and place upper limits on the mass of molecular gas which are generally in the range 1E9 to a few times 1E10 solar masses. These limits are consistent with the following interpretations: (1) GPS sources do not require very dense gas in their hosts, and (2) The GPS sources are unlikely to be confined by dense gas and will evolve to become larger radio sources