Water safety plans - Book 1: Planning water safety management for urban piped water supplies in developing countries

Historically, global control of drinking water has relied upon infrequent testing of selected water quality parameters at specified points within a water supply. Weaknesses identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) in this approach have resulted in a fundamental change noted in the revised, third edition of the WHO Guidelines for Drinking Water Quality, 2004. The change involves the development of quality assurance processes known as Water Safety Plans (WSPs) founded upon the HACCP principles used in the food industry. Water Safety Plans - Books 1 and 2, document state of the art research designed to complement the advances being made in the global water quality sector. Book 1 presents guidelines for implementing WSPs in developing countries. Book 2 gives further detail on supporting programmes. Together they provide essential reading for water utility managers, helping them to assess, identify and manage water quality risk in their piped water supplies, as well as individuals and organizations representing vulnerable groups and suggesting methods for improving monitoring and management of water quality in low socio-economic areas. Evidence for these books is drawn from three years of research undertaken in Uganda and India funded by the Department for International Development (DFID)

Water safety plans - Book 2: Supporting water safety management for urban piped water supplies in developing countries

Historically, global control of drinking water has relied upon infrequent testing of selected water quality parameters at specified points within a water supply. Weaknesses identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) in this approach have resulted in a fundamental change noted in the revised, third edition of the WHO Guidelines for Drinking Water Quality, 2004. The change involves the development of quality assurance processes known as Water Safety Plans (WSPs) founded upon the HACCP principles used in the food industry. Water Safety Plans - Books 1 and 2, document state of the art research designed to complement the advances being made in the global water quality sector. Book 1 presents guidelines for implementing WSPs in developing countries. Book 2 gives further detail on supporting programmes. Together they provide essential reading for water utility managers, helping them to assess, identify and manage water quality risk in their piped water supplies, as well as individuals and organizations representing vulnerable groups and suggesting methods for improving monitoring and management of water quality in low socio-economic areas. Evidence for these books is drawn from three years of research undertaken in Uganda and India funded by the Department for International Development (DFID)

New Horizons: Pioneering Pharmaceutical R&D with Generative AI from lab to the clinic -- an industry perspective

The rapid advance of generative AI is reshaping the strategic vision for R&D across industries. The unique challenges of pharmaceutical R&D will see applications of generative AI deliver value along the entire value chain from early discovery to regulatory approval. This perspective reviews these challenges and takes a three-horizon approach to explore the generative AI applications already delivering impact, the disruptive opportunities which are just around the corner, and the longer-term transformation which will shape the future of the industry. Selected applications are reviewed for their potential to drive increase productivity, accelerate timelines, improve the quality of research, data and decision making, and support a sustainable future for the industry. Recommendations are given for Pharma R&D leaders developing a generative AI strategy today which will lay the groundwork for getting real value from the technology and safeguarding future growth. Generative AI is today providing new, efficient routes to accessing and combining organisational data to drive productivity. Next, this impact will reach clinical development, enhancing the patient experience, driving operational efficiency, and unlocking digital innovation to better tackle the future burden of disease. Looking to the furthest horizon, rapid acquisition of rich multi-omics data, which capture the 'language of life', in combination with next generation AI technologies will allow organisations to close the loop around phases of the pipeline through rapid, automated generation and testing of hypotheses from bench to bedside. This provides a vision for the future of R&D with sustainability at the core, with reduced timescales and reduced dependency on resources, while offering new hope to patients to treat the untreatable and ultimately cure diseases.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figure

Static risk mapping using a Geographic Information System

Water safety plans (WSPs) are risk management tools designed to assure the safety of drinking water. This paper outlines the development of a Geographic Information System (GIS) to assess and manage risk data which supports the development of the WSP. Findings presented in the paper are based on research undertaken by the Water. Engineering and Development Centre (WEDC) in collaboration with the National Water and Sewerage Corporation (NWSC) and Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda

Springs of Florida

bulletin which documented the major and important springs in the state (Ferguson et al., 1947). This publication was revised in 1977, with many previously undocumented springs and many new water-quality analyses being added (Rosenau et al., 1977). The Florida Geological Survey's report on first magnitude springs (Scott et al., 2002) was the initial step in once again updating and revising the Springs of Florida bulletin. The new bulletin includes the spring descriptions and water-quality analyses from Scott et al. (2002). Nearly 300 springs were described in 1977. As of 2004, more than 700 springs have been recognized in the state and more are reported each year. To date, 33 first magnitude springs (with a flow greater than 100 cubic feet per second or approximately 64.6 million gallons of water per day) have been recognized in Florida, more than any other state or country (Rosenau et al., 1977). Our springs are a unique and invaluable natural resource. A comprehensive understanding of the spring systems will provide the basis for their protection and wise use. (Document pdf contains 677 pages

#INLSmakes: 'Tinker Table' lesson plans

In collaboration with NC State's Makerspace, we have created documentation and instructions for activities to be used in their Tinker Table. Tinker Table is a low-tech/no-tech introduction to making, makerspaces, and their tools using short hands-on lessons to encourage curiosity and engagement of patrons

System assessment to develop water safety plans

Water Safety Plans (WSPs) are risk management tools designed to assure the safety of drinking water. WSPs have the advantage that they help minimise the risks to water contamination through identification and management of vulnerable points within a water supply system, which could allow microbial hazards to enter. This paper discusses one of the crucial elements in establishing WSPs, the system assessment. It outlines findings from fieldwork undertaken on a UK, Department for International Development (DFID) funded project on development of WSPs in Kampala, Uganda

Parallel Batch-Dynamic Trees via Change Propagation

The dynamic trees problem is to maintain a forest subject to edge insertions and deletions while facilitating queries such as connectivity, path weights, and subtree weights. Dynamic trees are a fundamental building block of a large number of graph algorithms. Although traditionally studied in the single-update setting, dynamic algorithms capable of supporting batches of updates are increasingly relevant today due to the emergence of rapidly evolving dynamic datasets. Since processing updates on a single processor is often unrealistic for large batches of updates, designing parallel batch-dynamic algorithms that achieve provably low span is important for many applications. In this work, we design the first work-efficient parallel batch-dynamic algorithm for dynamic trees that is capable of supporting both path queries and subtree queries, as well as a variety of nonlocal queries. Previous work-efficient dynamic trees of Tseng et al. were only capable of handling subtree queries [ALENEX\u2719, (2019), pp. 92 - 106]. To achieve this, we propose a framework for algorithmically dynamizing static round-synchronous algorithms to obtain parallel batch-dynamic algorithms. In our framework, the algorithm designer can apply the technique to any suitably defined static algorithm. We then obtain theoretical guarantees for algorithms in our framework by defining the notion of a computation distance between two executions of the underlying algorithm. Our dynamic trees algorithm is obtained by applying our dynamization framework to the parallel tree contraction algorithm of Miller and Reif [FOCS\u2785, (1985), pp. 478 - 489], and then performing a novel analysis of the computation distance of this algorithm under batch updates. We show that k updates can be performed in O(klog(1+n/k)) work in expectation, which matches the algorithm of Tseng et al. while providing support for a substantially larger number of queries and applications

Compact and wideband transmit opto-antenna for radio frequency over fiber

An advanced transmit remote opto-antenna unit is proposed that accomplishes impedance matching between a photodetector and a low-profile antenna in a specified frequency bandwidth, without requiring an area-consuming matching network. This results in a highly compact design, which also avoids the losses and spurious radiation by such an electrically large matching circuit. Instead, the photodetector is almost directly connected to the antenna, which is designed as a conjugate load, such that the extracted and radiated power are optimized. The required input impedance for the antenna is obtained by adopting a half-mode air-filled suhstrate-integrated-waveguide topology, which also exhibits excellent radiation efficiency. The proposed unit omits electrical amplifiers and is, therefore, completely driven by the signal supplied by an optical fiber when deployed in an analog optical link, except for an externally supplied photodetector bias voltage. Such a highly cost-effective, power efficient and reliable unit is an important step in making innovative wireless communication systems, which deploy extremely dense attocells of 15 cm x 15 cm, technically and economically feasible. As a validation, a prototype, operating in the Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure radio bands (5.15 GHz-5.85 GHz), is constructed and its radiation properties are characterized in free-space conditions. After normalizing with respect to the optical source's slope efficiency, a maximum boresight gain of 12.0 dBi and a -3 dB gain bandwidth of 1020 MHz (18.6 %) are observed. (C) 2019 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreemen