Review of risk from potential emerging contaminants in UK groundwater

This paper provides a review of the types of emerging organic groundwater contaminants (EGCs) which are beginning to be found in the UK. EGCs are compounds being found in groundwater that were previously not detectable or known to be significant and can come from agricultural, urban and rural point sources. EGCs include nanomaterials, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, industrial compounds, personal care products, fragrances, water treatment by-products, flame retardants and surfactants, as well as caffeine and nicotine. Many are relatively small polar molecules which may not be effectively removed by drinking water treatment. Data from the UK Environment Agency’s groundwater screening programme for organic pollutants found within the 30 most frequently detected compounds a number of EGCs such as pesticide metabolites, caffeine and DEET. Specific determinands frequently detected include pesticides metabolites, pharmaceuticals including carbamazepine and triclosan, nicotine, food additives and alkyl phosphates. This paper discusses the routes by which these compounds enter groundwater, their toxicity and potential risks to drinking water and the environment. It identifies challenges that need to be met to minimise risk to drinking water and ecosystems

Implementation of Aquaponics in Education: An Assessment of Challenges, Solutions and Success

Aquaponics is the combination of aquaculture and hydroponic technology to grow both fish and plants together in a closed-loop system. While aquaponics can play a role in increasing food security, it may also be a potential educational tool because of its interdisciplinary nature and required technological skill set. With aquaponics, students could conduct hands-on activities involving chemistry, physics and biology to solidify their understanding of a range of theories. Beyond standard science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) principles, aquaponics may be related to projects on sustainability, environmental science, agriculture, the food system, health, economics, business and marketing. The interdisciplinary nature of aquaponics may make it an appealing tool for education, yet that same aspect may also make an aquaponics system challenging to implement and manage. Given this paradox, this exploratory research assesses challenges, solutions and success of aquaponics in education with a specific focus on implementation. Qualitative data were collected through phone interviews with educators (n=10) who currently, or had in the past, used an aquaponics system in an educational setting in North America. The most frequently described uses for aquaponics were flexible, hands-on teaching and learning of STEM and food-related concepts. Participants reported two broad challenges to implementing aquaponics: technical difficulties as a result of the nature of aquaponics and restrictions as a result of their school settings. Solutions given by participants were physical aquaponics system modifications and the development of intangible characteristics, especially community connections and support, passion for aquaponics and expertise. In this study, success in aquaponics in education emerged as a cyclical pattern: participants valued the overall learning experiences of aquaponics and the continued application of these learning experiences. Ultimately, these exploratory findings will help educators manage their expectations for aquaponics while establishing objectives for their particular educational settings

“There’s Minny a One in Ould Ireland”: Judy Plum’s Witchcraft of Irish Stereotypes and Storytelling

This article explores the representation of the Irish servant Judy Plum in L.M. Montgomery's Pat of Silver Bush and Mistress Pat. Taking into account her speech patterns, aptitude in storytelling, and inclination towards superstition, Aoife Emily Hart considers the possibility that Judy constitutes yet another variation on the trope of the stage Irishman, a type of ethnic caricature prevalent in the nineteenth century. Probing the tensions, gaps, and contradictions in the portrayal of Judy in the two novels, Hart considers a more intriguing possibility, that there is a self-styled and subversive quality to Judy's performance of Irishness in Pat of Silver Bush and Mistress Pat, a self-stylization that involves varying degrees of oppression and privilege in terms of gender, ethnicity, and class. Rather than pathetic and marginalized as she nears death at the end of Mistress Pat, Hart concludes, Judy represents a defiant and resilient alternative to the ethos of utilitarian modernity that prevails at Silver Bush

Assessing Scotland's Progress on the Environmental Agenda

For good reasons the environment has a high political profile in Scotland. This report is concerned with three important components of the environmental agenda and the way in which they are being taken forward by the responsible authorities in Scotland. The delivery of environmental outcomes on agricultural land by means of a range of current policies, including agri-environment schemes, cross-compliance conditions on direct payments to farmers and implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive.The selection and management of a new network of Marine Protected Areas.Policy measures designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to mitigate climate change.Each of these topics is addressed individually in three separate chapters, aiming to identify some of the leading questions and the policy responses that have been adopted. The progress that is being made in meeting the objectives and aspirations set out in legislation and other key policy documents is then considered. Some of the objectives under review are determined entirely by the Government and by more local authorities in Scotland. Others arise primarily from obligations under EU legislation

ChemArt Automated Packaging System

ChemArt is a Rhode Island based photochemical etching company that specializes in manufacturing Christmas Ornaments. Each Christmas ornament is handmade in the United States, and at this point in time each and every ornament is packaged by hand as well. Packing the ornaments into their retail boxes is labor intensive and time consuming work. The facility is equipped to make more ornaments than package ornaments at any given time, so packaging becomes a bottleneck in their process. Currently ChemArt hires temporary employees to package the surplus Christmas ornaments that the full time staff cannot package. The project proposed by ChemArt was to create an automatic or semiautomatic packaging system for some or all of the ornaments that ChemArt produces. During the first semester, the design team set forth to create an automated packaging system for ChemArts ornaments, focusing specifically on the White House ornaments. ChemArt is a custom design shop with customers ordering ornaments in quantities ranging from 250 ornaments to 950,000, with the White House being ChemArts largest customer. Because of the high volume of custom jobs that ChemArt does - making up sixty percent of the companys business - it is di cult to standardize a machine or system of machines. For this portion of the design project the team focuses on finding design solutions using the White House ornament packaging assembly, which makes up the remaining forty percent of ChemArts business. The second semester was spent focusing specifically on creating adjustable mechanisms that perform the jobs of placing the lid on the conveyor, placing the insert into the box, placing a pamphlet in the box, then sealing the box with the lid. All of these steps were redesigned for adjustability in order to ensure that they would work with any of ChemArts ornament boxes. Once the adjustable designs were created in SolidWorks the team built them and tested them to ensure their adjustability and functionality within the system. Team Pack-in-the-Boxs Capstone Design Project was a success. The team designed, built, tested, and accordingly modified a set of adjustable machines that accomplish the goal of packaging ChemArts Christmas ornaments. With minor modifications the modular apparatuses that the team created can be used with a conveyor system in ChemArts Lincoln, Rhode Island facilities on all of the types of boxes that they use to package the ornaments

The gilded masks of digital rhetoric : social and pedagogical implications of evolving paralinguistic elements in web composition

Over the past few years it has become apparent to educators that the traditional focal points of composition are being necessarily shifted, outside of the classroom, because of the rhetorical spaces made available by the Internet. In the wake of the Web 2.0 revolution, when social networking and the production of web texts are flourishing, it’s more important than ever for educators to take note of the changes occurring in discursive habits and of the ability of students to respond to those changes in a way that will allow them to participate in and shape the dialogue. In undertaking a study of some of the most academically weak but rhetorically strong elements of online composition, emoticons, I argue that the use of these symbols as gestural representations are one indication of a collective attempt to remove composition from the institution of education. Furthermore, I believe that proficiency with content production and interpersonal communication on the web is a survival skill, emerging as a result of what economists and scholars call the “information economy,” and that using emoticons to augment linguistic communication is a subset of that development. As a result of the division between academic composition and web composition, the forms and styles of online writing are left to evolve unguided by education and have important implications, not just for pedagogy, but for the social constructs which govern the ways we use language to create and disseminate information. The manner in which educators succeed or fail to address changes in composition will have a direct bearing on how students identify themselves as writers, how they evaluate content, and with what authority they speak online

Developing a STEM Outreach Plan with Data Viz

As an academic liaison librarian serving a wide range of departments in the STEM fields, there are many competing priorities. My goal in developing strategic planning matrices for STEM outreach is to move away from a reactionary service approach to one that is proactive and evidence based. Mapping the current assessment goals of the university, colleges, and departments I serve, alongside the Libraries’ initiatives to support student and faculty research, information literacy, open-access and scholarly communications endeavors, has been a large but worthwhile undertaking. To pilot the project, data for the College of Engineering and Computer Science was collected into Excel. The complexity of the information collected and the ability to visualize overlapping priorities could not adequately be represented with Excel tables. Multiple Excel files are being combined in Tableau Public to create visualizations such as matrices, heat maps, and treemaps. Upon completion of the project, detailed methods for data collection and templates for creating visualizations in Tableau Public will be shared openly

Women prisoners and the drive for desistance:capital and responsibilization as a barrier to change

There is a significant and growing volume of research into the way in which offenders desist from crime and their resettlement and reentry into society following a custodial sentence. As is too often the case in criminological research, women are underrepresented in these areas of investigation. This research aimed to investigate how women in the last 3 months of a prison sentence plan and prepare for their release. Using data generated from qualitative interviews with women prisoners and prison staff over a 13-month period in a closed women’s prison in England, this paper will argue that women prisoners have motivation and desire to desist from crime post-release, but their attempts to plan for release are hindered by a responsibilization discourse that runs throughout the institution and by a severe lack in all forms of capital (social, cultural, economic, and symbolic). This not only results in many women being released with little support in place to help them achieve their aims of a crime-free life in the future but also highlights the problems with a prison system based on male-centered knowledge

A national-scale assessment of micro-organic contaminants in groundwater of England and Wales

A large variety of micro-organic (MO) compounds is used in huge quantities for a range of purposes (e.g. manufacturing, food production, healthcare) and is now being frequently detected in the aquatic environment. Interest in the occurrence of MO contaminants in the terrestrial and aquatic environments continues to grow, as well as in their environmental fate and potential toxicity. However, the contamination of groundwater resources by MOs has a limited evidence base compared to other freshwater resources. Of particular concern are newly ‘emerging contaminants’ such as pharmaceuticals and lifestyle compounds, particularly those with potential endocrine disrupting properties. While groundwater often has a high degree of protection from pollution due to physical, chemical and biological attenuation processes in the subsurface compared to surface aquatic environments, trace concentrations of a large range of compounds are still detected in groundwater and in some cases may persist for decades due to the long residence times of groundwater systems. This study provides the first national-scale assessment of micro-organic compounds in groundwater in England and Wales. A large set of monitoring data was analysed to determine the relative occurrence and detected concentrations of different groups of compounds and to determine relationships with land-use, aquifer type and groundwater vulnerability. MOs detected including emerging compounds such as caffeine, DEET, bisphenol A, anti-microbial agents and pharmaceuticals as well as a range of legacy contaminants including chlorinated solvents and THMs, petroleum hydrocarbons, pesticides and other industrial compounds. There are clear differences in MOs between land-use types, particularly for urban-industrial and natural land-use. Temporal trends of MO occurrence are assessed but establishing long-term trends is not yet possible