Water System Consolidation for Westinghouse Savannah River Company

Proceedings of the 1995 Georgia Water Resources Conference, April 11 and 12, 1995, Athens, Georgia.As part of a water distribution study for Westinghouse Savannah River Company (WSRC), Metcalf & Eddy, Inc. (M&E) evaluated the potential for total or partial consolidation of the site's water supply systems. Under current operation, the site meets water demand through 28 systems serving populations from 1000 to 6000 consumers. With an overall 24-hour average water demand of 1080 gallons per minute (gpm) and peak water demands varying in each system from 10 to 750 gpm, the site area for consolidation covers approximately 300 square miles. Multiple consolidation alternatives were evaluated for consolidation of the drinking water supply. Potential shifts in population centers and area demands was an important element considered in the study. The evaluation of the alternatives considered available groundwater and surface water quality and quantity to meet the projected demand while considering capital costs, operational reliability and flexibility, and low life-cycle cost. Hydraulic analysis of the water distribution transmission lines for each alternative were modelled using an M&E digital computer modeling program. Ranking and weighting of both economic and non-economic factors allowed for a recommendation of a final alternative for consolidation. It was shown that in many cases, non-economic factors could be as important, if not more important, than economic factors.Sponsored and Organized by: U.S. Geological Survey, Georgia Department of Natural Resources, The University of Georgia, Georgia State University, Georgia Institute of TechnologyThis book was published by the Carl Vinson Institute of Government, The University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602 with partial funding provided by the U.S. Department of Interior, Geological Survey, through the Georgia Water Research Institute as authorized by the Water Resources Research Act of 1990 (P.L. 101-397). The views and statements advanced in this publication are solely those of the authors and do not represent official views or policies of the University of Georgia or the U.S. Geological Survey or the conference sponsors

Combined HIV-1 sequence and integration site analysis informs viral dynamics and allows reconstruction of replicating viral ancestors

Understanding HIV-1 persistence despite antiretroviral therapy (ART) is of paramount importance. Both single-genome sequencing (SGS) and integration site analysis (ISA) provide useful information regarding the structure of persistent HIV DNA populations; however, until recently, there was no way to link integration sites to their cognate proviral sequences. Here, we used multiple-displacement amplification (MDA) of cellular DNA diluted to a proviral endpoint to obtain full-length proviral sequences and their corresponding sites of integration. We applied this method to lymph node and peripheral blood mononuclear cells from 5 ART-treated donors to determine whether groups of identical subgenomic sequences in the 2 compartments are the result of clonal expansion of infected cells or a viral genetic bottleneck. We found that identical proviral sequences can result from both cellular expansion and viral genetic bottlenecks occurring prior to ART initiation and following ART failure. We identified an expanded T cell clone carrying an intact provirus that matched a variant previously detected by viral outgrowth assays and expanded clones with wild-type and drug-resistant defective proviruses. We also found 2 clones from 1 donor that carried identical proviruses except for nonoverlapping deletions, from which we could infer the sequence of the intact parental virus. Thus, MDA-SGS can be used for "viral reconstruction" to better understand intrapatient HIV-1 evolution and to determine the clonality and structure of proviruses within expanded clones, including those with drug-resistant mutations. Importantly, we demonstrate that identical sequences observed by standard SGS are not always sufficient to establish proviral clonality

Computational approaches to fMRI analysis

Analysis methods in cognitive neuroscience have not always matched the richness of fMRI data. Early methods focused on estimating neural activity within individual voxels or regions, averaged over trials or blocks and modeled separately in each participant. This approach mostly neglected the distributed nature of neural representations over voxels, the continuous dynamics of neural activity during tasks, the statistical benefits of performing joint inference over multiple participants and the value of using predictive models to constrain analysis. Several recent exploratory and theory-driven methods have begun to pursue these opportunities. These methods highlight the importance of computational techniques in fMRI analysis, especially machine learning, algorithmic optimization and parallel computing. Adoption of these techniques is enabling a new generation of experiments and analyses that could transform our understanding of some of the most complex - and distinctly human - signals in the brain: acts of cognition such as thoughts, intentions and memories