Sustainability of intensive groundwater development: experience in Spain

Intensive aquifer development is common in arid and semiarid countries. The associated economic and social benefits are great, but management is needed and sustainability has to be analysed in the framework of a sound hydrogeological background which includes recharge as a key term. Recharge under natural conditions may greatly differ from the actual value under groundwater exploitation conditions when the aquifer is connected to surface water bodies or evaporation conditions are modified. Actual recharge is not an aquifer property but is variable depending on groundwater abstraction and its pattern, and changes in surface water-groundwater relationships and other circumstances, such as return irrigation flows, leakages, and activities to artificially modify it. Groundwater plays an important role in nature as it sustains spring flow, river base flow, wetlands, and crypto-wetlands, and the related provision of ecological services to mankind. Therefore, developable groundwater resources and their sustainability have to take into account concurrence and the net benefits of capturing it in a given moment and not in other circumstances, and exchanging groundwater-related nature services for the human use of groundwater. The often large storage relative to annual flow of aquifers implies that aquifer development produces effects that may last decades and even affect upcoming human generations. This new dimension, which has economic and sustainability aspects, is not as important for other water resources. Critical flow thresholds have to be considered for groundwater-dependent ecosystems. This is considered from the point of view of water quantity, which is the dominant aspect under arid and semiarid conditions. However, water quality may be as or more important for humans and for nature services, but this needs a separate treatment. The hydrogeological and socio-economic aspects of aquifer behaviour are presented taking into account the experience drawn from some intensively exploited and economically and socially important aquifers, mostly those in La Mancha, in central Spain, but also other intensively exploited Spanish aquifers. Topdown-down administrative decisions to get a given sustainable have resulted in partial failures, but if action is agreed among stakeholders better outcomes could be achieved. Mixed solutions seem the best approach

SYNPA: SMT Performance Analysis and Allocation of Threads to Cores in ARM Processors

Simultaneous multithreading processors improve throughput over single-threaded processors thanks to sharing internal core resources among instructions from distinct threads. However, resource sharing introduces inter-thread interference within the core, which has a negative impact on individual application performance and can significantly increase the turnaround time of multi-program workloads. The severity of the interference effects depends on the competing co-runners sharing the core. Thus, it can be mitigated by applying a thread-to-core allocation policy that smartly selects applications to be run in the same core to minimize their interference. This paper presents SYNPA, a simple approach that dynamically allocates threads to cores in an SMT processor based on their run-time dynamic behavior. The approach uses a regression model to select synergistic pairs to mitigate intra-core interference. The main novelty of SYNPA is that it uses just three variables collected from the performance counters available in current ARM processors at the dispatch stage. Experimental results show that SYNPA outperforms the default Linux scheduler by around 36%, on average, in terms of turnaround time in 8-application workloads combining frontend bound and backend bound benchmarks.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figure

Migration of antimony from polyethylene terephthalate used in mineral water bottles.

The influence of storage time and temperature on Sb migration from PET bottles into mineral water was studied in short-term tests lasting up to 15 days and long-term studies lasting up to 220 days. Samples purchased were stored in three different coloured bottles: clear (CL), light blue (LB) and dark blue (DB). Sb migration was assayed by HG-AFS for total determination and HPLC-ICP-MS for speciation analysis. Migration studies showed that waters stored at 4 and 20 oC were not subject to Sb migration. At 40 oC there was a significant increase in Sb concentration, although the maximum limit established by the European Union (5.0 ug/L) was not exceeded, whereas at 60 oC samples were subject to considerable Sb migration after 30 days of storage. In this case, the maximum limit established by the European Union was exceeded and both Sb (V) and Sb (III) were detected

Antimony speciation in spirits stored in PET bottles: identification of a novel antimony complex

Total antimony and its +V and +III oxidation state species were determined in twelve spirit samples (Greek raki and tsipouro) stored in polyethylene terephthalate bottles. Reliable and reproducible results were obtained following direct analysis by using ICP-MS providing total Sb concentrations between 0.4-4 mu g L-1. Antimony speciation analysis by LC-ICP-MS was also assessed, showing the presence of both inorganic Sb species along with an unknown Sb complex, which was the predominant species in all samples analysed. The structure of this complex was investigated by using liquid chromatography with high-resolution tandem mass spectrometry. The analysis gave evidence for an acetaldehyde-bisulphite pyruvate Sb complex with the formula: C7H14O12S2Sb. The proposed ligands are organic substances expected to be present in the raki matrix. In addition, the influence of high temperature storage conditions and extended exposure times up to two weeks, on Sb migration from PET bottles into raki samples was investigated. Total Sb and Sb species content was determined by ICP-MS and LC-ICP-MS, respectively. The concentrations determined were in the range of 5.6 to 28 mu g Sb per L spirit after a week of storage at 60 degrees C. In which case, inorganic Sb(V) and Sb(III) became the predominant species in comparison to the 'novel' organic Sb complex

Way Combination for an Adaptive and Scalable Coherence Directory

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permissíon from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertisíng or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.[EN] This manuscript opens the way to a new class of coherence directory structures that are based on the brand-new concept of way combining. A Way-Combining Directory (WC-dir) builds on a typical sparse directory but allows to take advantage of several ways in the same set to codify the sharing information of each memory block. The result is a sparse directory with variable effective associativity per set and variable length entries, thus being able to dynamically adapt the directory structure to the particular requirements of each application. In particular, our proposal uses just enough bits per entry to store a single pointer, which is optimal for the common case of having just one sharer. For those addresses that have more than one sharer, we have observed that in the majority of cases extra bits could be taken from other empty ways in the same set. All in all, our proposal minimizes the storage overheads without losing the flexibility to adapt to several sharing degrees and without the complexities of other previously proposed techniques. Detailed simulations of a 128-core multicore architecture running benchmarks from PARSEC-3.0 and SPLASH-3 demonstrate that WC-dir can closely approach the performance of a non-scalable bit vector sparse directory, beating the state-of-the-art Scalable Coherence Directory (SCD) and Pool directory proposals.This work has been supported by the Spanish MCIU and AEI, as well as European Commission FEDER funds, under grant "RTI2018-098156-B-C53".Titos-Gil, R.; Flores, A.; Fernández-Pascual, R.; Ros, A.; Petit Martí, SV.; Sahuquillo Borrás, J.; Acacio, ME. (2019). Way Combination for an Adaptive and Scalable Coherence Directory. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. 30(11):2608-2623. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2019.2917185S26082623301

The Sport Concussion Assessment Tool (SCAT2) for evaluating civilian mild traumatic brain injury

Post-concussion symptoms; SCAT2; Head injurySíntomas posteriores a la conmoción cerebral; SCAT2; Lesión cranealSímptomes posteriors a la commoció cerebral; SCAT2; Lesió cranialSelf-report measures, particularly symptom inventories, are critical tools for identifying patients with persistent post-concussion symptoms and their follow-up. Unlike in military or sports-related assessment, in general civilian settings pre-injury levels of concussion-like symptoms are lacking. Normative data are available in adolescent and college populations, but no reference data exist to guide clinical adult explorations. The purpose of this study was to use the second edition of the Sport Concussion Assessment Tool (SCAT2) to profile a cohort of 60 healthy community volunteers who had not sustained a head injury. Participating volunteers underwent MRI scanning and were evaluated with the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS). Participants reported a median of 3 concussion-like symptoms and the 97.5 percentile score was found at 10.5 symptoms, out of a total of 22. The median severity score was 4.9 points, and 28.9 was the upper limit of the reference interval. Only 10 participants (16.7%) did not endorse any symptom. The most frequently endorsed symptom was feeling difficulty in concentrating, with 41.7% of the sample reporting it. Age, sex and general distress, anxiety and depressive symptoms were not associated with concussion-like symptoms. Our data yielded elevated cut-offs scores for both the number of symptoms and the symptom severity. In conclusion, postconcussive-like symptoms are frequent in the general non-concussed adult population and it should be taken into account in any future models developed for screening patients at risk of developing physical, cognitive, and psychological complaints following mild traumatic injury.UNINN is supported by a Grant from the Generalitat de Catalunya (SGR 2014-844, http://agaur.gencat.cat). This work has been supported in part by the Fondo de Investigacion Sanitaria (Instituto de Salud Carlos III, https://portalfis.isciii.es) with grants FIS PI11/00700 (J.S.) and grant FIS PI13/02397 (M.A.P.), which were co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). A.R. was a recipient of a pre-doctoral grant from the Fundacio Institut de Recerca VHIR (PRED-VHIR-2012-26, http://en.vhir.org)

A method to assess annual average renewable groundwater reserves for large regions in Spain

This paper proposes a method for assessing the groundwater renewable reserves of large regions for an average year, based on the integration of the recession curves for their basins springs or the natural base flow of their rivers. In this method, the hydrodynamic volume (or renewable reserves), were estimated from the baseflow equation. It was assumed that the flow was the same as the natural recharge, and that the recession coefficients were derived by the hydrogeological parameters and geometrical characteristics of aquifers, and adjusted to fit the recession curves at gauging stations. The method was applied to all the aquifers of Spain, which have a total groundwater renewable reserve of 86,895 hm3 four times the mean annual recharge. However, the distribution of these reserves is very variable; 18.6% of the country aquifers contain 94.7% of the entire reserve

The brain monitoring with information technology (BrainIT) collaborative network: EC feasibility study results

The BrainIT group works collaboratively on developing standards for collection and analyses of data from brain injured patients towards providing a more efficient infrastructure for assessing new health technology. Materials and methods Over a 2 year period, core dataset data (grouped by nine categories) were collected from 200 head-injured patients by local nursing staff. Data were uploaded by the BrainIT web and random samples of received data were selected automatically by computer for validation by data validation (DV) research nurse staff against gold standard sources held in the local centre. Validated data was compared with original data sent and percentage error rates calculated by data category. Findings Comparisons, 19,461, were made in proportion to the size of the data received with the largest number checked in laboratory data (5,667) and the least in the surgery data (567). Error rates were generally less than or equal to 6%, the exception being the surgery data class where an unacceptably high error rate of 34% was found. Conclusions The BrainIT core dataset (with the exception of the surgery classification) is feasible and accurate to collect. The surgery classification needs to be revised