Baseline Groundwater Quality : a comparison of selected British and Norwegian aquifers

The aim of this work is to present a discussion on the concept of baseline and to compare the natural variations in inorganic water quality present in a selection of British and Norwegian groundwaters. The use of boxplots and cumulative frequency plots facilitates comparison between individual rock aquifers, different regions with divergent geological and climatic records, and between various elements and parameters. The range of baseline concentrations is often large; e.g. uranium concentrations in Precambrian granitic groundwaters in Norway spans almost 4 orders of magnitude. Baseline values are useful as a means to assess pollution or to set a realistic base for remediation. The EU Maximum Admissible Concentrations (MAC values) of drinking water should be set on toxicological criteria only, as natural unpolluted groundwater sometimes contain elements in concentrations deemed to be harmful. Most of the hard rock groundwaters in Norway have relatively high pH compared with those of the UK. Na-HCO3 type waters seem to be much more common in Norway than in the UK where Ca-HCO3 type water dominate. High F, U and Rn concentrations are found in many granitic and sedimentary groundwaters in Norway, while Ba concentrations tend to be higher in the UK sedimentary aquifers. Universal baseline values do not exist for any element and statistical representative sampling from all aquifers is necessary to establish reliable knowledge about the natural groundwater quality in each area. A suggested series of methodologies are suggested which can be applied to aquifers where the effects of anthropogenic pollution are present. There is a strong need for timeseries data on a wide range of parameters to ascertain the long-term effects of human activity on groundwater quality. The trends of groundwater quality with depth should also be studied more thoroughly. In order for a European wide policy to be implemented it is necessary to establish protocols for criteria related to data quality, sampling and analytical wor

FlowR: Aspect oriented programming for information flow control in ruby

This paper reports on our experience with providing Information Flow Control (IFC) as a library. Our aim was to support the use of an unmodified Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud infrastructure by IFC-aware web applications. We discuss how Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) overcomes the limitations of RubyTrack, our first approach. Although use of AOP has been mentioned as a possibility in past IFC literature we believe this paper to be the first illustration of how such an implementation can be attempted. We discuss how we built FlowR (Information Flow Control for Ruby), a library extending Ruby to provide IFC primitives using AOP via the Aquarium open source library. Previous attempts at providing IFC as a language extension required either modification of an interpreter or significant code rewriting. FlowR provides a strong separation between functional implementation and security constraints which supports easier development and maintenance; we illustrate with practical examples. In addition, we provide new primitives to describe IFC constraints on objects, classes and methods that, to our knowledge, are not present in related work and take full advantage of an object oriented language (OO language). The experience reported here makes us confident that the techniques we use for Ruby can be applied to provide IFC for any Object Oriented Program (OOP) whose implementation language has an AOP library.This is the final version published by ACM in Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Modularity (MODULARITY '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 37-48, available from the ACM Digital Library here: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2577080.2577090

Core excitations across the neutron shell gap in ²⁰⁷Tl

The single closed-neutron-shell, one proton-hole nucleus 207Tl was populated in deep-inelastic collisions of a 208Pb beam with a 208Pb target. The yrast and near-yrast level scheme has been established up to high excitation energy, comprising an octupol

DEFCON: high-performance event processing with information security

In finance and healthcare, event processing systems handle sensitive data on behalf of many clients. Guaranteeing information security in such systems is challenging because of their strict performance requirements in terms of high event throughput and low processing latency. We describe DEFCON, an event processing system that enforces constraints on event flows between event processing units. DEFCON uses a combination of static and runtime techniques for achieving light-weight isolation of event flows, while supporting efficient sharing of events. Our experimental evaluation in a financial data processing scenario shows that DEFCON can provide information security with significantly lower processing latency compared to a traditional approach

Birth outcomes by type of attendance at antenatal education: An observational study

Background: Antenatal education aims to prepare expectant parents for pregnancy, birth, and parenthood. Studies have reported antenatal education teaching breathing and relaxation methods for pain relief, termed psychoprophylaxis, is associated with reduction in caesarean section rates compared with general birth and parenting classes. Given the rising rates of caesarean section, we aimed to determine whether there was a difference in mode of birth in women based on the type of antenatal education attended. Materials and methods: A cross-sectional antenatal survey of nulliparous women ≥28 weeks gestation with a singleton pregnancy was conducted in two maternity hospitals in Sydney, Australia in 2018. Women were asked what type of antenatal education they attended and sent a follow-up survey post-birth. Hospital birth data were also obtained. Education was classified into four groups: psychoprophylaxis, birth and parenting, other, or none. Results: Five hundred and five women with birth data were included. A higher proportion of women who attended psychoprophylaxis education had a vaginal birth (instrumental/spontaneous) (79%) compared with women who attended birth and parenting, other or no education (69%, 67%, 60%, respectively P = 0.045). After adjusting for maternal characteristics, birth and hospital factors, the association was attenuated (odds ratio 2.03; 95% CI 0.93–4.43). Conclusions: Women who attended psychoprophylaxis couple-based education had a trend toward higher rates of vaginal birth. Randomised trials comparing different types of antenatal education are required to determine whether psychoprophylaxis education can reduce caesarean section rates and improve other birth outcomes

Multifetal pregnancies: preterm admissions and outcomes

Objective. To describe the rates of antenatal hospital admission during twin or higher order multifetal pregnancies, and the admission outcomes as discharge undelivered, transfer to higher care, or spontaneous or elective delivery. Methods. Cohort study using linked birth and hospital data. The cohort comprised women who gave birth to twins or higher order multiple infants of ≥ 24 weeks gestation in 2001–2008 and who were admitted to hospital in weeks 20–36 of the pregnancy. Results. In 63.4% of 10 779 twin pregnancies and 99.5% of 197 triplet and quadruplet pregnancies, the woman was admitted to hospital at least once in weeks 20–36 of the pregnancy, for a total 10 985 admissions. Almost half the admissions (46.3%) ended in discharge without delivery, 10.7% in transfer to higher care, 21.1% in spontaneous labour and birth, and 21.8% in elective delivery (induction or prelabour Caesarean section). The reason for admission was preterm labour in 34.2% of admissions. Conclusions. Hospital admission during pregnancy is common for women with multifetal pregnancies, with many of these admissions resulting in preterm birth. This is the first study to report the rate of pregnancy admissions for women with multifetal pregnancies, and provides a baseline for future studies of hospital use in this population. What is known about the topic? Multifetal pregnancies are high risk and require greater medical care than singleton pregnancies. However, few studies specifically examine multifetal pregnancies, and most pregnancy studies exclude them, so there is little known about the resource use of this group. What does this paper add? This is the first paper to report population rates of hospital admission during pregnancy for women with multifetal pregnancies. We report the admission rates, and the admission outcomes as discharge undelivered, transfer to higher care or spontaneous or elective delivery. What are the implications for practitioners? Most women with multifetal pregnancies are admitted to hospital at least once during the pregnancy, with 51% of these admissions resulting in preterm delivery. Of those discharged undelivered, 60% were admitted for 1 day or less. This has implications for resource use, proposed place of birth and for practitioners advising pregnant women. </jats:p