Alternative objectives : time extensions and less stringent objectives

The Water Framework Directive (2000/60/EC) (WFD) establishes a suite of environmental objectives for groundwater. In implementing the Directive and producing the first River Basin Management Plans, Member States have had to identify whether the these objectives are being met. If this assessment has shown that one or more of the objectives for groundwater is not being met, or is at risk of being failed, programmes of measures must be implemented to ensure that all relevant environmental objectives are met within six years – the publication date of the next River Basin Management Plan (22nd December, 2015). In reality, especially for groundwater, achieving all the relevant objectives in such a short timescale may not be possible or practical. The WFD recognises this and allows for an extension of the deadline (beyond 2015) for the purposes of a phased achievement of the environmental objectives. This is provided that there is no further deterioration in status (Article 4.4). Any such extension is limited to a maximum of two further river basin cycles (12 years) except where natural conditions mean that objectives can still not be achieved. A further provision is made for the situation where a water body is so badly affected by human activity or where natural conditions mean that achievement of the objectives(s) would be infeasible or disproportionally expensive. In these cases less stringent objectives (relative to those defined in Article 4.1) can be set, provided that there is the least possible deviation from good status conditions. Where extended deadlines or less stringent objectives have been proposed, Member States must provide an explanation and justification in the River Basin Management Plan. In the case of extended deadlines, a timetable for implementation of measures and the achievement of objectives must also be provided. This paper provides an overview of the approach used in England and Wales for identifying programmes of measures for groundwater, predicting outcomes and setting alternative objectives in relation to groundwater quality. Similar approaches were used for quantitative (water resource) aspects and also for surface water bodies

Stock assessment of pelagic bait fishes in southern Queensland with special reference to pilchards (Sardinops sagax)

The pilchard fisheries of Australia expanded rapidly during the 1980s and 1990s and the need for biological information to facilitate ecologically sustainable development of the fisheries led to the initiation of projects funded by the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation (FRDC). The aims of the projects described for southern Queensland were: to examine the species composition of purse-seine catches; to describe the size structure of the species caught by purse-seining and determine the age-structure of the pilchard population; to identify the location and timing of clupeoid spawning; to estimate the spawning biomass of pilchards using the Daily Egg Production Method; to examine the potential impacts of a purse-seine fishery on populations of bait fish and on other stakeholders; to develop and assess methods for preventing the encirclement and mortality of dolphins in purse-seine nets and to examine the potential yield of a purse-seine fishery for pilchards

Adding Support for Delay Tolerance to IPv6 Networks

AbstractAs we continue to connect ever lower power and more power constrained devices to the Internet of Things the problem of main- taining constant end to end connectivity becomes harder. Accepting that continuous end to end connectivity cannot be maintained, we are forced to seek solutions to allow good operating function. Delay Tolerant Networking, an evolution of existing store and forward systems is a candidate for resolving this issue, however, current implementations are not ideal for use in constrained Inter- net of Things environments. We propose a solution to this by integrating the capabilities of Delay Tolerant Networking into the IP layer, in such a way as to maintain compatibility with existing and future systems and minimising additional overhead. This has been achieved by developing a new IPv6 Hop by Hop option header which contains the information required for messages to be delayed. This solution is then demonstrated to be implementable within the limitations of current Internet of Things hardware

Cryptanalysis of the Legendre PRF and generalizations

The Legendre PRF relies on the conjectured pseudorandomness properties of the Legendre symbol with a hidden shift. Originally proposed as a PRG by Damgård at CRYPTO 1988, it was recently suggested as an efficient PRF for multiparty computation purposes by Grassi et al. at CCS 2016. Moreover, the Legendre PRF is being considered for usage in the Ethereum 2.0 blockchain. This paper improves previous attacks on the Legendre PRF and its higher-degree variant due to Khovratovich by reducing the time complexity from O(plogp/M) to O(plog^2p/M2) Legendre symbol evaluations when M≤p√4 queries are available. The practical relevance of our improved attack is demonstrated by breaking two concrete instances of the PRF proposed by the Ethereum foundation. Furthermore, we generalize our attack in a nontrivial way to the higher-degree variant of the Legendre PRF and we point out a large class of weak keys for this construction. Lastly, we provide the first security analysis of two additional generalizations of the Legendre PRF originally proposed by Damgård in the PRG setting, namely the Jacobi PRF and the power residue PRF

Learning and Adaptation in Polycentric Transport Governance:The Case of the Dutch Brabant Accessibility Agenda

The future of urban-regional transport crucially depends on the ability of transport governance systems to adapt. Polycentric theory claims that the presence of polycentric attributes and conditions enables governance systems to learn and adapt. However, an analysis of the Dutch Brabant Accessibility Agenda shows that their presence says little about the adaptive capacity of transport governance systems because learning and adaptation are influenced by dependencies. To optimize the adaptive capacity of transport governance systems, it is therefore vital to acknowledge both the diverse ways in how they learn and adapt, and the dependencies that shape these processes