Hydrographic Study of Peirce Island Wastewater Treatment Plant Effluent in the Piscataqua River of Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Report of Findings from the December 10 – 14, 2012 Study Period

In order to assist the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services (NHDES) evaluate the impact of treated wastewater effluent from Peirce Island Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) to the Lower Piscataqua River and Portsmouth Harbor a hydrographic dye study was conducted in December 2012 in Portsmouth, NH. Eight (8) shellfish cages with American oysters (Crassostrea virginica) and blue mussels (Mytilus edulis) were deployed both upstream and downstream of the Peirce Island WWTP in the Piscataqua River, Little Harbor, and the entrance of Little Bay. Eight (8) mini CTDs that monitor conductivity/salinity, temperature, and depth, and six (6) moored fluorometers, which measure dye tagged effluent from the Peirce Island WWTP were attached to the subsurface cages. A fifty (50) gallon mixture of Rhodamine WT dye and distilled water was injected into WWTP on December 11, 2012 for a half tidal cycle (approximately 12.4 hours). Additionally, boat tracking fluorometers connected with a mobile geographic information system (GIS) were used to measure dye levels on the surface in situ and in real time. Microbiological analyses of fecal coliform (FC), male-specific coliphage (MSC), Norovirus (NoV) genogroup I (GI) and genogroup II (GII), and Adenovirus (AdV) were conducted on WWTP influent and effluent composite samples collected with automated samplers to determine the WWTP efficiency in reducing indicator bacteria and viruses. Microbiological sampling and testing of oysters and mussels from the eight (8) sentinel cages was conducted to assess the impact of WWTP effluent on shellfish growing areas and growing area classifications. Prior to conducting the study, the assumption was that the FDA’s recommended minimum dilution of 1000:1was not applicable in this situation because the recommended dilution is based on a WWTP having at least secondary treatment. The microbiological findings in shellfish samples, wastewater samples from the Peirce Island WWTP, and the results of the dye study, confirm that a minimum of 1,000:1 dilution with respect to Peirce Island WWTP is currently not applicable for this WWTP. The FDA and NHDES recommend continued MSC testing of wastewater samples from the WWTP before and after the WWTP upgrade. The FDA and NHDES recommend a future field study after the WWTP upgrade in order to delineate the 1,000:1 dilution zone

Use of viral indicators to assess public health risk to shellfish growing areas: A case study from Blaine, Washington

A hydrographic dye study of effluent from the Lighthouse Point Water Reclamation Facility in Blaine, Washington, was conducted in November 2012. Six cages filled with oysters were deployed at various locations (stations) along the anticipated path of the effluent to correlate the dye concentrations found at the cages with the indicator bacteria and viral findings in the oysters. Sampling was also conducted at the plant to assess bacteria and virus removal efficiencies through the treatment process. The study objectives were to: (1) determine the bacterial and viral conditions in the influent and effluent and removal efficiencies for a WWTP using membrane filtration (2) determine the bacterial and viral conditions that could arise in receiving waters under a short term lapse in treatment at the WWTP; (3) provide guidance to the Washington Department of Health (WA DOH) regarding the WWTP closure zone based on dilution of effluent (4) research the dilution level needed to achieve reduction in viruses to ensure the safety of shellfish harvested near WWTPs as part of FDA’s dilution guidance The proposed presentation addresses the session theme based on the following features: (1) A description of tools and methodology currently used by FDA to assess risk from wastewater outfalls to commercial shellfish growing areas, including development of an GIS application for mapping dye plumes in real time, (2) Current efforts by FDA to develop an easily quantifiable viral indicator (MS2 Coliphage) and how this indicator correlates with presence of viral pathogens such as Adenovirus and Norovirus in oysters, (3) Evaluation fecal coliform bacteria indicator to assess public health risk from viral pathogens with wastewater plants employing membrane filtration treatment, and (4) Since Blaine sits on the border between the US and Canada, the case study also highlights transborder pollution issues

Coding for a discrete information source with a distortion measure

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering, 1963.MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ENGINEERING.Vita.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 145-146).by Thomas John Goblick, Jr.Ph.D

Microwave Electronics

Contains reports on five research projects

Processing and Transmission of Information

Contains reports on seven research projects.Lincoln Laboratory, Purchase Order DDL B-00337U.S. ArmyU.S. NavyU.S. Air Force under Air Force Contract AF19(604)-7400National Institutes of Health (Grant MH-04737-02

Microwave Electronics

Contains research objectives and reports on four research projects.Department of the NavyDepartment of the Air Force under Contract AF19(122)-458Office of Naval Research under Contract Nonr 1845(05)Department of the ArmyLincoln Laboratory, Purchase Order DDL-B22

Entropy-constrained scalar quantization with a lossy-compressed bit

We consider the compression of a continuous real-valued source X using scalar quantizers and average squared error distortion D. Using lossless compression of the quantizer's output, Gish and Pierce showed that uniform quantizing yields the smallest output entropy in the limit D -> 0, resulting in a rate penalty of 0.255 bits/sample above the Shannon Lower Bound (SLB). We present a scalar quantization scheme named lossy-bit entropy-constrained scalar quantization (Lb-ECSQ) that is able to reduce the D -> 0 gap to SLB to 0.251 bits/sample by combining both lossless and binary lossy compression of the quantizer's output. We also study the low-resolution regime and show that Lb-ECSQ significantly outperforms ECSQ in the case of 1-bit quantization.The authors wish to thank Tobias Koch and Gonzalo Vázquez Vilar for fruitful discussions and helpful comments to the manuscript. This work has been supported in part by the European Union 7th Framework Programme through the Marie Curie Initial Training Network “Machine Learning for Personalized Medicine” MLPM2012, Grant No. 316861, by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and Ministry of Education under grants TEC2016-78434-C3-3-R (MINECO/FEDER, EU) and IJCI-2014-19150, and by Comunidad de Madrid (project ’CASI-CAM-CM’, id. S2013/ICE-2845).Publicad

Processing and Transmission of Information

Contains research objectives and reports on four research projects.Lincoln Laboratory, Purchase Order DDL B-00306U. S. ArmyU. S. NavyU. S. Air Force under Air Force Contract AF19(604)-7400National Science Foundation (Grant B-16526)National Institutes of Health (Grant MP-4737

Molecular screening of blue mussels indicated high mid-summer prevalence of human genogroup II Noroviruses, including the pandemic “GII.4 2012” variants in UK coastal waters during 2013

Pandemic norovirus in coastal blue mussels during summer in UK This molecular study is the first report, to the best of our knowledge, on identification of norovirus, NoV GII.4 Sydney 2012 variants, from blue mussels collected from UK coastal waters. Blue mussels (three pooled samples from twelve mussels) collected during the 2013 summer months from UK coastal sites were screened by RT-PCR assays. PCR products of RdRP gene for noroviruses were purified, sequenced and subjected to phylogenetic analysis. All the samples tested positive for NoVs. Sequencing revealed that the NoV partial RdRP gene sequences from two pooled samples clustered with the pandemic “GII.4 Sydney variants” whilst the other pooled sample clustered with the NoV GII.2 variants. This molecular study indicated mussel contamination with pathogenic NoVs even during mid-summer in UK coastal waters which posed potential risk of NoV outbreaks irrespective of season. As the detection of Sydney 2012 NoV from our preliminary study of natural coastal mussels interestingly corroborated with NoV outbreaks in nearby areas during the same period, it emphasizes the importance of environmental surveillance work for forecast of high risk zones of NoV outbreaks

The Frequency Following Response (FFR) May Reflect Pitch-Bearing Information But is Not a Direct Representation of Pitch

The frequency following response (FFR), a scalp-recorded measure of phase-locked brainstem activity, is often assumed to reflect the pitch of sounds as perceived by humans. In two experiments, we investigated the characteristics of the FFR evoked by complex tones. FFR waveforms to alternating-polarity stimuli were averaged for each polarity and added, to enhance envelope, or subtracted, to enhance temporal fine structure information. In experiment 1, frequency-shifted complex tones, with all harmonics shifted by the same amount in Hertz, were presented diotically. Only the autocorrelation functions (ACFs) of the subtraction-FFR waveforms showed a peak at a delay shifted in the direction of the expected pitch shifts. This expected pitch shift was also present in the ACFs of the output of an auditory nerve model. In experiment 2, the components of a harmonic complex with harmonic numbers 2, 3, and 4 were presented either to the same ear (“mono”) or the third harmonic was presented contralaterally to the ear receiving the even harmonics (“dichotic”). In the latter case, a pitch corresponding to the missing fundamental was still perceived. Monaural control conditions presenting only the even harmonics (“2 + 4”) or only the third harmonic (“3”) were also tested. Both the subtraction and the addition waveforms showed that (1) the FFR magnitude spectra for “dichotic” were similar to the sum of the spectra for the two monaural control conditions and lacked peaks at the fundamental frequency and other distortion products visible for “mono” and (2) ACFs for “dichotic” were similar to those for “2 + 4” and dissimilar to those for “mono.” The results indicate that the neural responses reflected in the FFR preserve monaural temporal information that may be important for pitch, but provide no evidence for any additional processing over and above that already present in the auditory periphery, and do not directly represent the pitch of dichotic stimuli