Tools for Risk Analysis: Updating the 2006 WHO guidelines

This chapter reviews developments since the WHO Guidelines for the safe use of wastewater in agriculture were published in 2006. The six main developments are: the recognition that the tolerable additional disease burden may be too stringent for many developing countries; the benefits of focusing on single-event infection risks as a measure of outbreak potential when evaluating risk acceptability; a more rigorous method for estimating annual risks; the availability of dose-response data for norovirus; the use of QMRA to estimate Ascaris infection risks; and a detailed evaluation of pathogen reductions achieved by produce-washing and disinfection. Application of the developments results in more realistic estimates of the pathogen reductions required for the safe use of wastewater in agriculture and consequently permits the use of simpler wastewater treatment processes

Recognizing pornographic images

We present a novel algorithm for discriminating pornographic and assorted benign images, each categorized into semantic subclasses. The algorithm exploits connectedness and coherence properties in skin image regions in order to capture alarming Regions of Interest (ROIs). The technique to identify ROIs in an image employs a region-splitting scheme, in which the image plane is recursively partitioned into quadrants. Splitting is achieved by considering both the accumulation of skin pixels and texture coherence. This processing step is proven to significantly boost the accuracy and reduction of running time demands, even in the presence of sparse noise due to errors attributed to skin segmentation. For detected ROIs, we extract 15 rough color and spatial features computed from the pixels residing in the ROI. A novel classification scheme based on a tree-structured ensemble of strong Random Forest classifiers is also proposed. The method achieves competitive performance both in terms of response time and accuracy when compared to the state-of-the-art

Structural and transport property changes in austenitic stainless steel induced by nitrogen incorporation

The saturation of the near surface layers of metals with different elements is a powerful tool to change their surface properties. In this work, structure and transport changes induced by incorporation of large amounts of nitrogen at moderate temperatures (∼370−430°C) in austenitic stainless steel are investigated. The structural study of the plasma nitrided ASS has been carried out using a combination of global (X-ray diffraction, nuclear reaction analysis) and local probe techniques (Mossbauer, X-ray absorption near edge structure, extended X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopies). It reveals that nitriding at moderate temperatures (∼400°C) results in the nitrided layer with Fe, Cr and Ni being in different local chemical environments: Cr in the CrN-like state, Fe in the Fe4N-like state, Ni in the metallic state. The results demonstrate that the incorporation of interstitial nitrogen destabilizes homogeneous distribution of the ASS constituents, which leads to the segregation of the elements into small zones rich in Cr and Ni and provide strong evidence that the decomposition is of a spinodal nature. These experimental findings contradict the widely accepted view that the phase formed during nitriding at moderate temperatures is a homogeneous supersaturated nitrogen solid solution. The nitrogen atomic transport study has been carried out by using ion beam nitriding of single-crystalline stainless steel, and the issues of the influence of the crystalline orientation, nitriding temperature, ion flux and ion energy are addressed. The diffusion coefficients have been extracted from the fitting of the nitrogen depth profiles by using the trapping-detrapping model. It is shown that the crystalline orientation plays a significant role in nitrogen diffusion: the penetration depth is largest, intermediate and lowest for the (001), (110) and (111) orientation, respectively. The pre-exponential factor D0 varies by two orders of magnitude depending on the orientation, while the activation energy E is similar (∼1.1 eV) for the (111) and (110) orientations and higher for the (001) orientation (∼1.4 eV). It is found that the nitrogen ion energy and the flux have the effect on the nitrogen transport in the bulk with higher energies (or fluxes) showing larger diffusion coefficients. The ion energy effect is more pronounced for the (001) than for the (111) orientation, while the flux effect is similar in both orientations. In addition, the diffusivity during post-nitriding thermal annealing without ion irradiation is found to be independent of the crystalline orientation. The observed radiation enhanced diffusion and anisotropy are discussed on the basis of nitrogen incorporation induced changes in the matrix structure (ASS decomposition and formation heterogeneous structure), ion bombardment induced effects (defects, localized vibrations) and correlated diffusion