Boron determination in a multi element national water monitoring program: the absence of legal limits

Directive 98/83/EC concerning the drinking water quality and Directive 80/777/EC for Natural Mineral Water demand strict control and monitoring for the presence of metals. The State General Laboratory as the official control laboratory (Accredited by ISO 17025:2005) implements a national monitoring program in order to ensure that the drinking and natural mineral water quality satisfy the requirements of the respective Directives. The National Monitoring program covers mainly metals such as Pb, Cd, Cr, Ni, As, Se, Sb, Hg, Mn, Cu, Fe, Al and B in water supplied for human consumption either by distribution networks, vending machines, mobile water containers, ground water intended for human consumption as well as bottled water. The determination of metals in water by Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectroscopy (ICP-MS) is a technique that successfully meets the requirements of the above Directives as it is a very powerful tool for the measurement of metals at very low concentrations with high accuracy and precision. The results obtained indicate that metal concentrations in drinking and bottled water examined were by far, below the acceptable legal limits and even below the relevant detection limits. However, in samples of bottled natural mineral water, high boron concentration were determined and risk assessment was performed due to the absence of relevant legal limits. The present paper demonstrates the steps undertaken by the General Water Analysis Laboratory of the SGL for the validated method used by ICP-MS in the determination of trace metals including boron in drinking and bottled water.     

WI – Call for Papers,Heft 5/2010, Konstruktionsforschung in der Wirtschaftsinformatik

Ohne Zusammenfassung This article is also available in English via and : Winter R, Baskerville R (2009) BISE – Call for Papers, Issue 5/2010, Science of Business and Information Systems Engineering. Bus Inf Syst Eng. doi: 10.1007/s12599-009-0047-2.     

Model-driven development of composite context-aware web applications

Context-awareness constitutes an essential aspect of services, especially when interaction with end-users is involved. In this paper a solution for the context-aware development of web applications consisting of web services is presented. The methodology proposes a model based approach and advocates in favour of a complete separation of the web application functionality from the context adaptation at all development phases (analysis, design, implementation). In essence, context adaptation takes place on top of and is transparent to the web application business functionality. Starting from UML diagrams of independent web services and respective UML context models, our approach can produce a functional composite context-aware application. At execution level this independence is maintained through an adaptation framework based on message interception.     

State of the art of 2D DIGE

Difference gel electrophoresis enables the accurate quantification of changes in the proteome including combinations of PTMs and protein isoform expression. Here, we review recent advances in study design, image acquisition, and statistical analysis. We also compare DIGE to established and emerging mass spectrometric analysis technologies. Despite these recent advances in MS and the still unsolved limitations of 2DE to map hydrophobic, high molecular weight proteins with extreme pIs, DIGE remains the most comprehensive top-down method to study changes in abundance of intact proteins.     

Selection of formal verification heuristics for parallel execution

Functional verification is “the” major design-phase bottleneck for silicon productivity. Since functional verification is an NP-complete problem, it relies on a large number of heuristics with associated parameters (engines). With the advent of parallel processing, formal verification can be optimized by selecting the best n engines to run in parallel, increasing the chance of reaching successful termination of the verification task. In this paper, we will present a methodology to build engine estimators based on structural metrics and to select n engines to run in parallel. The methodology considers both engines’ estimated performance and engines’ correlation. Results confirmed that the methodology can be a very quick selection mechanism for parallelization of engines in order to increase the chance of running the best engines to solve the problem.     

On the stabilization of feedforward systems with bounded control

For the global asymptotic stabilization of nonlinear—controllable in the first approximation—cascades consisting of a globally asymptotically—locally exponentially stable system driving a stable system, a Lyapunov-like design is proposed. This yields (bounded) control laws, where the control magnitude can be chosen arbitrarily large. This result provides an alternative to classical forwarding.     

Polymer‐Supported Bisacetoxybromate(I) Anion –‐An Efficient Co‐Oxidant in the TEMPO‐Mediated Oxidation of Primary and Secondary Alcohols

A polymer‐bound reagent for the efficient oxidation of primary alcohols to aldehydes and secondary alcohols to ketones in the presence of a catalytic amount of 2,2,6,6‐tetramethyl‐1‐piperidinyloxyl (TEMPO) is described. The oxidation process is particular mild and allows one to prepare aldehydes with α‐chirality without racemization. This also includes the synthesis of α‐aminoaldehydes. In most cases, work‐up of this heavy metal‐free oxidation is achieved by simple filtration followed by removal of the solvent. Insight into the role of the bromate(I) anion in the oxidation process was gained from the TEMPO‐mediated oxidation of benzaldehyde in the presence of the hypochlorite anion loaded on an anion exchange resin.     

Comparing transmission potential networks based on social network surveys,close contacts and environmental overlap in rural Madagascar

Social and spatial network analysis is an important approach for investigating infectious disease transmission, especially for pathogens transmitted directly between individuals or via environmental reservoirs. Given the diversity of ways to construct networks, however, it remains unclear how well networks constructed from different data types effectively capture transmission potential. We used empirical networks from a population in rural Madagascar to compare social network survey and spatial data-based networks of the same individuals. Close contact and environmental pathogen transmission pathways were modelled with the spatial data. We found that naming social partners during the surveys predicted higher close-contact rates and the proportion of environmental overlap on the spatial data-based networks. The spatial networks captured many strong and weak connections that were missed using social network surveys alone. Across networks, we found weak correlations among centrality measures (a proxy for superspreading potential). We conclude that social network surveys provide important scaffolding for understanding disease transmission pathways but miss contact-specific heterogeneities revealed by spatial data. Our analyses also highlight that the superspreading potential of individuals may vary across transmission modes. We provide detailed methods to construct networks for close-contact transmission pathogens when not all individuals simultaneously wear GPS trackers.