Economic Benefits of Reservoirs in the Irrigated Agriculture

Abstract

In the Jordan Valley of Jordan, the demand for water and ability to control its location, timing, quality, and quantity are becoming critical. The competition for water between the urban and agricultural sectors is increasing. There is a general trend in Jordan to reduce water allocated for agricultural use. Increasing the price of irrigation water or restricting the planted areas of water consuming crops, such as bananas, has been implemented during the recent growing season. The main objective of this paper is to highlight the impact of optimal allocation of irrigation water by building storage capacity on the economy of Jordan Valley. A linear programming technique is used, and the main results show that for proper management of water storage capacity, the suggested cropping pattern would generate $88.2 million, whereas the actual cropping pattern generated $74.4 million. The optimal water demand schedule is distributed according to the needs of the planted crops, and water demand has been allocated in an efficient way. In addition, appropriate management of storage capacity has solved the problem of water scarcity during the summer months, when peak production takes place. Storage-transfer system between locations played a significant role in reallocating irrigation water through the storage system. This compensates to a high degree in keeping the agricultural production more stable in physical and monetary units.     

International Rivers as Boundaries

Abstract

International rivers serve a number of purposes, the most obvious are the navigational and non-navigational uses. Less noticed is the fact that international rivers are also used to delimit boundaries between nations. The immediate question that would arise is: Where are such boundaries actually drawn across the river? Boundaries, however, are established by treaties and the answer to this question is often included in the interpretation of treaties delimiting such water boundaries, taking into account the special characteristics of the international river. Indeed, this has been the case regarding the boundaries across the Chobe river between Botswana and Namibia. Determining where such boundaries lie would result in deciding to whom a disputed Island, the Kasikili/Sedudu, belongs. In a praiseworthy step, the two countries agreed to take their dispute over the Island, after failure to resolve it through negotiations, to the International Court of Justice. This paper discusses the uses of international rivers as boundaries, and reviews the dispute between Botswana and Namibia, and the decision of the Court thereon.     

Sharing Rivers for Peace,Development, and Security

Abstract

Water is a finite resource, and with the considerable upsurge in population, urbanization, and industrialization, it is also becoming an increasingly scarce resource. Many countries in the world rely on river waters, and many of those rivers are shared by two or more countries. Dams on those rivers have been a major source of tensions, disputes, and, in some cases, even conflict between riparian countries because dams could result in massive diversion of river flows. Those developments have, inter alia, highlighted the relevance and importance of the principles of international water law, as reflected in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses. The World Commission on Dams has also underscored the importance of, and elaborated on, those principles with regard to dams on shared rivers. This article discusses and analyzes the recommendations of the Commission in this area, and compares them with the principles of international water law as enunciated in the United Nations Convention     

Prediction of Evaporation Losses in Wet Cooling Towers

The accurate prediction of all aspects of cooling tower behavior is very important. Accurately predicting evaporation losses is significant because water in cooling towers is cooled primarily through the evaporation of a portion of the circulating water, which causes the concentration of dissolved solids and other impurities to increase. An empirical relation is developed on the basis of ASHRAE's rule of thumb that is simple and accurate with a wide range of applicability. The predicted values are in good agreement with experimental data as well as predictions made by an accurate mathematical model.     

Detection of deoxynivalenol in foods and indoor air using an array biosensor

Deoxynivalenol (DON), a mycotoxin produced by several Fusaruim species, is a worldwide contaminant of foods and feeds. Because of the potential dangers due to accidental or intentional contamination of foods with DON, there is a need to develop a rapid and highly sensitive method for easy identification and quantification of DON. In this study, we have developed and utilized a competitive immunoassay technique to detect DON in various food matrixes and indoor air samples using an array biosensor. A DON-biotin conjugate, immobilized on a NeutrAvidin-coated optical waveguide, competed with the DON in the sample for binding to fluorescently labeled DON monoclonal antibodies. To demonstrate a simple procedure amenable for on-site use, DON-spiked cornmeal, cornflakes, wheat, barley, and oats were extracted with methanol-water (3:1) and assayed without cleanup or preconcentration. The limits of detection ranged from 0.2 ng/mL in buffer to 50 ng/g in oats. The detection limit of DON spiked into an aqueous effluent from an air sampler was 4 ng/mL.     

Thermoeconomic considerations in the design and rating of two-phase heat exchangers

We discuss a closed-form model for thermoeconomic design and analysis of two-phase heat exchangers used as condensers and evaporators. The results are presented in terms of the optimum number of heat-transfer units (NTUs) as a function of the dimensionless unit-cost ratio and the exit-to-inlet absolute temperature ratio of the single-phase fluid. The sensitivities of various unit-cost parameters (UCPs) are presented. It is demonstrated that the selection of UCPs play a significant role in sizing heat exchangers.     

Comparison of Conventional and Cross-Layer Multimedia Transport Schemes for Wireless Networks

Three competing schemes have been proposed for multimedia transport over broadband wireless channels: (a) traditional UDP (Postel, The User Datagram Protocol, 1980 [1]), (b) semi-cross-layer UDP-Lite (The Lightweight User Datagram Protocol, 2004 [2]), and (c) cross-layer header estimation (Khayam et al., IEEE Transactions on Multimedia 9(2):377–385, 2007 [3]; Khayam and Radha, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications 6(11):3946–3954, 2007 [4]). In all these schemes, corrupted and lost packets are recovered using FEC at the application layer. In this paper, we analytically and experimentally compare the performances of these broadband wireless multimedia schemes. First, we derive lower bounds on the excepted FEC redundancy required by ideal cross-layer header estimation, UDP and UDP-Lite over an arbitrary-order Markov wireless channel. We show that under realistic wireless channel conditions, the cross-layer header estimation scheme always requires lesser redundancy than UDP and UDP-Lite. We then propose a practical minimum distance decoding (MDD) header estimation scheme, which is receiver-based, low complexity and highly accurate. Trace-driven multimedia experiments over wireless LANs demonstrate that MDD header estimation requires significantly lesser FEC redundancy and renders better video quality than existing schemes.     

A Functional Programming Framework for Latency Insensitive Protocol Validation

Latency insensitive protocols (LIPs) have been proposed as a viable means to connect synchronous IP blocks via long interconnects in a system-on-chip. The reason why one needs to implement LIPs on long interconnects stems from the fact that with increasing clock frequencies, the signal delay on some interconnects exceeds the clock period. Correctness of a system composed of synchronous blocks communicating via LIPs is established by showing latency equivalence between a completely synchronous composition of the blocks, and the LIP based composition. A design flow based on a synchronous composition specification, and stepwise refinement to LIP composition can be easily conceived, and a proof obligation to show latency equivalence between the synchronous specification and the refinement needs to be discharged. In this work, we propose a functional programming based framework for modeling and simulating LIP, and implement the semantics of various refinement steps in the programming model, so we can validate the LIP model against the original system within this functional programming framework. Such validation becomes easier due to the inherent denotational model of functional languages. We specifically use Standard ML to model the original system implementation as well as its latency insensitive version and compare the two by creating a model that contains both, giving them the same inputs and checking their outputs to be latency equivalent.     

Two fully distributed concurrency control algorithms

Two new concurrency control algorithms are introduced for partially replicated distributed databases. They both maintain two values of a data item, and differ in that one requires all locks to be granted at one time, whereas the other does not. They are based on locking, and avoid deadlocks by using timestamps to establish an execution order when conflicts arise. Since they both proceed without any communication among schedulers, but only communication between the originating site and all participating sites, we say they are fully distributed