Participatory Modeling Workshops in a Water-Stressed Basin Result in Gains in Modeling Capacity but Reveal Disparity in Water Resources Management Priorities

Participatory modeling workshops were held in Sonora, México, with the goal of developing water resources management strategies in a water-stressed basin. A model of the water resources system, consisting of watershed hydrology, water resources infrastructure, and groundwater models, was developed deliberatively in the workshops, along with scenarios of future climate and development. Participants used the final version of the water resources systems model to select management strategies. The performance of the strategies was based on the reliability of meeting current and future demands at a daily time scale over a year’s period. Pre- and post-workshop surveys were developed and administered. The survey questions focused on evaluation of participants’ modeling capacity and the utility and accuracy of the models. The selected water resources strategies and the associated, expected reliability varied widely among participants. Most participants could be clustered into three groups with roughly equal numbers of participants that varied in terms of reliance on expanding infrastructure vs. demand modification; expectations of reliability; and perceptions of social, environmental, and economic impacts. The wide range of strategies chosen and associated reliabilities indicate that there is a substantial degree of uncertainty in how future water resources decisions could be made in the region. The pre- and post-survey results indicate that participants believed their modeling abilities increased and beliefs in the utility of models increased as a result of the workshops.     

Blocking the Routes to Triviality with Depth Relevance

In Rogerson and Restall’s (J Philos Log 36, 2006, p. 435), the “class of implication formulas known to trivialize (NC)” (NC abbreviates “naïve comprehension”) is recorded. The aim of this paper is to show how to invalidate any member in this class by using “weak relevant model structures”. Weak relevant model structures verify deep relevant logics only.     

Eicosapentaenoic acid (20∶5n-3) from the marine microalgaPhaeodactylum tricornutum

Eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA, 20∶5n-3) was obtained from the marine microalgaePhaeodactylum tricornutum by a three-step process: fatty acid extraction by direct saponification of biomass, polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) concentration by formation of urea inclusion compounds, and EPA isolation by semipreparative high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Alternatively, EPA was obtained by a similar two-step process without the PUFA concentration step by the urea method. Direct saponification of biomass was carried out with two solvents that contained KOH for lipid saponification. An increase in yield was obtained because the problems associated with emulsion formation were avoided by separating the biomass from the soap solution before adding hexane for extraction of insaponifiables. The most efficient solvent, ethanol (96%) at 60°C for 1 h, extracted 98.3% of EPA. PUFA were concentrated by the urea method with a urea/fatty acid ratio of 4∶1 at a crystallization temperature of 28°C and by using methanol and ethanol as urea solvents. An EPA concentration ratio of 1.73 (55.2∶31.9) and a recover yield of 78.6% were obtained with methanol as the urea solvent. This PUFA concentrate was used to obtain 93.4% pure EPA by semipreparative HPLC with a reverse-phase, C₁₈, 10 mm i.d.×25-cm column and methanol/water (1% acetic acid), 80∶20 w/w, as the mobile phase. Eighty-five percent of EPA loaded was recovered, and 65.7% of EPA present inP. tricornutum biomass was recovered in highly pure form by this three-step downstream process. Alternatively, 93.6% pure EPA was isolated from the fatty acid extract (without the PUFA concentration step) with 100% EPA recovery yield. This two-step process increases the overall EPA yield to 98.3%, but it is only possible to obtain 20% as much EPA as that obtained by three-step downstream processing.     

Copper hydrometallurgy-current status,preliminary economics,future direction and positioning versus smelting

The heap leaching of oxide copper ores with copper cathode recovery by solvent extraction and electrowinning is now well established as a low-cost method of copper recovery. This technology has recently been applied successfully to mixed oxide and chalcocite ores, notably in Chile at Cerro Colorado, Quebrada Blanca and Zaldivar.Currently, there are significant development efforts underway to try to extend heap leaching to chalcopyrite ores.The success of heap leaching/SX/EW has also led to a revival in the development of hydrometallurgical processes to recover copper from chalcopyrite and other copper concentrates. The current status of copper hydrometallurgy is reviewed and the most commercially attractive potential applications are explored. The advantages and disadvantages of the hydrometallurgical treatment of chalcopyrite concentrates and its preliminary economics are compared with those for the current best practices in copper smelting and refining.     

Predicting teamwork results from social network analysis

Modelling students' behaviours has reached a status that can only be overcome by improving the ability of predicting the results on teamwork. Indeed, teamwork is an important piece on the learning process, but understanding their mechanisms and predicting the results achieved is far from being solved by traditional classifiers. In this paper, we address the problem of predicting teamwork results, and propose a recommender system that suggests new teams, in the context of a given curricular unit. Any student, who is looking for a team, may use the system; in particular, he may ask for the best team to join, either considering all available colleagues or just the set of his previous teammates. Our system makes use of social network analysis and classification methods as the algorithmic core of the decision‐making process. System evaluation is presented through a set of experimental results, which report the performance of social network analysis and classification algorithms over real datasets.     

A constant-time dynamic storage allocator for real-time systems

Dynamic memory allocation has been used for decades. However, it has seldom been used in real-time systems since the worst case of spatial and temporal requirements for allocation and deallocation operations is either unbounded or bounded but with a very large bound. In this paper, a new allocator called TLSF (Two Level Segregated Fit) is presented. TLSF is designed and implemented to accommodate real-time constraints. The proposed allocator exhibits time-bounded behaviour, O(1), and maintains a very good execution time. This paper describes in detail the data structures and functions provided by TLSF. We also compare TLSF with a representative set of allocators regarding their temporal cost and fragmentation. Although the paper is mainly focused on timing analysis, a brief study and comparative analysis of fragmentation incurred by the allocators has been also included in order to provide a global view of the behaviour of the allocators. The temporal and spatial results showed that TLSF is also a fast allocator and produces a fragmentation close to that caused by the best existing allocators.

The Strong Property of Morphological Connected Alternated Filters

This paper studies connectivity aspects that arise in image operators that process connected components. The focus is on morphological image analysis (i.e., on increasing image operators) and, in particular, on a robustness property satisfied by certain morphological filters that is denominated the strong property. The behavior of alternated compositions of openings and closings is investigated under certain assumptions, particularly connectedness and a connected component preserving condition. It is shown that these conditions cannot in general guarantee the strong property of certain connected alternated filters because of issues related to the locality of the filters. As treated in the paper, there have been a series of misunderstandings in the literature concerning this topic, and it is important to clarify them. The root cause of those problems is discussed, and a solution is indicated. The class of connected openings and closings used to build connected alternated filters should therefore be defined to avoid such situations, since the strong property of alternated filters should be a distinctive characteristic of this class.

The Basic Constructive Logic for Negation-Consistency

In this paper, consistency is understood in the standard way, i.e. as the absence of a contradiction. The basic constructive logic B_Kc4, which is adequate to this sense of consistency in the ternary relational semantics without a set of designated points, is defined. Then, it is shown how to define a series of logics by extending B_Kc4 up to minimal intuitionistic logic. All logics defined in this paper are paraconsistent logics.     

Inductively coupled probe for the measurement of partial discharges

Partial discharges are a transient phenomena whose measurement is remarkably important for electrical equipment diagnosis and maintenance. These discharges appear in the measurement circuit as very narrow current pulses of some nanoseconds. Therefore, discharge pulse detection is a particularly difficult problem, especially because they are superposed on the high voltage waveforms that cause them. In this paper, we present an inductively coupled probe able to measure this physical phenomenon by means of a very simple and inexpensive device that can be installed in the equipment under test. After modeling the probe, its response will be compared to that of commercial devices using both calibrated discharges and partial discharges occurring at real power.