BACKGROUND Detection of estrogens in the environment has raised concerns in recent years because of their potential to affect both wildlife and humans. OBJECTIVES We compared exposures to prescribed and naturally occurring estrogens in drinking water to exposures to naturally occurring background levels of estrogens in the diet of children and adults and to four independently derived acceptab...

A targeted review of documented waterborne disease outbreaks over the past decades reveals some recurring themes that should be understood by drinking-water suppliers. Evidence indicates the outbreaks are often linked to some significant change in conditions that provides a sudden challenge to a water system. Severe weather events, such as heavy rainfall or runoff from snow melt, as well as tre...

An on-line fountain code is defined as a fountain code for which an optimal encoding strategy can be found efficiently given any instantaneous decoding state. This property is important for data distribution in practical networks. In this paper we formalize the problem of on-line fountain code construction, and propose new on-line fountain codes that outperform known ones in having factor 3-5 l...

A cross-regional comparative study was conducted to survey the drinking behaviors of university students, in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Macau. In particular, I tested students’ preference for bottled water over filtered tap water, in a context where the latter option is widely accessible, free of charge, and meets drinking standards. It was found that Singapore has a relatively low rate of bottl...

This paper proposes a fountain coding system which has lower space decoding complexity and lower decoding erasure rate than the Raptor coding systems. The main idea of the proposed fountain code is employing shift and exclusive OR to generate the output packets. This technique is known as the zigzag decodable code, which is efficiently decoded by the zigzag decoder. In other words, we propose a...

Although many people expect their drinking water to be "flavorless", natural and processed drinking waters have flavors due to minerals and organics in the natural water, inputs from any step of water processing or transport, and interaction of these chemicals with an individuals' nose and mouth. Since people can detect the flavor of water, the idea has been proposed that drinking water consume...

Emerging contaminant in drinking water has created concerns among public, water supplier and government. Pharmaceutical in water and food even in low concentration have shown potential risks to human. Acetaminophen and ibuprofen are among a set of the most prescribed drugs in the world. In this study raw water and treated drinking water from Latyan drinking water treatment facilities were analy...