services has long been recognized as essential to public health and individual welfare. In most countries government policy has traditionally been to keep water companies in public ownership, and to keep tariffs artificially low through a range of more or less explicit subsidy measures. The results have often been unsatisfactory. Service quality and coverage remain inadequate in many countries,...

eCommerce networks, or groups of companies collaborating over the Internet, have the potential to revolutionize the efficiency and responsiveness of business. These networks are still far from mature, but they will ultimately transform every major business process—from logistics to R&D to financing to customer service. Drawing from a recently completed, exhaustive study of over 160 organization...

Filtration of a solution may lower metal concentrations through adsorption of metal species to the filter. Processes such as filter-sterilizing nutrient solution and filtration of field water are sensitive to these sorption artifacts, yet basic data on the affinity of different filters for metals are lacking. This article describes the adsorption of five metals to eight types of 0.2-microm memb...

Land application of contaminated waste products has been defended as beneficial use by some scientists and regulators, based on the premise that the behavior of any toxins accumulated in soils from this practice is reasonably well understood and will not have detrimental agronomic or environmental impacts into the foreseeable future. In this review, I use the case of toxic metals in sewage slud...

Co-contamination of metals and organic pollutants is a global problem as metals interfere with the metabolism of complex organics by bacteria. Based on a prior observation that metal tolerance was altered by the sole carbon source being used for growth, we sought to understand how metal toxicity specifically affects bacteria using an organic pollutant as their sole carbon source. To this end me...

Ball milling is investigated as a method of reducing the leaching concentration (often termed stablilization) of heavy metals in municipal solid waste incineration (MSWI) fly ash. Three heavy metals (Cu, Cr, Pb) loose much of their solubility in leachate by treating fly ash in a planetary ball mill, in which collisions between balls and fly ash drive various physical processes, as well as chemi...

The purpose of this study is to recognize the contamination characteristics of trace metals in soils and apportion their potential sources in Northern China to provide a scientific basis for basic of soil environment management and pollution control. The data set of metals for 12 elements in surface soil samples was collected. The enrichment factor and geoaccumulation index were used to identif...

Introduction: Unsustainable natural resources utilization is on the increase in the developing countries thus the ability of many local communities to meet their basic needs including food, water and shelter is jeopardized. Uncontrolled gold-mining in Sikasso region is one such an anthropogenic activity that is of great environmental concern to the local and national governments of Mali owing t...

Sales forecasting is a common topic in business. Our task is predicting a famous drug company daily sales for 1,115 stores located across Germany for six weeks in advance. Store sales are influenced by many factors. Our project aims to create a robust prediction model. Based on Gradient Boosting and Random Forest, our model performs well in this sales forecasting competition with resulting in r...

In November, 1963, a small private symposium met at Johns Hopkins Univers^ to explore what were the major problems in making safe and effective drugs avails. from both the academic and industrial fields were present. In addition, the gt?f. included economists, the president of a drug company, lawyers and an Eng'1^ social scientist (Professor Richard Titmuss). In the course of their deliberation...