BACKGROUND Poor state of water supply systems, shortage of water purification facilities and disinfection systems, low quality of drinking water generally in Russia and particularly in the regions of the Russian Arctic, Siberia and Far East have been defined in the literature. However, no standard protocol of water security assessment has been used in the majority of studies. STUDY DESIGN AND...

Today, several actors within the Internet’s burgeoning underground economy specialize in providing services to like-minded criminals. At the same time, gray and white markets exist for services on the Internet providing reasonably similar products. In this paper we explore a hypothetical arbitrage between these two markets by purchasing “Human Intelligence” on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, ...

A new measurement of the atmospheric νµ/νe ratio-of-ratios, 0.61 ± 0.15 ± 0.05, has been obtained using a 3.2-kty exposure of the Soudan-2 underground detector. This measurement, based upon neutrino reactions in an iron tracking calorimeter of honeycomb-lattice geometry, is in agreement with the anomalously low value reported by the underground water detectors.

yazd province is one of the most arid regions of iran and its agriculture particularly pistachio cultivation depends on groundwater resources. in the recent decades, natural factors (drought and severe evaporation) and human activities (over- exploitation of groundwater) caused a sharp decline in the quality and quantity of groundwater in this province. in the present study, the spatial and tem...

The yellow pages service of GTE SuperPages enables Web users to flexibly search through liitings of 11 million businesses in over 17000 categories. To achieve the flexibility desired it uses an Information Retrieval (IR) engine to search through complex listing objects. The objects themselves are stored in an object database. The use of the IR engine enables us to create an index that spans all...

Animal behavior is often altruistic. In the frame of the theory of natural selection, altruism can only exist under specific conditions like kin selection or reciprocal cooperation. We show that reciprocal cooperation, which is generally invoked to explain non-kin altruism, requires very restrictive conditions to be stable. Some of these conditions are not met in many cases of altruism observed...

In systems experiencing water scarcity and consequent intermittent supply, users often adopt private tanks that collect water during service periods and supply users when the service is not available. The tank may be fed by gravity or by private pumping stations depending on the network pressure level. Once water resources are collected, the tank can supply users by gravity if it is located on ...

Background: In recent times, the decreasing groundwater reserves due to over-consumption of water resources and the unprecedented reduction of precipitation, during the past 1 decades, have resulted in a change in the volume and quality of water with time. The aim of this study was to determine the spatial and temporal variations of hardness and total dissolved solids in drinking water resource...