Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology attempts to provide concise, critical reviews of timely advances, philosophy and significant areas of accomplished or needed endeavor in the total field of xenobiotics, in any segment of the environment, as well as toxicological implications.

The Water Research Institute at the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) is proud to have initiated and sponsored the International Workshop "Soil and Aquifer Pollution: Non-Aqueous Phase Liquids - Contamination and Recla- tion," held May 13th-15th, 1996, on the Technion campus in Haifa. Groundwater contamination is one of the pressing issues facing Israel and other countries which depend on groundwater for water supply. In Israel, 60% of the water supply comes from groundwater, most of it from two large aquifers. The Coastal Aquifer underlies the area where the largest concentration of human activity already takes place, and where much of future development is expected to occur. It is a phreatic sandstone aquifer, vulnerable to pollution from activities at the surface. The Mountain Aquifer is recharged in the higher terrain to the east, and flows, first in a phreatic zone, then confined, westward and underneath the Coastal Aquifer. This limestone aquifer has higher permeabilities and flow velo- ties, so pollution can reach the groundwater quite readily. Smaller local aquifers are also important components in the national water system. While measures are taken to protect these aquifers from pollution, there are locations where contamination has already occurred. Furthermore, accidental pollution may not be totally avoided in the future. Therefore, understanding the processes of groundwater contamination, recommending the proper measures for preventing it, and determining the best means for reclamation once pollution has occurred, are of great practical importance. Non-aqueous phase liquids (NAPLs) are among the most significant contaminants.

This book addresses most of the environmental impacts of sand mining from small rivers The problems and solutions addressed in this book are applicable to all rivers that drain through densely populated tropical coasts undergoing rapid economic growth. Many rivers in the world are drastically being altered to levels often beyond their natural resilience capability. Among the different types of human interventions, mining of sand and gravel is the most disastrous one, as the activity threatens the very existence of river ecosystem. A better understanding of sand budget is necessary if the problems of river and coastal environments are to be solved.

If the political and social benchmarks of sustainability and sustainable development are to be met, ignoring the role of the humanities and social, cultural and ethical values is highly problematic. People's worldviews, beliefs and principles have an immediate impact on how they act and should be studied as cultural dimensions of sustainability. Collating contributions from internationally renowned theoreticians of culture and leading researchers working in the humanities and social sciences, this volume presents an in-depth, interdisciplinary discussion of the concept of cultural sustainability and the public visibility of such research. Beginning with a discussion of the concept of cultural sustainability, it goes on to explore its interaction with philosophy, theology, sociology, economics, arts and literature. In doing so, the book develops a much needed concept of 'culture' that can be adapted to various disciplines and applied to research on sustainability. Addressing an important gap in sustainability research, this book will be of great interest to academics and students of sustainability and sustainable development, as well as those studying sustainability within the humanities and social sciences, such as cultural studies, ethics, theology, sociology, literature and history.

This book describes a cross-domain architecture and design tools for networked complex systems where application subsystems of different criticality coexist and interact on networked multi-core chips. The architecture leverages multi-core platforms for a hierarchical system perspective of mixed-criticality applications. This system perspective is realized by virtualization to establish security, safety and real-time performance. The impact further includes a reduction of time-to-market, decreased development, deployment and maintenance cost, and the exploitation of the economies of scale through cross-domain components and tools. Describes an end-to-end architecture for hypervisor-level, chip-level, and cluster level. Offers a solution for different types of resources including processors, on-chip communication, off-chip communication, and I/O. Provides a cross-domain approach with examples for wind-power, health-care, and avionics. Introduces hierarchical adaptation strategies for mixed-criticality systems Provides modular verification and certification methods for the seamless integration of mixed-criticality systems. Covers platform technologies, along with a methodology for the development process. Presents an experimental evaluation of technological results in cooperation with industrial partners. The information in this book will be extremely useful to industry leaders who design and manufacture products with distributed embedded systems in mixed-criticality use-cases. It will also benefit suppliers of embedded components or development tools used in this area. As an educational tool, this material can be used to teach students and working professionals in areas including embedded systems, computer networks, system architecture, dependability, real-time systems, and avionics, wind-power and health-care systems.

The scope of opportunities in chemical and biomolecular engineering has grown tremendously in recent years. Careers in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering conveys the breadth and depth of today's chemical and biomolecular engineering practice, and describes the intellectually enriching, socially conscious and financially lucrative opportunities available for such graduates in an ever-widening array of industries and applications. This book aims to help students interested in studying chemical engineering and biomolecular engineering to understand the many potential career pathways that are available in these dynamic fields - and is an indispensable resource for the parents, teachers, advisors and guidance counselors who support them, In addition to 10 chapters that discuss the roles such graduates play in many diverse industries, this book also features 25 Profile articles that share in-depth, first-person insight from industry-leading chemical and biomolecular engineers. These technical professionals discuss their work and educational experiences (in terms of both triumphs and challenges), and share wisdom and recommendations for students pursuing these two dynamic engineering disciplines.

This volume summarises the materials presented at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Sea-Dumped Chemical Munitions, held in Kaliningrad (Moscow Region), Russia, in January 1995. The conference was sponsored by the NATO Division of Scientific and Environmental Affairs in the framework of its outreach programme to develop co-operation between NATO member countries and the Cooperation Partner countries in the area of disarmament technologies. The problem of the ecological threat posed by chemical weapons (CW) dumped in the seas after the Second World War deserves considerable international attention: the amount of these weapons, many of them having been captured from the German Army, is assessed at more than three times as much as the total chemical arsenals reported by the United States and Russia. They were disposed of in the shallow depths of North European seas - areas of active fishing - in close proximity to densely populated coastlines, with no consideration of the long-term consequences. The highly toxic material have time and again showed up, for instance when retrieved occasionally in the fishing nets, attracting local media coverage only. Nevertheless, this issue has not yet been given adequate and comprehensive scientific analysis, the sea-disposed munitions are not covered by either the Chemical Weapons Convention or other arms control treaties. In fact, the problem has been neglected for a long time on the international level. Only recently were official data made available by the countries which admitted conducting dumping operations.

Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology provides concise, critical review articles of timely advances, philosophy and significant areas of accomplished or needed endeavor in the total field of xenobiotics, in any segment of the environment, as well as toxicological implications.

The book gives an outline of prevailing hydrogeologic conditions in the Arab Middle East together with the geologic background. Emphasis is given to relationships between the main features influencing the hydrogeologic conditions - regional geologic developments, paleogeographic conditions, morphology, climate and paleo-climate - and the resulting hydrogeologic features: formation of aquifers, distribution of major aquifers, main groundwater flow systems, occurrence of renewable and fossil groundwater. Reported data on hydraulic aquifer parameters, recharge rates and groundwater flow volumes are evaluated with a view to arrive at characteristic values under the specific hydrogeologic and climatic conditions. The area considered covers approximately the Arabian Plate. Information on the following countries is included: Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates, West Bank and Gaza, Yemen.

This book presents both general and comprehensive observations of unsuccessful and successful experiences in water pollution trading programs within the U.S. These experiences help in understanding the major environmental, economic and regulatory barriers that prevent the application of pollution trading in water media to become successful. This work combines background information with real experience.

This book presents chemical analyses of our most pressing waste, pollution, and resource problems for the undergraduate or graduate student. The distinctive holistic approach provides both a solid ground in theory, as well as a laboratory manual detailing introductory and advanced experimental applications. The laboratory procedures are presented at microscale conditions, for minimum waste and maximum economy. This work fulfills an urgent need for an introductory text in environmental chemistry combining theory and practice, and is a valuable tool for preparing the next generation of environmental scientists.

In line with COP21 agreements, state-led climate change mitigation and adaptation actions are being undertaken to transition to carbon-neutral, green economies. However, the capacity of many countries for action is limited and may result in a 'boomerang effect', defined as the unintended negative consequences of such policies and programmes on local communities and their negative feedbacks on the state. To avoid this effect, there is a need to understand the policy drivers, decision-making processes, and impacts of such action, in order to determine the ways and means of minimizing negative effects and maximizing mutually beneficial policy outcomes. This book directly engages the policy debates surrounding water resources and climate actions through both theoretical and comparative case studies. It develops the 'boomerang effect' concept and sets it in relation to other conceptual tools for understanding the mixed outcomes of state-led climate change action, for example 'backdraft' effect and 'maldevelopment'. It also presents case studies illustrative of the consequences of ill-considered state-led policy in the water sector from around the world. These include Africa, China, South Asia, South America, the Middle East, Turkey and Vietnam, and examples of groundwater, hydropower development and forest hydrology, where there are often transboundary consequences of a state's policies and actions. In this way, the book adds empirical and theoretical insights to a still developing debate regarding the appropriate ways and means of combating climate change without undermining state and social development.

This book outlines the methodologies, approaches and tools for modelling chemicals in a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) perspective, and also covers the main advantages and drawbacks of applying LCA to chemical processes. In the first part of this book, authors pay close attention to the limitations of modelling the environmental and social impacts of chemical processes, providing valuable insights to the problems of the Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) analysis for chemical processes. In the second part of this book, readers will learn about the LCA application to chemical processes in the laboratory and industrial scale. In each chapter of this book, readers will also find specific case studies on the modelling and application of LCA in the chemical industry.

In this book, editor G Rasul Chaudhry presents a wide range of topics authored by researchers at the cutting edge of biodegradation and bioremediation. The book includes recent research describing how microorganisms clean soil and water, and how they remove toxic substances. It also presents information on how genetics and molecular biological methods are used to improve the ability of microorganisms to degrade a variety of substances.

The series Advances in Industrial Control aims to report and encourage technology transfer in control engineering. The rapid development of control technology has an impact on all areas of the control discipline. New theory, new controllers, actuators, sensors, new industrial processes, computer methods, new applications, new philosophies ..., new challenges. Much of this development work resides in industrial reports, feasibility study papers and the reports of advanced collaborative projects. The series offers an opportunity for researchers to present an extended exposition of such new work in all aspects of industrial control for wider and rapid dissemination. The water and wastewater industry has undergone many changes in recent years. Of particular importance has been a renewed emphasis on improving resource management with tighter regulatory controls setting new targets on pricing, industry efficiency and loss reduction for both water and wastewater with more stringent environmental discharge conditions for wastewater. Meantime, the demand for water and wastewater services grows as the population increases and wishes for improved living conditions involving, among other items, domestic appliances that use water. Consequently, the installed infrastructure of the industry has to be continuously upgraded and extended, and employed more effectively to accommodate the new demands, both in throughput and in meeting the new regulatory conditions. Investment in fixed infrastructure is capital-intensive and slow to come on-stream. One outcome of these changes and demands is that the industry is examining the potential benefits of, and in many cases using, more advanced control systems.

Recent results on the nature of low-, intermediate- and high-energy nuclear forces as well as on the internal structure of nucleons and atomic nuclei are presented. Prospects to find a new state of the nuclear matter at extreme conditions that existed in the early Universe and the utilisation of the nuclear energy are discussed.

Climate change mitigation and sustainable practices are now at the top of political and technical agendas. Environmental system modelling provides a way of appraising options and this book will make a significant contribution to the uptake of such systems. It provides knowledge of the principles involved in modelling systems, builds confidence amongst designers and offers a broad perspective of the potential of these new technologies.

The aim of the book is to provide an understanding of the concepts and principles behind predictive modelling methods; review progress in the development of the modelling software available; and explore modelling in building design through international case studies based on real design problems.

Healthcare Kaizen focuses on the principles and methods of daily continuous improvement, or Kaizen, for healthcare professionals and organizations. Kaizen is a Japanese word that means "change for the better," as popularized by Masaaki Imai in his 1986 book Kaizen: The Key to Japan's Competitive Success and through the books of Norman Bodek, both of whom contributed introductory material for this book. Winner of a 2013 Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award! In 1989, Dr. Donald M. Berwick, founder of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, endorsed the principles of Kaizen in the New England Journal of Medicine, describing it as "the continuous search for opportunities for all processes to get better." This book shows how to make this goal a reality. Healthcare Kaizen shares some of the methods used by numerous hospitals around the world, including Franciscan St. Francis Health, where co-author Joe Swartz has led these efforts. Most importantly, the book covers the management mindsets and philosophies required to make Kaizen work effectively in a hospital department or as an organization-wide program. All of the examples in the book were shared by leading healthcare organizations, with over 200 full-color pictures and visual illustrations of Kaizen-based improvements that were initiated by nurses, physicians, housekeepers, senior executives and other staff members at all levels. Healthcare Kaizen will be helpful for organizations that have embraced weeklong improvement events, but now want to follow the lead of ThedaCare, Virginia Mason Medical Center, and others who have moved beyond just doing events into a more complete management system based on Lean or the Toyota Production System. It's often said, without much reflection, that people hate change. The experiences shared

The book covers a critical compilation of analytical methods used for the monitoring of pesticides and their degradation products in water. It contains up-to-date material and is the direct result of the authors' experience in the field of pesticide analysis. The book is structured in six chapters, starting from general aspects of pesticides like usage, physicochemical parameters and occurrence in the environment. A second chapter is devoted to sampling from water matrices, stability methods of pesticides in water and quality assurance issues. The general chromatographic methods for pesticides are reported, including the newly developed electrophoresis methods and GC-MS and LC-MS confirmatory analytical methods. Sample preparation methodologies, including off-line and on-line techniques are described in the next two chapters, with a comprehensive list of examples of pesticides and many metabolites, including the use of different GC-methods and LC-methods. The final chapter is devoted to the development of biological techniques, immunoassays and biosensors, for the trace determination of pesticides in water samples.

The book answers one of the key problems in pesticide analysis: the diversity of chemical functional groups, with varying polarity and physicochemical properties. Pesticides and their metabolites have received particular attention during the last few years in environmental trace-organic analysis. For instance, in the case of groundwater, the use of pesticides has become a cause for concern. Under the right conditions, pesticides, such as fertilizer nitrogen, can move through the soil into groundwater, a phenomenon once thought improbable. The movement of agrochemicals in surface water flow can be, in some instances, a major problem, specially in the case of water soluble pesticides that are generally transported to estuarine and coastal waters. Estuarine waters feature gradients of both pollutant concentrations and physicochemical characteristics such as salinity, turbidity and pH, and all these parameters must be carefully considered when developing methods of analysis for trace organics in estuarine waters.

One of the key parameters in analytical determination is the environmental sampling. Different protocols and devices are needed for sampling sea-water samples - usually using large sample volumes of more than 50 litres either with LLE or SPE, with the problems encountered due to dissolved and particulate matter - which is different from drinking water and well water sampling. The representativeness of the sampling is also of concern.

The sample preparation of organic compounds from water matrices has been recognized to be a bottleneck and it has been traditionally neglected in the literature. We should comment following R.W. Frie's ideas - that the most sophisticated hardware is useless if the chemistry in the protocol does not work. During the last few years new adsorbents have appeared - carbon type, polymeric sorbents with high capacity and immunosorbents - which can more efficiently trap the more polar compounds.

The development of advanced automation methods based, usually on solid phase extraction techniques - PROSPEKT, OSP-2 and ASPEC XL - are examples of commercially available equipment that are of growing importance. These systems are generally coupled to LC and GC techniques.

Sampling and sample handling can not be regarded as separate techniques in the analytical process and both should be integrated into the whole analytical determination. For this reason, validation and confirmation methods, such as mass spectrometry, either GC-MS and/or LC-MS, are needed. These serve to check the quality assurance of the developed method. The discussion between multiscreening versus specific methods of analysis and the influence of the matrix (ground-, surface- and estuarine-water), is also a point of concern due to the diversity of chemical classes within the compounds of study.

Finally the use of rapid methods of analysis, which refer basically to biological techniques, biosensors and immunoassays are also of growing interest for the determination of pesticides in environmental matrices. The rapid development of these techniques, being more sensitive and that can work at different pH and drastic environmental conditions, like very different pH and salinity values, makes that these methods are very useful and complementary to conventional GC and/or LC techniques for the determination of pesticides.

The rapid growth of the discipline of aquatic ecology has been driven both by scientific interest in the complexities of aquatic ecosystems and by their enormous environmental importance and sensitivity. This book focuses on the remarkably diverse roles played by underwater plants, and is divided into three parts: 10 thematic chapters, followed by 18 case studies, and rounded off by three integrative chapters. The topics range from macrophytes as fish food to macrophytes as mollusc and microbe habitat, making this of interest to aquatic ecologists as well as limnologists, ecosystem ecologists, microbial ecologists, fish biologists, and environmental managers.

Gradually-varied flow (GVF) is a steady non-uniform flow in an open channel with gradual changes in its water surface elevation. The evaluation of GVF profiles under a specific flow discharge is very important in hydraulic engineering. This book proposes a novel approach to analytically solve the GVF profiles by using the direct integration and Gaussian hypergeometric function. Both normal-depth- and critical-depth-based dimensionless GVF profiles are presented. The novel approach has laid the foundation to compute at one sweep the GVF profiles in a series of sustaining and adverse channels, which may have horizontal slopes sandwiched in between them.

Statistics is strongly tied to applications in different scientific disciplines, and the most challenging statistical problems arise from problems in the sciences. In fact, the most innovative statistical research flows from the needs of applications in diverse settings. This volume is a testimony to the crucial role that statistics plays in scientific disciplines such as genetics and environmental sciences, among others. The articles in this volume range from human and agricultural genetic DNA research to carcinogens and chemical concentrations in the environment and to space debris and atmospheric chemistry. Also included are some articles on statistical methods which are sufficiently general and flexible to be applied to many practical situations. The papers were refereed by a panel of experts and the editors of the volume. The contributions are based on the talks presented at the Workshop on Statistics and the Sciences, held at the Centro Stefano Franscini in Ascona, Switzerland, during the week of May 23 to 28, 1999. The meeting was jointly organized by the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology in Lausanne and Zurich, with the financial support of the Minerva Research Foundation. As the presentations at the workshop helped the participants recognize the po tential role that statistics can play in the sciences, we hope that this volume will help the reader to focus on the central role of statistics in the specific areas presented here and to extrapolate the results to further applications."