Central and Southern Africa are generally regarded as being endemic areas for African horse sickness (AHS). With the advent of the concepts of risk analysis and regionalisation/zoning, however, the possibility has now arisen of establishing 'zones' within South Africa for AHS surveillance purposes. In 1993, a protocol was submitted to the European Community (now European Union: EU), proposing t...

iran is located in a roughly triangular deforming region, consisting of relatively undeformed shield areas to the southwest (arabia) and northeast and the more recently deformed, though currently inactive, southwest afghanistan block in the east. the current geological and tectonic setting of iran is due to the ongoing convergence between the arabian and eurasian plates, which resulted in the f...

Phytoplankton underpin the marine food web in shelf seas, with some species having properties that are harmful to human health and coastal aquaculture. Pressures such as climate change and anthropogenic nutrient input are hypothesized to influence phytoplankton community composition and distribution. Yet the primary environmental drivers in shelf seas are poorly understood. To begin to address ...

vi Foreword University of Cagliari vii Foreword Since my M.Sc. dissertation [SR02], I have focused my research interest in the Information and Communication Technology field, with regard on the communication network resources optimization. While in [SR02] I have analysed a single network component (a multi-service switch), in this Ph.D. dissertation I have enlarged my focus to entire infrastruc...

Estimates of crustal and lithospheric thickness beneath ten permanent seismic stations in southern, central, and eastern Africa have been obtained from modeling S-wave receiver functions (SRFs). For eight of the examined stations, the Moho depth estimates agree well with estimates from previous studies using P-wave receiver functions (PRFs). For two stations, TSUM and BGCA, previous PRF estimat...

Positioning, based on GNSS reference network technology, is becoming a routine operation within and outside the spatial industry. The expanding user base diverse range of applications employing this technology can impose significant expectations providers services. In positioning navigation, requirement for high accurate coordinate estimates cannot be over-emphasized. This ensured by provision ...

A questionnaire survey was conducted to investigate the problems involved in the infectious waste recovery at home-visit nursing stations. 1965 nursing stations were selected randomly, and questionnaires were sent to them. Nurses at 1314 stations (66.9%) responded to the survey and responses from 1283 stations were identified as suitable for analysis after excluding 26 stations that closed and ...

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is an ad-hoc network with a fixed network infrastructure (see an example in figure 1). The physical structure of a WMN includes base stations, a backbone and mobile stations. The base stations (also known as mesh routers or mesh points) are static wireless nodes, forming the network infrastructure and providing wireless network access to the mobile stations. The back...

Although the EDCA access mechanism of the 802.11e standard supports legacy DCF stations, the presence of DCF stations in the WLAN jeopardizes the provisioning of the service guarantees committed to the EDCA stations. The reason is that DCF stations compete with Contention Windows (CW ’s) that are predefined and cannot be modified, and as a result the impact of the DCF stations on the service re...

Results of study of anomaly behavior of amplitudes, phase velocities and gradients of ULF electromagnetic disturbances (F = 0.002 – 0.5 Hz) before and during a seismic active period are presented. Investigations were carried out in Japan (Izu and Chiba peninsulas) by two groups of magnetic stations spaced apart at a distance ∼140 km. Every group (magnetic gradientometer) consists of three 3comp...