Recently developed fish stock assessment methods are briefly presented which could be used for the management of the fish stocks of African reservoirs. These methods include length-structured versions of Virtual Population Analysis which seem particularly suited to reservoirs because (a) they do not include any equilibrium assumption; and (b) they can be used in conjunction with such highly sel...

Chun-Tian Cheng*, K.W.Chau Department of Civil Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116024, P.R. China Department of Civil and Structural Engineering, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong Abstract: Flooding disaster is one of the most damaging natural disasters in China, with annual average losses costing more than 200 billion yuan in recent years. Aft...

The concentrations of heavy metals (mercury (Hg), cadmium (Cd), lead (Pb), chromium (Cr), copper (Cu) and arsenic (As)) in surface water and sediments were investigated in two adjacent drinking water reservoirs (Hongfeng and Baihua Reservoirs) on the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau in Southwest China. Possible pollution sources were identified by spatial and statistical analyses. For both reservoirs, Cd...

Microemboli are implicated in neurological injury; therefore, the extracorporeal circuit (ECC) should not generate microbubbles or transmit introduced air. The venous reservoir is the first component in the ECC designed to remove introduced air. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relative safety of two kinds of adult venous reservoirs--the closed soft-shell venous reservoir (SSVR ...

As a result of very large surface area to volume ratios, evaporation is of significant importance when dealing with lab-on-a-chip devices that possess open air/liquid interfaces. For devices utilizing a reservoir as a fluid delivery method to a microfluidic network, excessive evaporation can quickly lead to reservoir dry out and overall device failure. Predicting the rates of evaporation from t...

In the Oil and Gas industry, processing and visualizing 3D models is of paramount importance for making exploratory and production decisions. Hydrocarbons reservoirs are entities buried deep in the earth’s crust, and a simplified 3D geological model that mimics this environment is generated to run simulations and help understand geological and physical concepts. For the task of visually inspect...

The benefits of using Intrinsic Plasticity (IP), an unsupervised, local, biologically inspired adaptation rule that tunes the probability density of a neuron’s output towards an exponential distribution – thereby realizing an information maximization – have already been demonstrated. In this work, we extend the ideas of this adaptation method to a more commonly used nonlinearity and a Gaussian ...

To establish whether colonisation of the upper respiratory tract or bacterial contamination of inhaler devices or solutions predisposes to colonisation of the lower respiratory tract in patients with cystic fibrosis, bacterial isolates from groups of children who were positive (n = 13) or negative (n = 18) for Pseudomonas aeruginosa were studied. Cultures of swabs from inhaler devices, toothbru...