Colfax, WA, operates an aerated lagoon to achieve compliance with its National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit, which currently requires biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) and total suspended solids (TSS) removal. However, ammonia removal may soon be required, and Colfax is considering a nitrifying trickling filter (NTF) that would allow them to also maintain the lagoons. To ...

The term 'pilot studies' refers to mini versions of a full-scale study (also called 'feasibility' studies), as well as the specific pre-testing of a particular research instrument such as a questionnaire or interview schedule. Pilot studies are a crucial element of a good study design. Conducting a pilot study does not guarantee success in the main study, but it does increase the likelihood of ...

PILOT (the Pathfinder for an International Large Optical Telescope) is a proposed Australian/European optical/infrared telescope for Dome C on the Antarctic Plateau, with target first light in 2012. The proposed telescope is 2.4m diameter, with overall focal ratio f/10, and a 1 degree field-of-view. In median seeing conditions, it delivers 0.3" FWHM widefield image quality, from 0.7-2.5 microns...

BACKGROUND/AIMS External pilot trials are recommended for testing the feasibility of main or confirmatory trials. However, there is little evidence that progress in external pilot trials actually predicts randomisation and attrition rates in the main trial. To assess the use of external pilot trials in trial design, we compared randomisation and attrition rates in publicly funded randomised con...

Small-scale pilot projects have demonstrated that integrated population, health and environment approaches can address the needs and rights of vulnerable communities. However, these and other types of health and development projects have rarely gone on to influence larger policy and programme development. ExpandNet, a network of health professionals working on scaling up, argues this is because...

Recently, this journal has published a paper which dealt with basis expansion model (BEM) based least-squares (LS) channel estimation in doubly-selective orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (DS-OFDM) systems. The least-squares channel estimator computes the pseudo-inverse of a channel estimation matrix. For the existence of the pseudo-inverse, it is necessary that the channel estimation ...