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Onsite greywater reuse in a low-tech solar-driven pilot laundry facility: field insights on performance, self-sufficiency, and user acceptance
No full textThis study evaluates the LaundReCycle system, a unique low-tech laundry facility designed for water and energy self-sufficiency through greywater treatment and reuse, rainwater harvesting, and solar power. Installed in Cape Town, South Africa, the system treats greywater using a settling tank, biofilter, sediment and activated carbon filters, and UV disinfection. Treated water is reused for washing, while rainwater replenishes losses and an off-grid solar setup supplies energy. The biofilter achieved 82% chemical oxygen demand (COD) and 95% turbidity removal after a 3-day retention time. This demonstrates effective treatment within a short timeframe. The results suggest potential suitability for low-grade laundry reuse. However, broader applicability may be limited by residual coloration and stable compounds. Water self-sufficiency improved during the study, reaching up to 93 %. Energy self-sufficiency reached 91.6 and 90.8 % in a scenario with increased energy efficiency and operational capacity, respectively. Complementary socioeconomic surveys in South Africa and Switzerland revealed cultural influences on attitudes toward greywater reuse. These findings support the scalability of decentralised non-potable reuse systems when adapted to local conditions
John Grisham’s The Widow: a legal mystery that asks if a sleazy lawyer can ever be seen as a ‘good’ victim
No full text"Then we have this other story…": introducing the intergenerational interpretative stories of socially marginalised critical scholars of Indian universities
No full textThis is the introduction, by the editors, to a book of short stories produced as part of a larger research project. The stories are interpretations of interview transcripts from interviews with participants. The introduction sets the tone; outlines the processes; raises questions about feminist intellectual historiography, and about authorship, attribution and acknowledgements in a project of this nature.The full book is: Dhawan, N. B., & Belluigi, D. Z. [Eds]."Then we have this Other Story…": Intergenerational Interpretative Stories of Socially Marginalised Critical Scholars of Indian Universities (1963-2024). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17181463<br/
Gen4Track: a tuning-free data augmentation framework via self-correcting diffusion model for vision-language tracking
No full textThe performance of current Vision-Language Tracking (VLT) models is constrained by the limited diversity and quantity of labeled data. Compared to constructing large-scale datasets, data augmentation offers a more cost-saving strategy for VLT by synthesizing new samples from existing data, rather than generating them from scratch. However, conventional techniques like rotation and flipping may disrupt scene composition, causing conflicts between visual layouts and textual annotations. Recent advances in generative models have inspired the use of synthetic videos for data augmentation. Yet, existing approaches fail to address the core concerns of data augmentation in VLT (shown in Fig. 1)-target location accuracy, text-video consistency, and video content coherency. To bridge the gap, we propose Gen4Track, a tuning-free data augmentation framework that leverages the self-correcting mechanism to dynamically generate high-quality video data with annotations. Our approach involves (1) optimizing the attention calculations in a frozen text-to-image diffusion model to synthesize coherent videos that satisfy specific conditions (e.g., spatial location, category, color, and style), and (2) implementing a self-correcting mechanism based on a Large Language Model (LLM) to improve text-video consistency. During video augmentation, we propose content-coherent self-attention and location-enhanced cross-attention mechanisms, ensuring that image-level editings are accurately and coherently propagated throughout the video. Then, with the goal of maximizing text-video consistency, we iteratively refine the augmentation instruction with our designed self-correcting mechanism for a more aligned video. Extensive experiments validate that Gen4Track significantly boosts the performance of SOTA VLT models (achieving improvements of up to 3.2% in SUC and 3.5% in PRE), opening a new chapter of training Vision-Language trackers with synthetic videos rather than manually annotated data
‘Because now, we can’: the impact of the Saudi Vision 2030 on power, opportunity and the advancement of Saudi women in the academic sector
No full textSharing our Screen - Does the online delivery of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion training provide a blueprint for asynchronous professional development training in healthcare?
No full textAsynchronous professional development training continues to gain traction in the healthcare sector, and yet debate continues about how it can best be delivered, and policies written to support its adoption. To address a gap for universally-accessible Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (ED&I) training in Northern Ireland, Queen's University Belfast (QUB), Ulster University (UU) and the Northern Ireland Medical Training Agency (NIMDTA) co-developed an award-winning ED&I training course for healthcare staff with an educational supervisory role. Iterative evaluation allowed for policy recommendations to be developed to support healthcare educators to develop asynchronous e-learning resources
Cases
No full textThis part of the book includes the hypothetical cases and the answers given by the experts of the various legal systems included in this volume's comparison. This is the core of the volume's ‘factual analysis'. The authors thus suppose that administrative functions and powers are exercised by public authority in a certain way and raise issues concerning the standards of administrative conduct and the mechanisms for controlling it and making public bodies accountable. Considered as a whole, the hypothetical cases concern three type of constraints on administrative rulemaking and planning: parliamentary oversight and judicial review; consultation; and general principles, such as legitimate expectations and transparency. As in the previous books of this series, the disaggregation of these responses is designed to facilitate the analytical process. Their common and distinctive traits will be examined in Part IV.</p
Protocol for an umbrella review of systematic reviews evaluating the efficacy of digital health solutions in supporting adult cancer survivorship care
No full textIntroductionThe growing number of people living with, through and beyond cancer poses a new challenge for sustainable survivorship care solutions. Digital health solutions which incorporate various information and communication technologies are reshaping healthcare; offering huge potential to facilitate health promotion, support healthcare efficiencies, improve access to healthcare and positively impact health outcomes. Digital health solutions include websites and mobile applications, health information technologies, telehealth solutions, wearable devices, AI-supported chatbots and other technologically assisted provision of health information, communication and services. The breadth and scope of digital health solutions necessitate a synthesis of evidence on their use in supportive care in cancer. This umbrella review will identify, synthesise, and compare systematic reviews which have evaluated the efficacy or effectiveness of digital solutions for adult cancer survivorship care with a particular focus on surveillance and management of physical effects, psychosocial effects, new cancer/ recurring cancers and supporting health promotion and disease prevention.Methods and analysisAn umbrella review of published systematic reviews will be undertaken to explore the types of digital health solutions used, their efficacy or effectiveness as a form of supportive care, and the barriers and enablers associated with their implementation. The umbrella review will be reported according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Overviews of Reviews (PRIOR) checklist. A search will be conducted across key databases. Records will be assessed independently by two review authors for eligibility against predefined criteria and will undergo two stage title, abstract and full text screening. All systematic reviews that meet the inclusion criteria will be assessed for quality using the AMSTAR 2 checklist with quality assessment and data extraction by two reviewers. The degree of publication overlap of primary studies across the included reviews will also be calculated and a mapping of the evidence will also be presented.Ethics and disseminationAs this research proposes using systematic reviews that are already published, ethical approval is not required. Results from this umbrella review will be published in a peer-reviewed journal where any significant deviations from the protocol will be justified