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Exposure is defined as the ˵concentration or the amount of a particular agent that reaches a target organism, system, or (sub)population in a specific frequency for a defined duration″ (WHO/IPCS 2004). Exposure is normally characterized by means of exposure scenarios. The information from the exposure scenario is used for building up an exposure model. Exposure models can be understood as a translation of an exposure scenario to a mathematical algorithm to yield a qualitative and a quantitative estimate of exposure. Exposure can be understood as dose estimation, by the oral, dermal, or inhalation route. Exposure assessment is based on three basic elements: (i) the exposure scenario, (ii) the exposure model, and (iii) the exposure parameters (WHO/IPCS 2005). The basic characterization of the exposure is made by the exposure scenario (ES). The ES describes the circumstances of the exposure, covering all situations and corresponding information needed to perform an exposure estimate. The WHO (2004) defines the term exposure scenario as ˵a combination of facts, assumptions, and interferences that define a discrete situation where potential exposures may occur. These may include the source, the exposed population, the time frame of exposure, micoenvironment(s), and the activities. Scenarios are often created to aid exposure assessors in estimating exposure.″ This definition should be used as a basic concept for exposure estimation. Since 2006, an additional definition of exposure scenario must be taken into consideration regarding to the European Chemicals Regulation (REACH; European Commisson 2006). In the regulation, the exposure scenario is defined as ˵…the set of conditions that describe how the substance is manufactured or used during its life-cycle and how the manufacturer or importer controls, or recommends others to control, exposures of humans and the environment.″ This chapter is explaining the exposure scenario on the basis of the WHO definition, with hints of the particularities of the REACH regulation. Similarly to drug treatment, an exposure estimate can be understood as the dose of a contaminant or hazardous substance that can be taken in by an individual or a population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Risk cycles can lead to promotion of an existing risk or its reduction. Risk-reduction cycles are an effective means to minimize exposures of man and the environment to pollutants. Risk perception is an essential precondition for risk-reduction efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 6 of the book "Indonesia Beyond the Water's Edge: Managing an Archipelagic State" is presented. It focuses on the 2008 Shipping Law in Indonesia and the issue of reforming its port system. It notes the monopoly of Indonesian Port Corporations (IPCs) over commercial ports and its regulatory authority over private sector ports. It cites international trends in global sea freight that will impact the performance of Indonesian ports. It also cites maritime-related issues covered by the Shipping Law.

Any release of a chemical agent whether accidental or deliberate constitutes a chemical incident in the civil setting and a chemical attack in warfare. This chapter presents the overall management of civil chemical (HAZMAT) releases from the standpoint of the management of the incident. Early medical management of toxic trauma must be dynamically integrated with the management of the incident. An understanding of how chemical incidents are managed safely is an essential prerequisite for responding to emergency medical personnel. Application of measures for detection, protection and decontamination must therefore precede any medical intervention. The stages of management of chemical incidents by responding emergency services are described in relation to HAZMAT hot, warm and cold zones. Some countries now deploy trained and protected emergency medical and paramedical personnel into the contaminated warm zone where they can provide essential early life support and organise safe evacuation of casualties to hospital emergency departments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Planning as Satisfiability (SAT) is the best approach for optimally (wrt makespan) solving classical planning problems. SAT-based planners, like satplan, can thus return plans having minimal makespan guaranteed. However, the returned plan does not take into account plan quality issues introduced in the last two International Planning Competitions (IPCs): such issues include minimal-actions plans and plans with ˵soft″ goals, where a metric has to be optimized over actions/goals. Recently, an approach to address such issues has been presented, in the framework of planning as satisfiability with preferences: by modifying the heuristic of the underlying SAT solver, the related system (called satplan(P)) is guaranteed to return plans with minimal number of actions, or with maximal number of soft goals satisfied. But, besides such feature, it is well-known that introducing ordering in SAT heuristics can lead to significant degradation in performances. In this paper, we present a generate-and-test approach to tackle the problem of dealing with such optimization issues: without imposing any ordering, a (candidate optimal) plan is first generated, and then a constraint is added imposing that the new plan (if any) has to be ˵better″ than the last computed, i.e., the plan quality is increased at each iteration. We implemented this idea in satplan, and compared the resulting systems wrt satplan(P) and SGPlan on planning problems coming from IPCs. The analysis shows performance benefits for the new approach, in particular on planning problems with many preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Planning as Satisfiability (SAT) is the best approach for optimally solving classical planning problems. The SAT-based planner satplan has been the winner in the deterministic track for optimal planners in the 4th International Planning Competition (IPC-4) and the co-winner in the last 5th IPC (together with another SAT-based planner). Given a planning problem Π, satplan works by (i) generating a SAT formula Πn with a fixed "makespan" n, and (ii) checking Πn for satisfiability. The algorithm stops if Πn is satisfiable, and thus a plan has been found, otherwise n is increased. Despite its efficiency, and the optimality of the makespan, satplan has significant deficiency related in particular to "plan quality", e.g., the number of actions in the returned plan, and the possibility to express and reason on "soft" goals. In this paper, we present satplan ≺ , a system, modification of satplan, which makes a significant step towards the elimination of satplan's limitations. Given the optimal makespan, satplan ≺  returns plans with minimal number of actions and maximal number of satisfied "soft" goals, with respect to both cardinality and subset inclusions. We selected several benchmarks from different domains from all the IPCs: on these benchmarks we show that the plan quality returned by satplan ≺  is often significantly higher than the one returned by satplan. Quite surprisingly, this is often achieved without sacrificing efficiency while obtaining results that are competitive with the winning system of the "SimplePreferences" domain in the satisfying track of the last IPC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent advance of L4 microkernel technology enables building a secure embedded system with comparable performance to a traditional monolithic kernel-based system. According to the different system software architecture, the execution behavior of an application in microkernel environment differs greatly from that in traditional monolithic environment. Therefore, we need a performance profiler to improve performance of the application in microkernel environment. Currently, L4's profiling tools provides only program-level information such as the number of function calls, IPCs, context switches, etc. In this paper, we present L4oprof, a system-wide statistical profiler in L4 microkernel environment. L4oprof leverages the hardware performance counters of PMU on a CPU to enable profiling of a wide variety of hardware events such as clock cycles and cache and TLB misses. Our evaluation shows that L4oprof incurs 0~3% higher overhead than Linux OProfile. Moreover, the main cause of performance loss in L4Linux applications is shown compared with Linux applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Achieving the world's social and economic objectives is not possible without the use of significant quantities of chemicals, including industrial chemicals, pesticides, and pharmaceuticals. Comprehensive and cost-effective use of these substances while maintaining high health and safety standards is, in principle, possible and has been shown in a number of cases. However, it is still a long way until these standards are implemented worldwide following the principles of sustainable development with the goal of a better quality of life of all people. A number of international bodies and authorities promote the sound management of chemicals at national and international level, some of which are described in this chapter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Depending on the matrix (e.g., water, air) and the classification of a substance (e.g., contaminant), a multitude of limits and guidelines has been defined. The motivation for defining such a limit or guideline can be different. The most important reason is to protect the population from adverse health effects such as acute chronic toxicity or cancer. Another reason could be the protection of ecosystems which could be more vulnerable than humans. Moreover, aesthetic considerations, like the taste and/or odor of drinking water, can result in limitations of chemicals. In the following chapter, definitions of and examples for limits in water, air, or occupational environments are given. These lists are by no means exhaustible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Superscalar processors depend heavily on broadcast-based bypass networks to improve performance by exploiting more instruction level parallelism. However, increasing clock speeds and shrinking technology make broadcasting slower and difficult to implement, especially for wide issue and deeply pipelined processors. High latency bypass networks delay the execution of dependent instructions, which could result in significant performance loss. In this paper, we first perform a detailed analysis of the performance impact due to delays in the execution of dependent instructions caused by high latency bypass networks. We found that the performance impact due to delayed data-dependent instruction execution varies based on the data dependence present in a program and on the type of instructions constituting the program code. We also found that the performance impact varies significantly with the hardware configuration, and that with a high latency bypass network, the processor hardware critical for near-maximal performance reduces considerably. We then propose Single FU bypass networks to reduce the bypass network latency, where results from an FU are forwarded only to itself. The new bypass network design is based on the observations that an instruction΄s result is mostly required by just one other instruction and that the operands of many instructions come from a single other instruction. The new bypass network results in significant reduction in the data forwarding latency, while incurring only a small impact (about 2% for most of the SPEC2K benchmarks) on the instructions per cycle (IPC) count. However, reduced bypass latency can potentially increase the clock speed. Single FU bypass networks are also much more scalable than the broadcast-based bypass networks, for more wide and more deeply pipelined future microprocessors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]