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Although urbanization is an engine of growth, many African cities are overly crowded with massive traffic congestion and high housing prices, pushing the poor away to unfavorable settlements or remote suburban areas and making them commute long. The paper sheds light on the relationship between land value and urban attributes in a rapidly growing African city, Antananarivo, Madagascar. It shows that the land value gradient is steep with an elasticity of −0.78 with respect to trip time to the city center. Thus, housing prices are overshooting. Better urban planning is needed through improving transport accessibility by minibus. Other urban infrastructure services, such as piped water and garbage collection, and urban amenities are also important to add to land values. Spatial heterogeneity is found across different locations in the city. While some areas require clean water and climate resilience, others need more city amenities, such as parks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: In the context of rural revitalization strategies, effectively managing rural waste is a critical task for achieving ecological environmental sustainability. The current state of garbage collection and transportation is examined in this paper, focusing on the rural waste management practices in Dongfeng County, Liaoyuan City, Jilin Province, through mathematical modeling. Methods: By analyzing the rural domestic waste collection network, the volume of waste generated at various points is fuzzified using the fuzzy mathematical theory. Results: The results of path optimization for waste collection and transportation were derived from a case study, demonstrating the feasibility and practicality of the rural domestic waste recycling network model. Dicussion: Additionally, sensitivity analysis was conducted to assess the impact of changes on the total cost. Potential solutions for rural waste recycling and treatment are offered in this paper, providing valuable insights for the development of a rural domestic waste recycling network in Jilin Province. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Solid-state drives (SSDs) are widely adopted in mobile devices, desktop PCs, and data centers since they offer higher throughput, lower latency, and lower power consumption to modern computing systems and applications compared with hard disk drives (HDDs). However, the performance of the SSDs can be degraded depending on the I/O access pattern due to the unique characteristics of SSDs. For example, random I/O operation degrades the SSD performance since it reduces the spatial locality and induces garbage collection (GC) overhead. In this paper, we present an address reshaping scheme in a virtual file system (VFS) called sVFS for improving performance and easy deployment. To do this, it first sequentializes a random access pattern in the VFS layer which is an abstract layer on top of a more concrete file system. Thus, our scheme is independent and easily deployed on any concrete file systems, block layer configuration (e.g., RAID), and devices. Second, we adopt a mapping table for managing sequentialized addresses, which guarantees correct read operations. Third, we support transaction processing for updating the mapping table to avoid sacrificing the consistency. We implement our scheme at the VFS layer in Linux kernel 5.15.34. The evaluation results show that our scheme improve the random write throughput by up to 27%, 36%, 34%, and 2.35× using the microbenchmark and 25%, 22%, 20%, and 3.51× using the macrobenchmark compared with the existing scheme in the case of EXT4, F2FS, XFS, and BTRFS, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Tourism is a critical component of the economic framework in Thailand and numerous other countries worldwide, acting as a significant revenue generator. In the year 2022, the tourism industry made a significant contribution to Thailand's Gross Domestic Product, representing 22.92 percent of the total. However, the emphasis on urban development and management in order to boost visitor numbers can worsen urban metabolism, leading to an escalation in resource. The urban administration needs to know how much waste must be managed to plan for effective environmental and public health management. The focus of this study is on the construction of an artificial neural network forecasting model that takes into account socioeconomic and demographic variables to anticipate the management of municipal solid waste in a city known for tourism. METHODS: Models were generated by synthesizing and integrating municipal solid waste collection quantities with 17 inputs of socioeconomic, demographic, event occurrences, and tourism-specific metrics variables from 2015-2021 in Chiang Mai municipality. Deep learning techniques were used to create the models. Socioeconomic characteristics were derived using nosecount data at the provincial and municipal levels. Data preprocessing involved the implementation of knowledge discovery in database strategy to ensure the creation of datasets with sufficient numbers and quality for modeling. This issue involved calculating the correlation coefficient between 17 inputs and the quantities of municipal solid waste collected. RapidMiner® computer software was used to construct a model incorporating frameworks using artificial neural network techniques. To ensure robustness and prevent overfitting, the dataset was divided into training and validation sets. The model was trained using backpropagation methods, and the evaluation of the model's performance was based on the correlation between the observed and predicted values of the mean municipal solid waste collection rate. FINDINGS: The waste prediction model achieved optimal performance by incorporating eight input variables across two hidden layers, one consisting of ten nodes and the other of five nodes. Across eight trials, this arrangement produced the lowest correlation coefficient (0.67), mean absolute error (320.779 +/- 22.080), and root mean square error (16.5). On the other hand, the chosen model used 17 input variables split across two hidden layers, each with 8 or 4 nodes. The model yielded a correlation coefficient of 0.69, a mean absolute error of 461.953 +/- 706.680, and a root mean square error of 21.9. The current daily amount of municipal solid waste collected is 340 metric tonnes, while the projection model anticipates an increase to 348 metric tonnes per day by 2023, with a margin of error of 2 percent. The model further predicts a daily garbage collection of 361 metric tons through 2030. CONCLUSION: Future waste management strategies may be planned, and various environmental impacts in tourism cities can be analyzed using the forecasting process and framework for the municipal solid waste collection rate described in this research. These characteristics are harnessed by the model to gain a thorough insight into waste dynamics in metropolitan regions with high tourist activity, ultimately facilitating the adoption of more sustainable urban planning and management approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to extend the lifespan of SSDs, it is essential to achieve wear leveling that evenly distributes the accumulated erase counts of NAND blocks, thereby delaying the occurrence of bad blocks as much as possible. This paper proposes the Greedy-MP policy, integrating static and dynamic wear leveling. When a specific block exhibits excessive erasures surpassing a defined threshold, Greedy-MP initiates the migration of cold data, expected to undergo infrequent modifications, to that block. Additionally, migrated blocks are excluded as candidates for garbage collection until their erase counts reach a similar level to others, preventing premature transition into bad blocks. Performance evaluations demonstrate that Greedy-MP achieves the longest lifespan across all test scenarios. Compared to policies solely utilizing static wear leveling like PWL, it extends the lifespan by up to 1.72 times. Moreover, when integrated with dynamic wear leveling policies such as CB alongside static wear leveling like PWL, it extends the lifespan by up to 1.99 times. Importantly, these extensions are achieved without sacrificing performance. By preserving garbage collection efficiency, Greedy-MP delivers the shortest average response time for I/O requests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Healthcare workers face a high risk of blood-borne infections due to needlestick injuries, especially in developing countries like Pakistan.This study aims to evaluate the prevalence of needlestick injuries, reporting practices, and post-exposure prophylaxis measures among healthcare personnel in tertiary care hospitals in Punjab.A cross-sectional study was conducted from May to July 2019. Data were collected from healthcare personnel working in teaching hospitals across six randomly selected cities of Punjab. Data were collected from 600 healthcare personnel using a pretested, self-administered questionnaire, employing stratified random sampling to ensure representative sampling. Descriptive statistics were applied, and differences in needlestick injuries across demographic segments were assessed using the Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis H tests.Among the 600 respondents, 533 returned the complete questionnaire, yielding a response rate of 88.8%. The majority of respondents were female (n = 341, 64.2%). The mean years of service was 5.58 (±5.78), with most participants falling in the 0.5–5 years category (n = 338, 66.4%). The prevalence of self-reported needlestick injuries in the last six months was 35.25%. Most injuries occurred during sampling (n = 95, 35.85%), followed by recapping (n = 63, 23.77%). Reporting of needlestick injuries to the respective department was poor, with only 82 (21.87%) injuries reported. The frequency of needlestick injuries differed significantly across profession, working department, and education categories (p < 0.05). Sanitary staff were more likely to sustain needlestick injuries during garbage collection and waste handling. Post-exposure screening for blood-borne infections was received by 79 (42.93%) individuals, and post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) was administered to 67 (36.41%).The high prevalence of needlestick injuries among healthcare personnel occurred primarily during sampling and recapping. Reporting of NSIs was inadequate, and post-exposure testing and prophylaxis practices were substandard. Enhanced policies and protocols are necessary for effective NSI surveillance and the administration of pre- and post-exposure prophylaxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this research, an analysis of the socio-environmental vulnerability in the urban area of the border municipality of Tijuana, Baja California (BC), in Mexico is carried out with data from the year 2020. Currently, this municipality is the most populated in the country, housing a population of just over 1.9 million inhabitants, characterized by being a city in constant urban growth due to its geographical location and various social, cross-border and productive dynamics directed by industrial development. However, Tijuana presents territorial problems related to lack of urban planning, overpopulation, urban marginalization, topographic conditions, urban waste management, air quality and lack of infrastructure and basic services. The proposed methodology develops a socio-environmental vulnerability index (SEVI), based on the evaluation of critical or extreme demographic and urban aspects, including social, economic, environmental and physical variables of the territory with the support of the Geographic Information System (GIS). This index is composed of a total of 19 indicators related to education, health, employment, housing conditions, infrastructure, population settlement, industrial concentration and some factors regarding environmental quality, especially focused on the disposal of urban solid waste (USW) in clandestine sites, garbage collection service coverage and flood risk. This analysis allowed us to determine the groups most vulnerable to socio-environmental risks in 692 Basic Geostatistical Areas (AGEB, the acronym in Spanish) of nine city delegations. The results of the research highlight that 14.78% of the population is between a situation of high and very high socio-environmental vulnerability, representing just over 284,000 inhabitants. It is concluded that the use of GIS in spatial planning allows us to identify risk areas and thereby promote more sustainable measures to ensure the well-being of the population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This article proposes EPO‐R, which is an efficient garbage collection scheme designed for multi‐version concurrency control (MVCC) protocols. MVCC generates a version for each update operation, and it can exhaust physical memory for dynamically changing environments such as IoT payments. Eager pruning of obsolete versions (EPO) is a novel garbage collection technique for long‐term transactions. We found room for improvement in EPO, which triggers reclamation invocation. EPO is triggered for each write operation, and it wastes CPU resources. The proposed method EPO‐R is triggered on a read operation to address this issue. The result of experiments with 64 CPU cores and workloads with the combination of short‐term and long‐term transactions demonstrated that EPO‐R exhibited 6.3 times higher throughput than that of EPO. The reason for this can be explained by analyzing the number of unreclaimable versions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the amplified vector-control measures, sporadic-epidemic outbreaks of dengue incidence occurred in Delhi, intermittently. This study aimed to identify the major individual, household, and community level predictors of dengue cases in the hot-spots of Delhi. Primary survey data was collected from the selected sample of 347 households, at the South- West district of Delhi. This survey has interviewed the head of the household to collect the information of dengue incidences within last one year and household information related to socio-economic, demographic, environmental factors, such as housing pattern, density, water storage containers, drainage and garbage collection site and method, mosquito protection measures and awareness. Among 347 households, 54 households had reported dengue cases, and 69 individuals had reported dengue cases in last one year. Garbage and water collection site and methods, drainage and household type, household monthly income, indoor bamboo plants, construction site (within 500 m), presence of tertiary care hospital, were the significant predictors of dengue incidences in Delhi. In conclusion, strategic control measures and intense social interventions such as household and community awareness, promotion of healthy practices should be promoted to control the dengue incidences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the significant increase in plastic production globally, with Bangladesh facing a severe environmental crisis due to plastic pollution in its maritime ecosystems. The country's rich marine biodiversity is threatened by the widespread disposal of plastic waste, impacting marine life and livelihoods. Despite efforts to ban plastic bags and implement recycling measures, the lack of waste management infrastructure and affordable alternatives hinders progress in addressing the issue. International collaboration and sustainable practices are essential to mitigate the detrimental effects of plastic pollution on the environment and human health. [Extracted from the article]

In metropolitan cities, it is very complicated to govern the optimum routes for garbage collection vehicles due to high waste production and very dense population. Furthermore, wrongly designed routes are the source of wasting time, fuel and other resources in the collection of municipal trash procedure. The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) published between 2011 and 2023 was systematically analysed. The majority of the surveyed research compute the waste collecting problems using metaheuristic approaches. This manuscript serves two purposes: first, categorising the VRP and its variants in the field of waste collection; second, examining the role played by most of the metaheuristics in the solution of the VRP problems for a waste collection. Three case study of Asia continent has been analysed and the results show that the metaheuristic algorithms have the capability in providing good results for large-scale data. Lastly, some promising paths ranging from highlighting research gap to future scope are drawn to encourage researchers to conduct their research work in the field of waste management route problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An unorganized solid waste management (SWM) disposal system stresses ecosystems, messes up different natural cycles, and is bad for human health. In developing nations like Chhattisgarh, managing solid waste is seen as a big concern by civil authorities everywhere. Several elements, including social, cultural, economic, political, environmental, physical, and institutional ones, influence the proper management of solid waste. The primary objective of this research is to investigate the key elements that influence the management of solid waste among rural areas of Chhattisgarh as well as to explore their perception toward SWM in Chhattisgarh. Additionally, a measurement model was used to analyze the data, which was gathered from 365 respondents who were polled from every home in Chhattisgarh's rural regions using a basic random sample technique. A quantitative research approach has been used to evaluate the variables influencing successful solid waste management and a confirmatory factor analysis was used to evaluate the reliability as well as validity of the scale of measurement for each construct. The outcome indicated that socioeconomic (p < 0.000), cultural (p < 0.021), physical and technical (p > 0.096), institutional (p < 0.012), and environmental factors (p < 0.017) have a significant influence on the management of solid waste in rural areas of Chhattisgarh. Future studies may take into account a wide range of additional characteristics linked to domestic logistical capabilities, such as garbage collection, task completion time, utilization of cold structures, and product freshness notifications, among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the amount of garbage on water surface ever increasing, traditional cleaning methods are no longer able to meet the requirements for safety, efficiency, as well as intelligence in applications. Hence, water surface garbage cleaning robots have emerged and become the focus of development in this field. After more than 20 years of development, it has entered the stage of practical application from research with various structure types designed and the realization of fully autonomous operations from garbage detection to collection. A large amount of literature has been accumulated, but there is still no comprehensive review. Therefore, this paper aims to provide an extensive review of development of water surface garbage cleaning robots in literature. The structures of the water surface garbage cleaning robots are classified with the characteristics of each type summarized. The typical framework of an autonomous water surface garbage cleaning robot is analyzed, and its three key technologies of perception, decision-making, and control are highlighted and discussed. Finally, the paper explores the trends of development for technologies in water surface garbage cleaning robots, which are centered on the challenges presented by current applications, to provide a reference for further research and application of water surface garbage cleaning robots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complete Coverage Path Planning (CCPP) is a key technology for Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) that require complete coverage on the water surface, such as water sample collection, garbage collection, water field patrol, etc. When facing complex and irregular boundaries, the traditional CCPP-based boustrophedon method may encounter many problems and challenges, such as multiple repeated regions, multiple turns, and the easy occurrence of local optima. The traditional genetic algorithm also has some shortcomings. The fixed fitness function, mutation operator and crossover operator are not conducive to the evolution of the population and the production of better offspring. In order to solve the above problems, this paper proposes a CCPP method based on an improved genetic algorithm, including a stretched fitness function, an adaptive mutation operator, and a crossover operator. The algorithm combines the key operators in the fireworks algorithm. Then, the turning and obstacle avoidance during the operation of the Unmanned Surface Vehicle are optimized. Simulation and experiments show that the improved genetic algorithm has higher performance than the exact unit decomposition method and the traditional genetic algorithm, and has more advantages in reducing the coverage path length and repeating the coverage area. This proves that the proposed CCPP method has strong adaptability to the environment and has practical application value in improving the efficiency and quality of USV related operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Double unmanned surface vehicles (DUSVs) towing a floating rope are more effective at removing large floating garbage on the water's surface than a single USV. This paper proposes a comprehensive trajectory planner for DUSVs connected with a floating rope for cooperative water-surface garbage collection with dynamic collision avoidance, which takes into account the kinematic constraints and dynamic cooperation constraints of the DUSVs, which reflects the current collection capacity of DUSVs. The optimal travel sequence is determined by solving the TSP problem with an ant colony algorithm. The DUSVs approach the garbage targets based on the guidance of target key points selected by taking into account the dynamic cooperation constraints. An artificial potential field (APF) combined with a leader–follower strategy is adopted so that the each USV passes from different sides of the garbage to ensure garbage capturing. For dynamic obstacle avoidance, an improved APF (IAPF) combined with a leader–follower strategy is proposed, for which a velocity repulsion field is introduced to reduce travel distance. A fuzzy logic algorithm is adopted for adaptive adjustment of the desired velocities of the DUSVs to achieve better cooperation between the DUSVs. The simulation results verify the effectiveness of the algorithm of the proposed planner in that the generated trajectories for the DUSVs successfully realize cooperative garbage collection and dynamic obstacle avoidance while complying with the kinematic constraints and dynamic cooperation constraints of the DUSVs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Amazonia Investiga is the property of PRIMMATE and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study evaluated the environmental impact and overall benefits of incorporating humus composites in the anaerobic co-digestion of kitchen waste and residual sludge. The life cycle assessment method was used to quantitatively analyze the environmental impact of the entire anaerobic co-digestion treatment process of waste, including garbage collection, transportation, and final product utilization. Moreover, the comprehensive assessment of the environmental impact, energy-saving and emission-reduction abilities, and economic cost of using humus composites in the anaerobic co-digestion treatment process was conducted using a benefit analysis method. The results showed that the anaerobic co-digestion of kitchen waste and residual sludge significantly contributed to the mitigation of global warming potential (GWP), reaching −19.76 kgCO2-eq, but had the least impact on the mitigation of acidification potential (AP), reaching −0.10 kgSO2-eq. In addition, the addition of humus composites significantly increased the production of biogas. At a concentration of 5 g/L, the biogas yield of the anaerobic co-digestion process was 70.76 m3, which increased by 50.62% compared with the blank group. This amount of biogas replaces ~50.52 kg of standard coal, reducing CO2 emissions by 13.74 kg compared with burning the same amount of standard coal. Therefore, the anaerobic co-digestion treatment of kitchen waste and residual sludge brings considerable environmental benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tax avoidance and tax evasion remain critical challenges for central or local governments and municipalities. This non-compliance also represents an ethical issue since individuals who benefit from publicly provided services do not contribute to their financing as they are legally required. The study aimed to test whether the use of behavioural interventions would reduce the number of non-payers of the garbage collection fee in the city of Hlohovec, Slovakia. The experiment was carried out by distributing leaflets to households with permanent residence in Hlohovec. The subjects of the experiment were randomly divided into three groups. Households in the control group (number of households is 1,718) did not receive any leaflets, households in the first intervention group (number of households is 1,721) received a leaflet containing a social norm, and households in the second intervention group (number of households is 1,625) received a leaflet containing a deterrent message. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions were used to analyse the data. The results showed that using a social norm did not significantly increase the number of garbage collection fee payers. At the same time, leaflets with deterrent messages led to an increase in outstanding debt. These results suggest that people reacted unfavorably to the perceived threat (deterrent message), and the opposite effect occurred, i.e. this type of intervention led to an increase in the number of non-payers of garbage collection fee. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the implementation of garbage classification, perishable waste has become increasingly concentrated. This has led to a significant change in the VOC release characteristics at residential garbage collection points, posing a potential risk with unknown characteristics. This study investigated the release characteristics, odor pollution, and health risks of VOCs at garbage collection points under different classification effectiveness, seasons, garbage drop-off periods, and garbage collection point types. The results showed that the average concentration of VOCs released from the garbage sorting collection points (SPs) was 341.43 ± 261.16 μg/m3, and oxygenated compounds (e.g., ethyl acetate and acetone) were the main VOC components. The VOC concentration increased as the community classification effectiveness improved, and it was higher in summer (followed by spring, autumn, and winter). Moreover, the VOC concentrations were higher in the evenings than in the mornings and at centralized garbage collection points (CPs) than at SPs. Further, odor activity value (OAV) assessments indicated that acrolein, styrene, and ethyl acetate were the critical odorous components, with an average OAV of 0.87 ± 0.85, implying marginal odor pollution in some communities. Health risk assessments further revealed that trichloroethylene, benzene, and chlorotoluene were the critical health risk substances, with an average carcinogenic risk (CR) value of 10−6–10−4, and a non-carcinogenic risk (HI) value < 1. These results indicated that HIs were acceptable, but potential CRs existed in the communities. Therefore, VOC pollution prevention and control measures should be urgently strengthened at the garbage collection points in high pollution risk scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data-flow reversal is at the heart of source-transformation reverse algorithmic differentiation (reverse ST-AD), arguably the most efficient way to obtain gradients of numerical models. However, when the model implementation language uses garbage collection (GC), for instance, in Java or Python, the notion of address that is needed for data-flow reversal disappears. Moreover, GC is asynchronous and does not appear explicitly in the source. This article presents an extension to the model of reverse ST-AD suitable for a language with GC. The approach is validated on a Java implementation of a simple Navier-Stokes solver. Performance is compared with existing AD tools ADOL-C and Tapenade on an equivalent implementation in C and Fortran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Solid-state drives (SSD) are replacing hard disk drives (HDD) in the majority of computer systems today. Because SSDs outperform HDDs in terms of efficiency, SSDs are now more necessary to replace HDDs. However, due to uncertain data integrity, SSDs are not forensically sound in design. The data on SSD is continuously changing as a result of Wear Leveling, TRIM and Garbage Collection, which makes data integrity verification in digital forensics challenging. The use of hash algorithms to validate data integrity is crucial in establishing the legitimacy of evidence gathered from suspect systems. In order to shed light on this matter, an experiment was carried out to gather data from an SSD in both user active and user non-active state. The data was then analyzed using the different attributes of Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (SMART) to ascertain the data integrity and by proposing a scoring method "SSD DiScore (SSD Data Integrity Score)", which can aid in digital forensic investigation procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a growing number of studies on how prior beliefs distort citizens' interpretation of performance information for service providers, little is known about whether prior beliefs matter equally across different services and types of providers. In this study, we provide a wide replication and extension of the experimental design used in Baekgaard and Serritzlew (2016) with three types of providers (public, non‐profit, and for‐profit) across two services (nursing homes and refuse collection). Based on two large‐N nationally representative experiments (N = 3018 and N = 3020), we find that citizens' sector preference does indeed impact their interpretation of performance information, corresponding to the original study. However, public sector preference plays a substantially different role in the two services. Our findings strengthen the external validity of previous research and simultaneously identify theoretical boundaries to its application across various services and providers. This, we argue, underlines the importance of replicating and extending pivotal studies on performance information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rodents are notorious pests, known for transmitting major public health diseases and causing agricultural and economic losses. The lack of site-specific and national standardised rodent surveillance in several disadvantaged communities has rendered interventions targeted towards rodent control as often ineffective. Here, by using the example from a pilot case-study in the Bahamas, we present a unique experience wherein, through multidisciplinary and community engagement, we simultaneously developed a standardised national surveillance protocol, and performed two parallel but integrated activities: (1) eight days of theoretical and practical training of selected participants; and (2) a three-month post-training pilot rodent surveillance in the urban community of Over-the-Hill, Nassau, The Bahamas. To account for social and environmental conditions influencing rodent proliferation in the Bahamas, we engaged selected influential community members through a semi-structured interview and gathered additional site-specific information using a modified Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC) exterior and interior rodent evaluation form, along with other validated instruments such as tracking plates and snap trapping, to test and establish a standardised site-specific rodent surveillance protocol tailored for the Bahamas. Our engagement with community members highlighted poor disposal of animal and human food, irregular garbage collection, unapproved refuse storage, lack of accessible dumpsters, poor bulk waste management, ownership problems and structural deficiencies as major factors fuelling rodent proliferation in the study areas. Accordingly, results from our pilot survey using active rodent signs (that is, the presence of rodent runs, burrows, faecal material or gnawed material) as a proxy of rodent infestation in a generalized linear model confirmed that the variables earlier identified during the community engagement program as significantly correlated with rodent activities (and capturing) across the study areas. The successful implementation of the novel site-specific protocol by trained participants, along with the correlation of their findings with those recorded during the community engagement program, underscores its suitability and applicability in disadvantaged urban settings. This experience should serve as a reference for promoting a standardised protocol for monitoring rodent activities in many disadvantaged urban settings of the Global South, while also fostering a holistic understanding of rodent proliferation. Through this pilot case-study, we advocate for the feasibility of developing sustainable rodent control interventions that are acceptable to both local communities and public authorities, particularly through the involvement of a multidisciplinary team of professionals and community members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Environmental & Social Management Journal / Revista de Gestão Social e Ambiental is the property of Environmental & Social Management Journal and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The explosive growth of massive data makes shingled magnetic recording (SMR) disks a promising candidate for balancing capacity and cost. SMR disks are typically configured with a persistent buffer to reduce the read–modify–write (RMW) overhead introduced by non-sequential writes. Traditional SMR zones-based persistent buffers are subject to sequential-write constraints, and frequent cleanups cause disk performance degradation. Conventional magnetic recording (CMR) zones with in-place update capabilities enable less frequent cleanups and are gradually being used to construct persistent buffers in certain SMR disks. However, existing CMR zones-based persistent buffer designs fail to accurately capture hot blocks with long update periods and are limited by an inflexible data layout, resulting in inefficient cleanups. To address the above issues, we propose a strategy called Amphisbaena. First, a two-phase data block classification method is proposed to capture frequently updated blocks. Then, a locality-aware buffer space management scheme is developed to dynamically manage blocks with different update frequencies. Finally, a latency-sensitive garbage collection policy based on the above is designed to mitigate the impact of cleanup on user requests. Experimental results show that Amphisbaena reduces latency by an average of 29.9% and the number of RMWs by an average of 37% compared to current state-of-the-art strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Latin America and the Caribbean, it is reported that 52% of household waste is food waste. Redirecting this waste away from the landfills and into composting systems represent significant wins for the environment, through the reduction in greenhouse gases; the state, by reducing the cost of garbage collection; and homeowners, through the conversion of waste into an organic planting medium. Based on a survey of homeowners in Trinidad and Tobago, design specifications were developed for a composter, which was then fabricated and tested at a workshop at The University of West Indies. The results showed a 98% reduction in the volume of waste to compost and that the composter took 94 hours to produce stable compost. The chemical properties of the resulting compost were a bit higher than expected, but this was due to the small size of the composting chamber and the composition of the waste which was composted. This paper concludes that upscaling the composter to a commercial scale and testing it in a controlled community is necessary to determine both the financial and technological feasibility of the composter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beirut’s 2015 garbage crisis provoked protests against unaccountable elites. Consociationalists consider such crises an external “load” on the system. I argue that consociation can actually cause crises by enabling elite rent-seeking. Drawing on Jessop and Poulantzas, I show that the consociational elite cartel “condenses” class interests into the Lebanese state. Concord among elites and inclusion of Gulf capital enabled rent creation through privatized garbage collection in the 1990s. This concord among rent-seeking elites made the state “agile.” In 2015, a return to consociational “immobilism” prevented effective waste-management. State and political economy must therefore be part of any assessment of consociationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a lot of research on garbage collection vessels, but not many have utilized renewable energy. This research aims to utilize piezoelectricity as a power source for the conveyor of the garbage collection ship. When it rains, piezoelectricity will convert rainwater vibrations into electricity. This research uses an inner flat catamaran garbage collection vessel with a conveyor and a wing conveyor. The power source from piezoelectricity is planned to fulfil the power of the electric motor driving the conveyor. Piezoelectric experiments have been conducted with artificial raindrops with raindrop diameter variations of 8.5 mm, 10 mm, and 12 mm. The results have showed that the piezoelectricity required to support the electrical power of the conveyor is 520 pieces, with the average power generated is 55.69 watts per beat. In addition, the research has also produced a conceptual design of a garbage collection vessel with piezoelectricity on the ship's deck. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]