Groundwater, health and livelihoods in Africa

Groundwater is Africa’s most precious natural resource, providing reliable water supplies to at least a third of the continent’s population. Where it can be found, groundwater has many advantages over river water: it is naturally protected from contamination, able to provide water throughout dry seasons and droughts, and can often be found close to the point of need and therefore developed incrementally and at low cost

Groundwater resilience to climate change in Africa

In Africa, groundwater is the major source of drinking water and its use for irrigation is forecast to increase substantially to combat growing food insecurity. Climate change along with rapid population growth are likely to impact all water resources, but the response of groundwater will be slower than that of surface water providing a potential buffer to help support adaptation. Here an interdisciplinary team from the UK and Africa present the results of a DFID funded research project to provide the first quantitative assessment of continental groundwater resources for Africa and to examine how resilient they are to climate change

Sobczyk's simplicial calculus does not have a proper foundation

The pseudoscalars in Garret Sobczyk's paper \emph{Simplicial Calculus with Geometric Algebra} are not well defined. Therefore his calculus does not have a proper foundation

Entanglement, joint measurement, and state reduction

Entanglement is perhaps the most important new feature of the quantum world. It is expressed in quantum theory by the joint measurement formula. We prove the formula for self-adjoint observables from a plausible assumption, which for spacelike separated measurements is an expression of relativistic causality. State reduction is simply a way to express the JMF after one measurement has been made, and its result known.Comment: New material. Reformatted for journal submissio

H2O: An Autonomic, Resource-Aware Distributed Database System

This paper presents the design of an autonomic, resource-aware distributed database which enables data to be backed up and shared without complex manual administration. The database, H2O, is designed to make use of unused resources on workstation machines. Creating and maintaining highly-available, replicated database systems can be difficult for untrained users, and costly for IT departments. H2O reduces the need for manual administration by autonomically replicating data and load-balancing across machines in an enterprise. Provisioning hardware to run a database system can be unnecessarily costly as most organizations already possess large quantities of idle resources in workstation machines. H2O is designed to utilize this unused capacity by using resource availability information to place data and plan queries over workstation machines that are already being used for other tasks. This paper discusses the requirements for such a system and presents the design and implementation of H2O.Comment: Presented at SICSA PhD Conference 2010 (http://www.sicsaconf.org/

The Price Equation

I give concise derivations of Price's equation and the criteria for kin and group selection, prove that kin and group selection are equivalent, and discuss the controversies about altruism