The Limits of Liability in Promoting Safe Geologic Sequestration of CO2

Deployment of new technologies is vital to climate change policy, but it invariably poses difficult tradeoffs. Carbon capture and storage (“CCS”), which involves the capture and permanent burial of CO2 emissions, exemplifies this problem. This article provides an overview of CCS in Part I, focusing on geologic sequestration, and analyzes the scientific work on the potential for releases of CO2 and brine from sequestrian reservoirs. Part II evaluates the comparative advantages of government regulation and common law liability. Part III examines the relative efficiencies of different doctrines of common law liability when applied to likely releases from sequestrian sites. The authors propose a hybrid legal framework in Part IV that combines a traditional regulatory regime with a novel two-tiered system of liability that is calibrated to objective site characteristics.The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Busines

Improving the Efficiency of Genomic Selection

We investigate two approaches to increase the efficiency of phenotypic prediction from genome-wide markers, which is a key step for genomic selection (GS) in plant and animal breeding. The first approach is feature selection based on Markov blankets, which provide a theoretically-sound framework for identifying non-informative markers. Fitting GS models using only the informative markers results in simpler models, which may allow cost savings from reduced genotyping. We show that this is accompanied by no loss, and possibly a small gain, in predictive power for four GS models: partial least squares (PLS), ridge regression, LASSO and elastic net. The second approach is the choice of kinship coefficients for genomic best linear unbiased prediction (GBLUP). We compare kinships based on different combinations of centring and scaling of marker genotypes, and a newly proposed kinship measure that adjusts for linkage disequilibrium (LD). We illustrate the use of both approaches and examine their performances using three real-world data sets from plant and animal genetics. We find that elastic net with feature selection and GBLUP using LD-adjusted kinships performed similarly well, and were the best-performing methods in our study.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figure

Bind-n-Seq: high-throughput analysis of in vitro protein-DNA interactions using massively parallel sequencing.

Transcription factor-DNA interactions are some of the most important processes in biology because they directly control hereditary information. The targets of most transcription factor are unknown. In this report, we introduce Bind-n-Seq, a new high-throughput method for analyzing protein-DNA interactions in vitro, with several advantages over current methods. The procedure has three steps (i) binding proteins to randomized oligonucleotide DNA targets, (ii) sequencing the bound oligonucleotide with massively parallel technology and (iii) finding motifs among the sequences. De novo binding motifs determined by this method for the DNA-binding domains of two well-characterized zinc-finger proteins were similar to those described previously. Furthermore, calculations of the relative affinity of the proteins for specific DNA sequences correlated significantly with previous studies (R(2 )= 0.9). These results present Bind-n-Seq as a highly rapid and parallel method for determining in vitro binding sites and relative affinities

Power to the people: end-user building of digital library collections

Naturally, digital library systems focus principally on the reader: th e consumer of the material that constitutes the library. In contrast, this paper describes an interface that makes it easy for people to build their own library collections. Collections may be built and served locally from the user's own web server, or (given appropriate permissions) remotely on a shared digital library host. End users can easily build new collections styled after existing ones from material on the Web or from their local files-or both, and collections can be updated and new ones brought on-line at any time. The interface, which is intended for non-professional end users, is modeled after widely used commercial software installation packages. Lest one quail at the prospect of end users building their own collections on a shared system, we also describe an interface for the administrative user who is responsible for maintaining a digital library installation

Fermion vacuum energies in brane world models

The fermion representations and boundary conditions in five dimensional anti de Sitter space are described in detail. In each case the one loop effective action is calculated for massless fermions. The possibility of topological or Wilson loop symmetry breaking is discussed.Comment: 6 pages, no figures, one correctio

Greenstone: open-source DL software

Greenstone is a comprehensive system for constructing and presenting collections of thousands or millions of documents, including text, images, audio, and video. Greenstone libraries contain many collections, individually organized, though they bear a strong family resemblance. Easily maintained, collections can be augmented and rebuilt automatically

Galaxies in Clusters: the Observational Characteristics of Bow-Shocks, Wakes and Tails

The dynamical signatures of the interaction between galaxies in clusters and the intracluster medium (ICM) can potentially yield significant information about the structure and dynamical history of clusters. To develop our understanding of this phenomenon we present results from numerical modelling of the galaxy/ICM interaction, as the galaxy moves through the cluster. The simulations have been performed for a broad range, of ICM temperatures (kT = 1,4 and 8 keV), representative of poor clusters or groups through to rich clusters. There are several dynamical features that can be identified in these simulations; for supersonic galaxy motion, a leading bow-shock is present, and also a weak gravitationally focussed wake or tail behind the galaxy (analogous to Bondi-Hoyle accretion). For galaxies with higher mass-replenishment rates and a denser interstellar medium (ISM), the dominant feature is a dense ram-pressure stripped tail. In line with other simulations, we find that the ICM/galaxy ISM interaction can result in complex time- dependent dynamics, with ram-pressure stripping occurring in an episodic manner. In order to facilitate this comparison between the observational consequences of dynamical studies and X-ray observations we have calculated synthetic X-ray flux and hardness maps from these simulations. These calculations predict that the ram-pressure stripped tail will usually be the most visible feature, though in nearby galaxies the bow-shock preceding the galaxy should also be apparent in deeper X-ray observations. We briefly discuss these results and compare with X-ray observations of galaxies where there is evidence of such interactions.Comment: 14 pages, 8 diagrams, MNRAS (in press