Electric power transmission and distribution systems : costs and their allocation

National Science Foundation Grant no. SIA73-07871 A0

Racing Academy: A preliminary evaluation of an online racing car simulation game for supporting students learning of engineering

This paper reports a study which evaluates an online racing car simulation game designed to support undergraduate students learning. A game based learning community was created to support undergraduate students learning of engineering at the University of Bath. One hundred and sixty one students (146 males and 15 females), aged between 18 and 22, average age 18, participated in the study. The results indicated that there was a significant increase in the students’ knowledge of engineering. They also felt that Racing Academy was motivating. They found it enjoyable, they felt competent playing the game and they put effort into the game. The analysis of the qualitative data is ongoing and will be focussed on investigating whether the students felt that Racing Academy helped their learning. Preliminary analysis suggests that the students did feel that Racing Academy supported their learning, but that further work is needed to fully embed Racing Academy into the course

Evaluating Response to High-Dose 13.3 mg/24 h Rivastigmine Patch in Patients with Severe Alzheimer's Disease

AIMS: To identify factors predicting improvement/stabilization on the Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study-Clinical Global Impression of Change (ADCS-CGIC) and investigate whether early treatment responses can predict long-term outcomes, during a trial of 13.3 mg/24 h versus 4.6 mg/24 h rivastigmine patch in patients with severe Alzheimer's disease (AD). METHODS: Logistic regression was used to relate Week 24 ADCS-CGIC score to potential baseline predictors. Additional analyses based on receiver-operating characteristic curves were performed using Week 8/16 ADCS-CGIC scores to predict response (13.3 mg/24 h patch) at Week 24. ADCS-CGIC score of (1) 1-3 = "improvement," (2) 1-4 = "improvement or no change". RESULTS: "Treatment" (13.3 mg/24 h patch) and increased age were significant predictors of "improvement" (P = 0.01 and P = 0.003, respectively), and "treatment" (P = 0.001), increased age (P = 0.002), and prior AD treatment (P = 0.03) for "improvement or no change". At Week 8 and 16, ADCS-CGIC scores of 4 and 5 were optimal thresholds in predicting "improvement," and "improvement or no change," respectively, at Week 24. CONCLUSIONS: A significant therapeutic effect of high-dose rivastigmine patch on ADCS-CGIC response was observed. The 13.3 mg/24 h patch was identified as a predictor of "improvement" or "improvement or no change". Patients with minimal worsening/improvement/no change after treatment initiation may be more likely to respond following long-term therapy

A Made-in-Alberta Failure: Unfunded Oil and Gas Closure Liability

Alberta policy on inactive and orphan oil and gas wells is a massive regulatory failure characterized by a historical lack of transparency, excessive regulatory discretion, and regulatory capture — three deficiencies long since identified and understood in the scholarship as undermining the effectiveness of environmental laws and policies. The current policy to deal with the problem, the 2020 Liability Management Framework, fails to address these structural problems and is consequently unlikely to substantially reduce inventories of orphan and inactive assets. It is equally unlikely to uphold the polluter-pays principle, which states that the entity that pollutes the environment is responsible for cleaning it up. It is time for an independent and transparent public inquiry to examine Alberta’s mishandling of the inactive and orphan well problem and to recommend a regime that will effectively meet this challenge. The inactive and orphan oil and gas well problem is an immense environmental and financial crisis that has been unsuccessfully dealt with by various policies over several decades. Approximately 230,000 drilled wells in the non-oil sands sector need to be abandoned and reclaimed, while 90,000 others that have been abandoned still await reclamation. The industry has continually delayed this closure work, resulting in a current liability estimate of at least $60 billion—and quite possibly double that amount. This liability is largely unfunded as industry has not set aside enough (or any) money to pay for it, while successive governments over many decades have failed to require industry to post security in any meaningful amounts. In the absence of significant and immediate legal and policy reforms, the coming years and decades will see the enormous environmental, social, and economic costs of this regulatory failure fall on the province’s taxpayers. The new Liability Management Framework’s components include mandatory spending to reduce the inactive inventory, assessment of licensee risk and capacity, and an orphan program. On their face, these are steps in the right direction. However, persisting high levels of secrecy, discretion, and nearly exclusive industry influence put the framework’s goals in doubt. Under the new framework, the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) will not disclose financial information on licensees or even the general state of the oil and gas industry. The new framework also still relies heavily on AER discretion to trigger closure obligations and fails to legislate timelines or quotas for closure work. Provisions for external scrutiny are minimal, impeding meaningful democratic oversight. Finally, the framework perpetuates historic industry influence in its design and implementation, which to date has resulted in a singular focus on minimizing industry’s costs at the expense of reducing environmental risks and protecting the public purse. Albertans have watched for decades as the problem of orphan and inactive assets has burgeoned into an environmental and financial crisis. They deserve a full accounting for the policies thathave led to this state of affairs and they need unimpeded access to all of the relevant facts and information so that they can better understand the policy choices facing them as residents and taxpayers in the province

Not Fit for Purpose: Oil Sands Mines and Alberta’s Mine Financial Security Program

Mining jurisdictions around the world are grappling with the significant environmental harms and costs associated with orphaned mines, i.e., mines whose owners are financially unable or otherwise unwilling to remediate and reclaim their mine sites. Numerous Canadian examples, including the notorious Giant Mine in the Northwest Territories, have significantly harmed water, soil, air, and wildlife, as well as human health, safety, and well-being. Such impacts can be particularly devastating for Indigenous peoples, who continue to rely on their traditional territories for cultural and other purposes. Canadian governments have gradually developed remediation and reclamation liability regimesto ensure that mine operators remediate and reclaim in a timely manner, or to at least ensure that governments have access to sufficient funds to carry out this closure work themselves. While they differ in various ways, the basic logic of such regimes is the same: by requiring mine owners toset aside some funds (e.g., in the form of cash or a letter of credit), they act as a kind of insurance that the public will not bear the costs of remediation and reclamation. Unfortunately, Alberta has refused to develop an effective regime to protect Albertans from bearing the costs of oil sands mine remediation and reclamation. The regime in place today will not ensure that there are sufficient funds set aside to complete this closure work in the eventthat operators fail to do so. In some respects, this is not news. It has been over two decadessince Alberta’s Auditor General first identified serious deficiencies in Alberta’s regime. Continued mismanagement has left Albertans with a significant risk that they will be responsible for cleaning up oil sands mines that threaten potentially irreversible environmental harm, including a growing inventory of nearly 1.6 trillion litres of toxic tailings. Alberta’s Mine Financial Security Program (MFSP), which applies to both coal and oil sands mines, is a misnomer. While it allows mine owners to post full security against their closure liabilities, it also allows them to rely on the estimated value of their assets (proved andprobable reserves) as collateral to avoid posting meaningful security. This is essentially themining equivalent of the province’s failed asset-to-liability approach in the conventional oil and gas sector. The results are staggering. While the coal mining sector has chosen to secure nearly the entirety of its estimated closure liabilities (approximately $700 million), oil sands companies have posted less than$1 billion in security against an official estimate of approximately $46 billion in total closure liabilities. This is less than two percent of official estimates, and less than one percent of internal estimates leaked to the media in 2018, which suggested that total closure liabilities could be as high as$130 billion. Finally, following two critical reports from the Auditor General (2015 and 2021), Alberta undertook a year-long review of the MFSP in 2022. The results of this review, however, are currently unknown. Significant reforms are necessary. The MFSP rests on a series of unrealistic assumptions about asset values, future oil markets and prices, and the development of effective but also low-cost remediation and reclamation technologies. The MFSP’s asset-to-liability approach, which allows oil sands companies to avoid posting security where their assets are deemed to be worth at least three times more than their liabilities (3:1), is also counter-intuitive and counter-productive: instead of collecting security when operators can afford it, operators would be required to post security when profitability is declining — precisely when operators are least able to afford it and resulting in further financial distress. Simply put, the MFSP will not provide insurance precisely when it is needed most. Correcting the MFSP asset calculations, requiring annual security deposits, and opening the process for estimating remediation and reclamation costs to independent scrutiny are three reforms that could be instituted in the short term and that would go some way towards ensuring the fulfillment of the polluter-pays principle upon which all such regimes are ultimately based. In the longer term, the MFSP exposes Albertans to far too much risk and uncertainty. Our primary recommendation is for Alberta to convene an independent and transparent expert panel,with opportunities for public participation, to recommend a regime that adequately incentives progressive remediation and reclamation and secures outstanding oil sands liabilities while not exacerbating the near-term risk of default. No matter the specific structure that is adopted for security, the assurance of independent, transparent assessment of the degree to which potential liabilities are fully funded, perhaps in the style of pension fund reporting, is essential

Comparative study on the rice bran stabilization processes: A review

Rice bran is an undervalued/underutilized by-product of rice milling, rich in protein, lipids, dietary fibers, vitamins, and minerals. It is an inexpensive source of high-quality protein, fiber and lipids to be incorporated into value-added food products. The issue with rice bran is its susceptibility to rancidity and therefore measures must be taken to stabilize the bran in order for it to be fully utilized. Due to this susceptibility to rancidity, historically the bran has either been disposed and wasted or used as low-grade animal feed. As the nutritional value of the bran has been recognized, along with its potential to add value to food products, research has been increasing in volume in order to determine the most effective methods for stabilizing the bran and extracting the valuable nutrients from it. It’s been reported that a free fatty acid content of over 5% is considered to render the bran unfit for human consumption (Tao, Rao & Liuzzo, 1993). Therefore, controlling this level of rancidity is imperative to being able to store and use rice bran over extended periods of time. In order to achieve control, stabilization procedures can be carried out on the rice bran to slow down the lipase activity within the bran and preserve the nutritional qualities that rice bran possesses. Stabilization of rice bran is particularly important for use over winter months in developing countries, where there may be no crops to harvest and therefore a supply of non- rancid rice bran could be extremely beneficial. This length of storage for stabilized rice bran could be up to a period of 6 months, where it can become important for value-added product development (Bagchi, Adak & Chattopadhyay, 2014). The present review will provide an overview of the traditional and innovation rice bran stabilization techniques, those have been a common interest in the research community, and the suitability of the process in terms of the energy consumption

Emergence of Cooperation and Evolutionary Stability in Finite Populations

To explain the evolution of cooperation by natural selection has been a major goal of biologists since Darwin. Cooperators help others at a cost to themselves, while defectors receive the benefits of altruism without providing any help in return. The standard game dynamical formulation is the 'Prisoner's Dilemma', in which two players have a choice between cooperation and defection. In the repeated game, cooperators using direct reciprocity cannot be exploited by defectors, but it is unclear how such cooperators can arise in the first place. In general, defectors are stable against invasion by cooperators. This understanding is based on traditional concepts of evolutionary stability and dynamics in infinite populations. Here we study evolutionary game dynamics in finite populations. We show that a single cooperator using a strategy like 'tit-for-tat' can invade a population of defectors with a probability that corresponds to a net selective advantage. We specify the conditions required for natural selection to favour the emergence of cooperation and define evolutionary stability in finite populations.Organismic and Evolutionary BiologyEconomicsMathematic