On the estimation of CO2 capillary entry pressure : Implications on geological CO2 storage

This work was partially funded by the Research Council of Norway through a CLIMIT project, ConocoPhillips and the Ekofisk co-venturers, including TOTAL, ENI, Statoil and Petoro. We thank the anonymous reviewers whose comments/suggestions helped to improve the written presentation of this manuscript.Peer reviewedPostprin

A Call to Arms: Revisiting Database Design

Good database design is crucial to obtain a sound, consistent database, and - in turn - good database design methodologies are the best way to achieve the right design. These methodologies are taught to most Computer Science undergraduates, as part of any Introduction to Database class. They can be considered part of the "canon", and indeed, the overall approach to database design has been unchanged for years. Moreover, none of the major database research assessments identify database design as a strategic research direction. Should we conclude that database design is a solved problem? Our thesis is that database design remains a critical unsolved problem. Hence, it should be the subject of more research. Our starting point is the observation that traditional database design is not used in practice - and if it were used it would result in designs that are not well adapted to current environments. In short, database design has failed to keep up with the times. In this paper, we put forth arguments to support our viewpoint, analyze the root causes of this situation and suggest some avenues of research.Comment: Removed spurious column break. Nothing else was change

Asymptotics of the solutions of the stochastic lattice wave equation

We consider the long time limit theorems for the solutions of a discrete wave equation with a weak stochastic forcing. The multiplicative noise conserves the energy and the momentum. We obtain a time-inhomogeneous Ornstein-Uhlenbeck equation for the limit wave function that holds both for square integrable and statistically homogeneous initial data. The limit is understood in the point-wise sense in the former case, and in the weak sense in the latter. On the other hand, the weak limit for square integrable initial data is deterministic

Perspectives on the environmental implications of sustainable hydro-power: comparing countries, problems and approaches

Perspectives on the Environmental Implications of Sustainable Hydropower gathers scientific papers from three of the worlds most important hydropower producers to discuss aspects of sustainable hydropower and the means by which it can be studied and achieved. The papers examine the application and use of new technologies and protocols for studying hydropower, adaptive management and the implications and use of long-term data sets for minimizing hydropower impacts on fish populations. The papers include a cross section of biological and hydrological experts. The implicit among country comparisons highlight a number of common hydropower themes, particularly the need to expand from single species studies to include broader consideration of the ecosystem, the importance of maintaining habitat, trait and species diversity and the need for consistently collected long-term data sets. Hydropower Sustainability Long-term studies Brazil Canada NorwaypublishedVersio

Arachnoid cysts do not contain cerebrospinal fluid: A comparative chemical analysis of arachnoid cyst fluid and cerebrospinal fluid in adults

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Arachnoid cyst (AC) fluid has not previously been compared with cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from the same patient. ACs are commonly referred to as containing "CSF-like fluid". The objective of this study was to characterize AC fluid by clinical chemistry and to compare AC fluid to CSF drawn from the same patient. Such comparative analysis can shed further light on the mechanisms for filling and sustaining of ACs.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Cyst fluid from 15 adult patients with unilateral temporal AC (9 female, 6 male, age 22-77y) was compared with CSF from the same patients by clinical chemical analysis.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>AC fluid and CSF had the same osmolarity. There were no significant differences in the concentrations of sodium, potassium, chloride, calcium, magnesium or glucose. We found significant elevated concentration of phosphate in AC fluid (0.39 versus 0.35 mmol/L in CSF; <it>p </it>= 0.02), and significantly reduced concentrations of total protein (0.30 versus 0.41 g/L; <it>p </it>= 0.004), of ferritin (7.8 versus 25.5 ug/L; <it>p </it>= 0.001) and of lactate dehydrogenase (17.9 versus 35.6 U/L; <it>p </it>= 0.002) in AC fluid relative to CSF.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>AC fluid is not identical to CSF. The differential composition of AC fluid relative to CSF supports secretion or active transport as the mechanism underlying cyst filling. Oncotic pressure gradients or slit-valves as mechanisms for generating fluid in temporal ACs are not supported by these results.</p

Pore scale modelling of Three-Phase Capillary Pressure Curves Directly in Uniformly-Wet Rock Images

Acknowledgments: The early stages of this research work were funded by the Research Council of Norway through the CLIMIT program, ConocoPhillips and the Ekofisk co-venturers, including TOTAL, ENI, Statoil and Petoro. Dr. Yingfang Zhou would like to acknowledge the support from State Key Laboratory of Oil and Gas Reservoir Geology and Exploitation (Southwest Petroleum University), PLN201602, to finalize this work. Professor Dimitrios G. Hatzignatiou acknowledges financial support received from the University of Houston to complete the present work.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

GoIFISH: a system for the quantification of single cell heterogeneity from IFISH images.

Molecular analysis has revealed extensive intra-tumor heterogeneity in human cancer samples, but cannot identify cell-to-cell variations within the tissue microenvironment. In contrast, in situ analysis can identify genetic aberrations in phenotypically defined cell subpopulations while preserving tissue-context specificity. GoIFISHGoIFISH is a widely applicable, user-friendly system tailored for the objective and semi-automated visualization, detection and quantification of genomic alterations and protein expression obtained from fluorescence in situ analysis. In a sample set of HER2-positive breast cancers GoIFISHGoIFISH is highly robust in visual analysis and its accuracy compares favorably to other leading image analysis methods. GoIFISHGoIFISH is freely available at www.sourceforge.net/projects/goifish/.This is the final published version. It is also available from Genome Biology at http://genomebiology.com/2014/15/8/442

Analysis of Transaction Management Performance

There is currently much interest in incorporating transactions into both operating systems and general purpose programming languages. This paper provides a detailed examination of the design and performance of the“¢ transaction manager of the Camelot system. Camelot is a transaction facility that provides a rich model of transactions intended to support a wide variety of general-purpose applications. The transaction manager's principal function is to execute the protocols that ensure atomicity. The conclusions of this study are: a simple optimization to two-phase commit reduces logging activity of distributed transactions; non-blocking commit is practical for some applications; multithreaded design improves throughput provided that log batching is used; multi-casting reduces the variance of distributed commit protocols in a LAN environment; and the performance of transaction mechanisms such as Camelot depend heavily upon kernel performance

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Masteroppgave i bedriftsledelse (MBA) - Universitetet i Nordland, 201

A comparison of ancient deltaic shoreline progradation with modern deltaic progradation rates: Unravelling the temporal structure of the shallow-marine Blackhawk Formation, Upper Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway, USA

Understanding how sedimentary rocks represent time is one of the significant challenges in sedimentology. Sedimentation rates retrieved from vertical sections are strongly timescale dependent, which means that we cannot use empirical rate data derived from vertical sections in modern environments to interpret the temporal structure of ancient sedimentary deposits. We use the Lower to Middle Campanian Blackhawk Formation deposits in eastern Utah and western Colorado as a natural laboratory to test a source-to-sink methodology circumventing this timescale dependence by relating modern progradation rates to the deltaic shoreline progradation of ancient siliciclastic rocks. Our objective is to quantify how much time is needed to account for the observed cumulative deltaic shoreline progradation recorded by the shallow-marine sandstone bodies of the Blackhawk Formation in terms of progradation rates derived from comparable modern deltaic systems. By making the simplifying assumption that the Blackhawk Formation rocks were deposited along a linear coastline that only grew by aggradation and progradation, it is possible to argue that the stratigraphic completeness of two-dimensional dip-oriented stratigraphic cross-sections through these deposits should be high. Furthermore, we hypothesise that delta progradation estimates capture a significant portion of the biostratigraphically and radiometrically constrained duration of the succession. By comparing the recorded progradation with modern progradation rates, we estimate that we need ca. 20% (median value, with minimum and maximum estimates of 2% and 300%) of the time available from biostratigraphic and radiometric dating to account for the progradation recorded by the sedimentary deposits. This indicates that long-term progradation rates averaged over the entire duration of the Blackhawk Formation were only a factor of five times slower than the modern progradation rates derived from observations over periods that are five to six orders of magnitude shorter. We conclude that a significant amount of time is represented by prograding deltaic shoreline deposits and that by considering the cumulative shoreline progradation, we could limit the effects of timescale dependence on the rate estimates used in our analysis