An International Regulatory Framework for Risk Governance of Carbon Capture and Storage

This essay was prepared as part of a workshop on carbon capture and sequestration held by the International Risk Governance Council (IRGC) in Washington, DC, from March 15–16, 2007. The goal of the workshop was to bring together researchers, practitioners, and regulators from Europe, the United States, and Australia to outline the attributes that an effective regulatory regime for carbon capture and storage should possess. This essay focuses specifically on providing an overview of eight fundamental elements that we believe any effective international and national regulatory structure must address: 1) classification of carbon dioxide (CO2); 2) oversight of CO2 capture and storage; 3) site ownership and storage rights; 4) site operation and management; 5) long-term management and liability; 6) regulatory compliance and enforcement; 7) links to CO2 markets and trading mechanisms; and 8) risk communication and public acceptance. This essay is one of 12 collected for the workshop, and the recommendations herein are the views of the authors and do not reflect the views of their agencies, the IRGC, or specific workshop discussions.carbon sequestration, geologic storage, risk, regulation

Climate Change in Fiction: The Evolution and Challenges of Environmental Apocalyptic Literature

This thesis examines the several aspects and variations of environmental apocalyptic literature, and its potential ability to mobilize action against the imminent threat of global climate change. It delves into the intersection between climate research and fiction, as well as the rhetorical techniques used in works such as The Death of Grass by John Christopher, The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard, Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, and The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and covers the complementarity between climate fiction and works of non-fiction such as The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh. Finally, this thesis will assess the effectiveness of climate change fiction’s capacity to stress and address the immediacy of approaching climate calamities, as well as argue the importance of environmental apocalyptic literature in the effort to motivate readers towards action to prevent disasters caused by climate change

Studies on heterotrophic nitrification in a lake. [Translation from: Z.allg.Mikrobiol. 12 567-574, 1973. ]

In a lake the nitrogen compounds are liable to regular cycling in which nitrate is reduced and ammonium oxidised. As a nitrate maximum is regularly established in the upper part of the hypolimnion of a stratified summer lake, the authors have dealt in particular with the oxidising side of the nitrogen cycle. Described here are partial results of the nitrification in Plusssee. The Plusssee was chosen, since it is almost entirely without inflows, and, lying in a wooded basin, is well protected from the wind, and therefore stably stratified. In order to determine the number of autotrophic nitrificants the distribution of the Nitrosomonas and Nitrobacter spores in the lake were analysed. From the estimates on the determination of spore numbers of the heterotrophic nitrificants, 14 species in the pure culture were isolated and examined from morphological, biochemical and taxonomic viewpoints

Voter Registration at Tax Time: Evidence of Efficacy, Approaches to Implementation

Voting rights are the bedrock of democracy, but in many parts of the country, those rights are being eroded. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, while 25 states have enacted laws to improve access to the ballot, 18 states have enacted 30 laws making it harder to vote.Policies encouraging citizens to register to vote when they file their income tax returns could play a crucial part in the protection and expansion of ballot access nationally. Properly implemented, voter registration at tax time has the capacity to augment existing ballot access policies and counteract or even reverse voter suppression policies as they apply to registration.The following report presents the results of two rounds of field experiments conducted during the 2018 and 2020 election cycles, that tested the efficacy of a program offering voter registration to lower-income people filing their income taxes through nonprofit Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) sites. It then reviews possible routes to broad implementation of tax-time voter registration through voluntary channels, at the state level, and via federal action

Covariance Blocking and Whitening Method for Successive Relative Transfer Function Vector Estimation in Multi-Speaker Scenarios

This paper addresses the challenge of estimating the relative transfer function (RTF) vectors of multiple speakers in a noisy and reverberant environment. More specifically, we consider a scenario where two speakers activate successively. In this scenario, the RTF vector of the first speaker can be estimated in a straightforward way and the main challenge lies in estimating the RTF vector of the second speaker during segments where both speakers are simultaneously active. To estimate the RTF vector of the second speaker the so-called blind oblique projection (BOP) method determines the oblique projection operator that optimally blocks the second speaker. Instead of blocking the second speaker, in this paper we propose a covariance blocking and whitening (CBW) method, which first blocks the first speaker and applies whitening using the estimated noise covariance matrix and then estimates the RTF vector of the second speaker based on a singular value decomposition. When using the estimated RTF vectors of both speakers in a linearly constrained minimum variance beamformer, simulation results using real-world recordings for multiple speaker positions demonstrate that the proposed CBW method outperforms the conventional BOP and covariance whitening methods in terms of signal-to-interferer-and-noise ratio improvement.Comment: IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA), New Paltz, NY, USA, Oct 22-25, 202

LIFELONG EDUCATION AS A KEY FACTOR OF THE TRANSFORMATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE HUMAN CAPITAL’S POTENTIAL

The Actuality of the proposed research is caused by the facts that the rapid development of market relations in the Latvian economy and a high level of life in the “old countries” of the European Union affect the outlook of the majority of young people in Latvia. There is a tendency to reduce the motivation   for obtaining fundamental education by giving preference to acquisition of certain professional skills allowed to get ‘quick money”. The Object of the research is the transformation process of students’ beliefs, values, competences, experience during their lifelong learning. The Aim of the research in to analyze the influence of lifelong education   on the transformation of students’ beliefs, values, competences and experience. The Methods of the research are the following: 1.theoretical methods: the theoretical analysis of the scientific literature on the given problem; 2.quantitative methods: questionnaires; 3.the empirical analysis of the survey’s answers given by students of Latvian higher and vocational schools about the transformation of their beliefs, values, competences, experience during the process of lifelong learning. The Baltic International Academy (Riga, Latvia), The Latvian Agricultural University and the Jelgava College (Jelgava, Latvia) were used as the experimental Base of the research.