Economic evaluation of mental health effects of flooding using Bayesian networks

The appraisal of appropriate levels of investment for devising flooding mitigation and to support recovery interventions is a complex and challenging task. Evaluation must account for social, political, environmental and other conditions, such as flood state expectations and local priorities. The evaluation method should be able to quickly identify evolving investment needs as the incidence and magnitude of flood events continue to grow. Quantification is essential and must consider multiple direct and indirect effects on flood related outcomes. The method proposed is this study is a Bayesian network, which may be used ex-post for evaluation, but also ex-ante for future assessment, and near real-time for the reallocation of investment into interventions. The particular case we study is the effect of flood interventions upon mental health, which is a gap in current investment analyses. Natural events such as floods expose people to negative mental health disorders including anxiety, distress and post-traumatic stress disorder. Such outcomes can be mitigated or exacerbated not only by state funded interventions, but by individual and community skills and experience. Success is also dampened when vulnerable and previously exposed victims are affected. Current measures evaluate solely the effectiveness of interventions to reduce physical damage to people and assets. This paper contributes a design for a Bayesian network that exposes causal pathways and conditional probabilities between interventions and mental health outcomes as well as providing a tool that can readily indicate the level of investment needed in alternative interventions based on desired mental health outcomes

Liquid loading in wellbores and its effect on cleanup period and well productivity in tight gas sand reservoirs

Tight gas reservoirs normally have production problems due to very low matrix permeability and significant damage during well drilling, completion, stimulation and production. Therefore they might not flow gas to surface at optimum rates without advanced production improvement techniques. After well stimulation and fracturing operations, invaded liquids such as filtrate will flow from the reservoir into the wellbore, as gas is produced during well cleanup. In addition, there might be production of condensate with gas. The produced liquids when loaded and re-circulated downhole in wellbores, can significantly reduce the gas pro-duction rate and well productivity in tight gas formations.This paper presents assessments of tight gas reservoir productivity issues related to liquid loading in wellbores using numerical simulation of multiphase flow in deviated and horizontal wells. A field example of production logging in a horizontal well is used to verify reliability of the numerical simulation model outputs. Well production performance modelling is also performed to quantitatively evaluate water loading in a typical tight gas well, and test the water unloading techniques that can improve the well productivity. The results indicate the effect of downhole liquid loading on well productivity in tight gas reservoirs. It also shows how well cleanup is sped up with the improved well productivity when downhole circulating liquids are lifted using the proposed methods

A low cost and highly accurate technique for big data spatial-temporal interpolation

The high velocity, variety and volume of data generation by today's systems have necessitated Big Data (BD) analytic techniques. This has penetrated a wide range of industries; BD as a notion has various types and characteristics, and therefore a variety of analytic techniques would be required. The traditional analysis methods are typically unable to analyse spatial-temporal BD. Interpolation is required to approximate the values between the already existing data points, yet since there exist both location and time dimensions, only a multivariate interpolation would be appropriate. Nevertheless, existing software are unable to perform such complex interpolations. To overcome this challenge, this paper presents a layer by layer interpolation approach for spatial-temporal BD. Developing this layered structure provides the opportunity for working with much smaller linear system of equations. Consequently, this structure increases the accuracy and stability of numerical structure of the considered BD interpolation. To construct this layer by layer interpolation, we have used the good properties of Radial Basis Functions (RBFs). The proposed new approach is applied to numerical examples in spatial-temporal big data and the obtained results confirm the high accuracy and low computational cost. Finally, our approach is applied to explore one of the air pollution indices, i.e. daily PM2.5 concentration, based on different stations in the contiguous United States, and it is evaluated by leave-one-out cross validation

Simvastatin decreases hepatic ischaemia/reperfusion-induced liver and lung injury in rats

Liver failure is still a significant clinical problem after transplantation surgery, tissue resections (the Pringle manoeuvre) and haemorrhagic shock. The restoration of blood flow to an ischaemic region leads to tissue injury at a greater rate than the original ischaemic insult, an event termed "ischaemia-reperfusion injury" (I/R). Despite advances in surgical techniques, I/R still poses a problem of clinical importance. In this research, we studied the effect of simvastatin pretreatment on liver and lung injury induced by hepatic I/R. Rats were subjected to 30 min of ischaemia followed by 24 h of reperfusion. Simvastatin (10 mg/kg) was administered orally from three days before the operation. After the reperfusion time, serum ALT, AST, LDH and TNF a levels were studied and liver and lung tissues were stained with haematoxylin and eosin and TUNEL to detect apoptotic cells. Serum aminotransferase activity and LDH and TNFα levels were increased markedly by hepatic I/R, and these were suppressed significantly by simvastatin. The tissue injury index and the number of apoptotic cells via TUNEL staining in the liver and lungs were higher in the I/R group than in the I/R + simvastatin group. These results suggest that simvastatin ameliorates I/R-induced liver and lung tissue damage by inhibiting the level of inflammation and the apoptotic pathways. Simvastatin administration may therefore provide protection against the adverse effects of I/R injury in liver transplantation

Vulnerability considerations for power line communication's supervisory control and data acquisition

Due to the increasing importance of communication networking, the power line (PL) channel has been considered as a good candidate for the communication medium. Power line communications (PLC) term stands for the technologies for the data communication over the electrical power supply network. The PL channels were not designed to transmit high speed data; therefore, they exhibit hostile medium for communication signal transmission. There are many factors such as noises, attenuation, distance, etc. affecting the quality of the transmission over PL channels. This paper presents PL model in the first sections of the work. Then it covers the security assessment of the PL system in the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) context

Microscopic origin of Cooper pairing in the iron-based superconductor Ba₁₋ₓKₓFe₂As₂

Resolving the microscopic pairing mechanism and its experimental identification in unconventional superconductors is among the most vexing problems of contemporary condensed matter physics. We show that Raman spectroscopy provides an avenue towards this aim by probing the structure of the pairing interaction at play in an unconventional superconductor. As we study the spectra of the prototypical Fe-based superconductor Ba1−xKxFe2As2 for 0.22 ≤ x ≤ 0.70 in all symmetry channels, Raman spectroscopy allows us to distill the leading s-wave state. In addition, the spectra collected in the B1g symmetry channel reveal the existence of two collective modes which are indicative of the presence of two competing, yet sub-dominant, pairing tendencies of dx2−y2 symmetry type. A comprehensive functional Renormalization Group and random-phase approximation study on this compound confirms the presence of the two sub-leading channels, and consistently matches the experimental doping dependence of the related modes. The consistency between the experimental observations and the theoretical modeling suggests that spin fluctuations play a significant role in superconducting pairing

Presence of Caffeic Acid in Flaxseed Lignan Macromolecule

Phenolic compounds were extracted from defatted flaxseeds using ethanol-dioxane (1:1, v/v). The crude extract obtained was purified using Amberlite XAD-16 column chromatography with water and methanol as mobile phases. RP-HPLC and SE-HPLC showed a lignan macromolecule (LM) as a dominant phenolic compound in the purified extract. After the alkaline hydrolysis of LM caffeic acid glucoside (CaAG) was isolated using a semi-preparative HPLC and its structure was confirmed by LC-ESI-MS. In LM of the investigated flaxseed, one molecule of caffeic acid corresponded with five molecules of p-coumaric acid and two molecules of ferulic acid. The presence of caffeic acid in the lignan molecule might be very beneficial due to its high antioxidant activity

Metformin inhibits polyphosphate-induced hyper-permeability and inflammation

Circulating inflammatory factor inorganic polyphosphate (polyP) released from activated platelets could enhance factor XII and bradykinin resulted in increased capillary leakage and vascular permeability. PolyP induce inflammatory responses through mTOR pathway in endothelial cells, which is being reported in several diseases including atherosclerosis, thrombosis, sepsis, and cancer. Systems and molecular biology approaches were used to explore the regulatory role of the AMPK activator, metformin, on polyP-induced hyper-permeability in different organs in three different models of polyP-induced hyper-permeability including local, systemic shortand systemic long-term approaches in murine models. Our results showed that polyP disrupts endothelial barrier integrity in skin, liver, kidney, brain, heart, and lung in all three study models and metformin abrogates the disruptive effect of polyP. We also showed that activation of AMPK signaling pathway, regulation of oxidant/ anti-oxidant balance, as well as decrease in inflammatory cell infiltration constitute a set of molecular mechanisms through which metformin elicits it's protective responses against polyP-induced hyper-permeability. These results support the clinical values of AMPK activators including the FDA-approved metformin in attenuating vascular damage in polyP-associated inflammatory diseases.Peer reviewe