Impact of Stratigraphic Heterogeneity on Hydrocarbon Recovery in Carbonate Reservoirs: Effect of Fluid Properties and Development Strategy

Imperial Users onl

Ecological impacts of deforestation and forest degradation in the peat swamp forests of northwestern Borneo

Tropical peatlands have some of the highest carbon densities of any ecosystem and are under enormous development pressure. This dissertation aimed to provide better estimates of the scales and trends of ecological impacts from tropical peatland deforestation and degradation across more than 7,000 hectares of both intact and disturbed peatlands in northwestern Borneo. We combined direct field sampling and airborne Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) data to empirically quantify forest structures and aboveground live biomass across a largely intact tropical peat dome. The observed biomass density of 217.7 ± 28.3 Mg C hectare-1 was very high, exceeding many other tropical rainforests. The canopy trees were ~65m in height, comprising 81% of the aboveground biomass. Stem density was observed to increase across the 4m elevational gradient from the dome margin to interior with decreasing stem height, crown area and crown roughness. We also developed and implemented a multi-temporal, Landsat resolution change detection algorithm for identify disturbance events and assessing forest trends in aseasonal tropical peatlands. The final map product achieved more than 92% user’s and producer’s accuracy, revealing that after more than 25 years of management and disturbances, only 40% of the area was intact forest. Using a chronosequence approach, with a space for time substitution, we then examined the temporal dynamics of peatlands and their recovery from disturbance. We observed widespread arrested succession in previously logged peatlands consistent with hydrological limits on regeneration and degraded peat quality following canopy removal. We showed that clear-cutting, selective logging and drainage could lead to different modes of regeneration and found that statistics of the Enhanced Vegetation Index and LiDAR height metrics could serve as indicators of harvesting intensity, impacts, and regeneration stage. Long-term, continuous monitoring of the hydrology and ecology of peatland can provide key insights regarding best management practices, restoration, and conservation priorities for this unique and rapidly disappearing ecosystem

A Brief Report on LawGPT 1.0: A Virtual Legal Assistant Based on GPT-3

LawGPT 1.0 is a virtual legal assistant built on the state-of-the-art language model GPT-3, fine-tuned for the legal domain. The system is designed to provide legal assistance to users in a conversational manner, helping them with tasks such as answering legal questions, generating legal documents, and providing legal advice. In this paper, we provide a brief overview of LawGPT 1.0, its architecture, and its performance on a set of legal benchmark tasks. Please note that the detailed information about the model is protected by a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) and cannot be disclosed in this report

European Trade on the Far East and the Mercantile Relationship with Vietnam from the 16th to 19th Century

The 16th century witnessed a significant start for European maritime trade on the Far East, triggering by the pioneer Portuguese. Though being not a great market as compared with China, Japan, Indonesia in the Far East, Vietnam still attracted many European empires by an abundant quantity of merchandise as well as a strategic position on the international trade route. The Portuguese, Dutch, British and French respectively represented themselves in Vietnam, with somewhat different interests, paying much attempts to establish a stronghold for trade there. Nonetheless, their trade in Vietnam had become feeble since the end of 17th century. That was explained by several reasons

Design and fabrication of a moving robotic glove system

This paper presents the research, design, and manufacture of a robotic hand to control movement with a glove. The moving glove-controlled robotic hand is based on two main parts: the hand mechanism and the control circuit. The control glove unit includes an Arduino nRF24l01 microcontroller module and five flex sensors for five fingers. These sensors are used to collect data about the curvature of each finger. Then those data will be received by the Arduino microcontroller and sent by the nRF24l01 module. The hand's microcontroller will process that information and control five servo motors so that the five fingers of the robotic hand are moved. The result of this research is to produce a robotic hand that accurately simulates the curvature of a user's finger and mimics the motion of a glove well. Moreover, the robot hand can grip objects of different sizes (from 0.1 to 1 kg) and shapes, from which this robot helps users easily manipulate objects

The Hue Citadel Area in the Transition of Urban Composition During the Rise and Fall of the Nguyen Dynasty in the 19th Century

The history of the old Hue City intertwined closely with the fortunes of the Nguyen Dynasty. After the citadel area was chosen as the capital of a unified Vietnam from 1802 by Emperor Gia Long (the founder of the Nguyen Dynasty, 1802—1945), the appearance of Hue changed rapidly towards urbanization. In the first period from 1802 to 1884, urban composition was informed along the course of the Huong River by royal sites, of which the core was the Hue citadel – an admirable combination of geographical space and human talents, handicrafts works, and commercial space. That made Hue an interesting historical landscape albeit its narrow space for a broader urbanization. However, with incoherent policies on the economy, diplomacy as well as religious conflict, the Nguyen Dynasty was not able to avoid an invasion by the French Empire or to save itself from decline. Being home to a defeated native dynasty, Hue became powerless in both economy and administration under French colonization, in spite of the fact that modern industrial locations were partly encouraged to be built here from 1884. The present paper attempts to give a general view on the urban composition and urbanization of Hue based on the two political periods of the feudalistic period (1802—1884) and period of colonization (1884—1899)

On reduced Arakelov divisors of real quadratic fields

We generalize the concept of reduced Arakelov divisors and define $C$-reduced divisors for a given number $C \geq 1$. These $C$-reduced divisors have remarkable properties which are similar to the properties of reduced ones. In this paper, we describe an algorithm to test whether an Arakelov divisor of a real quadratic field $F$ is $C$-reduced in time polynomial in $\log|\Delta_F|$ with $\Delta_F$ the discriminant of $F$. Moreover, we give an example of a cubic field for which our algorithm does not work.Comment: 18 page