Carbon Capture and Storage Regulatory Test Toolkit - Summary Brochure

Large point sources of carbon dioxide are responsible for a significant proportion of the world's greenhouse gas emissions - with fossil fuel power stations and other large-scale industrial activities responsible for around half of the total. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is expected to make a major contribution to reducing these emissions. Few CCS projects currently exist in the world - and a lack of experience in regulatory agencies and commercial entities of how regulatory systems would apply to such projects increases risk - potentially leading to delays and increased costs for emerging CCS projects. This toolkit has been produced by Scottish Carbon Capture and Storage (SCCS) researchers on behalf of the Scottish Government and sponsored by the Global CCS Institute. It guides users through a regulatory test exercise, which provides a low-cost, low-risk approach to testing regional and national legislation and regulatory systems for CCS projects, and gaining the benefits in follow-up activities. The toolkit recommends use of a real or simulated CCS project as part of this exercise to assist government agencies and other stakeholders to work together to test and improve understanding of regulatory systems. It explains how a simulated or real CCS project can be taken through the regulatory process from inception to decommissioning - a test of the regulatory process at much lower cost, time and risk than would be incurred under a real project application.Large point sources of carbon dioxide are responsible for a significant proportion of the world's greenhouse gas emissions - with fossil fuel power stations and other large-scale industrial activities responsible for around half of the total. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is expected to make a major contribution to reducing these emissions. Few CCS projects currently exist in the world - and a lack of experience in regulatory agencies and commercial entities of how regulatory systems would apply to such projects increases risk - potentially leading to delays and increased costs for emerging CCS projects. This toolkit has been produced by Scottish Carbon Capture and Storage (SCCS) researchers on behalf of the Scottish Government and sponsored by the Global CCS Institute. It guides users through a regulatory test exercise, which provides a low-cost, low-risk approach to testing regional and national legislation and regulatory systems for CCS projects, and gaining the benefits in follow-up activities. The toolkit recommends use of a real or simulated CCS project as part of this exercise to assist government agencies and other stakeholders to work together to test and improve understanding of regulatory systems. It explains how a simulated or real CCS project can be taken through the regulatory process from inception to decommissioning - a test of the regulatory process at much lower cost, time and risk than would be incurred under a real project application

Multi-locus analysis of human infective Cryptosporidium species and subtypes using ten novel genetic loci

Background: Cryptosporidium is a protozoan parasite that causes diarrheal illness in a wide range of hosts including humans. Two species, C. parvum and C. hominis are of primary public health relevance. Genome sequences of these two species are available and show only 3-5% sequence divergence. We investigated this sequence variability, which could correspond either to sequence gaps in the published genome sequences or to the presence of species-specific genes. Comparative genomic tools were used to identify putative species-specific genes and a subset of these genes was tested by PCR in a collection of Cryptosporidium clinical isolates and reference strains. Results: The majority of the putative species-specific genes examined were in fact common to C. parvum and C. hominis. PCR product sequence analysis revealed interesting SNPs, the majority of which were species-specific. These genetic loci allowed us to construct a robust and multi-locus analysis. The Neighbour-Joining phylogenetic tree constructed clearly discriminated the previously described lineages of Cryptosporidium species and subtypes. Conclusions: Most of the genes identified as being species specific during bioinformatics in Cryptosporidium sp. are in fact present in multiple species and only appear species specific because of gaps in published genome sequences. Nevertheless SNPs may offer a promising approach to studying the taxonomy of closely related species of Cryptosporidia

The Epidemiology of Pediatric Autoimmune Hepatitis in Scotland:A National Cohort Study

OBJECTIVES: Autoimmune hepatitis (AIH) is a rare, but potentially severe, cause of liver disease in children. We aimed to summarize how children with AIH in Scotland presented, were investigated and managed in addition to producing novel epidemiological data and outcomes.METHODS: All prevalent pediatric patients with AIH cared for in pediatric services between January 2013 and September 2018 were included. Individual patient data were obtained from electronic patient records in the 3-main academic pediatric centers in Scotland covering the entire population.RESULTS: Thirty-eight patients were included (25 female) with median follow-up of 33 months (range, 2-145 mo) and 136 total patient years. The incidence between 2014 and 2017 was 0.49/100 000/y (95% confidence interval, 0.29-0.78) and point prevalence between 2013 and 2018 was 1.75/100 000 (95% confidence interval, 1.42-2.13). Thirty-five (92%) patients were autoantibody positive, most commonly anti-nuclear antibody (63%) and anti-smooth muscle antibody (42%). Thirty-seven (97%) patients had induction therapy with oral corticosteroids, 30 (79%) required maintenance treatment with azathioprine, and 23 (61%) received ursodeoxycholic acid. There were 1.4 disease flares per 10 patient years and 3 patients required liver transplantation with an overall 5-year survival rate without the need for transplantation of 95%.CONCLUSIONS: We calculated a novel incidence and prevalence rate for pediatric AIH in Scotland. Nearly all were invariably treated initially with corticosteroids with most placed-on azathioprine as maintenance therapy. Outcomes were generally favorable with low rates of disease flares and the need for transplantation being rare.</p

Introduction: Christian “Civilizing Missions” of the Past and Present

There is a growing demand from the media industry, including computer games, virtual reality and simulation, for increasing realism in real-time for their computer generated images. Despite considerable advances in processing power and graphics hardware, increasing scene complexity means that it is still not possible to achieve high fidelity computer graphics in a reasonable, let alone real, time on a single computer. Cost prediction is a technique which acquires knowledge of computational complexity within the rendering pipeline as the computation progresses and then uses this to best allocate the available resources to achieve the highest perceptual quality of an image in a time constrained system. In this paper we describe a method of acquiring computational cost complexity knowledge within a high fidelity graphics environment. This cost map may be used in combination with other perceptually derived maps to control a selective renderer in order to achieve the best perceptual quality results for a user specified frame-rate

Benefits management of cloud computing investments

This paper examines investments in cloud computing using the Benefits Management approach. The major contribution of the paper is to provide a unique insight into how organizations derive value from cloud computing investments. The motivation for writing this paper is to consider the business benefits generated from utilizing cloud computing in a range of organizations. Case studies are used to describe a number of organizations approaches to benefits exploitation using cloud computing. It was found that smaller organizations can generate rapid growth using strategies based on cloud computing. Larger organizations have used utility approaches to reduce the costs of IT infrastructur

An Upper Ontology for Benefits Management of Cloud Computing

Benefits Management provides an established approach for decision making and value extraction for IT/IS investments and, can be used to examine cloud computing investments. The motivation for developing an upper ontology for Benefits Management is that the current Benefits Management approaches do not provide a framework for capturing and representing semantic information. There is also a need to capture benefits for cloud computing developments to provide existing and future users of cloud computing with better investment information for decision making. This paper describes the development of an upper ontology to capture greater levels of knowledge from stakeholders and IS professionals in cloud computing procurement and implementation. Complex relationships are established between cloud computing enablers, enabling changes, business changes, benefits and investment objectives

The Epidemiology of Pediatric Autoimmune Hepatitis in Scotland:A National Cohort Study

OBJECTIVES: Autoimmune hepatitis (AIH) is a rare, but potentially severe, cause of liver disease in children. We aimed to summarize how children with AIH in Scotland presented, were investigated and managed in addition to producing novel epidemiological data and outcomes.METHODS: All prevalent pediatric patients with AIH cared for in pediatric services between January 2013 and September 2018 were included. Individual patient data were obtained from electronic patient records in the 3-main academic pediatric centers in Scotland covering the entire population.RESULTS: Thirty-eight patients were included (25 female) with median follow-up of 33 months (range, 2-145 mo) and 136 total patient years. The incidence between 2014 and 2017 was 0.49/100 000/y (95% confidence interval, 0.29-0.78) and point prevalence between 2013 and 2018 was 1.75/100 000 (95% confidence interval, 1.42-2.13). Thirty-five (92%) patients were autoantibody positive, most commonly anti-nuclear antibody (63%) and anti-smooth muscle antibody (42%). Thirty-seven (97%) patients had induction therapy with oral corticosteroids, 30 (79%) required maintenance treatment with azathioprine, and 23 (61%) received ursodeoxycholic acid. There were 1.4 disease flares per 10 patient years and 3 patients required liver transplantation with an overall 5-year survival rate without the need for transplantation of 95%.CONCLUSIONS: We calculated a novel incidence and prevalence rate for pediatric AIH in Scotland. Nearly all were invariably treated initially with corticosteroids with most placed-on azathioprine as maintenance therapy. Outcomes were generally favorable with low rates of disease flares and the need for transplantation being rare.</p