Environmental Impact Assessment from the Emission of Combined Natural Gas Cycle Power Plant

 This paper analysed the potential environmental impact of the natural gas-fired generating station in the surrounding area. The primary objective of this Study includes determination of the present environmental condition, study of the project related activities and assessment of the potential environmental effects due to these specific activities. The major environmental disciplines studied include ground and surface water hydrology, climatic condition, quality of air, noise, terrestrial and aquatic ecology. The power plant produce electricity using natural gas as fuel and natural gas does not contain any sulphur contents. The main pollutants are nitrous oxide (NO2), particulate matter (PM), CO from exhaust gas coming out from the turbine through stack and their values are well below National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). Noise and Vibration in the study area is assed to be minor due plant operation and does not impact on local faunal species. Heavy metal concentrations in the groundwater found below the acceptable limit and suitable for using domestic and irrigation purpose. The analysis revealed that surface water quality is suitable for aquatic flora and fauna. Study also indicates that power plant has no negative impact on climatic condition, air quality and aquatic eco system

Bandlimited Spatial Field Sampling with Mobile Sensors in the Absence of Location Information

Sampling of physical fields with mobile sensor is an emerging area. In this context, this work introduces and proposes solutions to a fundamental question: can a spatial field be estimated from samples taken at unknown sampling locations? Unknown sampling location, sample quantization, unknown bandwidth of the field, and presence of measurement-noise present difficulties in the process of field estimation. In this work, except for quantization, the other three issues will be tackled together in a mobile-sampling framework. Spatially bandlimited fields are considered. It is assumed that measurement-noise affected field samples are collected on spatial locations obtained from an unknown renewal process. That is, the samples are obtained on locations obtained from a renewal process, but the sampling locations and the renewal process distribution are unknown. In this unknown sampling location setup, it is shown that the mean-squared error in field estimation decreases as $O(1/n)$ where $n$ is the average number of samples collected by the mobile sensor. The average number of samples collected is determined by the inter-sample spacing distribution in the renewal process. An algorithm to ascertain spatial field's bandwidth is detailed, which works with high probability as the average number of samples $n$ increases. This algorithm works in the same setup, i.e., in the presence of measurement-noise and unknown sampling locations.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Trans on Signal Processin

Whose Click Fraud Data Do You Trust? Effect Of Click Fraud On Advertiser’s Trust And Sponsored Search Advertising Decisions

Online sponsored search has emerged as a dominant business model for majority of search engines and as a popular advertising mechanism for online retailers. However, sponsored search advertising is being negatively impacted by click fraud which involves the intentional clicking on sponsored links with the purpose of gaining undue monetary returns for the search engine or harming a particular advertiser by depleting its advertising budget. While search engines tend to compensate advertisers to an extent for click frauds, it still leaves an element of uncertainty in the minds of advertisers whether search engine is being faithful in reporting the click fraud numbers. Armed with additional data available from third party click fraud audit companies, advertisers may have more reasons to suspect click fraud numbers reported by search engines if there is a discrepancy between the numbers reported by two sources (search engines and third party click fraud audit companies). While the phenomenon of click fraud has been acknowledged to exist, its effect on sponsored search advertisers’ trust and their decision to advertise with a particular search engine has not been given sufficient attention in the literature. As an initial step, in this research in progress study, we develop a theoretical model to examine the effect of click fraud on advertiser’s trust in search engine and its subsequent impact on advertiser’s decision to adjust advertising spend for different search engines. In this paper, we also outline the proposed experimental design to validate the theoretical model subsequently in future. Broadly, the research suggests that sponsored search advertisers are likely to adjust their advertising spend based on level of trust they have in search engine, click fraud numbers discrepancy, and return on investment obtained from advertising on that particular search engine

Quality Uncertainty And Adverse Selection In Online Sponsored-Search Markets

Sponsored-search mechanisms, where advertisers bid for better placement in the listing of search results on Yahoo! and Google, have emerged as the dominant revenue model for online search engines. Interestingly, Yahoo! and Google employ different mechanisms to determine the placement of bidders’ advertisements. This provides an unprecedented opportunity to extend the research relating quality and advertising in traditional markets to the online setting, and also examine whether intervention by the search intermediary impacts the outcomes observed in these markets. Using data from online sponsored-search auctions, we examine the relationship between advertisers’ quality and their advertising-intensity, indicated by their willingness to pay for search listings. We assess how this relationship differs across search, experience, and credence products characterized by differing degrees of quality uncertainty as well as across the two markets. We find significant differences in the quality-advertising relationships across the three product categories as well as across the two market mechanisms. We discuss the implications of our findings for consumers as well as intermediaries, and provide directions for future research in this emerging context

First-Mover Advantage in Online Review Platform

While first-mover advantage has been widely studied at firm-level, our research focuses on individual-level first-mover advantage in online review platform. More specifically, we study whether early reviews receive higher proportion of helpful votes than later reviews. We try to answer three questions. (1) Does first-mover have advantage in online review platform? (2) Does the first-mover advantage differs across different types of reviewers? (3) Are reputation-seeking reviewers more likely to exploit the first-move advantage? We analyze the model using Zero-inflated Beta with the review data from Amazon.com. Our preliminary results show that early reviews are perceived more helpful than later reviews when controlling for total time being posted, review characteristics, and reviewer characteristics. The first-mover advantage is greater for high frequency reviewer than low frequency reviewer

Synthesis of BIS-(p-Chlorobenzyl) Sulphide Using H2S and TBMAC Polymer Bound as Phase Transfer Catalyst

The aim of this project is the utilization of Hydrogen Sulphide (H2S) in the synthesis of Dibenzyl Chloro Sulphide (DCBS) and ChloroBenzyl Mercaptan (CBM). This is done by the absorption of H2S in methyl Diethanolamine first and then reaction of this H2S rich methyl Diethanolamine with Chloro Benzyl Chloride for the formation of DBCS and CBM. The reaction of methyl Di ethanolamine and Chloro Benzyl Chloride is very difficult as they are two different phases, So the phase transfer catalyst has been used to carry out this reaction. The TBMAC Polymer bound has been chosen as the PTC as it is solid and reusable. The overall objective of this project is to maximize the conversion of Chloro Benzyl Chloride and maximize the selectivity of DBCS. In this project Chloro Benzyl Chloride has been used along with Toluene as a solvent.It also includes study about sources of hydrogen sulfide, need for removal, recovery and PTC study. Parameters chosen for maximizing conversion and selectivity are Reaction time, catalyst loading, stirring speed, temperature and Chloro Benzyl Chloride concentration