Great SCO2T! Rapid tool for carbon sequestration science, engineering, and economics

CO2 capture and storage (CCS) technology is likely to be widely deployed in coming decades in response to major climate and economics drivers: CCS is part of every clean energy pathway that limits global warming to 2C or less and receives significant CO2 tax credits in the United States. These drivers are likely to stimulate capture, transport, and storage of hundreds of millions or billions of tonnes of CO2 annually. A key part of the CCS puzzle will be identifying and characterizing suitable storage sites for vast amounts of CO2. We introduce a new software tool called SCO2T (Sequestration of CO2 Tool, pronounced "Scott") to rapidly characterizing saline storage reservoirs. The tool is designed to rapidly screen hundreds of thousands of reservoirs, perform sensitivity and uncertainty analyses, and link sequestration engineering (injection rates, reservoir capacities, plume dimensions) to sequestration economics (costs constructed from around 70 separate economic inputs). We describe the novel science developments supporting SCO2T including a new approach to estimating CO2 injection rates and CO2 plume dimensions as well as key advances linking sequestration engineering with economics. Next, we perform a sensitivity and uncertainty analysis of geology combinations (including formation depth, thickness, permeability, porosity, and temperature) to understand the impact on carbon sequestration. Through the sensitivity analysis we show that increasing depth and permeability both can lead to increased CO2 injection rates, increased storage potential, and reduced costs, while increasing porosity reduces costs without impacting the injection rate (CO2 is injected at a constant pressure in all cases) by increasing the reservoir capacity.Comment: CO2 capture and storage; carbon sequestration; reduced-order modeling; climate change; economic

The seven servants of Ham: Labourer’s letters from Wellington in the New Zealand Journal, 1840-1845

Several years ago David Fitzpatrick noted that ‘the materials of family history’ had assumed increasing importance in studies of immigration. ‘[O]ld photographs, diaries and letters’, combined with genealogical methods, allow historians to ‘reconstitute the personal stories’ of migrants. A number of New Zealand historians have done just that. Raewyn Dalziel’s research on 1840s immigrants to New Plymouth involved genealogical techniques. Rollo Arnold’s Farthest Promised Land traced ‘ordinary people whose family traditions are rooted in the English villages’. More recently, Jock Phillips and Terry Hearn have drawn on ‘family histories collected by members of the New Zealand Society of Genealogists’. Of the many forms of private documents used in studies of colonial immigration, used letters have perhaps proved of greatest interest. In 1972 Charlotte Erickson’s book of English–American correspondence demonstrated the contribution letters could make to studies of ‘the process of migration and the impact of this experience upon the migrant himself’. Angela McCarthy described letters as a fascinating ‘source for exploring New Zealand history’ and used them to draw attention to ‘the critical importance of kin and neighbourhood connections’ of Irish migrants to New Zealand. Similarly, Frances Porter and Charlotte Macdonald have used extracts from early immigrants’ letters to identify women’s experiences of ‘unsettlement’ and ‘destabilisation’

‘Emigrants of the labouring classes’: Capital, labour and learning in Wellington, 1840-45

Questions of space and place are of increasing interest to educational researchers. A recent synopsis of “educational geography” identifies Henri Lefebvre as a particularly “overarching presence in the educational appropriation of spatial theories with many researchers referring to his work on perceived, conceived and lived space” (Gulson and Symes, 2007, p.101). Physical, or perceived, space is that of everyday embodied “spatial practices” in everyday life: “social practice, the body, the use of the hands, the practical basis of the perception of the outside world” (Lefebvre, 1974, p.38). Abstract, or conceived, space, a product of capitalism, “includes the ‘world’ of commodities, its ‘logical’ and its worldwide strategies; as well as the power of money and that of the political state” (Lefebvre, 1974, p.53). “Representations of space” are the charts, texts or maps of these rationally determined enclosures, including those of “cartographers, urban planners or property speculators” (Shields, 2004, p. 210). Enacting technologies of domination, these introduce “a new form into a pre-existing space – generally a rectilinear or rectangular form such as a meshwork or chequerwork” (Lefebvre, 1974, p.139). Lived, or social, space includes the realm of the imagination that “has been kept alive and acceptable by the arts and literature. This ‘third space’ not only transcends but also has the power to refigure the balance of popular ‘perceived space’ and official ‘conceived space’” (Shields, 2004, p. 210). The artistic and other expressions of “lived space” are referred to as “representational spaces.” In capitalist societies, Lefbvre argued, the abstract appropriations of “conceived space”, and textual representations of this space, gain ascendency

Critical Psychiatry

Critical psychiatry appraises and comments upon psychiatric services as they are usually provided. This article, prompted by the publication of a recent book, considers the place of critical psychiatry historically and in the context of contemporary mental health care and treatment

Defining Scaffolding In The Context Of Specific Learning Difficulties

This study is an investigation of the ways in which teachers in a special school for children with specific learning difficulties support the learning of children in this context. This thesis questioned the utility of the 'scaffolding' metaphor in the context of Specific Learning Difficulties and sought to redefine the metaphor for the teaching of atypical children. This was because of the nature of learning difficulties. A second aim of the study was to determine whether there were qualitative differences in the teaching strategies employed in Mathematics and Guided Writing lessons during 'Speaking and Listening' when novel tasks were introduced. Observations were carried out during eight Mathematics lessons and five Guided Writing lessons. Although the metaphor that best captures a sense of shared competence and permanent support at a basic level remains open to discussion, this research has succeeded in highlighting some ways in which teachers engage children and foster learning effectively. Qualitative analysis of the data revealed that teachers supported children in these contexts by 'creating an effective learning environment'. This was achieved in three main ways: the mutual construction of knowledge, the negotiation of failure and teacher mediation of the learning environment. Differences in teaching approaches did emerge between Mathematics and Guided Writing lessons. In both curricular areas there were examples of all three forms of support but important differences emerged in their nature. The implications of these results for theory and practice are discussed

"I my own professor": Ashton-Warner as New Zealand educational theorist, 1940-60.

The invitation to contribute to this volume addressed me as a New Zealander who had written about how Sylvia Ashton-Warner's fantasies, theories, imagery, and life-history narratives threaded their way through my own. I had written of my youthful encounters with her work in Educating Feminists (Middleton 1993), in which I looked back on reading Spinster in 1960 at age thirteen and reflected on my teenage dreams of life as an artist and beatnik in Parisian cafes and garrets: confined to an Edwardian boarding school hostel in a provincial New Zealand town, I had plotted my escape to what Ashton-Warner described in Myself as "some bohemian studio on the Left Bank in Paris or over a bowl of wine in Italy, me all sophisticated and that, with dozens of lovers, paint everywhere and love and communion and sympathy and all that" (Myself, 212). When, in the early 1970s, I began secondary school teaching and read Teacher, that book built bridges between the frightening urgency of classroom survival, the enticing theories but alien classrooms described by American deschoolers and free-schoolers, and "what I believed myself to be when a girl on the long long road to school, a vagabond and an artist" (I Passed This Way, 307). As a young teacher I, too, had poured my impassioned soul into writing journals and poetry, painting, and playing the piano. Like Ashton-Warner, I had hoped that artistic self-expression could keep the mad woman in my attic at bay, for "asylums are full of artists who failed to say the things they must and famous tombs are full of those who did" (Incense to Idols, 169)

After the education disciplines: teaching theory on-line.

Like all social theorising, the academic study of education is 'reflexive'- complicated by the fact of our immersion in it. This paper discusses an on-line version of an undergraduate teacher-education course, 'Social Issues in New Zealand Education,' that is designed to teach its students how to do such 'situated' educational theorising. Consistent with this theme, the paper is written as a stream-of-consciousness narrative. In an attempt to fix in print the 'counterpoint' of pedagicical theorising in general, as well as more specifically in an on-line setting, it is episodic in structure - more like the lateral leaps of hypertext than the disciplined hierarchies of headings characteristic of the linearity of conventional academic argument. It falls into three parts. The first introduces the online virtual classroom environment in which the teaching takes place. Part two locates the course within more general epistemological issues confronting designers of education (foundations) courses in pre-service teaching degrees in the twenty-first century. In Part three, the syllabus of the course is outlined. The paper concludes with examples of students doing 'situated' educational theorising as they engage with course readings and assignments. Through this multi-layered account, I raise for discussion some broad questions about pedagogy in educational foundations courses in today's environment

Discipline Formation in Information Management: Case Study of Scientific and Technological Information Services

Discipline formation in information management is investigated through a case study of the origi-nation and development of information services for scientific and technical information in Australia. Particular reference is made to a case of AESIS, a national geoscience, minerals and petroleum reference database coordinated by the Australian Mineral Foundation. This study pro-vided a model for consideration of similar services and their contribution to the discipline. The perspective adopted is to consider information management at operational, analytical and strate-gic levels. Political and financial influences are considered along with analysis of scope, perform-ance and quality control. Factors that influenced the creation, transitions, and abeyance of the service are examined, and some conclusions are drawn about an information management disci-pline being exemplified by such services