Deepwater Drilling: Law, Policy, and Economics of Firm Organization and Safety

Although the causes of the Deepwater Horizon spill are not yet conclusively identified, significant attention has focused on the safety-related policies and practices—often referred to as the safety culture—of BP and other firms involved in drilling the well. This paper defines and characterizes the economic and policy forces that affect safety culture and identifies reasons why those forces may or may not be adequate or effective from the public’s perspective. Two potential justifications for policy intervention are that: a) not all of the social costs of a spill may be internalized by a firm; and b) there may be principal-agency problems within the firm, which could be reduced by external monitoring. The paper discusses five policies that could increase safety culture and monitoring: liability, financial responsibility (a requirement that a firm’s assets exceed a threshold), government oversight, mandatory private insurance, and risk-based drilling fees. We find that although each policy has a positive effect on safety culture, there are important differences and interactions that must be considered. In particular, the latter three provide external monitoring. Furthermore, raising liability caps without mandating insurance or raising financial responsibility requirements could have a small effect on the safety culture of small firms that would declare bankruptcy in the event of a large spill. The paper concludes with policy recommendations for promoting stronger safety culture in offshore drilling; our preferred approach would be to set a liability cap for each well equal to the worst-case social costs of a spill, and to require insurance up to the cap.Deepwater Horizon, BP oil spill, safety culture, government policy, liability caps, financial responsibility, insurance

Organizational Design for Spill Containment in Deepwater Drilling Operations in the Gulf of Mexico: Assessment of the Marine Well Containment Company (MWCC)

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010 led to the deaths of 11 workers, a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf, and nearly three months of massive engineering and logistics efforts to stop the spill. The series of failures before the well was finally capped and the spill contained revealed an inability to deal effectively with a well in deepwater and ultradeepwater. Ensuring that containment capabilities are adequate for drilling operations at these depths is therefore a salient challenge for government and industry. In this paper we assess the Marine Well Containment Company (MWCC), a consortium aimed at designing and building a system capable of containing future deepwater spills in the Gulf. We also consider alternatives for long-term readiness for deepwater spill containment. We focus on the roles of liability and regulation as determinants of readiness and the adequacy of incentives for technological innovation in oil spill containment technology to keep pace with advances in deepwater drilling capability. Liability and regulation can significantly influence the strength of these incentives. In addition, we discuss appropriate governance structure as a major determinant of the effectiveness of MWCC.oil spill, containment, industry R&D, liability, regulation, governance, innovation

Hybrid CoAP-based resource discovery for the Internet of Things

Enabling automatic, efficient and scalable discovery of the resources provided by constrained low-power sensor and actuator networks is an important element to empower the transformation towards the Internet of Things (IoT). To this end, many centralized and distributed resource discovery approaches have been investigated. Clearly, each approach has its own motivations, advantages and drawbacks. In this article, we present a hybrid centralized/distributed resource discovery solution aiming to get the most out of both approaches. The proposed architecture employs the well-known Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and features a number of interesting discovery characteristics including scalability, time and cost efficiency, and adaptability. Using such a solution, network nodes can automatically and rapidly detect the presence of Resource Directories (RDs), via a proactive RD discovery mechanism, and perform discovery tasks through them. Nodes may, alternatively, fall back automatically to efficient fully-distributed discovery operations achieved through Trickle-enabled, CoAP-based technics. The effectiveness of the proposed architecture has been demonstrated by formal analysis and experimental evaluations on dedicated IoT platforms

Comparison of empirical and predicted ultraviolet aircraft signatures

In light of the potential threat to aircraft from missiles using ultraviolet (UV) wavebands, it is important to understand the signature of an aircraft and how this can be predicted. This study compares empirical UV signature data to modeled data from camouflage electro-optical simulation (CAMEOSIM) to determine how well the contrast between the object and the background can be predicted using local knowledge of the atmosphere. CAMEOSIM uses the standard moderate resolution atmospheric transmission (MODTRAN) model to estimate the radiative transfer through the atmosphere. Both MODTRAN and CAMEOSIM are well validated in visible and infrared wavebands, and MODTRAN can accurately predict UV radiative transfer. Unfortunately, the work so far has concentrated on bulk transfer to describe the sky background in the UV where the aircraft scene is typically a negative contrast “hole” in a positive sky background. Importantly, path-to-path scattering is a key consideration in this scene since it is this that will tend to blur the edges of an object and reduce the contrast associated with it. A developed understanding of the limitations is required. It is determined that prediction is possible up to the ranges of 5 km. The local visibility (in km) is required for this prediction

Comparing Simulations of AGN Feedback

We perform adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) and smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) cosmological zoom simulations of a region around a forming galaxy cluster, comparing the ability of the methods to handle successively more complex baryonic physics. In the simplest, non-radiative case, the two methods are in good agreement with each other, but the SPH simulations generate central cores with slightly lower entropies and virial shocks at slightly larger radii, consistent with what has been seen in previous studies. The inclusion of radiative cooling, star formation, and stellar feedback leads to much larger differences between the two methods. Most dramatically, at z=5, rapid cooling in the AMR case moves the accretion shock well within the virial radius, while this shock remains near the virial radius in the SPH case, due to excess heating, coupled with poorer capturing of the shock width. On the other hand, the addition of feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGN) to the simulations results in much better agreement between the methods. In this case both simulations display halo gas entropies of 100 keV cm^2, similar decrements in the star-formation rate, and a drop in the halo baryon content of roughly 30%. This is consistent with AGN growth being self-regulated, regardless of the numerical method. However, the simulations with AGN feedback continue to differ in aspects that are not self-regulated, such that in SPH a larger volume of gas is impacted by feedback, and the cluster still has a lower entropy central core.Comment: 22 pages, 20 figures, 3 tables, Accepted to ApJ, comments welcom

Thermal stereo odometry for UAVs

In the last decade, visual odometry (VO) has attracted significant research attention within the computer vision community. Most of the works have been carried out using standard visible-band cameras. These sensors offer numerous advantages but also suffer from some drawbacks such as illumination variations and limited operational time (i.e., daytime only). In this paper, we explore techniques that allow us to extend the concepts beyond the visible spectrum. We introduce a localization solution based on a pair of thermal cameras. We focus on VO and demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed solution in daytime as well as night-time. The first challenge with thermal cameras is their geometric calibration. Here, we propose a solution to overcome this issue and enable stereopsis. VO requires a good set of feature correspondences. We use a combination of Fast-Hessian detector with for Fast Retina Keypoint descriptor for that purpose. A range of optimization techniques can be used to compute the incremental motion. Here, we propose the double dogleg algorithm and show that it presents an interesting alternative to the commonly used Levenberg-Marquadt approach. In addition, we explore thermal 3-D reconstruction and show that similar performance to the visible-band can be achieved. In order to validate the proposed solution, we build an innovative experimental setup to capture various data sets, where different weather and time conditions are considered

Progress towards recalibration of spectrographs

The spectral resolution of a spectrograph depends on the input slit width, the diffraction grating grooves and the number of imaging sensor/detector pixels. Due to the proprietary nature of spectrograph designs, recalibration by end-users can be challenging. Most calibration procedures currently published are applicable to in-house instruments or spectrographs with access to the internal specifications. Narrowing the input slit improves the resolution but also reduces the throughput of the imaging system. We attempted to recalibrate an Offner-based spectrograph by using a larger detector plane (an imaging system with a larger sensor), to vary the distance along the focal plane; and by utilising lens optics. Basic experiments were conducted by varying the distance from the exit window and inserting a lens to magnify the spectrograph output onto the larger detector plane. We concluded that the calibration could not be achieved using simple optics within the scope of our experiments. This article addresses a gap in literature that does not present the research community with the unsuccessful steps that are not applicable to similar problem statements. The alternative would be to rely on reflective optics, but this approach may reduce portability