Biomass in the time of climate change:An integrated modeling framework to capture the spatiotemporal complexity of bio–based value chains and other low–carbon options demonstrated for the Colombian energy system

Biomass could be instrumental in supporting the transition towards low–carbon energy systems for climate change mitigation. However, the sustainable potential and net impact of bioenergy is uncertain and case specific. This research aimed at developing and demonstrating a national–level integrated modeling framework to analyze the role of bio–based economy options to midcentury in Colombia. The framework encompassed the supply potential of bioresources subject to food security and environmental protection criteria, the conversion of biomass in biorefineries to fuels, heat, power, and chemicals, the competition with other low–carbon alternatives including variable renewable energy, mitigation pathways in existing oil refineries, and the regional conditions for bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).The framework has demonstrated that increasing the spatiotemporal and technical detail of low–carbon options could help identify synergies between different sectors, through biorefinery configurations, which can lower the mitigation efforts and energy system cost. Improving agricultural productivity in Colombia can curb deforestation and free up land for bioenergy to achieve a carbon–neutral energy system. The deployment of BECCS could contribute 41% of the cumulative avoided emissions. Achieving carbon–neutrality with limited availability of biomass can exert pressure on variable renewable electricity and increase the energy system cost by 11%. Spatial disaggregation of biomass sources and carbon sinks could identify regional contributions to national goals. This framework could be used to harmonize between the visions of the energy and agricultural sectors, national and regional governments, and the oil sector, towards integrated planning for low-carbon development

Understanding Physical and Mental Sexual Harassment of Women In Sub-Saharan Politics: A Comparative Analysis Of Nigeria And Uganda (1999-2019)

Recent studies have shown that violence against women politicians in sub-Saharan Africa is increasingly recognized globally as a key impediment to their participation in politics. This follows the troubling increase in documented cases of abuse, threat, harassment and intimidation aimed at women politicians on the continent. Consequently, bias toward women occupying political positions originates from the structural, cultural and symbolic violence, which differentiates this practice from other forms of political violence. This study provides an extensive understanding of the physical and mental sexual harassment of women in sub-Saharan African politics. It draws attention comparatively to this conundrum by drawing on the experience of women in Nigeria and Uganda. While it is a known that sexual harassment pervades the Nigerian and Ugandan political space, available data are very slim since cases are often underreported and when they do, are not pursued to a logical conclusion. A major impact of this is that women are reluctant to participate and be involved in the political and decision-making framework of their respective countries. In this study, primary and secondary sources were adopted and critically examined and analysed. The methodology adopted is based on content analysis of the sources used. Part of the results of the study shows that sexual harassment is associated with sexuality, patriarchy and gender power differences which is a huge factor that helps to perpetuate the conduct in sub-Saharan Africa. Secondly, gender-based violence against women has become normalised accounting for why women are often the victims of the conduct. Keyword: Sexual harassment, Nigeria/Uganda, Gender-based violence, Women in politics, Sub-Saharan Africa DOI: 10.7176/JAAS/80-07 Publication date:July 31st 202

Hardware accelerator for anti-aliasing Wu's line algorithm using FPGA

Digital images are suffering from the stair-step effect because they are built from small pixels. This effect termes aliasing and the method uses to decrease so-called anti-aliasing. This paper offers a hardware accelerator of an anti-aliasing algorithm using HLS (high level synthesis) along straight-line segments or edges. These straight-line segments are smoothed by modifying the intensity of the pixel. The hardware implementation of two different architectures which is based on Zynq FPGA are presented in this work. The first architecture is built from one core while the second architecture is built from multi-core and uses a parallel technique to speed up the algorithm by dividing line segments into sub-segments and drawing them after smoothing instantaneously to formulate the main line. This parallel usage leads to a very fast execution of Wu's algorithm which is represented one-tenth hardware runtime for one core only. Also, the optimized resource utilization and power consumption for different cores have been compared, through single-core design which utilizes 8% and consumes 1.6 W, while utilized resources using 10 cores are 77% with a power consumption of 2 W

Chemical reactivity and structural determination of metal and gaseous adsorbates on Cu{100} using TPD and LEED

The structures formed by adsorbing thin-film platinum, formic acid and oxygen on Cu{ 100} single crystal are investigated by quantitative low-energy electrondiffraction (LEED) and Temperature Programmed Reaction Spectroscopy (TPRS) Symmetrized Automated Tensor LEED (SATLEED) calculations are used to determine the structure of the formed surface alloys and overlayers. TPRS was used to probe the surface reactivity of the systems studied while surface composition was obtained using Auger Electron spectroscopy (AES). The decomposition of a formate intermediate from a clean Cu(100) surface has been monitored through the use of TPD Spectroscopy CO2 evolution was observed at -440K. The presence of repulsive lateral interactions between the adsorbates on the surface has been identified, through the shift of the peak temperature Tp to lower values, as the surface was exposed to increasing amounts of formic acid. The Tp for 0 5L was observed at 458K,while that for SOL appears at 443K This shift means that the decomposition energy is reduced by 6%. It has also been evidenced that platinum has a destabilising effect on the formate intermediate. The peak temperature (Tp) for the CO2 desorption spectra from copperplatinum model surfaces, appear around 40K lower than those from clean copper. This suggests a much less stable surface alloy compared to the clean surface. In activation energy terms, this destabilisation can be expressed as a 13% decrease in the energy required for the formate to decompose. It was also observed that desorption is much more rapid from the copper-platinum than from clean copper surfaces. More study is needed to fully understand these results. A Cu{100}-c(2x2)-Pt surface alloy structure formed by deposition of 1ML mono layer of Pt and thermal processing to 550K is shown to correspond to a coppercapped bimetallic surface localised alloy with a sub-surface ordered c(2x2) CuPt layer. The layerwise compositional profile has been extracted via ATA modelling resulting in an almost pure outermost copper monolayer with only a small Pt impurity concentration (10± 10 at%) Layers 3 and 4 contained higher Pt concentrations of 20+20 and 30±30 at% respectively. Substitution of platinum into the selvedge results in a significant expansion in the surface mterlayer spacmgs relative to clean Cu{100} and switches the weak oscillatory relaxation of clean Cu{100} to a strongly and non-uniformly expanded interlayer separation. The outermost three mterlayer spacings are strongly expanded to 1 84+0 02A (+1 9±1 1%), 1 91+0 03A (+5 8±1 7%) and 1 89±0 03A (+4 7±1 7%) respectively. A slight rippling in the c(2x2) CuPt underlayer of amplitude 0 03±0 04A, with Pt atoms rippled outwards towards the vacuum interface within the composite layer occurs. A Pt/Cu{100}-(2x2)-0 surface alloy structure, formed by deposition of a high Pt loading and thermal processing in an oxygen atmosphere, is shown to correspond to an oxygen overlayer on a copper-capped bimetallic surface localised alloy with an ordered c(2x2) CuPt monolayer in layers 2 and 4. The selvedge structure within the LEED probing depth strongly resembles the {100} surface of the LI2 phase of the bulk Cu3Pt alloy. Substitution of platinum into the selvedge results in a significant expansion in the surface mterlayer spacmgs relative to Cu{100}-(2V2xV2)R45°-0 due to the larger metallic radius of Pt and switches the weak oscillatory relaxation of Cu{100}-(2>/2xV2)R450-0 to a strongly and non-umformly expanded mterlayer separation. The outermost three interlayer spacmgs are expanded with a slight rippling in the first CuPt underlayer with Pt atoms rippled outwards towards the vacuum interface within the composite layer

Measuring e-learning systems success

The education sector has been radically affected by developments in information technology. In the education arena, substantial funds have been invested in the systematic development of technology infrastructure. E-learning is believed to be the main platform for adopting and using new and more advanced IT in the education sector. However, measuring the success of e-learning systems is one of the key issues facing universities and educational institutions. Although considerable attention has been paid to the information systems success issue, there remain arguments about which factors are the most telling in measuring information system success. The issue of evaluation of the success of information systems generally, and e-learning systems in particular, has become more complicated due to the differing interests and needs of stakeholders. Different groups of stakeholders deal with e-learning systems in different ways - for instance, students, academic staff, ICT staff, management, and software developers. These stakeholders have substantially different objectives and often there are conflicts between their aims. This study proposes an evaluation methodology model to assess e-learning systems success. The model proposed is one which includes eight constructs: IT infrastructure services; system quality; information quality; service delivery quality; perceived usefulness; user satisfaction; customer value; and organisational value. A range of stakeholders such as students, academic staff, and ICT staff are considered in this model. Three instruments were designed to measure the perceptions of three different stakeholders towards e-learning system success. A quantitative study was conducted at University of Southern Queensland (USQ), with survey responses from 720 students who use the e-learning system, 110 academic staff members, and 22 ICT staff. The results confirm that the study model is valid and reliable to measure the success of e-learning systems from different points of view. Some of the relationships among the constructs in the study model were supported and some were not. The study contributed to the body of knowledge by providing a valid and reliable model to measure the success of e-learning systems. Moreover, this study contributes to the practitioners, recommending universities and educational institutions that develop and support e-learning systems

Identifying the determinants of e-learning service delivery quality

In recent years, many universities and educational institutions have made considerable investments in e-learning systems. These are systems that deliver educational services via electronic channels. Service quality has been studied in previous research as a critical factor for measuring systems success. Modest attention has been paid to factors affecting the service delivery quality in the e-learning arena. The objective of this study is to identify the factors considered to impact the e-learning systems service delivery quality through a survey of stakeholders. The sample was 720 students enrolled in online courses at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ).The main finding of this study is that IT infrastructure, system quality, and information quality significantly affect service delivery quality in the e-learning systems field. IT infrastructure services were found to play a critical role in improving system quality and information quality, and this construct can be considered as a foundation of delivering high quality educational services.<br /

Fingerprint recognition based on shark smell optimization and genetic algorithm

Fingerprint recognition is a dominant form of biometric due to its distinctiveness. The study aims to extract and select the best features of fingerprint images, and evaluate the strength of the Shark Smell Optimization (SSO) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) in the search space with a chosen set of metrics. The proposed model consists of seven phases namely, enrollment, image preprocessing by using weighted median filter, feature extraction by using SSO, weight generation by using Chebyshev polynomial first kind (CPFK), feature selection by using GA, creation of a user’s database, and matching features by using Euclidean distance (ED). The effectiveness of the proposed model’s algorithms and performance is evaluated on 150 real fingerprint images that were collected from university students by the ZKTeco scanner at Sulaimani city, Iraq. The system’s performance was measured by three renowned error rate metrics, namely, False Acceptance Rate (FAR), False Rejection Rate (FRR), and Correct Verification Rate (CVR). The experimental outcome showed that the proposed fingerprint recognition model was exceedingly accurate recognition because of a low rate of both FAR and FRR, with a high CVR percentage gained which was 0.00, 0.00666, and 99.334%, respectively. This finding would be useful for improving biometric secure authentication based fingerprint. It is also possibly applied to other research topics such as fraud detection, e-payment, and other real-life applications authentication

Indian stock market’s discord with the real economy

The Covid-19 pandemic has created economic conditions that are keeping the stock markets high in India. However, analysing historical trends and current data together, Simtiha Ishaq Mir and Younis Ahmed Ghulam warn that the stock market is out of sync with the real state of the economy and that the government needs to take urgent steps to avoid an uncontrolled and catastrophic bursting of this bubble. The downslide in the markets as the SENSEX lost 1500 points this morning suggests their warning is both timely and serious