Industrial Megaprojects: Concepts, strategies and practices for success

This is a review of a recent book on Megaprojects written by an experienced practitioner and researcher of megaprojects who has been writing about them over the last three decades. It focuses on industrial megaprojects covering mainly megaprojects in the Oil & Gas Production, Petroleum Processing and Refining, Minerals and Metals, Chemical, LNG, Power Generation and Pipelines. The book is written mainly from the perspective of project owners but contains some good advice to project managers as well.

Black Hole Demography: From scaling relations to models

In this contributed paper I review our current knowledge of the local Black Hole (BH) scaling relations, and their impact on the determination of the local BH mass function. I particularly emphasize the remaining systematic uncertainties impinging upon a secure determination of the BH mass function and how progress can be made. I then review and discuss the evidence for a different time evolution for separate BH-galaxy scaling relations, and how these independent empirical evidences can be reconciled with the overall evolution of the structural properties of the host galaxies. I conclude discussing BH demography in the context of semi-empirical continuity accretion models, as well as more complex evolutionary models, emphasizing the general constraints we can set on them.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures. Invited article for the focus issue on astrophysical black holes in Classical and Quantum Gravity, guest editors: D.Merritt and L. Rezzoll