Climate change and IMO technical and operational measures for reduction of emissions of greenhouse gas from ships

According to a study conducted by the International Maritime organisation (IMO) shipping sector is responsible for 3.3% of the global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol calls upon states to pursue limitation or reduction of emissions of GHG from marine bunker fuels working through the IMO. In 2011, 14 years after the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, the Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC) of the IMO has adopted mandatory energy efficiency measures for international shipping which can be treated as the first ever mandatory global GHG reduction instrument for an international industry. The MEPC approved an amendment of Annex VI of the 1973 International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL 73/78) to introduce a mandatory Energy Efficiency Design Index (EEDI) for new ships and the Ship Energy Efficiency Management Plan (SEEMP) for all ships. Considering the growth projections of human population and world trade the technical and operational measures may not be able to reduce the amount of GHG emissions from international shipping in a satisfactory level. Therefore, the IMO is considering to introduce market-based mechanisms that may serve two purposes including providing a fiscal incentive for the maritime industry to invest in more energy efficient manner and off-setting of growing ship emissions. Some leading developing countries already voiced their serious reservations on the newly adopted IMO regulations stating that by imposing the same obligation on all countries, irrespective of their economic status, this amendment has rejected the Principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibility (the CBDR Principle), which has always been the cornerstone of international climate change law discourses. They also claimed that negotiation for a market based mechanism should not be continued without a clear commitment from the developed counters for promotion of technical co-operation and transfer of technology relating to the improvement of energy efficiency of ships. Against this backdrop, this article explores the challenges for the developing counters in the implementation of already adopted technical and operational measures.

IMO technical and operational measures for reduction of emissions of greenhouse gas from ships : perspectives of Asian countries

International shipping is responsible for about 2.7% of the global emissions of CO2. In the absence of proper action, emissions from the maritime sector may grow by 150% to 250% by 2050, in comparison with the level of emissions in 2007. Against this backdrop, the International Maritime Organisation has introduced a mandatory Energy Efficiency Design Index (EEDI) for new ships and the Ship Energy Efficiency Management Plan (SEEMP) for all ships. Some Asian countries have voiced serious reservations about the newly adopted IMO regulations. They have suggested that imposing the same obligations on all countries, irrespective of their economic status, is a serious departure from the Principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibility, which has always been the cornerstone of international climate change law discourse. Against this backdrop, this article presents a brief overview of the technical and operational measures from the perspective of Asian countries.

Breast cancer cells induce osteolytic bone lesions in vivo through a reduction in osteoblast activity in mice

Bone metastases are severely debilitating and have a significant impact on the quality of life of women with metastatic breast cancer. Treatment options are limited and in order to develop more targeted therapies, improved understanding of the complex mechanisms that lead to bone lesion development are warranted. Interestingly, whilst prostate-derived bone metastases are characterised by mixed or osteoblastic lesions, breast-derived bone metastases are characterised by osteolytic lesions, suggesting unique regulatory patterns. This study aimed to measure the changes in bone formation and bone resorption activity at two time-points (18 and 36 days) during development of the bone lesion following intratibial injection of MDA-MB-231 human breast cancer cells into the left tibiae of Severely Combined Immuno-Deficient (SCID) mice. The contralateral tibia was used as a control. Tibiae were extracted and processed for undecalcified histomorphometric analysis. We provide evidence that the early bone loss observed following exposure to MDA-MB-231 cells was due to a significant reduction in mineral apposition rate, rather than increased levels of bone resorption. This suggests that osteoblast activity was impaired in the presence of breast cancer cells, contrary to previous reports of osteoclast-dependent bone loss. Furthermore mRNA expression of Dickkopf Homolog 1 (DKK-1) and Noggin were confirmed in the MDA-MB-231 cell line, both of which antagonise osteoblast regulatory pathways. The observed bone loss following injection of cancer cells was due to an overall thinning of the trabecular bone struts rather than perforation of the bone tissue matrix (as measured by trabecular width and trabecular separation, respectively), suggesting an opportunity to reverse the cancer-induced bone changes. These novel insights into the mechanisms through which osteolytic bone lesions develop may be important in the development of new treatment strategies for metastatic breast cancer patients.

Performance-based structural fire design of steel frames using conventional computer software

Fire incident in buildings is common, so the fire safety design of the framed structure is imperative, especially for the unprotected or partly protected bare steel frames. However, software for structural fire analysis is not widely available. As a result, the performance-based structural fire design is urged on the basis of using user-friendly and conventional nonlinear computer analysis programs so that engineers do not need to acquire new structural analysis software for structural fire analysis and design. The tool is desired to have the capacity of simulating the different fire scenarios and associated detrimental effects efficiently, which includes second-order P-D and P-d effects and material yielding. Also the nonlinear behaviour of large-scale structure becomes complicated when under fire, and thus its simulation relies on an efficient and effective numerical analysis to cope with intricate nonlinear effects due to fire. To this end, the present fire study utilizes a second order elastic/plastic analysis software NIDA to predict structural behaviour of bare steel framed structures at elevated temperatures. This fire study considers thermal expansion and material degradation due to heating. Degradation of material strength with increasing temperature is included by a set of temperature-stress-strain curves according to BS5950 Part 8 mainly, which implicitly allows for creep deformation. This finite element stiffness formulation of beam-column elements is derived from the fifth-order PEP element which facilitates the computer modeling by one member per element. The Newton-Raphson method is used in the nonlinear solution procedure in order to trace the nonlinear equilibrium path at specified elevated temperatures. Several numerical and experimental verifications of framed structures are presented and compared against solutions in literature. The proposed method permits engineers to adopt the performance-based structural fire analysis and design using typical second-order nonlinear structural analysis software.

Predicting fault-prone software modules with rank sum classification

The detection and correction of defects remains among the most time consuming and expensive aspects of software development. Extensive automated testing and code inspections may mitigate their effect, but some code fragments are necessarily more likely to be faulty than others, and automated identification of fault prone modules helps to focus testing and inspections, thus limiting wasted effort and potentially improving detection rates. However, software metrics data is often extremely noisy, with enormous imbalances in the size of the positive and negative classes. In this work, we present a new approach to predictive modelling of fault proneness in software modules, introducing a new feature representation to overcome some of these issues. This rank sum representation offers improved or at worst comparable performance to earlier approaches for standard data sets, and readily allows the user to choose an appropriate trade-off between precision and recall to optimise inspection effort to suit different testing environments. The method is evaluated using the NASA Metrics Data Program (MDP) data sets, and performance is compared with existing studies based on the Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Naïve Bayes (NB) Classifiers, and with our own comprehensive evaluation of these methods.

Cytotoxicity of topical antimicrobial agents used in burn wounds in Australasia

BACKGROUND: Burn sepsis is a leading cause of mortality and morbidity in patients with major burns. The use of topical antimicrobial agents has helped improve the survival of these patients. Silvazine (Sigma Pharmaceuticals, Melbourne, Australia) (1% silver sulphadiazine and 0.2% chlorhexidine digluconate) is used exclusively in Australasia, and there is no published study on its cytotoxicity. This study compared the relative cytotoxicity of Silvazine with 1% silver sulphadiazine (Flamazine (Smith & Nephew Healthcare, Hull, UK)) and a silver-based dressing (Acticoat (Smith & Nephew Healthcare, Hull, UK)). METHODS: Dressings were applied to the centre of culture plates that were then seeded with keratinocytes at an estimated 25% confluence. The plates were incubated for 72 h and culture medium and dressings then removed. Toluidine blue was added to stain the remaining keratinocytes. Following removal of the dye, the plates were photographed under standard conditions and these digital images were analysed using image analysis software. Data was analysed using Student's t-test. RESULTS: In the present study, Silvazine is the most cytotoxic agent. Seventy-two hour exposure to Silvazine in the present study results in almost no keratinocyte survival at all and a highly statistically significant reduction in cell survival relative to control, Acticoat and Flamazine (P<0.001, P<0.01, P<0.01, respectively). Flamazine is associated with a statistically significant reduction in cell numbers relative to control (P<0.05), but is much less cytotoxic than Silvazine (P<0.005). CONCLUSION: In this in-vitro study comparing Acticoat, Silvazine and Flamazine, Silvazine shows an increased cytotoxic effect, relative to control, Flamazine and Acticoat. An in-vivo study is required to determine whether this effect is carried into the clinical setting.

Games and entertainment software

Games and the broader interactive entertainment industry are the major ‘born global/born digital’ creative industry. The videogame industry (formally referred to as interactive entertainment) is the economic sector that develops, markets and sells videogames to millions of people worldwide. There are over 11 countries with revenues of over $1 billion. This number was expected to grow 9.1 per cent annually to $48.9 in 2011 and $68 billion in 2012, making it the fastest-growing component of the international media sector (Scanlon, 2007; Caron, 2008).

Voltage unbalance reduction in low voltage feeders by dynamic switching of residential customers among three phases

Low voltage distribution feeders with large numbers of single phase residential loads experience severe current unbalance that often causes voltage unbalance problems. The addition of intermittent generation and new loads in the form of roof top photovoltaic generation and electric vehicles makes these problems even more acute. In this paper, an intelligent dynamic residential load transfer scheme is proposed. Residential loads can be transferred from one phase to another phase to minimize the voltage unbalance along the feeder. Each house is supplied through a static transfer switch with three-phase input and single-phase output connection. The main controller, installed at the transformer will observe the power consumption in each load and determine which house(s) should be transferred from one phase to another in order to keep the voltage unbalance in the feeder at a minimum. The efficacy of the proposed load transfer scheme is verified through MATLAB and PSCAD/EMTDC simulations.

Loss reduction experiences in electric power distribution companies of Iran

The experiences of the loss reduction projects in electric power distribution companies (EPDCs) of Iran are presented. The loss reduction methods, which are proposed individually by 14 EPDCs, corresponding energy saving (ES), Investment costs (IC), and loss rate reductions are provided. In order to illustrate the effectiveness and performance of the loss reduction methods, three parameters are proposed as energy saving per investment costs (ESIC), energy saving per quantity (ESPQ), and investment costs per quantity (ICPQ). The overall ESIC of 14 EPDC as well as individual average and standard deviation of the EISC for each method is presented and compared. In addition, the average and standard deviation of the ESPQs and ICPQs for the loss reduction methods, individually, are provided and investigated. These parameters are useful for EPDCs that intend to reduce the electric losses in distribution networks as a benchmark and as a background in the planning purposes.

Loss reduction planning in electric distribution networks of IRAN until 2025

In this paper, a loss reduction planning in electric distribution networks is presented based on the successful experiences in distribution utilities of IRAN and some developed countries. The necessary technical and economical parameters of planning are calculated from related projects in IRAN. Cost, time, and benefits of every sub-program including seven loss reduction approaches are determined. Finally, the loss reduction program, the benefit per cost, and the return of investment in optimistic and pessimistic conditions are introduced.

Optimization of an integrated model for automatic reduction and expansion of long queries

A long query provides more useful hints for searching relevant documents, but it is likely to introduce noise which affects retrieval performance. In order to smooth such adverse effect, it is important to reduce noisy terms, introduce and boost additional relevant terms. This paper presents a comprehensive framework, called Aspect Hidden Markov Model (AHMM), which integrates query reduction and expansion, for retrieval with long queries. It optimizes the probability distribution of query terms by utilizing intra-query term dependencies as well as the relationships between query terms and words observed in relevance feedback documents. Empirical evaluation on three large-scale TREC collections demonstrates that our approach, which is automatic, achieves salient improvements over various strong baselines, and also reaches a comparable performance to a state of the art method based on user’s interactive query term reduction and expansion.

A novel process of group-oriented question reduction for rule-based recommendation websites

Several websites utilise a rule-base recommendation system, which generates choices based on a series of questionnaires, for recommending products to users. This approach has a high risk of customer attrition and the bottleneck is the questionnaire set. If the questioning process is too long, complex or tedious; users are most likely to quit the questionnaire before a product is recommended to them. If the questioning process is short; the user intensions cannot be gathered. The commonly used feature selection methods do not provide a satisfactory solution. We propose a novel process combining clustering, decisions tree and association rule mining for a group-oriented question reduction process. The question set is reduced according to common properties that are shared by a specific group of users. When applied on a real-world website, the proposed combined method outperforms the methods where the reduction of question is done only by using association rule mining or only by observing distribution within the group.

Retrospective evaluation of dosimetric quality for prostate carcinomas treated with 3D conformal, intensity-modulated and volumetric-modulated arc radiotherapy

Introduction This study examines and compares the dosimetric quality of radiotherapy treatment plans for prostate carcinoma across a cohort of 163 patients treated across 5 centres: 83 treated with three-dimensional conformal radiotherapy (3DCRT), 33 treated with intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) and 47 treated with volumetric-modulated arc therapy (VMAT). Methods Treatment plan quality was evaluated in terms of target dose homogeneity and organ-at-risk sparing, through the use of a set of dose metrics. These included the mean, maximum and minimum doses; the homogeneity and conformity indices for the target volumes; and a selection of dose coverage values that were relevant to each organ-at-risk. Statistical significance was evaluated using two-tailed Welch’s T-tests. The Monte Carlo DICOM ToolKit software was adapted to permit the evaluation of dose metrics from DICOM data exported from a commercial radiotherapy treatment planning system. Results The 3DCRT treatment plans offered greater planning target volume dose homogeneity than the other two treatment modalities. The IMRT and VMAT plans offered greater dose reduction in the organs-at-risk: with increased compliance with recommended organ-at-risk dose constraints, compared to conventional 3DCRT treatments. When compared to each other, IMRT and VMAT did not provide significantly different treatment plan quality for like-sized tumour volumes. Conclusions This study indicates that IMRT and VMAT have provided similar dosimetric quality, which is superior to the dosimetric quality achieved with 3DCRT.

Bug reproduction : a collaborative practice within software maintenance activities

Software development settings provide a great opportunity for CSCW researchers to study collaborative work. In this paper, we explore a specific work practice called bug reproduction that is a part of the software bug-fixing process. Bug re-production is a highly collaborative process by which software developers attempt to locally replicate the ‘environment’ within which a bug was originally encountered. Customers, who encounter bugs in their everyday use of systems, play an important role in bug reproduction as they provide useful information to developers, in the form of steps for reproduction, software screenshots, trace logs, and other ways to describe a problem. Bug reproduction, however, poses major hurdles in software maintenance as it is often challenging to replicate the contextual aspects that are at play at the customers’ end. To study the bug reproduction process from a human-centered perspective, we carried out an ethnographic study at a multinational engineering company. Using semi-structured interviews, a questionnaire and half-a-day observation of sixteen software developers working on different software maintenance projects, we studied bug reproduction. In this pa-per, we present a holistic view of bug reproduction practices from a real-world set-ting and discuss implications for designing tools to address the challenges developers face during bug reproduction.