Characteristics of the wave energy resource at the Atlantic marine energy test site

The wave energy industry is progressing towards an advanced stage of development, with consideration being given to the selection of suitable sites for the first commercial installations. An informed, and accurate, characterisation of the wave energy resource is an essential aspect of this process. Ireland is exposed to an energetic wave climate, however many features of this resource are not well understood. This thesis assesses and characterises the wave energy resource that has been measured and modelled at the Atlantic Marine Energy Test Site, a facility for conducting sea trials of floating wave energy converters that is being developed near Belmullet, on the west coast of Ireland. This characterisation process is undertaken through the analysis of metocean datasets that have previously been unavailable for exposed Irish sites. A number of commonly made assumptions in the calculation of wave power are contested, and the uncertainties resulting from their application are demonstrated. The relationship between commonly used wave period parameters is studied, and its importance in the calculation of wave power quantified, while it is also shown that a disconnect exists between the sea states which occur most frequently at the site and those that contribute most to the incident wave energy. Additionally, observations of the extreme wave conditions that have occurred at the site and estimates of future storms that devices will need to withstand are presented. The implications of these results for the design and operation of wave energy converters are discussed. The foremost contribution of this thesis is the development of an enhanced understanding of the fundamental nature of the wave energy resource at the Atlantic Marine Energy Test Site. The results presented here also have a wider relevance, and can be considered typical of other, similarly exposed, locations on Ireland’s west coast.

Resource Curse or Destructive Creation: A Tale of Crony Capitalism in Transition

This paper explores the “resource curse” problem as a counter-example of creative performance and innovation by examining reliance on capital and physical resources, showing the gap between expectations and ex-post actual performance became clearer under conditions of economic turmoil. The analysis employs logistic regressions with dichotomous response and predictor variables, showing significant results.Several findings that have use for economic and business practice follow. First, in a transition period, a typical characteristic of successful firms was their reliance on either capital resources or physical asset endowments, whereas the innovation factor was not significant.Second, poor-performing enterprises exhibited evidence of over reliance on both capital and physical assets. Third, firms that relied on both types of resources tended to downplay creative performance. Fourth, reliance on capital/physical resources and adoption of “creative discipline/innovations” tend to be mutually exclusive. In fact, some evidence suggests that firms face more acute problem caused by the law of diminishing returns in troubled times. The Vietnamese corporate sector’s addiction to resources may contribute to economic deterioration, through a downward spiral of lower efficiency leading to consumption of more resources. The “innovation factor” has not been tapped as a source of economic growth. The absence of innovations and creativity has made the notion of “resource curse” become identical to “destructive creation” implemented by ex-ante resource-rich firms, and worsened the problem of resource misallocation in transition turmoil.

Towards a field-compatible optical spectroscopic device for cervical cancer screening in resource-limited settings: effects of calibration and pressure.

Quantitative optical spectroscopy has the potential to provide an effective low cost, and portable solution for cervical pre-cancer screening in resource-limited communities. However, clinical studies to validate the use of this technology in resource-limited settings require low power consumption and good quality control that is minimally influenced by the operator or variable environmental conditions in the field. The goal of this study was to evaluate the effects of two sources of potential error: calibration and pressure on the extraction of absorption and scattering properties of normal cervical tissues in a resource-limited setting in Leogane, Haiti. Our results show that self-calibrated measurements improved scattering measurements through real-time correction of system drift, in addition to minimizing the time required for post-calibration. Variations in pressure (tested without the potential confounding effects of calibration error) caused local changes in vasculature and scatterer density that significantly impacted the tissue absorption and scattering properties Future spectroscopic systems intended for clinical use, particularly where operator training is not viable and environmental conditions unpredictable, should incorporate a real-time self-calibration channel and collect diffuse reflectance spectra at a consistent pressure to maximize data integrity.

Legacy Resource Management Program Archaeological Reconnaissance Survey, United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD.

The Archaeological Reconnaissance Survey of United States Naval Academy will provide the Navy with a rich understanding of the history of this property. A National Register of Historic Places District, such as the Academy, deserves a thorough analysis of its past, in order to preserve what exists and to plan for the future. The goal of this project is to investigate the history of the Academy through traditional historic research, innovative computer analysis of historic maps, oral history interviews, and tract histories. This information has been synthesized to provide the Navy with a planning tool for Public Works, a concise look at the cartographic history of the Academy, and reference manual of the vast amounts of information which have been gathered during the course of this project. This information can serve as a reference tool to help the Public Works department comply with Section 106 regulations of the Historic Sites Preservation Act, with regard to construction. It can also serve as a source of cartographic history for those interested in the Academy's physical development, and as a way of preserving the culture of residents in Annapolis. This program and archaeological survey will ultimately serve to add to the rich history of the United States Naval Academy while preserving an important part of our nation's heritage.

The dynamic efficiency costs of common-pool resource exploitation

We conduct the first empirical investigation of common-pool resource users' dynamic and strategic behavior at the micro level using real-world data. Fishermen's strategies in a fully dynamic game account for latent resource dynamics and other players' actions, revealing the profit structure of the fishery. We compare the fishermen's actual and socially optimal exploitation paths under a time-specific vessel allocation policy and find a sizable dynamic externality. Individual fishermen respond to other users by exerting effort above the optimal level early in the season. Congestion is costly instantaneously but is beneficial in the long run because it partially offsets dynamic inefficiencies.

Inhibition-Induced Forgetting Results from Resource Competition between Response Inhibition and Memory Encoding Processes.

UNLABELLED: Response inhibition is a key component of executive control, but its relation to other cognitive processes is not well understood. We recently documented the "inhibition-induced forgetting effect": no-go cues are remembered more poorly than go cues. We attributed this effect to central-resource competition, whereby response inhibition saps attention away from memory encoding. However, this proposal is difficult to test with behavioral means alone. We therefore used fMRI in humans to test two neural predictions of the "common resource hypothesis": (1) brain regions associated with response inhibition should exhibit greater resource demands during encoding of subsequently forgotten than remembered no-go cues; and (2) this higher inhibitory resource demand should lead to memory encoding regions having less resources available during encoding of subsequently forgotten no-go cues. Participants categorized face stimuli by gender in a go/no-go task and, following a delay, performed a surprise recognition memory test for those faces. Replicating previous findings, memory was worse for no-go than for go stimuli. Crucially, forgetting of no-go cues was predicted by high inhibitory resource demand, as quantified by the trial-by-trial ratio of activity in neural "no-go" versus "go" networks. Moreover, this index of inhibitory demand exhibited an inverse trial-by-trial relationship with activity in brain regions responsible for the encoding of no-go cues into memory, notably the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. This seesaw pattern between the neural resource demand of response inhibition and activity related to memory encoding directly supports the hypothesis that response inhibition temporarily saps attentional resources away from stimulus processing. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: Recent behavioral experiments showed that inhibiting a motor response to a stimulus (a "no-go cue") impairs subsequent memory for that cue. Here, we used fMRI to test whether this "inhibition-induced forgetting effect" is caused by competition for neural resources between the processes of response inhibition and memory encoding. We found that trial-by-trial variations in neural inhibitory resource demand predicted subsequent forgetting of no-go cues and that higher inhibitory demand was furthermore associated with lower concurrent activation in brain regions responsible for successful memory encoding of no-go cues. Thus, motor inhibition and stimulus encoding appear to compete with each other: when more resources have to be devoted to inhibiting action, less are available for encoding sensory stimuli.

Muscle Logic: New Knowledge Resource for Anatomy Enables Comprehensive Searches of the Literature on the Feeding Muscles of Mammals.

BACKGROUND: In recent years large bibliographic databases have made much of the published literature of biology available for searches. However, the capabilities of the search engines integrated into these databases for text-based bibliographic searches are limited. To enable searches that deliver the results expected by comparative anatomists, an underlying logical structure known as an ontology is required. DEVELOPMENT AND TESTING OF THE ONTOLOGY: Here we present the Mammalian Feeding Muscle Ontology (MFMO), a multi-species ontology focused on anatomical structures that participate in feeding and other oral/pharyngeal behaviors. A unique feature of the MFMO is that a simple, computable, definition of each muscle, which includes its attachments and innervation, is true across mammals. This construction mirrors the logical foundation of comparative anatomy and permits searches using language familiar to biologists. Further, it provides a template for muscles that will be useful in extending any anatomy ontology. The MFMO is developed to support the Feeding Experiments End-User Database Project (FEED, https://feedexp.org/), a publicly-available, online repository for physiological data collected from in vivo studies of feeding (e.g., mastication, biting, swallowing) in mammals. Currently the MFMO is integrated into FEED and also into two literature-specific implementations of Textpresso, a text-mining system that facilitates powerful searches of a corpus of scientific publications. We evaluate the MFMO by asking questions that test the ability of the ontology to return appropriate answers (competency questions). We compare the results of queries of the MFMO to results from similar searches in PubMed and Google Scholar. RESULTS AND SIGNIFICANCE: Our tests demonstrate that the MFMO is competent to answer queries formed in the common language of comparative anatomy, but PubMed and Google Scholar are not. Overall, our results show that by incorporating anatomical ontologies into searches, an expanded and anatomically comprehensive set of results can be obtained. The broader scientific and publishing communities should consider taking up the challenge of semantically enabled search capabilities.

Scheduling parallel dedicated machines under a single non-shared resource

The scheduling problem of minimizing the makespan for m parallel dedicated machines under single resource constraints is considered. For different variants of the problem the complexity status is established. Heuristic algorithms employing the so-called group technology approach are presented and their worst-case behavior is examined. Finally, a polynomial time approximation scheme is presented for the problem with fixed number of machines.

Scheduling problems for parallel dedicated machines under multiple resource constraints

The paper considers scheduling problems for parallel dedicated machines subject to resource constraints. A fairly complete computational complexity classification is obtained, a number of polynomial-time algorithms are designed. For the problem with a fixed number of machines in which a job uses at most one resource of unit size a polynomial-time approximation scheme is offered.

Scheduling parallel dedicated machines with the speeding-up resource

We consider a problem of scheduling jobs on m parallel machines. The machines are dedicated, i.e., for each job the processing machine is known in advance. We mainly concentrate on the model in which at any time there is one unit of an additional resource. Any job may be assigned the resource and this reduces its processing time. A job that is given the resource uses it at each time of its processing. No two jobs are allowed to use the resource simultaneously. The objective is to minimize the makespan. We prove that the two-machine problem is NP-hard in the ordinary sense, describe a pseudopolynomial dynamic programming algorithm and convert it into an FPTAS. For the problem with an arbitrary number of machines we present an algorithm with a worst-case ratio close to 3/2, and close to 3, if a job can be given several units of the resource. For the problem with a fixed number of machines we give a PTAS. Virtually all algorithms rely on a certain variant of the linear knapsack problem (maximization, minimization, multiple-choice, bicriteria). © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008

The food multimix concept: potential of an innovative food based approach on nutritional status in pregnant women in resource-poor communities

RATIONALE & OBJECTIVES: The food multimix (FFM)concept states that limited food resources can be combined using scientific knowledge to meet nutrient needs of vulnerable groups at low cost utilizing the ‘nutrient strengths’ of individual or candidate foods in composite recipes within a cultural context. METHODS: The method employed the food-to-food approach for recipe development using traditional food ingredients. Recipes were subjected to proximate and micronutrient analysis and optimized to meet at tleast 40% of recommended daily intakes. End products including breads, porridge and soup were developed. RESULTS: FMM products were employed in a feeding trial among 120 healthy pregnant women in Gauteng, South Africa resulting in improvements in serum iron levels from baseline values of 14.59 (=/-7.67) umol/L and 14.02 (=/-8.13) umol/L for control and intervention groups (p=0.71), to 16.03 (=/-5.67) umol/L and 18.66 (=/-9.41) umol/L (p=0.19). The increases from baseline to post-intervention were however statistically significant within groups. Similarly Mean Cell Volume values improved from baseline as well as serum ferritin and transferritin levels. CONCLUSION: The FMM concept has potential value in feeding programs for vulnerable groups including pregnant and lactating mothers.

A critical evaluation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software sourcing and provision using theoretical constructs

Deliberating on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software sourcing and provision, this paper contrasts the corporate environment with the small business environment. The paper is about Enterprise Resource Planning client (ERPc) expectations and Enterprise Resource Planning vendor (ERPv) value propositions as a mutually compatible process for achieving acceptable standards of ERP software performance. It is suggested that a less-than-equitable vendor–client relationship would not contribute to the implementation of the optimum solution. Adapting selected theoretical concepts and models, the researchers analyse ERPv to ERPc relationship. This analysis is designed to discover if the provision of the very large ERP vendors who market systems such as SAP, and the provision of the smaller ERP vendors (in this instance Eshbel Technologies Ltd who market an ERP software solution called Priority) when framed as a value proposition (Walters, D. (2002) Operations Strategy. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave), is at all comparable or distinctive.

Environmental selection and resource allocation determine spatial patterns in picophytoplankton cell size

Here we describe a new trait-based model for cellular resource allocation that we use to investigate the relative importance of different drivers for small cell size in phytoplankton. Using the model, we show that increased investment in nonscalable structural components with decreasing cell size leads to a trade-off between cell size, nutrient and light affinity, and growth rate. Within the most extreme nutrient-limited, stratified environments, resource competition theory then predicts a trend toward larger minimum cell size with increasing depth. We demonstrate that this explains observed trends using a marine ecosystem model that represents selection and adaptation of a diverse community defined by traits for cell size and subcellular resource allocation. This framework for linking cellular physiology to environmental selection can be used to investigate the adaptive response of the marine microbial community to environmental conditions and the adaptive value of variations in cellular physiology.