Cloud computing : what upstream oil and gas can learn from other industries

The topic of “the cloud” has attracted significant attention throughout the past few years (Cherry 2009; Sterling and Stark 2009) and, as a result, academics and trade journals have created several competing definitions of “cloud computing” (e.g., Motahari-Nezhad et al. 2009). Underpinning this article is the definition put forward by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, which describes cloud computing as “a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction” (Garfinkel 2011, p. 3). Despite the lack of consensus about definitions, however, there is broad agreement on the growing demand for cloud computing. Some estimates suggest that spending on cloudrelated technologies and services in the next few years may climb as high as USD 42 billion/year (Buyya et al. 2009).

How does innovation happen in the upstream oil & gas industry? Insights from a global survey

Few would argue that the upstream oil & gas industry has become more technology-intensive over the years. But how does innovation happen in the industry? Specifically, what ideas and inputs flow from which parts of the sector’s value network, and where do these inputs go? And how do firms and organizations from different countries contribute differently to this process? This paper puts forward the results of a survey designed to shed light on these issues. A joint research initiative between the Society of Petroleum Engineers and the Queensland University of Technology, the survey was sent to 469 executives and senior managers who played a significant role with regards to R&D and/or technology deployment in their respective business units. A total of 199 responses were received from a broad range of organizations and countries around the world. Several interesting themes and trends emerge from the results, including: (1) service companies tend to file considerably more patents per innovation than other types of organization; (2) over 63% of the deployed innovations reported in the survey originated in service companies; (3) neither universities nor government-led research organizations are considered to be valuable sources of new information and knowledge in the industry’s R&D initiatives; and (4) despite the increasing degree of globalization in the marketplace, the USA still plays an extremely dominant role in the industry’s overall R&D and technology deployment activities. By providing a detailed snapshot of how innovation happens in the upstream oil & gas sector, this paper provides a valuable foundation for future investigations and discussions aimed at improving how R&D and technology deployment are managed within the industry.

Comparison of the coat protein, movement protein and RNA polymerase gene sequences of Australian, Chinese, and American isolates of barley yellow dwarf virus transmitted by Rhopalosiphum padi

Barley yellow dwarf luteovirus-GPV (BYDV-GPV) is a common problem in Chinese wheat crops but is unrecorded elsewhere. A defining characteristic of GPV is its capacity to be transmitted efficiently by both Schizaphis graminum and Rhopaloshiphum padi. This dual aphid species transmission contrasts with those of BYDV-RPV and BYDV-SGV, globally distributed viruses, which are efficiently transmitted only by Rhopaloshiphum padi and Schizaphis graminum respectively. The viral RNA sequences encoding the coat protein (22K) gene, the movement protein (17K) gene, the region surrounding the conserved GDD motif of the polymerase gene and the intergenic sequences between these genes were determined for GPV and an Australian isolate of BYDV-RPV (RPVa). In all three genes, the sequences of GPV and RPVa were more similar to those of an American isolate of BYDV-RPV (RPVu) than to any other luteovirus for which there is data available. RPVa and RPVu were very similar, especially their coat proteins which had 97% identity at the amino acid level. The coat protein of GPV had 76% and 78% amino acid identity with RPVa and RPVu respectively. The data suggest that RPVu and RPVa are correctly named as strains of the same serotype and that GPV is sufficiently different from either RPV strain to be considered a distinct BYDV type. The coat protein and movement protein genes of GPV are very dissimilar to SGV. The polymerase sequences of RPVu, RPVa and GPV show close affinities with those of the sobemo-like luteoviruses and little similarity with those of the carmo-like luteoviruses. The sequences of the coat proteins, movement proteins and the polymerase segments of BYDV serotypes, other than RPV and GPV, form a cluster that is separate from their counterpart sequences from dicot-infecting luteoviruses. The RPV and GPV isolates consistently fall within a dicot-infecting cluster. This suggests that RPV and GPV evolved from within this group of viruses. Since these other viruses all infect dicots it seems likely that their common ancestor infected a dicot and that RPV and GPV evolved from a virus that switched hosts from a dicot to a monocot.

The operating schedule for battery energy storage companies in electricity market

This paper presents a series of operating schedules for Battery Energy Storage Companies (BESC) to provide peak shaving and spinning reserve services in the electricity markets under increasing wind penetration. As individual market participants, BESC can bid in ancillary services markets in an Independent System Operator (ISO) and contribute towards frequency and voltage support in the grid. Recent development in batteries technologies and availability of the day-ahead spot market prices would make BESC economically feasible. Profit maximization of BESC is achieved by determining the optimum capacity of Energy Storage Systems (ESS) required for meeting spinning reserve requirements as well as peak shaving. Historic spot market prices and frequency deviations from Australia Energy Market Operator (AEMO) are used for numerical simulations and the economic benefits of BESC is considered reflecting various aspects in Australia’s National Electricity Markets (NEM).

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.

A recommendation approach dealing with multiple market segments

A new community and communication type of social networks - online dating - are gaining momentum. With many people joining in the dating network, users become overwhelmed by choices for an ideal partner. A solution to this problem is providing users with partners recommendation based on their interests and activities. Traditional recommendation methods ignore the users’ needs and provide recommendations equally to all users. In this paper, we propose a recommendation approach that employs different recommendation strategies to different groups of members. A segmentation method using the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is proposed to customize users’ needs. Then a targeted recommendation strategy is applied to each identified segment. Empirical results show that the proposed approach outperforms several existing recommendation methods.

Slicing big data - Twitter, gambling and time sensitive information

Big Data presents many challenges related to volume, whether one is interested in studying past datasets or, even more problematically, attempting to work with live streams of data. The most obvious challenge, in a ‘noisy’ environment such as contemporary social media, is to collect the pertinent information; be that information for a specific study, tweets which can inform emergency services or other responders to an ongoing crisis, or give an advantage to those involved in prediction markets. Often, such a process is iterative, with keywords and hashtags changing with the passage of time, and both collection and analytic methodologies need to be continually adapted to respond to this changing information. While many of the data sets collected and analyzed are preformed, that is they are built around a particular keyword, hashtag, or set of authors, they still contain a large volume of information, much of which is unnecessary for the current purpose and/or potentially useful for future projects. Accordingly, this panel considers methods for separating and combining data to optimize big data research and report findings to stakeholders. The first paper considers possible coding mechanisms for incoming tweets during a crisis, taking a large stream of incoming tweets and selecting which of those need to be immediately placed in front of responders, for manual filtering and possible action. The paper suggests two solutions for this, content analysis and user profiling. In the former case, aspects of the tweet are assigned a score to assess its likely relationship to the topic at hand, and the urgency of the information, whilst the latter attempts to identify those users who are either serving as amplifiers of information or are known as an authoritative source. Through these techniques, the information contained in a large dataset could be filtered down to match the expected capacity of emergency responders, and knowledge as to the core keywords or hashtags relating to the current event is constantly refined for future data collection. The second paper is also concerned with identifying significant tweets, but in this case tweets relevant to particular prediction market; tennis betting. As increasing numbers of professional sports men and women create Twitter accounts to communicate with their fans, information is being shared regarding injuries, form and emotions which have the potential to impact on future results. As has already been demonstrated with leading US sports, such information is extremely valuable. Tennis, as with American Football (NFL) and Baseball (MLB) has paid subscription services which manually filter incoming news sources, including tweets, for information valuable to gamblers, gambling operators, and fantasy sports players. However, whilst such services are still niche operations, much of the value of information is lost by the time it reaches one of these services. The paper thus considers how information could be filtered from twitter user lists and hash tag or keyword monitoring, assessing the value of the source, information, and the prediction markets to which it may relate. The third paper examines methods for collecting Twitter data and following changes in an ongoing, dynamic social movement, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement. It involves the development of technical infrastructure to collect and make the tweets available for exploration and analysis. A strategy to respond to changes in the social movement is also required or the resulting tweets will only reflect the discussions and strategies the movement used at the time the keyword list is created — in a way, keyword creation is part strategy and part art. In this paper we describe strategies for the creation of a social media archive, specifically tweets related to the Occupy Wall Street movement, and methods for continuing to adapt data collection strategies as the movement’s presence in Twitter changes over time. We also discuss the opportunities and methods to extract data smaller slices of data from an archive of social media data to support a multitude of research projects in multiple fields of study. The common theme amongst these papers is that of constructing a data set, filtering it for a specific purpose, and then using the resulting information to aid in future data collection. The intention is that through the papers presented, and subsequent discussion, the panel will inform the wider research community not only on the objectives and limitations of data collection, live analytics, and filtering, but also on current and in-development methodologies that could be adopted by those working with such datasets, and how such approaches could be customized depending on the project stakeholders.

Future-proofing the pharmacy profession in a hypercompetitive market

This paper highlights the hypercompetitive nature of the current pharmacy landscape in Australia and to suggest either a superior level of differentiation strategy or a focused differentiation strategy targeting a niche market as two viable, alternative business models to cost leadership for small, independent community pharmacies. A description of the Australian health care system is provided as well as background information on the current community pharmacy environment in Australia. The authors propose a differentiation or focused differentiation strategy based on cognitive professional services (CPS) which must be executed well and of a superior quality to competitors' services. Market research to determine the services valued by target customers and that they are willing to pay for is vital. To achieve the superior level of quality that will engender high patient satisfaction levels and loyalty, pharmacy owners and managers need to develop, maintain and clearly communicate service quality specifications to the staff delivering these services. Otherwise, there will be a proliferation of pharmacies offering the same professional services with no evident service differential. However, to sustain competitive advantage over the long-term, these smaller, independent community pharmacies will need to exploit a broad core competency base in order to be able to continuously introduce new sources of competitive advantage. With the right expertise, the authors argue that smaller, independent community pharmacies can successfully deliver CPS and sustain profitability in a hypercompetitive market.

Exploring the international market selection of small to medium sized enterprises

Research into the international market selection (IMS) of small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) commonly identifies psychic distance and networks as being the most important determinants of a firm’s IMS. Whether regional factors, such as bilateral and multilateral regional integration, are important as determinants of IMS is not well understood. This paper utilises a multiple case study method through in-depth interviews to investigate, in the context of the current business environment, how important regionalisation, psychic distance and networks are as determinants of IMS among SMEs in the food and beverage industries within Australia and Malaysia. The study found regional considerations to be important to the IMS of Malaysian but not Australian firms, while psychic distance was considered an important determinant on IMS by only half of the sampled firms. The role of networks, however, was considered the most important determinant of IMS among all the sampled firms.

Defining expected cost for the air conditioning to avoid a price spike of electricity market under DSR model

This work presents a demand side response model (DSR) which assists small electricity consumers, through an aggregator, exposed to the market price to proactively mitigate price and peak impact on the electrical system. The proposed model allows consumers to manage air-conditioning when as a function of possible price spikes. The main contribution of this research is to demonstrate how consumers can minimise the total expected cost by optimising air-conditioning to account for occurrences of a price spike in the electricity market. This model investigates how pre-cooling method can be used to minimise energy costs when there is a substantial risk of an electricity price spike. The model was tested with Queensland electricity market data from the Australian Energy Market Operator and Brisbane temperature data from the Bureau of Statistics during hot days on weekdays in the period 2011 to 2012.

Experimental evaluation of an autonomous surface vehicle for water quality and greenhouse gas emission monitoring

This paper describes the experimental evaluation of a novel Autonomous Surface Vehicle capable of navigating complex inland water reservoirs and measuring a range of water quality properties and greenhouse gas emissions. The 16 ft long solar powered catamaran is capable of collecting water column profiles whilst in motion. It is also directly integrated with a reservoir scale floating sensor network to allow remote mission uploads, data download and adaptive sampling strategies. This paper describes the onboard vehicle navigation and control algorithms as well as obstacle avoidance strategies. Experimental results are shown demonstrating its ability to maintain track and avoid obstacles on a variety of large-scale missions and under differing weather conditions, as well as its ability to continuously collect various water quality parameters complimenting traditional manual monitoring campaigns.

UV Photodissociation Action Spectroscopy of Haloanilinium Ions in a Linear Quadrupole Ion Trap Mass Spectrometer

UV-vis photodissociation action spectroscopy is becoming increasingly prevalent because of advances in, and commercial availability of, ion trapping technologies and tunable laser sources. This study outlines in detail an instrumental arrangement, combining a commercial ion-trap mass spectrometer and tunable nanosecond pulsed laser source, for performing fully automated photodissociation action spectroscopy on gas-phase ions. The components of the instrumentation are outlined, including the optical and electronic interfacing, in addition to the control software for automating the experiment and performing online analysis of the spectra. To demonstrate the utility of this ensemble, the photodissociation action spectra of 4-chloroanilinium, 4-bromoanilinium, and 4-iodoanilinium cations are presented and discussed. Multiple photoproducts are detected in each case and the photoproduct yields are followed as a function of laser wavelength. It is shown that the wavelength-dependent partitioning of the halide loss, H loss, and NH3 loss channels can be broadly rationalized in terms of the relative carbon-halide bond dissociation energies and processes of energy redistribution. The photodissociation action spectrum of (phenyl)Ag-2 (+) is compared with a literature spectrum as a further benchmark.

Ultraviolet Photodissociation of the N-Methylpyridinium Ion: Action Spectroscopy and Product Characterization

The ultraviolet photodissociation of gas-phase N-methylpyridinium ions is studied at room temperature using laser photodissociation mass spectrometry and structurally diagnostic ion-molecule reaction kinetics. The C5H5N-CH3+ (m/z 94), C5H5N-CD3+ (m/z 97), and C5D5N-CH3+(m/z 99) isotopologues are investigated, and it is shown that the N-methylpyridinium ion photodissociates by the loss of methane in the 36 000 - 43 000 cm(-1) (280 - 230 nm) region. The dissociation likely occurs on the ground state surface following internal conversion from the SI state. For each isotopologue, by monitoring the photofragmentation yield as a function of photon wavenumber, a broad vibronically featured band is recorded with origin (0-0) transitions assigned at 38 130, 38 140 and 38 320 cm(-1) for C5H5N-CH3+ C5H5N-CD3+ and C5D5N-CH3+, respectively. With the aid of quantum chemical calculations (CASSCF(6,6)/aug-cc-pVDZ), most of the observed vibronic detail is assigned to two in-plane ring deformation modes. Finally, using ion-molecule reactions, the methane coproduct at m/z 78 is confirmed as a 2-pyridinylium ion.

Does Addition of NO2 to Carbon-Centered Radicals Yield RONO or RNO2? An Investigation Using Distonic Radical Ions

Nitrogen dioxide is used as a "radical scavenger" to probe the position of carbon-centered radicals within complex radical ions in the gas phase. As with analogous neutral radical reactions, this addition results in formation of an \[M + NO2](+) adduct, but the structural identity of this species remains ambiguous. Specifically, the question remains: do such adducts have a nitro-(RNO2) or nitrosoxy-(RONO) moiety, or are both isomers present in the adduct population? In order to elucidate the products of such reactions, we have prepared and isolated three distonic phenyl radical cations and observed their reactions with nitrogen dioxide in the gas phase by ion-trap mass spectrometry. In each case, stabilized \[M + NO2](+) adduct ions are observed and isolated. The structure of these adducts is probed by collision-induced dissociation and ultraviolet photodissociation action spectroscopy and a comparison made to the analogous spectra of authentic nitro-and nitrosoxy-benzenes. We demonstrate unequivocally that for the phenyl radical cations studied here, all stabilized \[M + NO2](+) adducts are exclusively nitrobenzenes. Electronic structure calculations support these mass spectrometric observations and suggest that, under low-pressure conditions, the nitrosoxy-isomer is unlikely to be isolated from the reaction of an alkyl or aryl radical with NO2. The combined experimental and theoretical results lead to the prediction that stabilization of the nitrosoxy-isomer will only be possible for systems wherein the energy required for dissociation of the RO-NO bond (or other low energy fragmentation channels) rises close to, or above, the energy of the separated reactants.

Ozone-induced dissociation of conjugated lipids reveals significant reaction rate enhancements and characteristic odd-electron product ions

Ozone-induced dissociation (OzID) is an alternative ion activation method that relies on the gas phase ion-molecule reaction between a mass-selected target ion and ozone in an ion trap mass spectrometer. Herein, we evaluated the performance of OzID for both the structural elucidation and selective detection of conjugated carbon-carbon double bond motifs within lipids. The relative reactivity trends for \[M + X](+) ions (where X = Li, Na, K) formed via electrospray ionization (ESI) of conjugated versus nonconjugated fatty acid methyl esters (FAMEs) were examined using two different OzID-enabled linear ion-trap mass spectrometers. Compared with nonconjugated analogues, FAMEs derived from conjugated linoleic acids were found to react up to 200 times faster and to yield characteristic radical cations. The significantly enhanced reactivity of conjugated isomers means that OzID product ions can be observed without invoking a reaction delay in the experimental sequence (i.e., trapping of ions in the presence of ozone is not required). This possibility has been exploited to undertake neutral-loss scans on a triple quadrupole mass spectrometer targeting characteristic OzID transitions. Such analyses reveal the presence of conjugated double bonds in lipids extracted from selected foodstuffs. Finally, by benchmarking of the absolute ozone concentration inside the ion trap, second order rate constants for the gas phase reactions between unsaturated organic ions and ozone were obtained. These results demonstrate a significant influence of the adducting metal on reaction rate constants in the fashion Li > Na > K.