The G8 countries propose a goal of a 50% reduction in global emissions by 2050, in an effort that needs to take account of other agreements specifying that developing countries are to be provided with incentives to action and protected from the impact of measures taken by others. To help inform international negotiations of measures to achieve these goals we develop a technique for endogenously...

The phenomenon of the cementing annulus micro clearance gas channeling directly influences cement job quality and oilfield production, so accurately describing the flow rule of cementing annulus micro clearance gas channeling is the core and "bottleneck" problem of controlling gas channeling effectively. From the perspective of the micro particle motion and based on the lattice Boltzmann method...

The semantics of programming languages lack a formal, standardized specification language. We focus on control flow semantics and propose a graphical specification framework for these semantics, consisting of three elements: a graphical control flow specification language, a rule-based approach for constructing flow graphs and transformations from the former to the latter. In this thesis we int...

Object alternation (OA) tasks are increasingly used as probes of ventral prefrontal functioning in humans. In the most common variant of the OA task, subjects must deduce the task rule through trial-and-error learning. To examine the neural correlates of OA acquisition, the authors measured regional cerebral blood flow with positron emission tomography while subjects acquired an OA task, perfor...

There is potential for over-provision of environmental harms and under-provision of environmental benefits associated with GM crops. As a result, strong public regulation is needed to ensure that full social values are considered. However, one reason for opposition to GM crops is a lack of public trust in regulatory institutions and science, and the limited opportunities afforded to public-part...