Petroleum coke (petcoke) has been burned at kraft pulp mills to partially substitute for natural gas and fuel oil used in lime kilns. Due to the high vanadium and sulfur contents in petcoke, there had been concerns over the impact of burning petcoke on kiln and chemical recovery operations. Laboratory studies were performed to examine the fate of vanadium and sulfur in lime kilns and chemical recovery cycle. The results suggest that most of the vanadium in petcoke quickly forms calcium vanadates with lime in the kiln, mostly 3CaO•V2O5. In the causticizers, calcium vanadates react with Na2CO3 in green liquor to form sodium vanadate (NaVO3). Due to its high solubility, NaVO3 dissolves in the liquor circulating around the chemical recovery system. V becomes enriched in the liquor, leading to vanadium build-up in the system. The S in petcoke would stay in the reburned lime, lower the lime availability, increase SO2 emissions from the kiln stack, alter the S balance, increase the liquor sulphidity, and potentially contribute to ring formation in the kiln.

In this dissertation, we study the state-dependent two-user interference channel, where the state information is non-causally known at both transmitters but unknown to either of the receivers. We first propose two coding schemes for the discrete memoryless case: simultaneous encoding for the sub-messages in the first one and super-position encoding in the second one, both with rate splitting and Gel'fand-Pinsker coding. The corresponding achievable rate regions are established. Moreover, for the Gaussian case, we focus on the simultaneous encoding scheme and propose an active interference cancellation mechanism, which is a generalized dirty-paper coding technique, to partially eliminate the state effect at the receivers. The corresponding achievable rate region is then derived. We also propose several heuristic schemes for some special cases: the strong interference case, the mixed interference case, and the weak interference case. For the strong and mixed interference case, numerical results are provided to show that active interference cancellation significantly enlarges the achievable rate region. For the weak interference case, flexible power splitting instead of active interference cancellation improves the performance significantly. Moreover, we focus on the simplest symmetric case, where both direct link gains are the same with each other, and both interfering link gains are the same with each other. We apply the above coding scheme with different dirty paper coding parameters. When the state is additive and symmetric at both receivers, we study both strong and weak interference scenarios and characterize the theoretical gap between the achievable symmetric rate and the upper bound, which is shown to be less than 1/4 bit for the strong interference case and less than 3/4 bit for the weak interference case. Then we provide numerical evaluations of the achievable rates against the upper bound, which validates the theoretical analysis for both strong and weak interference scenarios. Finally, we define the generalized degrees of freedom for the symmetric Gaussian case, and compare the lower bounds against the upper bounds for both strong and weak interference cases. We also show that our achievable schemes can obtain the exact optimal values of the generalized degrees of freedom, i.e., the lower bounds meet the upper bounds for both strong and weak interference cases.

Paper is a complex fibrous material whose production involves substantial amounts of natural and industrial resources. To reduce its manufacturing costs, the pulp and paper industry often employs optical technology such as high sensitivity laser sensors used to measure physical parameters like thickness and opacity. More recently, computer simulations of paper optical properties are also being used to accelerate the research cycle required to the development of new types of paper. In these simulations, the bulk scattering of paper is usually approximated by analytical formulas, notably the Henyey-Greenstein function. In this work, we qualitatively investigate the degree of accuracy of such approximations with respect to collimated light. More specifically, an experimental set-up was devised to record the transmission of red and green HeNe lasers through different paper samples. The measured data was compared with data obtained using the Henyey-Greenstein function and data obtained using an alternative exponentiated cosine function. The comparisons are used to qualitatively assess the degree of accuracy of the bulk scattering approximations provided by both functions. This work closes with a discussion on the practical implications of our findings for the modeling of paper optical properties.

ABSTRACT The Usability Implications of Long Ballot Content for Paper, Electronic, and Mobile Voting Systems by Bryan A. Campbell In the 2008 United States presidential election over 131 million ballots were cast. A substantial fraction of those ballots, approximately 23 million (17.5%), were cast as absentee ballots either domestically or by overseas and military citizens (EAC, 2008). These numbers demonstrate that a demand exists in the United States for less centralized voting procedures. One potential solution, allowing voters to cast ballots on Internet-enabled mobile devices, could potentially increase voter participation, reduce election administration costs, increase election flexibility, and provide the ability for voters to interact with familiar technology. Two experiments were conducted to examine the efficacy of a custom-designed mobile voting system as compared to more traditional voting technologies such as direct recording electronic and paper ballot voting systems. The results from experiment one suggest that displaying long ballot content as a single scrollable list may have distinct negative consequences on the effectiveness of electronic voting systems. Further, experiment one showed that candidates appearing below the fold, or not immediately visible without additional action from the voter are at a higher risk of being mistakenly voted against. The results from experiment two are largely consistent with experiment one in that they showed that a scrollable review screen led to more voting errors and that those candidates below the fold were at a distinct disadvantage.

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The main objective of this research project, carried out at Karlstad University was to investigate which paper property has the best correlation with the package integrity failure (puncture hole). To achieve this goal, a simple equipment was designed at Karlstad University. This research project was divided into two phases, more precisely first a test design with investigation of suitable parameters to carry out the tests with the newly designed equipment and secondly with the help of those parameters the investigation of paper properties which will have direct connection with puncture strength. Results showed that Tensile Energy Absorption (TEA) has the best correlation with puncture strength as compared to other paper properties used in this research project i.e. burst strength, strain at break, tear strength, and tensile strength. In real it seems to be reasonable as tensile energy absorption (TEA) is the amount of energy absorbed during straining until it breaks. Higher the tensile energy absorption, higher will be the resistance against puncture. Furthermore sack paper proved to be the type of paper grade that has the strongest resistance against package integrity failure, as it has the highest tensile energy absorption (TEA) as compared to other paper grades used in this research project. It was also observed that paper in a package should be stretched in order to minimize the risk of puncture hole.

Paper is a complex fibrous material whose production involves substantial amounts of natural and industrial resources. To reduce its manufacturing costs, the pulp and paper industry often employs optical technology such as high sensitivity laser sensors used to measure physical parameters like thickness and opacity. More recently, computer simulations of paper optical properties are also being used to accelerate the research cycle required to the development of new types of paper. In these simulations, the bulk scattering of paper is usually approximated by analytical formulas, notably the Henyey-Greenstein function. In this work, we qualitatively investigate the degree of accuracy of such approximations with respect to collimated light. More specifically, an experimental set-up was devised to record the transmission of red and green HeNe lasers through different paper samples. The measured data was compared with data obtained using the Henyey-Greenstein function and data obtained using an alternative exponentiated cosine function. The comparisons are used to qualitatively assess the degree of accuracy of the bulk scattering approximations provided by both functions. This work closes with a discussion on the practical implications of our findings for the modeling of paper optical properties.

For learners engaging in senior-level courses, tutors in many cases would like to pick some articles as supplementary reading materials for them each week. Unlike researchers Googling papers from the Internet, tutors, when making recommendations, should consider course syllabus and their assessment of learners along many dimensions. As such, simply Googling articles from the Internet is far from enough. That is, learner models of each individual, including their learning interest, knowledge, goals, etc. should be considered when making paper recommendations, since the recommendation should be carried out so as to ensure that the suitability of a paper for a learner is calculated as the summation of the fitness of the appropriateness of it to help the learner in general. This type of the recommendation is called a Pedagogical Paper Recommender.<p>In this thesis, we propose a set of recommendation methods for a Pedagogical Paper Recommender and study the various important issues surrounding it. Experimental studies confirm that making recommendations to learners in social learning environments is not the same as making recommendation to users in commercial environments such as Amazon.com. In such learning environments, learners are willing to accept items that are not interesting, yet meet their learning goals in some way or another; learners overall impression towards each paper is not solely dependent on the interestingness of the paper, but also other factors, such as the degree to which the paper can help to meet their cognitive goals.<p>It is also observed that most of the recommendation methods are scalable. Although the degree of this scalability is still unclear, we conjecture that those methods are consistent to up to 50 papers in terms of recommendation accuracy. <p>The experiments conducted so far and suggestions made on the adoption of recommendation methods are based on the data we have collected during one semester of a course. Therefore, the generality of results needs to undergo further validation before more certain conclusion can be drawn. These follow up studies should be performed (ideally) in more semesters on the same course or related courses with more newly added papers. Then, some open issues can be further investigated. <p>Despite these weaknesses, this study has been able to reach the research goals set out in the proposed pedagogical paper recommender which, although sounding intuitive, unfortunately has been largely ignored in the research community. <p>Finding a good paper is not trivial: it is not about the simple fact that the user will either accept the recommended items, or not; rather, it is a multiple step process that typically entails the users navigating the paper collections, understanding the recommended items, seeing what others like/dislike, and making decisions. Therefore, a future research goal to proceed from the study here is to design for different kinds of social navigation in order to study their respective impacts on user behavior, and how over time, user behavior feeds back to influence the system performance.

The paper and pulp industry saw an increase in the number of mergers in 1980s and 1990s. There had been consolidation of a number of smaller companies into larger corporations, which have greater management, financial, and marketing power. This merging trend has resulted in a fewer number of firms and an increasing concentration in the industry. Although the number of firms has decreased, the total industry capacity has been increasing. The combination of these interesting factors has motivated the topic of this masters thesis. The primary purpose of this research is to explore the factors that positively influence a firms decision to vertically integrate into producing its own pulp.