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No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Pyrite oxidation in coal-bearing strata is recognised as the main precursor to Acidic Mine Drainage (AMD) generation. Predicting AMD quality and quantity for remediation, or proposed extraction, requires assessment of interactions between oxidising fluids and pyrite, and between oxidation products and groundwater. Current predictive methods and models rarely account for individual mineral weathering rates, or their distribution within rock. Better constraints on the importance of such variables in controlling rock leachate are required to provide more reliable predictions of AMD quality. In this study assumptions made during modelling of AMD generation were tested including; homogeneity of rock chemical and physical characteristics, controls on the rate of embedded pyrite oxidation and oxidation front ingress. The main conclusions of this work are:• The ingress of a pyrite oxidation front into coal-bearing strata depends on dominant oxidant transport mechanism, pyrite morphology and rock pore-size distribution.• Although pyrite oxidation rates predicted from rate laws and derived from experimental weathering of coal-bearing strata agree, uncertainty in surface area of framboids produces at least an order of magnitude error in predicted rates.• Pyrite oxidation products in partly unsaturated rock are removed to solution via a cycle of dissolution and precipitation at the water-rock interface. Dissolution mainly occurs along rock cleavage planes, as does diffusion of dissolved oxidant.• Significant variance of whole seam S and pyrite wt % existed over a 30 m exposure of an analysed coal seam. Assuming a seam mean pyrite wt % to predict net acid producing potential for coal and shale seams may be unsuitable, at this scale at least.• Seasonal variation in AMD discharge chemistry indicates that base-flow is not necessarily representative of extreme poor quality leachate. Summer and winter storms, following relatively dry periods, tended to release the greatest volume of pyrite oxidation products.

"Principal Components Analysis (PCA) is an important mathematical technique widely used in the world of quantitative finance. The ultimate goal of this paper is to construct a portfolio with hedging positions, which is able to outperform the SPY benchmark in terms of the Sharpe ratio. Mathematical techniques implemented in this paper besides principle component analysis are the Sharpe ratio, ARMA, ARCH, GARCH, ACF, and Markowitz methodology. Information about these mathematical techniques is listed in the introduction section. Through conducting in sample analysis, out sample analysis, and back testing, it is demonstrated that the quantitative approach adopted in this paper, such as principle component analysis, can be used to find the major driving factor causing movements of a portfolio, and we can perform a more effective portfolio analysis by using principle component analysis to reduce the dimensions of a financial model."

Component-based software engineering has been championed because they can be used to shorten the development cycle of system and therefore lower the costs. This research presents a modeling method that integrates the principle of divide and conquer and the use case concept to help model component-based software effectively. A real-world case is modeled and a system is developed to illustrate the concepts, application, and the advantages of using proposed methodology.

Groupware applications allow geographically distributed users to collaborate on shared tasks. However, it is widely recognized that groupware applications are expensive to build due to coordination services and group dynamics, neither of which is present in single-user applications. Previous collaboration transparency systems reuse existing single-user applications as a whole for collaborative work, often at the price of inflexible coordination. Previous collaboration awareness systems, on the other hand, provide reusable coordination services and multi-user widgets, but often with two weaknesses: (1) the multi-user widgets provided are special-purpose and limited in number, while no guidelines are provided for developing multi-user interface components in general; and (2) they often fail to reach the desired level of flexibility in coordination by tightly binding shared data and coordination services. In this dissertation, we propose a component-based approach to developing group- ware applications that addresses the above two problems. To address the first prob- lem, we propose a shared component model for modeling data and graphic user inter- face(GUI) components of groupware applications. As a result, the myriad of existing single-user components can be re-purposed as shared GUI or data components. An adaptation tool is developed to assist the adaptation process. To address the second problem, we propose a coordination service framework which systematically model the interaction between user, data, and coordination protocols. Due to the clean separation of data and control and the capability to dynamically "glue" them together, the framework provides reusable services such as data distribution, persistence, and adaptable consistency control. The association between data and coordination services can be dynamically changed at runtime. An Evolvable and eXtensible Environment for Collaboration (EXEC) is built to evaluate the proposed approach. In our experiments, we demonstrate two benefits of our approach: (1) a group of common groupware features adapted from existing single- user components are plugged in to extend the functionalities of the environment itself; and (2)coordination services can be dynamically attached to and detached from these shared components at different granules to support evolving collaboration needs.

Thesis (M.S.)--Worcester Polytechnic Institute. / Keywords: component adaptations; active interfaces; blackbox component adaptation; component specification language; software reuse. Includes bibliographical references.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Computer Science and Information Systems / Master / Master of Philosophy