Gas production from low-permeability (tight) gas sandstones is increasingly important in the USA as conventional gas reservoirs are being depleted, and its importance will increase worldwide in future decades. Travis Peak tight sandstones have produced gas since the 1940s. In this study, well log, 2D seismic, core, and production data were used to evaluate the geologic setting and reservoir characteristics of the Travis Peak formation. The primary objective was to assess the potential for basinward extension of Travis Peak gas production along the west margin of the East Texas Basin. Along the west margin of the East Texas Basin, southeast-trending Travis Peak sandstones belts were deposited by the Ancestral Red River fluvial-deltaic system. The sandstones are fine-grained, moderately well sorted, subangular to subrounded, quartz arenites and subarkoses; reservoir quality decreases with depth, primarily due to diagenetic quartz overgrowths. Evaluation of drilling mud densities suggests that strata deeper than 12,500 ft may be overpressured. Assessment of the geothermal gradient (1.6 °F/100 ft) indicates that overpressure may be relict, resulting from hydrocarbon generation by Smackover and Bossier formation potential source rocks. In the study area, Travis Peak cumulative gas production was 1.43 trillion cubic feet from January 1, 1961, through December 31, 2005. Mean daily gas production from 923 wells was 925,000 cubic ft/well/day, during the best year of production. The number of Travis Peak gas wells in “high-cost” (tight sandstone) fields increased from 18 in the decade 1966-75 to 333 in the decade 1996-2005, when high-cost fields accounted for 33.2% of the Travis Peak gas production. However, 2005 gas production from high cost fields accounted for 63.2% of the Travis Peak total production, indicating that production from high-cost gas wells has increased markedly. Along the west margin of the East Texas Basin, hydrocarbon occurs in structural, stratigraphic, and combination traps associated with salt deformation. Downdip extension of Travis Peak production will depend on the (1) burial history and diagenesis, (2) reservoir sedimentary facies, and (3) structural setting. Potential Travis Peak hydrocarbon plays include: updip pinch-outs of sandstones; sandstone pinch-outs at margins of salt-withdrawal basins; domal traps above salt structures; and deepwater sands.

Natural life history of cephalopods have been puzzling marine biologists for a long time. Fishery scientists also met with great difficulty in managing resources of squids as well as cuttlefishes. The lack of the accurate equation defining growth through time is one of the major reasons. This was due mainly to no stable characteristic for age determinations. It was known that in anatomy, stripe layers of cuttlebone are similar in embryonic development as shells of the bivalve, which has been used for age determinations. This study suggested that by taking the stripe marks on the bottom surface of the cuttlebone as quasi-daily-aging characters, it is possible to define the trend of growth of cuttlefish by (either a von Bertalanffy or Gompertz) growth equation. A semi-automatic computer processing system was designed and organized to measure the stripe area lengths (SAL) and lengths of stripe margin (LSM) for all stripe marks upon individual cuttlebone (analogous to scale reading in fishery research for the same purpose) of ¡]Sepia pharaonic Ehrenberg¡A1831¡^. A total of 21 cuttlebones were measured and the data analyzed. It appeared that the growth of the cuttlefishes are still on the stage of acceleration, and is not suitable to be represented by the VBGF curve traditionally used. Using SAL= and LSM= ' as length indicators respectively, two Gompertz growth equations were respectively estimated as followed. = 30.00*exp[-3.73*exp(-0.012*t)] ' = 23.18*exp[-4.27*exp(-0.015*t)] Two functional linear regression formulas were also prepared as: = -1.2684 + 0.7729 * L ' = -0.7829 + 0.6297 * L The above formulas can be used for the transformation between SAL (or LAM) and body length. The well-known Rosa Lee¡¦s phenomenon was not found either based on the character of SAL or LSM, implying that during the trend of growing, the mortality of Sepia pharaonic were not significantly different among different sizes of organisms. It was expected that with this breakthrough in technique and theory, additional knowledge on the populations biology of cuttlefish can be known in more detail.

This thesis analyses the effect of sectoral and macroeconomic variables on the profitability of the Turkish commercial banks over the period 2005-2009:3 by using multiple regressions. In this study, profitability of Turkish banking system in the mentioned period is discussed and questions such as why some commercial banks are more profitable than others and to what extent discrepancies in banks&rsquo / profitability are due to variation in endogenous factors under the control of bank management and to what extent external factors impact the profitability performance of these banks are sought to answer. Firstly, the empirical results revealed that sectoral characteristics explain a substantial part of the within country variation in bank interest margins and net profitability. High profitability tends to be associated with banks that hold a relatively high amount of equity capital, and with large non interest income. Other important internal determinants of banks&rsquo / profitability are non-interest expenses and fixed assets which have negative and significant impact. Also, equity capital is the internal determinant of net interest margin. Secondly, it is found that inflation is the macroeconomic determinant of net interest margin and profitability.

Abstract In recent years, domestic energy policy has continuously changed, especially, after a liberalization of electric power market opened, resulting into the power industry proprietor expected to has a stable electric power supply systems, high power generation, high thermal efficiency and low heat rate. They will consistently devise a way to propose a strategy of improved or enhanced in the light of a competitive footstone for electric force market. About 90% worldwide and 65% domestic electricity are generated by the thermal power plants, where the energy source is obtained from burning the fossil fuels. Therefore, Increasing the power generation capacity of thermal power plants will substantially raise to the percent reserve margin of to be smaller than 12% over the years. In Taiwan, the ambient temperature is always higher than 30oC at summer. When gas turbine has operated during peak, gave rise to deteriorate its power generation capability and often actually generated power lower 10% than based on a design condition of ISO 15oC. This study adopts a way which is not same as conventional method increased power generation capability of the thermal power plants. In other word, reducing the inlet air temperature to gas turbine, it will increase the air flow mass rate and the generated-power capacity. By means of EPRI Gate Cycle Software constructing a typical combined-cycle power plant, at the same time, to simulate and to search out an effective operating control strategy for the power plant with GTIAC. Furthermore, applying the electric chiller and the absorption chiller to combined-cycle power plant as an inlet air cooling system use thermodynamic and engineering analysis to discuss an extent of energy utilizing, the valuability of energy application, to access the economic effect of investing equipment to acquire an optimal balance point. Selecting the inlet air temperature 15oC,10oC and comparing the thermal performance of electric chiller with that of absorption chiller. Then, proposing a feasible suggestion to treat as an important reference criteration of improving present power GENSET and planning to install a thermal power plant for the electric power proprietor.

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Accurate tumor tracking remains as a major challenge in radiation therapy. Large margins are added to the clinical target volume (CTV) to ensure the treatment of tumor in presence of patient setup uncertainty and that caused by intra-motion. Fiducial seeds and calypso markers are commonly implanted into the disease sites to further reduce the dose delivery error due to tumor motion. For more accurate dose delivery and improved patient comfort, the use of radioactive tracers in positron emission tomography (PET) as non-invasive tumor markers has been proposed - a concept called emission-guided radiation therapy (EGRT). Instead of using images obtained from a stand-alone PET scanner for treatment guidance, we mount a positron imaging system on a radiation therapy machine. Such an EGRT system is able to track the tumor in real time based on the lines of response (LOR) of the tumor positron events, and perform radiation therapy simultaneously. In this work, we illustrate the EGRT concept using computer simulations and propose a typical treatment scheme. EGRT's advantage on increased dose delivery accuracy is demonstrated using a pancreas tumor case and a lung tumor case without the setup margin and motion margin. The emission process is simulated by Geant4 Application for Tomographic Emission package and Linac dose delivery is simulated using a voxel-based Monte Carlo algorithm. The tumor tracking error can be controlled within 2 mm which indicates margins can be significantly reduced. The dose distributions show that the proposed EGRT can accurately deliver the prescribed dose to the CTV with much less margins. Although still in a preliminary research stage, EGRT has the potential to substantially reduce tumor location uncertainties and to greatly increase the performance of current radiation therapy.

There are always differences between conceptual design estimates and the performance of a final product. These differences may result in constraint violations, which can have severe financial impacts. Such violations may necessitate downstream changes to recover aircraft performance. The ability to estimate the likelihood and impact of late-stage changes is key to mitigating the overall risk of a design. Reliability methods can treat design uncertainty; however, existing methods do not account for aspects of aircraft design such as sizing processes, the design freeze after conceptual design, and late-stage ``mitigation actions'' taken when a performance constraint is violated. By accounting for these elements, new reliability metrics can be developed. In addition to the probability of compliance, the designer can determine the probability of recovery through mitigation actions, which helps determine the true likelihood that a design can meet the requirements. Hypotheses are developed to fill the identified gaps, resulting in Aircraft Recovery through Mitigation & Optimization under Uncertainty for Reliability. ARMOUR augments reliability methods by integrating aircraft sizing, uncertainty margins, and mitigation actions. ARMOUR is demonstrated on the conceptual design of a large civil transport and is exercised to explore previously obscured relationships. The field of probabilistic aircraft design is enhanced by the concurrent quantification of three elements in one design environment: probability of compliance, probability of recovery after failure, and traditional design criteria. ARMOUR enables the identification of designs which both meets reliability goals and optimizes a traditional performance metric, selecting a design that efficiently meets reliability requirements.

Anecdotal descriptions and small studies have reported decreasing reimbursements from Medicare Part D sponsors and commercial third-party payers, resulting in decreased gross margins for independent pharmacies; however, reports are inconclusive regarding which payer more greatly affects independent pharmacies’ financial viability. Using 2006-2009 prescription claims data collected by a pharmacy switching company, the purpose of this study was to calculate and describe estimated reimbursement formulas and mean gross margins to assess the relative impact of these two payer groups. The study evaluated a total of 2,929,696 prescription claims paid for by Medicare Part D sponsors (n = 1,830,896) and commercial third-party payers (n = 1,098,800). The prescriptions were dispensed by 418 Texas independent pharmacies to 192,968 patients aged 65 to 94. Between 2008 and 2009, the median ingredient reimbursement ranged from AWP-17% to AWP-15% for Part D sponsors and from AWP-17.44% to AWP-15% for commercial third-party payers. The median dispensing fee ranged from $1.50 to $2.00 for Part D sponsors and from $1.10 to $2.00 for commercial third-party payers. For all payers, the median dispensing fee and median ingredient reimbursement decreased or was stagnant. Similarly, aggregate percent gross margin (calculated using the payers’ estimates of acquisition cost) decreased for both payer types between 2007 and 2009, with the mean gross margin of 4.0 percent earned for Part D prescriptions being higher than the 3.7 percent earned for commercial third-party prescriptions. In the same timeframe, the mean aggregate percent gross margin ranged from 2.8 percent to 6.0 percent among the five most popular Part D sponsors in the sample, and from 2.4 percent to 5.1 percent among the five most popular commercial third-party payers. The generic dispensing ratio explained a portion of the variance between and among payers. This study shows that significant variation exists in reimbursement formulas and percent gross margin between and among several of the most popular Part D sponsors and commercial third-party payers and supports pharmacy assertions that reimbursements from both payer types are decreasing. Pharmacies can respond to these pressures by being more conscientious of their business’ margins when reviewing contracts and increasing the proportion of generic drugs dispensed. / text

Traditional supervised machine learning algorithms are expected to have access to a large corpus of labeled examples, but the massive amount of data available in the modern world has made unlabeled data much easier to acquire than accompanying labels. Active learning is an extension of the classical paradigm intended to lessen the expense of the labeling process by allowing the learning algorithm to intelligently choose which examples should be labeled. In this dissertation, we demonstrate that the power to make adaptive label queries has benefits beyond reducing labeling effort over passive learning. We develop and explore several novel methods for active learning that exemplify these new capabilities. Some of these methods use active learning for a non-standard purpose, such as computational speedup, structure discovery, and domain adaptation. Others successfully apply active learning in situations where prior results have given evidence of its ineffectiveness. Specifically, we first give an active algorithm for learning disjunctions that is able to overcome a computational intractability present in the semi-supervised version of the same problem. This is the first known example of the computational advantages of active learning. Next, we investigate using active learning to determine structural properties (margins) of the data-generating distribution that can further improve learning rates. This is in contrast to most active learning algorithms which either assume or ignore structure rather than seeking to identify and exploit it. We then give an active nearest neighbors algorithm for domain adaptation, the task of learning a predictor for some target domain using mostly examples from a different source domain. This is the first formal analysis of the generalization and query behavior of an active domain adaptation algorithm. Finally, we show a situation where active learning can outperform passive learning on very noisy data, circumventing prior results that active learning cannot have a significant advantage over passive learning in high-noise regimes.

This dissertation consists of three essays in International Trade. The first essay studies the impact of changing tariffs on the range of goods countries export to the United States. The empirical analysis shows that tariffs tend to have a statistically significant but small impact: at best 5 percent of the increasing extensive margin for 1989-1999 and 12 percent for 1996-2006 is explained by tariff reductions. This suggests the extensive margin has not amplified the impact of tariffs on trade flows to such an extent that the relatively moderate tariff reductions since WW II can explain the strong growth of world trade. The second essay investigates the sector and country determinants of the range of goods that countries export to the United States. Besides relating the traditional determinants of comparative advantage, sectors’ factor intensities interacted with countries’ factor abundance to the extensive margin in a sector, the empirical investigation includes interactions between sector-level measures of intermediate intensity and trade frictions. Consistent with hypotheses about fragmentation, the results show that closer countries and countries with lower tariffs imposed on them export a wider range of goods in sectors that have large intermediate cost shares. The impact of trade frictions is, however, far less pronounced for the more skilled-labor intensive sectors that are characterized by use of a greater range of intermediates. The third essay studies the impact of trade liberalizations on U.S. bilateral trade from 1989-2001 with a focus on the influence of exporting country liberalizations which matter when exports are produced with imported intermediates. Guided by extensions of the Eaton and Kortum (2002) model which allows for production to involve the use of imported intermediates, the essay estimates a structural equation that links U.S. bilateral trade flows to both intermediate tariffs imposed by countries exporting to the United States and U.S. tariffs. The empirical estimates suggest that especially for less developed countries their own liberalizations have been quantitatively much more important in explaining bilateral trade growth with an effect 3 times larger than the impact of U.S. liberalizations. / text