Evaluation of environmental impact assessment (EIA) practice in Western Uganda

Abstract

In spite of a wealth of scientific literature, the concept of ecosystem services (ES) has little uptake in the worlds of planning and related environmental assessment. This paper is a personal search for the reasons of this lack of uptake, based on 20 years of consultancy experience in natural resources management, combined with a (non-exhaustive) survey of recent literature and an IAIA 2015 conference workshop. The paper takes stock of available lessons and ends with a simple and straightforward stepwise approach to use ES as an integrative concept in SEA. The paper also is a plea to stop complicating life and maybe for a while forget about computational models and monetary valuation, and first start asking stakeholders and decision-makers, listen to their language and find out what kind of information is relevant to them.     

Flexible embedded circuitry: A novel process for high density, cost effective electronics

Flexible electronics are starting to emerge with all-printed but also hybrid cost effective, smart electronic products that will find a wide range of applications in large quantities in our society. Such products have to be built on low cost substrate materials like PEN or PET foils. Because of the low thermal stability and limited chemical resistance of these foils, established interconnection technologies are not suitable. The current paper describes a novel technology for making electronic circuitry which does not need incompatible thermal and chemical processes during fabrication. The technology called ‘embedded circuitry’ uses laser ablation to write the circuitry patterns in the flexible foils. These patterns are subsequently filled with conductive pastes using mask-less squeegee filling techniques. Conducting lines in flexible PEN foil with widths down to 10 μm, line gaps down to 10 μm and resistances down to 0.1 Ω/mm are demonstrated. Finite element modeling and bending tests revealed good flexibility of this low cost circuitry. Also the circuitry can be directly used for chip attachment through flipchip bonding.     

Pellet heat transfer coefficients in packed beds: Global and local values

Pellet heat transfer coefficients in a packed bed have been obtained, both for specific individual pellets and for the entire bed. They are referred to as local and global values, respectively. It appears that the local values are scattered around the global value. This is due to the heat transfer coefficient of individual pellets being statistically distributed, as a result of the randomnes of the packing. At low Reynolds numbers, both global and local values fall well below Nu = 2, which is the lower limit for a single sphere in absence of convection. In the literature, this behaviour has been attributed i.a. to axial dispersion and fluid maldistribution. However, these phenomena cannot explain why the same behaviour is observed in slurries. The fact that the local values fall below Nu = 2 would suggest that neither of these explanations is valid for packed beds.     

Residence time distribution and hold-up in a cocurrent upflow packed bed reactor at elevated pressure

The residence time distribution in liquid phase was measured in a cocurrent upflow packed bed reactor for the system methanol-hydrogen at low Reynolds numbers and at elevated pressure. The plug flow with axial dispersion model was used to describe mixing in the system. The imperfect pulse method was used to measure the system response to a tracer pulse input. The parameters were calculated using the weighted moments method. The influence of the weighting factor was investigated. The experimental and theoretical outputs, as calculated by convolution, agreed very well. Different types of correlations were used for the Bodenstein number and liquid hold-up. From these correlations, the optimal one was selected for each parameter. A comparison was made between the ordinary moments and the weighted moments methods which led to the conclusion that the latter method is superior with respect to the accuracy of the estimated parameters and therefore strongly recommended.     

Lines of curvature for polyp detection in virtual colonoscopy

Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) is a helpful addition to laborious visual inspection for preselection of suspected colonic polyps in virtual colonoscopy. Most of the previous work on automatic polyp detection makes use of indicators based on the scalar curvature of the colon wall and can result in many false-positive detections. Our work tries to reduce the number of false-positive detections in the preselection of polyp candidates. Polyp surface shape can be characterized and visualized using lines of curvature. In this paper, we describe techniques for generating and rendering lines of curvature on surfaces and we show that these lines can be used as part of a polyp detection approach. We have adapted existing approaches on explicit triangular surface meshes, and developed a new algorithm on implicit surfaces embedded in 3D volume data. The visualization of shaded colonic surfaces can be enhanced by rendering the derived lines of curvature on these surfaces. Features strongly correlated with true-positive detections were calculated on lines of curvature and used for the polyp candidate selection. We studied the performance of these features on 5 data sets that included 331 pre-detected candidates, of which 50 sites were true polyps. The winding angle had a significant discriminating power for true-positive detections, which was demonstrated by a Wilcoxon rank sum test with p < 0.001. The median winding angle and inter-quartile range (IQR) for true polyps were 7.817 and 6.770 - 9.288 compared to 2.954 and 1.995 - 3.749 for false-positive detections.     

Descendants and Origins in Term Rewriting

In this paper we treat various aspects of a notion that is central in term rewriting, namely that of descendants or residuals. We address both first-order term rewriting and λ-calculus, their finitary as well as their infinitary variants. A recurrent theme is the parallel moves lemma. Next to the classical notion of descendant, we introduce an extended version, known as origin tracking. Origin tracking has many applications. Here it is employed to give new proofs of three classical theorems: the genericity lemma in λ-calculus, the theorem of Huet and Lévy on needed reductions in first-order term rewriting, and Berry's sequentiality theorem in (infinitary) λ-calculus.     

When Does Eddy Viscosity Damp Subfilter Scales Sufficiently?

Large eddy simulation (LES) seeks to predict the dynamics of spatially filtered turbulent flows. The very essence is that the LES-solution contains only scales of size ≥Δ, where Δ denotes some user-chosen length scale. This property enables us to perform a LES when it is not feasible to compute the full, turbulent solution of the Navier-Stokes equations. Therefore, in case the large eddy simulation is based on an eddy viscosity model we determine the eddy viscosity such that any scales of size <Δ are dynamically insignificant. In this paper, we address the following two questions: how much eddy diffusion is needed to (a) balance the production of scales of size smaller than Δ; and (b) damp any disturbances having a scale of size smaller than Δ initially. From this we deduce that the eddy viscosity ν _e has to depend on the invariants q = \frac12tr(S²)q = \frac{1}{2}\mathrm{tr}(S^{2}) and r = -\frac13tr(S³)r= -\frac{1}{3}\mathrm{tr}(S^{3}) of the (filtered) strain rate tensor S. The simplest model is then given by n_e = \frac32(D/p)² |r|/q\nu_{e} = \frac{3}{2}(\Delta/\pi)^{2} |r|/q. This model is successfully tested for a turbulent channel flow (Re  _τ =590).     

MaDe4IC: an abstract method for managing model dependencies in inter-organizational cooperations

Inter-organizational cooperations are complex in terms of coordination, agreements, and value creation for involved partners. When managing complex cooperations, it is vital to maintain models describing them. Changing one model to regain consistency with the running system might result in new inconsistencies. As a consequence, this maintenance phase grows in complexity with increasing number of models. In this context, challenges are to ensure consistency at design time and to monitor the system at runtime, i.e., at design time, consistency between different models describing the cooperation needs to be ensured. At runtime, behavior of the software system needs to be compared with its underlying models. In this paper, we propose a structured and model-independent method that supports ensuring and maintaining consistency between running system and underlying models for inter-organizational cooperations.