RiverStone Health

Research conducted at the Illinois Center for Transportation evaluated sustainable applications of quarry byproducts (QB) or QB blended with coarse recycled aggregates in chemically stabilized base and subbase layers in flexible pavements. In total, eight full-scale test sections, including one conventional flexible pavement with no QB as the control section, were constructed over a subgrade with an engineered strength of 6% California bearing ratio. The test sections were stabilized with either 3% Type I Portland cement or 10% Class C fly ash by dry weight. Fractionated reclaimed asphalt pavements and fractionated recycled concrete aggregates were also used as the recycled coarse aggregates. Based on laboratory tests conducted to determine strength properties of the chemically stabilized samples, QB and recycled aggregates were blended in a ratio of 70% to30% by weight, respectively. A lightweight deflectometer was used to evaluate the quality of the construction and the curing of the test sections. The constructed test sections were then evaluated for performance through accelerated pavement testing (APT) and frequent measurement of surface deformations. The results of APT showed quite a satisfactory rutting performance of all the evaluated QB applications with no observed surface cracking after 135,000 cycles. Four of the test sections were also instrumented with soil pressure cells to measure the wheel load deviator stress on top of the subgrade. The pressure measurements indicated subgrade pressures 3−5 times lower for the stabilized QB sections compared with that of the conventional flexible pavement control section.

In this second of two University of Texas roundtables, four highly successful veterans of the U.S. energy industry, with considerable experience running both public and private companies, discuss recent developments in this rapidly evolving industry. Among the most remarkable—and a major focus of this discussion—is the dramatic expansion of the output and productivity of the Permian Basin of West Texas, and the role of private equity in accomplishing it.Although the Permian has been a major source of oil and gas since 1920, the combination of massive horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing has contributed to a tripling of production volumes from about 800,000 barrels per day to 2.5 million during the past ten years. In fact, the productivity gains are said to be so great that, even with the huge run‐up in the cost of acquiring acreage (to as high as $40,000 per acre), today's producers are projecting annual operating returns of 20% even if oil prices fail to rise above their current level of about $50 a barrel.What's more, there appears to have been a fairly clear division of labor between private and public companies in this recent development of the Permian. With most of the high‐priced acreage now being acquired by larger public companies, the primary role of private equity has been to identify and make good on opportunities to increase the productivity and value of smaller operations that can then be sold to public companies—companies that have the size and access to capital to benefit from the economies of scale produced by combining them with their other operations.Thanks to their earlier position in the value chain, investments by private equity groups have generally not only produced higher payoffs, on average, but involved larger operating and financial risks. And this difference in risk profile is reflected in a notable difference in hedging practices between public and private equity‐controlled companies. This difference was summed up as follows by a private equity partner who has also run several public oil and gas companies:To a much greater extent in private equity than in public companies, we think of our projects and companies as delivering value that is largely independent of changes in oil prices. Hedging is our way of saying we don't want to take oil price risk if we don't have to. We do not count on price increases to make our required returns. The returns come from operating the company successfully without the help of commodity prices.

This article's objective is to share various financial approaches, facts, and opinions that may be helpful to those assisting the elderly. This document has four main sections: a tool kit of ideas for dealing with financial affairs; investment facts, financial planning, and recommendations--a road map for planning and investing; long-term care insurance--who might benefit, and; toward the end, steps to take to preserve wealth when life expectancy is short.

Broadband in North America is now at critical mass, passing the inflection point from the early adopter to the early majority. In fact, Strategy Analytics predicts that by 2010, over 78 million U.S. households will have some form of broadband connectivity, much of it capable of delivering the triple play of voice, video, and high-speed Internet access. Their providers will consist of local exchange carriers, multiservice operators, and municipalities that have deployed their own triple play networks. Why the municipalities, and what do they bring to the table? In many instances, smaller cities and towns have been bypassed by the first phases of the incumbent operators' triple play deployments. For reasons of economic development, quality of living, education, and the retention of skilled workforces, the government has stepped in to fill the void. This article looks at the most ambitious municipality-driven triple play deployment in North America, the UTOPIA MetroNet in Utah. The system integrator for UTOPIA is DynamicCity, which early on defined a set of design principles that would make the network successful. These included the requirement that the network be open to multiple service providers, be carrier class, be scalable and based on future-proof technology, and that the architecture be based on open standards while keeping costs to a minimum. The article first reviews some of the considerations behind the choice of the technology and deployment approach based on these guidelines, and then describes in detail the network topology and services architecture, the current status of the deployment, and future plans. Specific topics covered include the use of multiprotocol label switching/virtual private LAN service, IP multicasting, and traffic engineering.

Concurrent programming languages including CSP and Ada use synchronous message-passing to define communication between a pair of asynchronous processes. This paper presents an efficient way to synchronize these processes by improving on Bagrodia’s algorithm that provides binary rendezvous. Simulation results are presented to show the better performance of the optimized algorithm for two cases - the case where the interaction set is composed of all possible pairs and the case where the set of next allowable interactions is of cardinality one. For the latter, the optimized algorithm also improves upon the best case delay for synchronization. The client-server computing model, the producerconsumer interaction, and interaction between processes executing parallelized tasks represent some broad classes of computations which can leverage the proposed improvements.