Tensile stresses around boreholes due to transient fluid flow

We present solutions for the effective stress induced by gas flow through a porous solid into a borehole resulting from sudden pressure reduction. Tensile effective stress that exceeds the strength of the solid will lead to borehole failure. This has applications to the intentional creation of cavities, relevant to the efficient recovery of coalbed methane, and the avoidance of borehole stability problems in conventional gas production.     

A comparison of the reactions to government taxation measures of twentieth century mining companies and nineteenth century pastoralists

This paper compares pastoralists in South Australia in the nineteenth century with Australian mining companies in the twentieth century as they resist the efforts of government to extract a greater proportion of the wealth created in the exploitation of natural resources. In effect, in both cases the struggle relates to the allocation of economic rent between private and corporate capital on the one hand, and the owners of the resources, the people of Australia, on the other. It is difficult not to be impressed by the similarities in the ideologies, objectives and strategies of these two groups of resource exploiters, separated though they are by over one hundred years.     

The computation of deformations

The mathematics of irrotational deformation are simplified by presentation in matrix form. Matrix equations are easily programmed and are easily interpreted in geometrical terms. Graphical operations commonly carried out on orientation nets such as rotation of data can be translated into simple matrix equations for use with a computer. If the shape and orientation of the deformation ellipsoid for a pure shear are known, a matrix can be constructed for use as a deformation matrix. This can be used to deform other deformation ellipsoids to obtain a resultant ellipsoid. It can also be used to deform geological structures such as lineations and planes. The matrix equations for these operations are very simple, but their numerical solution often requires a computer.     

Earth Observation Scientific Workflows in a Distributed Computing Environment

Geospatially Enabled Scientific Workflows offer a promising toolset to help researchers in the earth observation domain with many aspects of the scientific process. One such aspect is that of access to distributed earth observation data and computing resources. Earth observation research often utilizes large datasets requiring extensive CPU and memory resources in their processing. These resource intensive processes can be chained; the sequence of processes (and their provenance) makes up a scientific workflow. Despite the exponential growth in capacity of desktop computers, their resources are often insufficient for the scientific workflow processing tasks at hand. By integrating distributed computing capabilities into a geospatially enabled scientific workflow environment, it is possible to provide researchers with a mechanism to overcome the limitations of the desktop computer. Most of the effort on extending scientific workflows with distributed computing capabilities has focused on the web services approach, as exemplified by the OGC's Web Processing Service and by GRID computing. The approach to leveraging distributed computing resources described in this article uses instead remote objects via RPyC and the dynamic properties of the Python programming language. The Vistrails environment has been extended to allow for geospatial processing through the EO4Vistrails package ( http://code.google.com/p/eo4vistrails/ ). In order to allow these geospatial processes to be seamlessly executed on distributed resources such as cloud computing nodes, the Vistrails environment has been extended with both multi‐tasking capabilities and distributed processing capabilities. The multi‐tasking capabilities are required in order to allow Vistrails to run side‐by‐side processes, a capability it does not currently have. The distributed processing capabilities are achieved through the use of remote objects and mobile code through RPyC.     

Angular resolution of terrestrial laser scanners

Knowledge of a laser scanner's spatial resolution is necessary in order to prevent aliasing and estimate the level of detail that can be resolved from a scanned point cloud. Spatial resolution can be decoupled into range and angular components. The latter is the focus of this paper and is governed primarily by sampling interval and laser beamwidth. However, emphasis is often placed on one of these—typically sampling interval—as an indicator of resolution. Since both affect the resolution of a scanned point cloud, consideration of only one factor independent of the other can lead to a misunderstanding of a system's capabilities. This will be demonstrated to be inappropriate except under very specific conditions. A new, more appropriate resolution measure for laser scanners, the effective instantaneous field of view (EIFOV), is proposed. It is derived by modelling the shift variance of the equal angular increment sampling process, laser beamwidth-induced positional uncertainty and observed angle quantisation with ensemble average modulation transfer functions (AMTFs). Several commercially available terrestrial laser scanner systems are modelled and analysed in terms of their angular resolution capabilities using the EIFOV.     

Spatial process and data models: Toward integration of agent-based models and GIS

The use of object-orientation for both spatial data and spatial process models facilitates their integration, which can allow exploration and explanation of spatial-temporal phenomena. In order to better understand how tight coupling might proceed and to evaluate the possible functional and efficiency gains from such a tight coupling, we identify four key relationships affecting how geographic data (fields and objects) and agent-based process models can interact: identity, causal, temporal and topological. We discuss approaches to implementing tight integration, focusing on a middleware approach that links existing GIS and ABM development platforms, and illustrate the need and approaches with example agent-based models.     

Analysis of Interpolation Methods for Kinematic DGPS Control in Aerial Photogrammetry

Kinematic differential Global Positioning System (DGPS) positioning is routinely used in industry for directly observing an aircraft's position at each instant of photographic exposure during a photogammetric survey. A critical aspect of the subsequent data processing is estimation of the aircraft position at the exact time of exposure. GPS measurements are acquired at a uniform sampling rate, typically 1 Hz. The exposure times, however, do not generally coincide with these times. As a result, the exposure station positions must be interpolated from the adjacent GPS positions. This is typically done using a low-order polynomial, expressed as a function of time, for each coordinate dimension. However, trajectory perturbations induced by atmospheric turbulence can render such interpolation methods ineffective. This article will convey the results of an investigation into the use of several different interpolation models with airborne GPS data during straight, level flight. The fundamental task of time series reconstruction will first be addressed, in which several possible interpolation models are described. Two 10-Hz, airborne GPS data sets were collected to test the accuracy of each model. The error properties resulting from the application of each model to these data will be presented and analyzed in terms of time-domain statistics and frequency-domain characteristids. It will be demonstrated that interpolation error can be significantly reduced, especially in the height dimension, through judicious choice of an interpolator. ? 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.