EOR as sequestration: Geoscience perspective

CO2 Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) has a development and operational history several decades longer than geologic sequestration of CO2 designed to benefit the atmosphere and provides much of the experience on which confidence in the newer technology is based. With modest increases in surveillance and accounting, future CO2 EOR using anthropogenic CO2 (CO2-A) captured to decrease atmospheric emissions can be used as part of a sequestration program.Bureau of Economic Geolog

Review of multidrug-resistant and extensively drug-resistant TB: global perspectives with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa

Tuberculosis (TB) remains a global emergency and is responsible for 1.7 million deaths annually. Widespread global misuse of isoniazid and rifampicin over three decades has resulted in emergence of the ominous spread of multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) and extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB) globally. These difficult to treat resistant forms of TB are increasingly seen in Asia, Eastern Europe, South America and sub-Saharan Africa, disrupting TB and HIV control programmes. We review the latest available global epidemiological and clinical evidence on drug-resistant TB in HIV-infected and uninfected populations, with focus on Africa where data are scanty because of poor diagnostic and reporting facilities. The difficult management and infection control problems posed by drug-resistant TB in HIV-infected patients are discussed. Given the increasing current global trends in MDR-TB, aggressive preventive and management strategies are urgently required to avoid disruption of global TB control efforts. The data suggest that existing interventions, public health systems and TB and HIV programmes must be strengthened significantly. Political and funder commitment is essential to curb the spread of drug-resistant TB

Theorizing surveillance in the UK crime control field

Drawing upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, this paper argues that the demise of the Keynesian Welfare State (KWS) and the rise of neo-liberal economic policies in the UK has placed new surveillance technologies at the centre of a reconfigured “crime control field” (Garland, 2001) designed to control the problem populations created by neo-liberal economic policies (Wacquant, 2009a). The paper also suggests that field theory could be usefully deployed in future research to explore how wider global trends or social forces, such as neo-liberalism or bio-power, are refracted through the crime control field in different national jurisdictions. We conclude by showing how this approach provides a bridge between society-wide analysis and micro-sociology by exploring how the operation of new surveillance technologies is mediated by the “habitus” of surveillance agents working in the crime control field and contested by surveillance subjects

Whoʼs Watching Us at Work? Toward a Structural-Perceptual Model of Electronic Monitoring and Surveillance in Organizations

Nearly 80% of organizations now employ some form of employee surveillance. This significant level of use infers a salient need for additional theory and research into the effects of monitoring and surveillance. Accordingly, this essay examines the panoptic effects of electronic monitoring and surveillance (EM/S) of social communication in the workplace and the underlying structural and perceptual elements that lead to these effects. It also provides future scholarly perspectives for studying EM/S and privacy in the organization from the vantage point of contemporary communication technologies, such as the telephone, voice mail, e-mail, and instant messaging, utilized for organizational communication. Finally, four propositions are presented in conjunction with a new communication-based model of EM/S, providing a framework incorporating three key components of the panoptic effect: (a) communication technology use, (b) organizational factors, and (c) organizational policies for EM/S

Secrecy in Educational Practices: Enacting Nested Black Boxes in Cheating and Deception Detection Systems

This paper covers secrecy from the vantage point of recent technological initiatives designed to detect cheating and deception in educational contexts as well as to monitor off-campus social media speech code violations. Many of these systems are developed and implemented by third-party corporate entities who claim practices to be proprietary and secret. The outsourcers involved in these efforts have provided one level of secrecy and educational administrators involved yet another level, thus constructing nested black boxes. Also discussed in this paper is the “paranoid style” of administration, often supported by the surveillance and construction of rosters of potential non-conformists, such as alleged cheaters and speech code violators. The educational technologies described in this article are increasingly applied to workplace practices, with young people being trained in what is deemed acceptable conduct. Secrecy can serve to alter the character of relationships within the educational institutions involved as well as inside the workplaces in which the approaches are increasingly being integrated

Locational wireless and social media-based surveillance

The number of smartphones and tablets as well as the volume of traffic generated by these devices has been growing constantly over the past decade and this growth is predicted to continue at an increasing rate over the next five years. Numerous native features built into contemporary smart devices enable highly accurate digital fingerprinting techniques. Furthermore, software developers have been taking advantage of locational capabilities of these devices by building applications and social media services that enable convenient sharing of information tied to geographical locations. Mass online sharing resulted in a large volume of locational and personal data being publicly available for extraction. A number of researchers have used this opportunity to design and build tools for a variety of uses – both respectable and nefarious. Furthermore, due to the peculiarities of the IEEE 802.11 specification, wireless-enabled smart devices disclose a number of attributes, which can be observed via passive monitoring. These attributes coupled with the information that can be extracted using social media APIs present an opportunity for research into locational surveillance, device fingerprinting and device user identification techniques. This paper presents an in-progress research study and details the findings to date

An Approach for Actions to Prevent Suicides on Commuter and Metro Rail Systems in the United States, MTI Report 12-33

The primary goals of this report are to discuss measures to prevent suicides on commuter and metro rail systems, and to outline an approach for suicide prevention on rail systems. Based on existing literature and analysis of data obtained from the Metrolink system in Southern California, it was found that most suicides occur near station platforms and near access points to the track. Suicides occurred most frequently when relatively more trains were in operation and in areas of high population density. There do not appear to be suicide “hot spots” (e.g., linked to mental hospitals in the proximity, etc.), based on data analyzed for U.S. systems. The suicide prevention measures range from relatively inexpensive signs posting call-for-help suicide hotline information to costly platform barriers that physically prevent people from jumping onto tracks in front of trains. Other prevention measures fall within this range, such as hotlines available at high frequency suicide locations, or surveillance systems that can report possible suicide attempts and provide the opportunity for intervention tactics. Because of the relatively low number of suicides on rail systems, as compared to the overall number of suicides in general, a cost-effective strategy for preventing suicides on rail systems should be approached in a very focused manner. The prevention measures executed by the rail authorities should be focused on the suicides occurring on the rail systems themselves, while the broader problem of suicides should be left to community-based prevention efforts. Moreover, prevention measures, such as surveillance and response, could “piggyback” on surveillance and response systems used for other purposes on the rail systems to make such projects economically feasible