Human Rights, Trans Rights, Prisoners’ Rights: An International Comparison

In this Note, I conduct an international comparison of the state of trans prisoners’ rights to explore how different national legal contexts impact the likelihood of achieving further liberation through appeals to human rights ideals. I examine the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, India, Argentina, and Costa Rica and show the degree to which a human rights framework has been successful thus far in advancing trans prisoners’ rights. My analysis also indicates that the degree to which a human rights framework is likely to be successful in the future varies greatly between countries. In countries that are hesitant to adopt a legally internationalist orientation, a human rights framework is unlikely to see much success. Additionally, even countries with robust human rights traditions may be unlikely to apply that framework if the needs and identities of imprisoned trans people are not sufficiently visible in the national public consciousness. However, in countries with significant human rights or international law traditions, as well as a high degree of trans visibility, appeals to a human rights framework will likely lead to success in advocating for further protections for trans prisoners’ rights

DAS Preprocessing Workflow

This report addresses deliverable D1.4 of the DigiMon project, which covers the preprocessing workflow for datasets acquired by Distributed Acoustic Systems (DAS). The workflow seeks to capture the key stages required to prepare the raw seismic data for the main processing stages and demonstrates their application using both synthetic and real-world data. A description of the synthetic datasets can be found in DigiMon deliverable D1.3 report, while details of the real-world datasets are included in DigiMon reports D1.1 and D1.2

Nanomaterial structure determination using XUV diffraction

Diffraction using coherent XUV radiation is used to study the structure of nanophotonic materials, in this case an ordered array of 196nm spheres. Crystal structure and defects are visible, and the nanomaterial dielectric constant determined

PR Social and Digital Professional Challenges: A Relationship between Organizations and Their Publics

Public Relations is extensively integrated into social and digital communication platforms. PR is focused on dialogic communication grounded in the philosophy of caring (Coombs, 2007). The most effective approach to understanding the PR role through social media is to examine how these platforms are used in developing relationships between an organization and its publics. Experienced professionals suggest it is the relationship between an organization\u27s goals and the needs of its publics that allows the most effective communication process. Therefore, students conducted in-depth interviews of members of a student organization to establish the goals of the organization. Then the publics were interviewed to see if the needs of the external audience matched the goals of the organization. From this data, the students developed content for the various social media platforms. The test of this experiment will be when these platforms are established for execution and the impact results in increased membership. This reflected the relationship between Valpo student organizations and increased membership, including potential membership

High resolution imaging of the M​L​ 2.9 August 2019 earthquake in Lancashire, UK, induced by hydraulic fracturing during Preston New Road PNR-2 operations

Hydraulic fracturing (HF) at Preston New Road (PNR), Lancashire, United Kingdom, in August 2019, induced a number of felt earthquakes. The largest event (⁠ML 2.9) occurred on 26 August 2019, approximately three days after HF operations at the site had stopped. Following this, in November 2019, the United Kingdom Government announced a moratorium on HF for shale gas in England. Here we provide an analysis of the microseismic observations made during this case of HF‐induced fault activation. More than 55,000 microseismic events were detected during operations using a downhole array, the vast majority measuring less than Mw 0. Event locations revealed the growth of hydraulic fractures and their interaction with several preexisting structures. The spatiotemporal distribution of events suggests that a hydraulic pathway was created between the injection points and a nearby northwest–southeast‐striking fault, on which the largest events occurred. The aftershocks of the ML 2.9 event clearly delineate the rupture plane, with their spatial distribution forming a halo of activity around the mainshock rupture area. Across clusters of events, the magnitude distributions are distinctly bimodal, with a lower Gutenberg–Richter b‐value for events above Mw 0, suggesting a break in scaling between events associated with hydraulic fracture propagation, and events associated with activation of the fault. This poses a challenge for mitigation strategies that rely on extrapolating microseismicity observed during injection to forecast future behavior. The activated fault was well oriented for failure in the regional stress field, significantly more so than the fault activated during previous operations at PNR in 2018. The differing orientations within the stress field likely explain why this PNR‐2 fault produced larger events compared with the 2018 sequence, despite receiving a smaller volume of injected fluid. This indicates that fault orientation and in situ stress conditions play a key role in controlling the severity of seismicity induced by HF

DAS Processing Algorithms

This report addresses deliverable D1.5 of the DigiMon project, which covers processing algorithms for Distributed Acoustic Systems (DAS) datasets that are contained within a python library called DASpy. The objective of DigiMon is to develop an early-warning system for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) which utilises a broad range of sensor technologies including DAS. While the system is primarily focused on the CCS projects located in shallow offshore environment of the North Sea, it is also intended to be adaptable to onshore settings. Some of the key areas that the systems will monitor include the movement of the plume within the reservoir, well integrity and CO2 leakage into the overburden. A combination of both active and passive seismic methods will be deployed to track the movement of CO2, for example seismic reflection to image seismic velocity changes or microseismics to capture small earthquakes relating to fault activation

DAS Processing Workflow

This report addresses deliverable D1.6 of the DigiMon project, which covers the processing workflow for datasets acquired by Distributed Acoustic Systems (DAS), and follows on from the DAS Preprocessing workflow report (DigiMon Deliverable 1.4), which captured the key stages required to prepare the raw seismic data for the main processing stages. The workflows are specifically for microseismic and ambient noise interferometry methods, which are both passive seismic methods that seek to image CO2 movement within a storage reservoir and potential breaches of the reservoir