Pressure and rate analysis in unconventional reservoirs

The aim of this work is to develop a realistic conceptual shale gas reservoir model that explains the observed behaviour of Haynesville wells and can predict their future behaviour. A model developed by Kostyleva (2019) consists of a two zone repetitive element for each set of wellbore perforations. A fractured zone is in contact with the wellbore and surrounded by a matrix zone representing the rock unaffected by fracturing. The two zones have different initial permeabilities. The matrix permeability decreases as soon as its pore pressure begins to fall. The decline in fractured zone permeability starts below a threshold pressure. Later, a pseudo-skin factor is introduced and increases with time. The validation of Kostyleva’s (2019) model is continued by accurately simulating the dynamic pressure behaviour of 8 Haynesville Shale wells from the period 2014 – 2016. Two components of Kostyleva’s (2019) model seem unrealistic. Any pressure drop in a region intended to represent the network of fractures around a wellbore should cause an immediate fall in its permeability. Field observations do not support the existence of an actual skin factor. Therefore, the present study proposes a new Multiple Fracture Zone (MFZ) model. Each perforation set is surrounded by several zones. Each zone represents a volume of shale containing both matrix and fractures and has a different permeability-pressure relationship. Fractures in zones nearer the wellbore contain more proppant and are less compressible. Any pressure drop decreases permeability and no pseudo-skin factor needs to be introduced. The MFZ model has been validated by accurately simulating the dynamic pressure behaviour of 8 Haynesville Shale wells from the period 2014 – 2018.Open Acces

The“specialness” Of Religious Conscience: An Egalitarian Response

Religion is often singled out for special legal treatment in Western societies. This is certainly true in the United States where religion enjoys a special place in the First Amendment to the Constitution via the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses. Through Free Exercise guarantees, for example, the Supreme Court held in Wisconsin v. Yoder that Amish children were entitled to an exemption from compulsory school attendance laws after the eighth grade, emphasizing that this was a uniquely religious exemption that did not apply to everyone. Moreover, those conscientiously objecting to contemporary vaccination laws may find themselves with varying protections depending on which US state they live in. For example, if both an Atheist and a Christian conscientiously object to the mandatory vaccine laws in New York, a legal exemption may be granted to the Christian but not the Atheist under New York’s current legal framework. These cases and many like it raise an important question: what, if anything, is “special” about religious conscience beliefs that justifies their special legal treatment? In this dissertation, I argue that, because religious and nonreligious conscience beliefs are sufficiently similar in nature, there is no reason to treat them differently before the law. In this way, I offer an Egalitarian Response to the question about religion’s legal specialness. In the first chapter, I introduce a few historical discussions concerning religion’s specialness. In the second chapter, I develop and defend a broad account of ‘conscience’ against competing notions in order to navigate questions concerning the comparative features of religious and nonreligious conscience more effectively. In the third and fourth chapters, I analyze several possibly demarcating features of religious conscience beliefs taken to be legally relevant by theorists in the field. At the end of these chapters I conclude that, when compared to the nonreligious conscience, the religious conscience fails to possess sufficiently differentiating features so that comparative special legal treatment is warranted. In the fifth and final chapter, I field lurking objections to the Egalitarian Response

The reliability, validity and clinical utility of the Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation – ten-item version (CORE-10) in post-acute patients with stroke

Objective: To explore the validity, reliability, and clinical utility of the Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation – ten-item version (CORE-10: a ten-item questionnaire designed to measure psychological distress) in a stroke inpatient sample and calculate reliable and clinically significant change scores. Setting: A post-acute stroke rehabilitation ward in the East of England. Participants: A total of 53 patients with stroke, capable of completing the CORE-10 as part of their routine clinical assessment. Exclusion criteria included moderate to severe aphasia and/or alexia. Main measures: Alongside the CORE-10, the Patient Health Questionnaire – 9, the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, the Centre for Epidemiological Studies-Depression Scale, and the Beck Depression Inventory Second Edition were used as concurrent measures. Results: To assess reliability, the internal consistency and test–retest reliability of the CORE-10 were calculated. The average number of days between CORE-10 test–retest administrations was 2.84 (SD = 3.12, Mdn = 1). Concurrent validity was assessed by examining correlations between the CORE-10 and comparable measures, and clinical utility was assessed using the criteria of Burton and Tyson (2015). The internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha) for the CORE-10 was .80, and test–retest reliability interclass correlation coefficient was .81. Total score correlations between the CORE-10 and concurrent measures ranged from r = .49 to r = .89. The CORE-10 achieved the maximum score (i.e. 6/6) on criteria for clinical utility. Calculations demonstrated a reliable change index of nine points and a clinically significant change cut point of 12 on the CORE-10. Percentiles for CORE-10 total scores are reported. Conclusions: This study provides preliminary support for the CORE-10 as a valid and reliable measure that has clinical utility for screening distress in inpatients with stroke

Investigating Class-level Difficulty Factors in Multi-label Classification Problems

This work investigates the use of class-level difficulty factors in multi-label classification problems for the first time. Four class-level difficulty factors are proposed: frequency, visual variation, semantic abstraction, and class co-occurrence. Once computed for a given multi-label classification dataset, these difficulty factors are shown to have several potential applications including the prediction of class-level performance across datasets and the improvement of predictive performance through difficulty weighted optimisation. Significant improvements to mAP and AUC performance are observed for two challenging multi-label datasets (WWW Crowd and Visual Genome) with the inclusion of difficulty weighted optimisation. The proposed technique does not require any additional computational complexity during training or inference and can be extended over time with inclusion of other class-level difficulty factors.Comment: Published in ICME 202

Efficient intra- and inter-night linking of asteroid detections using kd-trees

The Panoramic Survey Telescope And Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) under development at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy is creating the first fully automated end-to-end Moving Object Processing System (MOPS) in the world. It will be capable of identifying detections of moving objects in our solar system and linking those detections within and between nights, attributing those detections to known objects, calculating initial and differentially-corrected orbits for linked detections, precovering detections when they exist, and orbit identification. Here we describe new kd-tree and variable-tree algorithms that allow fast, efficient, scalable linking of intra and inter-night detections. Using a pseudo-realistic simulation of the Pan-STARRS survey strategy incorporating weather, astrometric accuracy and false detections we have achieved nearly 100% efficiency and accuracy for intra-night linking and nearly 100% efficiency for inter-night linking within a lunation. At realistic sky-plane densities for both real and false detections the intra-night linking of detections into `tracks' currently has an accuracy of 0.3%. Successful tests of the MOPS on real source detections from the Spacewatch asteroid survey indicate that the MOPS is capable of identifying asteroids in real data.Comment: Accepted to Icaru

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: A Measurement of the Thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect Using the Skewness of the CMB Temperature Distribution

We present a detection of the unnormalized skewness induced by the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (tSZ) effect in filtered Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) 148 GHz cosmic microwave background temperature maps. Contamination due to infrared and radio sources is minimized by template subtraction of resolved sources and by constructing a mask using outlying values in the 218 GHz (tSZ-null) ACT maps. We measure = -31 +- 6 \mu K^3 (measurement error only) or +- 14 \mu K^3 (including cosmic variance error) in the filtered ACT data, a 5-sigma detection. We show that the skewness is a sensitive probe of sigma_8, and use analytic calculations and tSZ simulations to obtain cosmological constraints from this measurement. From this signal alone we infer a value of sigma_8= 0.79 +0.03 -0.03 (68 % C.L.) +0.06 -0.06 (95 % C.L.). Our results demonstrate that measurements of non-Gaussianity can be a useful method for characterizing the tSZ effect and extracting the underlying cosmological information.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures. Replaced with version accepted by Phys. Rev. D, with improvements to the likelihood function and the IR source treatment; only minor changes in the result

Evidence for dark energy from the cosmic microwave background alone using the Atacama Cosmology Telescope lensing measurements

For the first time, measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) alone favor cosmologies with $w=-1$ dark energy over models without dark energy at a 3.2-sigma level. We demonstrate this by combining the CMB lensing deflection power spectrum from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope with temperature and polarization power spectra from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. The lensing data break the geometric degeneracy of different cosmological models with similar CMB temperature power spectra. Our CMB-only measurement of the dark energy density $\Omega_\Lambda$ confirms other measurements from supernovae, galaxy clusters and baryon acoustic oscillations, and demonstrates the power of CMB lensing as a new cosmological tool.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures; replaced with version accepted by Physical Review Letters, added sentence on models with non-standard primordial power spectr