Keck Spectroscopy of Two Young Globular Clusters in the Merger Remnant NGC 3921

Low-resolution UV-to-visual spectra of two candidate globular clusters in the merger remnant NGC 3921 are presented. These two clusters of apparent magnitude V = 22.2 (Mv = -12.5) lie at projected distances of ~5 kpc from the center and move with halo-type radial velocities relative to the local galaxy background. Their spectra show strong Balmer absorption lines indicative of main-sequence turnoffs dominated by A-type stars. Comparisons with model-cluster spectra computed by Bruzual & Charlot and others yield cluster ages in the range of 200-530 Myr, and metallicities about solar to within a factor of three. Given their small half-light radii (Reff < 5 pc) and ages corresponding to ~100 core- crossing times, these clusters are gravitationally bound and, hence, indeed young globulars. Assuming that they had Chabrier-type initial mass functions, their estimated current masses are 2.3(+-0.1)x10^6 Msun and 1.5(+-0.1)x10^6 Msun, respectively, or roughly half the mass of omegaCen. Since NGC 3921 itself shows many signs of being a 0.7(+-0.3) Gyr old protoelliptical, these two young globulars of roughly solar metallicity and their many counterparts observed with the Hubble Space Telescope provide supporting evidence that, in the process of forming elliptical-like remnants, major mergers of gas-rich disks can also increase the number of metal-rich globular clusters. (Abridged)Comment: 22 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in AJ, July 200

Wild Tides: Media Infrastructure and Built Space in Post-Financial Crisis Ireland

Wild Tides articulates the ways in which the circulatory logics of contemporary capitalism are mapped within the Republic of Ireland (Ireland) through the spatial lens of media industries and their infrastructures. Building upon existing critical research on media infrastructure, financialization, and logistics, the dissertation unpacks the shifting cultural and economic policy logics in Ireland since the global financial crisis of 2007-2008. The effects of this crisis in the country revealed the extent to which Ireland’s political, economic, cultural, and environmental futures were tied to the turbulence of global financial markets and trade. The dissertation addresses this post-crisis environment through three case study chapters: 1) creative industries and media production environments around Dublin (film studios, post-production hubs, urban formations, peripheral industries and infrastructures); 2) media and cultural policy across urban and rural spaces (media production funding, tax breaks, transnational agreements, labour conditions); 3) media infrastructures and the technology industry (data centers, tech industry clusters, pro-business planning, environmental discussions). The dissertation builds on research emphasizing the integral role that infrastructure plays within the social and spatial environments of contemporary life under global capitalism, contributing insights relevant to media industry studies, infrastructure studies, science and technology studies, and human geography. Responding to formative media studies questions as to the cultural role of media within contemporary transnational capitalism and the decline of nation-state governance, the dissertation applies political economy and critical geography to expand understandings of the emplaced role of labour, communities, and landscapes within media and its infrastructures. Drawing on extensive site-specific fieldwork in Ireland, policy and discourse analysis, and an interdisciplinary theoretical grounding, my approach, as well as looking inside the media infrastructures to see how they work, also looks at intensities and externalities: the edges of governance, where local culture interacts with sites of infrastructural development. The dissertation finds that the infrastructures of production and circulation of culture and media in Ireland are deeply intertwined via financial and business policy arrangement in the Irish government both before and after the crisis, revealing entanglements of the state and transnational corporations and implications of their complex cooperation on-the-ground. The interlocking operations of the Irish state and transnational corporations effectively naturalize the role of foreign direct investment (FDI) in determining Ireland’s spatial, political, cultural, and economic futures. The thesis unpacks these financialized logics of corporate and cultural development as they are enacted and lived in an environment of widespread economic austerity and more recent recovery. The concluding chapter of the dissertation unpacks the cultural politics of data centers in Ireland and the role of the tech industry within global climate change. Speaking to the role of media infrastructure in Ireland’s present and future, it proposes ways to think about infrastructure that do not play into the shifting tides of the global economy and contribute to ongoing environmental damage

New extractive frontiers in Ireland and the moebius strip of wind/data

This article maps the interconnections between two emergent resource frontiers in Ireland: wind and data. Adding to literature about extraction and extractivism, we account for how these expanded extractive frontiers are mobilised within self-sustaining and automated formations. In Ireland, digital infrastructures such as data centres are developed by multinational tech companies to avail of a naturally cool climate and business environment friendly to their investment, part of a wider extractive system by which data are made valuable for their expansive operations. Wind farms similarly make use of Ireland’s climate to generate energy, often used to power digital infrastructures, and are increasingly embedded within ‘smart’ energy and data systems. Wind and data are seen discretely as ‘abundant’ resources, their infrastructures built on terra or (offshore) mare nullius, and their operations ‘green’. However, their infrastructures are entangled with non-renewable energy systems and tax evasive capital, and built across existing communities and environments through policy, planning logics and increasingly automated methods of maintenance and optimisation. Through what we call ‘the moebius strip of wind/data’, wind and data infrastructures are increasingly formidable in dictating our energy futures. In this article, we articulate how they are connected and how we can disentangle them, especially in their operation across urban and rural geographies

From Toxic Industries to Green Extractivism: Rural Environmental Struggles, Multinational Corporations and Ireland’s Postcolonial Ecological Regime

In this article, we analyse the political ecology of Ireland’s industrial landscape in the current era of digital capitalism, which has been posited as the primary engine of an oncoming “green” eco-modernisation via smart technologies. As our research has found over the past several years (see Bresnihan and Brodie 2021a, 2021b, 2023), far from representing benevolent contributors to the planetary transition away from fossil fuels, digital corporations are poised to become primary beneficiaries by funnelling accumulation through green transition strategies into and through their proprietary infrastructures. In what follows, we unravel the ways in which this does not represent a necessarily new development in Ireland, but rather a historical and continuous transition within Irish environmental governance that facilitates the accumulation strategies of multinational companies via a model of foreign direct investment (FDI)-led state development. In so doing, the Irish state not only participates in these activities as they implicate Irish territory within these global extractive regimes, it also enrols Irish land, labour and infrastructure into them in geographically uneven ways. But, at the same time, there have been a multitude of historical and contemporary examples of civil society objection and outright popular resistance to this development model, representing points of friction at which environmental contradictions are negotiated and contested across local communities and the state in often ambivalent way

Influence of trace erythromycin and eryhthromycin-H2O on carbon and nutrients removal and on resistance selection in sequencing batch reactors (SBRs).

Three sequencing batch reactors (SBRs) were operated in parallel to study the effects of trace erythromycin (ERY) and ERY-H2O on the treatment of a synthetic wastewater. Through monitoring (1) daily effluents and (2) concentrations of nitrogen (N) and phosphorous (P) in certain batch cycles of the three reactors operated from transient to steady states, the removal of carbon, N, and P was affected negligibly by ERY (100 microg/L) or ERY-H2O (50 microg/L) when compared with the control reactor. However, through analyzing microbial communities of the three steady state SBRs on high-density microarrays (Phylo-Chip), ERY, and ERY-H2O had pronounced effects on the community composition of bacteria related to N and P removal, leading to diversity loss and abundance change. The above observations indicated that resistant bacteria were selected upon exposure to ERY or ERY-H2O. Shortterm batch experiments further proved the resistance and demonstrated that ammonium oxidation (56-95%) was inhibited more significantly than nitrite oxidation (18-61%) in the presence of ERY (100, 400, or 800 microg/L). Therefore, the presence of ERY or ERY-H2O (at microg/L levels) shifted the microbial community and selected resistant bacteria, which may account for the negligible influence of the antibiotic ERY or its derivative ERY-H2O (at microg/L levels) on carbon, N, and P removal in the SBRs

Evaluation of video-based linear depth inversion performance and applications using altimeters and hydrographic surveys in a wide range of environmental conditions

This paper is not subject to U.S. copyright. The definitive version was published in Coastal Engineering 136 (2018): 147-160, doi:10.1016/j.coastaleng.2018.01.003.The performance of a linear depth inversion algorithm, cBathy, applied to coastal video imagery was assessed using observations of water depth from vessel-based hydrographic surveys and in-situ altimeters for a wide range of wave conditions (0.3 < significant wave height < 4.3 m) on a sandy Atlantic Ocean beach near Duck, North Carolina. Comparisons of video-based cBathy bathymetry with surveyed bathymetry were similar to previous studies (root mean square error (RMSE) = 0.75 m, bias = −0.26 m). However, the cross-shore locations of the surfzone sandbar in video-derived bathymetry were biased onshore 18–40 m relative to the survey when offshore wave heights exceeded 1.2 m or were greater than half of the bar crest depth, and broke over the sandbar. The onshore bias was 3–4 m when wave heights were less than 0.8 m and were not breaking over the sandbar. Comparisons of video-derived seafloor elevations with in-situ altimeter data at three locations onshore of, near, and offshore of the surfzone sandbar over ∼1 year provide the first assessment of the cBathy technique over a wide range of wave conditions. In the outer surf zone, video-derived results were consistent with long-term patterns of bathymetric change (r2 = 0.64, RMSE = 0.26 m, bias = −0.01 m), particularly when wave heights were less than 1.2 m (r2 = 0.83). However, during storms when wave heights exceeded 3 m, video-based cBathy over-estimated the depth by up to 2 m. Near the sandbar, the sign of depth errors depended on the location relative to wave breaking, with video-based depths overestimated (underestimated) offshore (onshore) of wave breaking in the surfzone. Wave speeds estimated by video-based cBathy at the initiation of wave breaking often were twice the speeds predicted by linear theory, and up to three times faster than linear theory during storms. Estimated wave speeds were half as fast as linear theory predictions at the termination of wave breaking shoreward of the sandbar. These results suggest that video-based cBathy should not be used to track the migration of the surfzone sandbar using data when waves are breaking over the bar nor to quantify morphological evolution during storms. However, these results show that during low energy conditions, cBathy estimates could be used to quantify seasonal patterns of seafloor evolution.This research was funded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Coastal Field Data Collection Program, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Research and Technology under ERDC's research program titled “Force Projection Entry Operations, STO D.GRD.2015.34”, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory base program from the Office of Naval Research, a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship funded by the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, and the National Science Foundation

'Vulnerability' to human trafficking : a study of Viet Nam, Albania, Nigeria and the UK: report of a shared learning event in Tirana, Albania, 24-26 October 2017

Report describes the first stages of an ethically-led, two year research study into understanding the causes, dynamics, 'vulnerabilities' to and capabilities against human trafficking in three source countries - Albania, Viet Nam and Nigeria. The focus of this report is on Viet Nam, detailing emergent themese following a two-day Shared Learning Event held in Tirana, Albania between 24-26 October 2017

'Vulnerability' to human trafficking : a study of Viet Nam, Albania, Nigeria and the UK: report of a shared learning event in Lagos, Nigeria, 17-18 January 2018

Report describes the first stages of an ethically-led, two year research study into understanding the causes, dynamics, 'vulnerabilities' to and capabilities against human trafficking in three source countries - Viet Nam, Albania and Nigeria. The focus of this report is on Viet Nam, detailing emergent themese following a two-day Shared Learning Event held in Lagos, Nigeria, between 17-18 January 2018.

'Vulnerability' to human trafficking : a study of Viet Nam, Albania, Nigeria and the UK: report of a shared learning event held in Hanoi, Viet Nam 6-7 December 2017

Report describes the first stages of an ethically-led, two year research study into understanding the causes, dynamics, 'vulnerabilities' to and capabilities against human trafficking in three source countries - Viet Nam, Albania and Nigeria. The focus of this report is on Viet Nam, detailing emergent themese following a two-day Shared Learning Event held in Hanoi, Viet Nam, between 6-7 December 2017

'Vulnerability' to human trafficking: a study of Viet Nam, Albania, Nigeria and the UK : literature review

Literature Review