Smartphone imaging spectrometer for egg/meat freshness monitoring

Data transmission between spectroscopy equipment and mobile terminals is critical to realising hand-held field-level monitoring. Currently, on-the-go (OTG) communication technology is a convenient and efficient method of data transmission for...

Orphan Implementations of Public Policy for Conflict-Oriented Issues

This paper aims to broaden our understanding of public policy characterized by issues of non-consensus. The idea of flexible, independent administrative decision-making for a conflict-oriented policy-type is addressed in terms of chronological constructions of policy process. Distributions of limited resources are a source of public contention likely to draw ambiguous high-level policy decisions that lack practical administrative directives. Conflicting institutional, professional and stakeholder influences, at various levels of policy processes, illuminate circumstances fostering implementations incongruent with politically motivated macro-declarations. Yet, this does not necessarily represent failed policy. A reevaluation of administrative systems, by critical deconstruction of the dominant top-down discourse, provides a frame of reference for valid divergent implementations. A conceptual progression from field-level interpretation and adaptation of macro policy, initiatory orphan implementations emerge as policy itself. This revised bottom-up modality of the policy process implies a working balance of combined outputs, providing equitable outcome to serve largescale public interest.

Large Scale Reservoir Simulation Models for Regional Understanding of Inter-Field Communications - A Case Study Offshore Abu Dhabi

Reservoir simulation models aim to reproduce at well, sector and field level the pressure and production behavior observed in the historical data. The size and resolution of the models are essentially capped by the computational resources as the numerical computations are quite complex and hardware demanding. For this reason, the use of simulation models to understand inter-field communications at regional level have been always a challenge, rarely pursued, referring those analyses to simple material balance to evaluate influxes, lacking lateral vectors to identify where volumes are coming from, especially on cases of multiple field interactions. The work presented in this paper illustrates the value of merging existing field level simulations models into a large scale regional simulation grids, in order to understand pressure disturbances observed in multiple fields Offshore Abu Dhabi. The process of merging simulation models represents a big challenge considering the high variety of approaches used in the original models, different geology complexity, fluid characteristics, different depletion regimes and field development strategies. In this study, thousands of wells, 6 structures with different fluid and equilibrium regions were used to build the biggest reservoir simulation model in Abu Dhabi. The integration of the data pursues the replication of the existing static and dynamic models, addressing in parallel lateral and vertical upscaling issues when moving from very fine into coarser grids. Implications on the change of scale on the repeatability of the HCIIP volumes and the impact of pseudo relative permeability curves on the history match were carefully analyzed during the process. Evaluation of the impact of the simplifications over the overall quality of the model was of paramount importance, interrogating whether the simplifications affects the capability of the model for assessing the pressure communication and influxes among the fields. The regional simulation model allowed to understand the effects of the peripheral water injection of a giant field on the nearby satellite fields, also the effects of these interactions on the pressure and oil saturation changes through time. Fields and Structures separated way far (20 and 40 Km away) can eventually see pressure disturbances after very long periods of time (up to 300 psi in couple of decades in some cases). Although evidences for changes in pressure are very clear and supported by RFT/MDT time lapsed data, the work also proved that changes on saturations are not very evident or can be considered very marginal on fields separated by large distances. This work represents an alternative and more accurate approach for evaluating nearby field communications and to quantify the boundary conditions to restore models at original stage before nearby interferences, allowing proper initialization of the fine scaled simulation models on pre-production status.

Landsat-based Irrigation Dataset (LANID): 30 m resolution maps of irrigation distribution, frequency, and change for the US, 1997–2017

Data on irrigation patterns and trends at field-level detail across broad extents are vital for assessing and managing limited water resources. Until recently, there has been a scarcity of comprehensive, consistent, and frequent irrigation maps for the US. Here we present the new Landsat-based Irrigation Dataset (LANID), which is comprised of 30 m resolution annual irrigation maps covering the conterminous US (CONUS) for the period of 1997–2017. The main dataset identifies the annual extent of irrigated croplands, pastureland, and hay for each year in the study period. Derivative maps include layers on maximum irrigated extent, irrigation frequency and trends, and identification of formerly irrigated areas and intermittently irrigated lands. Temporal analysis reveals that 38.5×106 ha of croplands and pasture–hay has been irrigated, among which the yearly active area ranged from ∼22.6 to 24.7×106 ha. The LANID products provide several improvements over other irrigation data including field-level details on irrigation change and frequency, an annual time step, and a collection of ∼10 000 visually interpreted ground reference locations for the eastern US where such data have been lacking. Our maps demonstrated overall accuracy above 90 % across all years and regions, including in the more humid and challenging-to-map eastern US, marking a significant advancement over other products, whose accuracies ranged from 50 % to 80 %. In terms of change detection, our maps yield per-pixel transition accuracy of 81 % and show good agreement with US Department of Agriculture reports at both county and state levels. The described annual maps, derivative layers, and ground reference data provide users with unique opportunities to study local to nationwide trends, driving forces, and consequences of irrigation and encourage the further development and assessment of new approaches for improved mapping of irrigation, especially in challenging areas like the eastern US. The annual LANID maps, derivative products, and ground reference data are available through https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5548555 (Xie and Lark, 2021a).

Qualitative Research and Case Studies in Public Administration

Public administration has experienced academic growing pains and longstanding debates related to its identity as a social and administrative science. The field’s evolution toward a narrow definition of empiricism through quantitative measurement has limited knowledge cumulation. Because the goal of all scientific endeavors is to advance by building upon and aggregating knowledge across studies, a field-level point of view eschewing traditional dichotomies such as qualitative/quantitative debates in favor of methodological pluralism allows for examination of both the art and science of public administration. To accomplish this, traditional notions of quality, namely rigor, must be reconceptualized in a way that is appropriate for the philosophical commitments of a selected methodology. Rigor should focus on the accuracy, exhaustiveness, and systematicity of data collection and analysis. This allows for quality judgments about the degree to which the methods resulted in evidence that addresses the research questions and supports stated conclusions. This is a much broader approach to rigor that addresses multiple types of inquiry and knowledge creation. Once the question of rigor is not limiting the types of research done in the field, attention can be turned to the ways in which high-quality studies can contribute to knowledge cumulation. Case studies can be used as an example of a field-level point of view, as they have the ability to utilize abductive reasoning to consider both the whole (the entire case) and the particular (factors that contribute to outcomes, processes, or theories). Case studies explore the relationship between context-independent theories and context-dependent factors using different types of data collection and analysis: a triangulation of sorts. They can test theories in multiple ways and create or suggest new theories. Considering field-level questions as a case study and synthesizing findings from multiple related studies, regardless of methodology, can help move the field forward in terms of its connection between theory and practice, art and science.

Lagrangian approach to super-sample effects on biased tracers at field level: galaxy density fields and intrinsic alignments

It has been recognized that the observables of large-scale structure (LSS) is susceptible to long-wavelength density and tidal fluctuations whose wavelengths exceed the accessible scale of a finite-volume observation, referred to as the super-sample modes. The super-sample modes modulate the growth and expansion rate of local structures, thus affecting the cosmological information encoded in the statistics of galaxy clustering data. In this paper, based on the Lagrangian perturbation theory, we develop a new formalism to systematically compute the response of a biased tracer of LSS, which is expressed perturbatively in terms of the matter density field of sub-survey modes, to the super-sample modes at the field level. The formalism presented here reproduces the power spectrum responses that have been previously derived, and provides an alternative way to compute statistical quantities with super-sample modes. As an application, we consider the statistics of the intrinsic alignments of galaxies and halos, and derive the field response of the galaxy/halo shape bias to the super-sample modes. Possible impacts of the long-mode contributions on the covariance of the three-dimensional power spectra of the intrinsic alignment are also discussed, and the signal-to-noise ratios are estimated.

Artificial and natural electromagnetic structures with strongly inductive surface impedance

Artificial and natural electromagnetic structures with strongly inductive surface impedance are considered. The object of the research is layered structures of the “dielectric-conductor” type. The existence of impedance media with the maximum possible phase of a strongly inductive impedance in the range from a few hertz to tens of gigahertz has been established. The results of numerical modelling of the propagation of decimeter radio waves over a plane strongly inductive surface are presented, these numerical results are necessary for calculating the attenuation function W and the field level E of microwave electromagnetic waves.