Industry First Subsea Reentry Multilateral Wells: Case Study

To rapidly increase production from the Goliat Field without adding costly subsea equipment and infrastructure or mobilizing a high-end subsea construction vessel, an operator transformed two single-bore subsea wells into multilateral producers with independently controlled branches. A multidisciplinary team was assigned to perform a feasibility study for the introduction of multilateral wells. Work started with a reservoir geomechanics/wellbore stability review, based on which well construction/completion basis of design was made. The design and operations sequence were analyzed by a well engineering team. As a result, the main risks, uncertainties, and assumptions were clarified. Two candidate wells were identified, and then a multidisciplinary team was assigned to manage the project, finalize design, initiate procurement, and write procedures. Workshop preparation was closely monitored and reported on a weekly basis. The onshore team closely followed up and supported operational execution. The new laterals were added to the existing wells, and multilateral junctions were installed and tested. An intelligent completion was installed, and independent branch production started. In addition, the estimated reduction in generation of CO2 is estimated to be between 10 to 20 thousand metric tons per well as compared with drilling two new subsea wells and installing the associated infrastructure. The technology enables an exploration and production (E&P) company to introduce subsea reentry multilateral technology to increase production while minimizing costs. The process includes well candidate identification, planning, and execution. This practical example can be used for future reference by drilling and production-focused petroleum industry professionals to better understand the benefits and limitations of existing technologies.

Barriers to Adult Cochlear Implant Care in the United States: An Analysis of Health Care Delivery

Persistent underutilization of cochlear implants (CIs) in the United States is in part a reflection of a lack of hearing health knowledge and the complexities of care delivery in the treatment of sensorineural hearing loss. An evaluation of the patient experience through the CI health care delivery process systematically exposes barriers that must be overcome to undergo treatment for moderate-to-severe hearing loss. This review analyzes patient-facing obstacles including diagnosis of hearing loss, CI candidate identification and referral to surgeon, CI evaluation and candidacy criteria interpretation, and lastly CI surgery and rehabilitation. Pervasive throughout the process are several themes which demand attention in addressing inequities in hearing health disparities in the United States.

Race and Campaign Resources: Candidate Identification Numbers in Brazil

Party elites may hinder racial and ethnic minorities from winning public office by withholding resources. Prior studies have explored the distribution of money, media access, and party-list positions. In Brazil, party elites provide each candidate with a unique identification number. Voters must enter their preferred candidate’s identification number into an electronic voting machine to register their support. In this article, we replicate and extend Bueno and Dunning’s (2017) analysis of candidate identification numbers. They conclude that party elites do not provide white candidates with superior identification numbers than non-whites. We contend that assessing intraparty variation is theoretically and methodologically warranted. Using party fixed effects, we find that party elites provide non-white candidates with worse identification numbers than whites. We demonstrate that our findings are generalisable using data from other elections. Moreover, we show that party elites also withhold advantageous numbers from women and political novices.

THE CHANGING EVENT SURVEY: TRANSIENTS, SPACE DEBRIS & NEOs

Motivated by the promising era of time-domain and multi-messenger astronomy, CHanging Event Survey (CHES) is designed to join the ongoing campaign with a powerful wide-field optical telescope array. CHES project aims to monitor the transient universe, including gamma-ray bursts, fast radio bursts, the electromagnetic counterpart of gravitational waves events (kilonova), supernova, variable stars, near-earth objects, and space debris. The array consists of 12 individual wide field refractors with aperture 280 mm, covering 600 square degrees in total. In the same project, two 800 mm prime focus telescopes can be triggered for follow-up observation. Furthermore, CHES can effectively monitor 300 square deg in a dual band simultaneously, which enable the array to do candidate identification and follow-up for the triggers from LIGO/Virgo collaboration, Fermi, Swift, GECam and SVOM satellites.

Political parties and campaign resource allocation: Gender gaps in Brazilian elections

Political parties shape electoral outcomes by determining who stands for election and what campaign resources they have at their disposal. The introduction of gender quotas have led party leaders to nominate more women candidates, however, those women disproportionately lose. We contend that one of the reasons that women routinely lose is because party elites withhold the campaign resources necessary to mount an effective campaign. In this paper, we test this resource gatekeeping argument using data on the provision of campaign resources in Brazil. We analyze the distribution of three different types of party resources: candidate identification numbers, financial support, and television airtime. Our findings show that party elites provide female candidates less advantageous candidate identification numbers, less financial support, and less media access than they provide male candidates. Importantly, we do not find that gender gaps in campaign contributions are attributable to differences in candidate quality. This finding suggests that even when women are recruited to run for office, party elites may still undermine their electoral prospects.

ATP-Dependent Clp Protease Subunit C1, HvClpC1, Is a Strong Candidate Gene for Barley Variegation Mutant luteostrians as Revealed by Genetic Mapping and Genomic Re-sequencing

Implementation of next-generation sequencing in forward genetic screens greatly accelerated gene discovery in species with larger genomes, including many crop plants. In barley, extensive mutant collections are available, however, the causative mutations for many of the genes remains largely unknown. Here we demonstrate how a combination of low-resolution genetic mapping, whole-genome resequencing and comparative functional analyses provides a promising path toward candidate identification of genes involved in plastid biology and/or photosynthesis, even if genes are located in recombination poor regions of the genome. As a proof of concept, we simulated the prediction of a candidate gene for the recently cloned variegation mutant albostrians (HvAST/HvCMF7) and adopted the approach for suggesting HvClpC1 as candidate gene for the yellow-green variegation mutant luteostrians.

New Position Candidate Identification via Clustering toward an Extensible On-Body Smartphone Localization System

On-body device position awareness plays an important role in providing smartphone-based services with high levels of usability and quality. Traditionally, the problem assumed that the positions that were supported by the system were fixed at the time of design. Thus, if a user stores his/her terminal into an unsupported position, the system forcibly classifies it into one of the supported positions. In contrast, we propose a framework to discover new positions that are not initially supported by the system, which adds them as recognition targets via labeling by a user and re-training on-the-fly. In this article, we focus on a component of identifying a set of samples that are derived from a single storing position, which we call new position candidate identification. Clustering is applied as a key component to prepare a reliable dataset for re-training and to reduce the user’s burden of labeling. Specifically, density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) is employed because it does not require the number of clusters in advance. We propose a method of finding an optimal value of a main parameter, Eps-neighborhood (eps), which affects the accuracy of the resultant clusters. Simulation-based experiments show that the proposed method performs as if the number of new positions were known in advance. Furthermore, we clarify the timing of performing the new position candidate identification process, in which we propose criteria for qualifying a cluster as the one comprising a new position.