Colorado Mesa University

Legal precarity has been used to describe the relations between 'space, law and persons' that produce illegality and shape the sociolegal exclusion of forced migrants. Precarious legal status is demarcated by hierarchies of legal and social membership and degrees of exclusion. Within the context of legal precarity, we explore the coping strategies used by forced migrants preceding and during the COVID-19 period in Italy. Our analysis focuses on interviews with 31 asylum claimants. We find that forced migrants experienced protracted legal liminality and precarity characterised by extended time spent in migration camps, unpredictable legal status determination, and, more broadly, imperfect knowledge. In particular, their legal precarity was formed or shaped by a fluctuating legal and bureaucratic system, the suspension of asylum determination processes, and the closure of institutions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The cumulative impact affected their well-being and limited their full participation in society. This paper's key contribution is in identifying strategies employed in response. Individuals employed social network support, physical exercises, faith, and cognitive reframing of the legal difficulties to cope with prolonged precarious legal precarity. These findings have implications for migration scholarship and for professionals working with forced migrants, and can help inform policy and future research.

Detecting individual tree crowns in tropical forests is essential to study these complex and crucial ecosystems impacted by human interventions and climate change. However, tropical crowns vary widely in size, structure, and pattern and are largely overlapping and intertwined, requiring advanced remote sensing methods applied to high-resolution imagery. Despite growing interest in tropical tree crown detection, annotated datasets remain scarce, hindering robust model development. We introduce SelvaBox, the largest open‑access dataset for tropical tree crown detection in high-resolution drone imagery. It spans three countries and contains more than $83\,000$ manually labeled crowns -- an order of magnitude larger than all previous tropical forest datasets combined. Extensive benchmarks on SelvaBox reveal two key findings: 1) higher-resolution inputs consistently boost detection accuracy; and 2) models trained exclusively on SelvaBox achieve competitive zero-shot detection performance on unseen tropical tree crown datasets, matching or exceeding competing methods. Furthermore, jointly training on SelvaBox and three other datasets at resolutions from 3 to 10 cm per pixel within a unified multi-resolution pipeline yields a detector ranking first or second across all evaluated datasets. Our dataset, code, and pre-trained weights are made public.

We consider a Navier-Stokes fluid-plate interaction (FSI) system which describes the evolutions of the fluid contained within a 3D cavity, as it interacts with a deformable elastic membrane on the "free" upper boundary of the cavity. These models arise in various aeroelastic and biomedical applications as well as in the control of ocular pressure, and sloshing phenomena. We analyze the well-posedness of the stationary (A-parametrized) coupled PDE system by way of invoking the nonlinear generalization of the abstract variational formulations which was introduced in [1], wherein an inf-sup approach is followed to show existence-uniqueness of solutions under a small data assumption. In addition, we provide a numerical approximation scheme of the infinite dimensional coupled system via a finite element method approximation (FEM). The numerical results use a standard conforming scheme and handle the introduced nonlinearities via Picard iterations. Numerical results are obtained for an appropriate test problem satisfying the necessary boundary conditions and coupling. Moreover, error bounds between the FEM and theoretical solution in terms of the characteristic mesh size are supplied in appropriate Sobolev norms which agree with the established literature. These FEM approximations of the coupled system with their associated error bounds validate the theoretical findings.

PurposeThis paper aims to examine the relationship between human rights practices and firm market and financial performance and the moderating role of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) practices. Design/methodology/approachThe authors use ordinary least squares regression as a baseline methodology on US-listed firms from 2002 to 2023 and generalized method of moments estimation to account for endogeneity concerns. FindingsThe results indicate that firms’ human rights practices are significantly associated with market performance and return on assets. Additionally, ESG practices significantly moderate the relationship between human rights practices and firm performance. Human rights performance has a greater impact on market performance when moderated by ESG practices. Research limitations/implicationsThis study contributes to the academic discourse by exploring the complex relationship between human rights and ESG performance. Identifying human rights practices as a social cost has intrinsic value for firms, driving toward desirable levels of human rights practices within corporate governance systems, consistent with stakeholder and social exchange theories. Originality/valueThis study provides novel insights into the interactive effects of human rights and ESG factors on firms’ market and financial performance, offering a deeper understanding of how these elements collectively shape corporate outcomes.

This study shows that a multi-faceted approach, combining borehole geophysical logging and surface seismic P-wave first-arrival tomography with confirmatory coring, well installation, and chemical and mineralogical analysis, is effective for identifying difficult-to-locate preferential contaminant transport pathways in deeper fractured bedrock. Seismic tomography detected porous 10-20 m wide elongated fractured conduits that allow acidic groundwater contaminated with uranium (U) and nitrate (NO3-) to migrate within interbedded shale-limestone bedrock over 1000 m from a former disposal facility (S-3 Ponds site) located at the DOE Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee (USA). Conventional drilling techniques would easily miss these conduits because they are oriented parallel with fractured bedding planes. Synchrotron analysis of aquifer solids revealed that > 95 % of the U is hexavalent (UVI). This uranyl (UO22+) species is coordinated with carbonate, iron oxide, silicate and phosphate minerals within cemented white to yellow precipitates, which contain U concentrations as high as ∼21.6 % by weight fraction. Identifying the presence of these mineral phases, enables a further understanding of the potential effectiveness of remediation actions. The combination of methodologies presented here can also be applied to other explorations, such as the detection of water supply.