Academic literature on the topic 'Sonic portals'

Chapter five brings morality, literate listening, and sonic reading together to explore the semiotics of the “Moroccan model of Islam,” a state-sponsored effort to shape religious discourse and practices via media in the wake of “extremism.” In May 2003, Morocco experienced a major religiously motivated attack, in which thirty-seven Moroccans were killed. Extremist Islam, learned through foreign media, was blamed. In particular, people claimed satellite television and small portable media (like audio cassette and VCR tapes, as well as VCD and DVD disks, and more recently internet videos) had corrupted and confused Moroccans about proper Islam. One of the Moroccan state responses was to re-cultivate what they called the Moroccan model or pattern of Islam نموذج المغربي‎, namūdhaj almaghribī, a historically “moderate” Islam, which they would spread via modern radio and television stations, training institutes, and global dissemination of training materials. The Moroccan pattern of Islam included a bundle of semiotic forms promoted as uniquely Moroccan: clothing, Qur’anic recitation styles, writing scripts, textual reasoning patterns, and television/radio communicative channels for connecting Moroccans to Islam. This chapter examines critical Fassi responses to the state media efforts at semiotically shaping Islam in Morocco and the social non-movements precipitated from those responses.

The 1990s witnessed a significant increase in popular interest in the US regarding the geography of the world’s coastal and marine spaces. Factors motivating this renewed interest included growing public environmental awareness, a decade of unusually severe coastal storms, more frequent reporting of marine pollution hazards, greater knowledge about (and technology for) depleting fishstocks, domestic legislation on coastal zone management and offshore fisheries policies, new opportunities for marine mineral extraction, heightened understanding of the role of marine life in maintaining the global ecosystem, new techniques for undertaking marine exploration, the 1994 activation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, reauthorization of the US Coastal Zone Management Act in 1996, and designation of 1998 as the International Year of the Ocean. Responding to this situation, the breadth of perspectives from which coastal and marine issues are being encountered by geographers, the range of subjects investigated, and the number of geographers engaging in coastal-marine research have all increased during the 1990s. As West (1989a) reported in the original Geography in America, North American coastal-marine geography during the 1980s was focused toward fields such as coastal geomorphology, ports and shipping, coastal zone management, and tourism and recreation. Research in these areas has continued, but in the 1990s, with increased awareness of the importance of coastal and marine areas to physical and human systems, geographers from a range of subdisciplines beyond those usually associated with coastal-marine geography have begun turning to coastal and marine areas as fruitful sites for conducting their research. Climatologists are investigating the sea in order to understand processes such as El Niño, remote-sensing experts are studying how sonic imagery can be used for understanding species distribution in three-dimensional environments, political ecologists are investigating the ocean as a common property resource in which multiple users’ agendas portend conflict and cooperation, and cultural geographers are examining how the ocean is constructed as a distinct space with its own social meanings and “seascapes.” Despite (or perhaps because of ) this expansion in coastal-marine geography, the subdiscipline remains fragmented into what we here call “Coastal Physical Geography,” “Marine Physical Geography,” and “Coastal-Marine Human Geography.”

Sonic imaging has been traditionally provided using wireline acoustic logging tools in vertical or deviated pilot wells, and, in horizontal wells, using tractors and drillpipe conveyance, to provide information such as lithological changes and natural fractures extending tens of meters from the borehole. Providing a sonic imaging capability on other conveyance methods, particularly closer to drill time, has been a long-held ambition to reduce rig time and provide more timely information during the well construction process. Particularly where conventional wireline operations are not advisable or not possible, the slim-dipole logging technology offers greater flexibility and reduces operational risk. The small-diameter logging tool can be conveyed through the drillstring using a mud pump flow to deliver the tool out through a specialized 2 ½-in. portal in the bit to the open borehole. Sonic logging conveyed through the drillstring was primarily intended for estimating formation slownesses along extended reach wells providing essential information for designing completions and optimizing perforation performance along the reservoir interval. Providing a sonic imaging capability for this conveyance platform involved a tool firmware modification to extend the waveform listening times for both the monopole and dipole sources and optimizing on-board memory for data storage. New workflows were developed to reduce the interference of the direct borehole modes that typically obscure the underlying reflected arrival events, which account for the differences in the signal response, as compared to a traditional larger diameter wireline tool. Using finite difference modeling, we quantify the effects of the tool’s smaller diameter on the azimuth precision of the sonic imaging measurements and confirm the capabilities for providing useful sonic imaging results. Automated sonic imaging and migration workflows were used to convert these reflected arrival events into a 3D formation model and corresponding log of true dip and azimuth useful for formation evaluation and completions design in a timely manner. We present data from the study area introducing far-field imaging on slim dipole technology. Monopole and dipole sonic imaging waveform measurements were acquired along a highly deviated well through a complex fractured carbonate formation. Horizontally polarized shear (SH) reflections from major horizons through the formation were identified in the filtered dipole waveforms to provide structural insight for layers not crossing the wellbore. In addition, the automated workflows identified mode-converted refracted arrivals and P reflections from fractures along the lateral, and thus complemented the borehole image analysis.