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The COVID-19 virus ravaged the United States population and economy. In March 2020 almost every state went into a self-mandated lockdown. States began reopening in May and June of 2020 with different safety protocols and restrictions in place. Most Department of Defense (DoD) construction sites were considered essential, therefore did not have to shut down. To keep their personnel safe, contractors quickly began adopting additional safety measures as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). One of the most widely used safety measures was social distancing or staying 6 ft away from other individuals. This paper summarizes the impacts of COVID related delays on construction activities based on survey data. Results indicate that several issues caused construction delays including labor shortage, social distancing, COVID-19 protocols and material supply delays. The data also showed that delays were noticed in all aspects of construction including concrete, MEP, masonry and finishes.

In 2014Comparative Sociologypublished our analysis of microaggression complaints – a comparative and theoretical piece addressing microaggression complaints as a form of social control indicative of a distinct moral culture. The article attracted a surprising amount of attention in popular media, and with this attention came confusion and controversy. Here we respond to popular accounts of our work, addressing common criticisms and confusions as well as the sociological question of why the article produced such strong reactions. We conclude by clarifying the sociology of morality’s role in moral debates and suggesting ways that sociological knowledge can inform debate and guide reform.

This paper presents the development of an engineering geological, geotechnical and geohazard model for four oil and gas fields offshore of Abu Dhabi in the Arabian Gulf. The purpose of the model was to characterize the shallow ground conditions for the design of offshore platforms and other infrastructure. The model was developed based on the interpretation of nearly 60 years of ground engineering data including a vast amount of boreholes, laboratory test and cone penetration test data. Carbonate-rich sediments dominate the shallow geology of Abu Dhabi offshore region. The main lithological units of Miocene to Pleistocene age comprise weak carbonate rocks, calcarenite and calcisiltite, with frequent lenses and pockets of gypsum. These units are overlain by recent carbonate marine deposits. The geological models for the region were developed using the software package GSI3D™. Geostatistical methods were applied in the treatment of geological uncertainty in the model, and the analysis of the associated geotechnical design recommendations. The model also includes a detailed review of local and regional natural hazards, including seismic and submarine geohazards, with the potential to affect existing and proposed offshore infrastructure. Interrogation of the model enables effective decision-making on oil and gas development issues related to offshore ground investigation for the siting of new developments. This model can allow these works to be optimized at the advanced stages of planning, saving on time, cost and significantly reducing health, safety and environmental risks.

Nuclear energy is an important part of a sustainable, economic and secure energy balance for the United Kingdom (UK). Horizon Nuclear Power commissioned Arup to provide seismic hazard assessment (SHA) consultancy services for the proposed Wylfa Newydd Nuclear Power Station in Anglesey, Wales, UK. Advanced Boiling Water Reactors are proposed to provide at least 5400 MW, enough to power around 10 million homes. The SHA comprises a probabilistic seismic hazard assessment of ground motion, a tsunami hazard assessment and a capable faulting assessment. The capable faulting assessment included thoroughly identifying and investigating geological faults at the site, with due consideration of the geological, seismological and tectonic setting. The objective of the capable faulting assessment was to demonstrate that faults are not capable of surface rupture within the current tectonic setting. Should evidence suggest that faults with the potential to affect the safety of the nuclear installation are capable, IAEA guidance dictates that an alternative site shall be considered. A project 3D Geological Fault Model was developed to characterise geological faulting at the site for the capable faulting assessment. A systematic methodology that incorporates expert judgment was developed and applied to the investigation and correlation of geological faults between site investigation data points. A total of 36 geological faults were mapped across the site and three fault sets were identified. Absolute age dating of the fault gouge on a representative selection of samples was subsequently undertaken to demonstrate that faults at the site are not capable in accordance with IAEA guidelines.

Victimhood culture includes more than microaggression complaints. Campbell and Manning describe contemporary calls for trigger warnings and safe spaces, and how they mesh with victimhood culture’s central moral concerns. They consider whether these practices actually help those they are intended to protect or whether they are counterproductive. They note that both phenomena rely on the language of physical harm and discuss the role of expanded concepts of harm in the moral language of victimhood. This language, which includes new moral jargon and distinctive usage of common words, leads to confusion and conflict between campus activists and the outside world.

There is an inherent tension between the ideals of victimhood culture and the ideals of free speech and academic freedom. Campbell and Manning discuss legal norms for regulating speech. They describe how campus activists commonly reject legal and folk norms regarding free speech and push for greater restrictions, often justifying these with an expansive conception of harm. Despite widespread belief in the value of academic freedom, colleges and universities have already introduced many speech restrictions. Indeed, rather than having more free speech than the larger society, campuses have far less. On campus, the most strenuous censorship occurs at the behest of leftist activists and their sympathizers and targets those who question victimhood culture. But the campus also faces censorship from the right, in the form of outsiders who are outraged over the speech of campus activists. As campus culture continues to depart from mainstream morality, such problems will increase.

Campbell and Manning examine false claims of victimhood, as when people pretend to be victims of serious crimes. They consider the logic of such claims and the social conditions that give rise to them. False accusations are a way of manipulating third parties and arise under conditions that increase reliance on third parties while reducing due process. Victimhood culture encourages false accusations in the form of hate crime hoaxes, in which people claim to have been victimized by members of a more privileged social group. College campuses are especially prone to hate crime hoaxes, as well as moral panics that make it difficult and dangerous for anyone to express skepticism of victimhood claims. Campbell and Manning describe the dynamics of moral panic and consider the extent to which moral panic shapes contemporary concerns about campus rape culture.

Campbell and Manning examine how victimhood culture affects the discipline of sociology. The moral concerns of victimhood culture can lead to distortions of research and unscientific evaluations of theory. They discuss the potential of sociology as a science and potential tool for reform, and argue that the failure to distinguish between facts and values undermines this potential. Many sociologists neglect scientific goals and see sociology as synonymous with the pursuit of social justice. Campbell and Manning discuss the concept of social justice and its uses in moral decision-making. Like sociology, social justice has promise, but the moral climate of universities is such that social justice is synonymous with victimhood culture and any who dissent from this view are silenced. Conflating sociology with social justice, and social justice with victimhood culture, hampers our ability to seriously pursue social science and social reform.

Campus activists and others refer to various slights against women and minorities as “microaggressions” and use various means to publicize them. Campbell and Manning understand microaggression complaints as a distinct form of social control arising from a particular pattern of moral conflict. They argue that this pattern of conflict and social control indicates a distinctive moral culture—victimhood culture—that diverges from both the honor cultures and dignity cultures of the past. After outlining the logic of each of these cultures, they consider other manifestations of victimhood culture, such as calls for trigger warnings, safe spaces, and the banning of speakers. These and other aspects of victimhood culture attract opposition and backlash that can be understood as a clash between victimhood and dignity. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the cultural contradictions involved in according moral status to victims.

Campbell and Manning discuss how new moral cultures spread, focusing on the dynamics involved in the spread of victimhood culture. These include changes in childhood socialization, such as higher degrees of adult supervision and protection in the form of helicopter parenting. Campbell and Manning argue that victimhood culture is most developed among social elites, and this makes it a potentially valuable form of cultural capital for those seeking upward mobility, causing it to spread downward in the status structure. The spread of victimhood is strenuously opposed by many, but opposition can turn into imitation as critics of campus culture adopt the language and tactics of their adversaries. Campbell and Manning discuss the phenomenon of competitive victimhood, and how it can aid the spread of victimhood culture, but also produce purity spirals that limit the effectiveness of victimhood activists.

Interest groups or “think tanks” influence how people and policymakers understand public policies in part by using impression management to enhance their credibility as information sources. Using immigration policy as a case study, this research examines the impression management tactics of one interest group (the Center for Immigration Studies), compares its coverage of immigration issues to that of large-circulation U.S. newspapers, and determines the extent to which it has spread its messages across various news outlets. Although the organization’s positions on immigration represent a negative outlier in the debate, it has entered the dominant political discourse. The study offers a new methodological and conceptual framework for analyzing the behavior and impact of think tanks, as well as for studying impression management more generally.

Team-based learning (TBL) is a form of small-group learning that assumes stable teams promote accountability. Teamwork promotes communication among members; application exercises promote active learning. Students must prepare for each class; failure to do so harms their team’s performance. Therefore, TBL promotes accountability. As part of the course grade, students assess the performance of their teammates. The evaluation forces students to rank their teammates and to provide rationale for the highest and lowest rankings. These evaluations provide rich data on small-group dynamics. In this paper, we analyze 211 student teammate assessments. We find evidence that teams consistently give the lowest evaluations to their least involved members, suggesting that the team component increases accountability, which can promote learning. From these findings we draw implications about small-group dynamics in general and the pedagogy of TBL in particular.

This article focuses on intimate partner killings to address the question of why some killers subsequently commit suicide whereas others do not. Utilizing Blackian theories of conflict management and Manning’s theory of suicide, it advances hypotheses about when intimate partner conflict will result in homicide-suicide rather than homicide alone. These hypotheses propose that differing amounts of status superiority and relational distance predict and explain different patterns of lethal violence. The hypotheses are illustrated and supported with data taken from a study of intimate partner homicides in the state of West Virginia. The article concludes by arguing for a micro-structural model that addresses suicide, homicide, and homicide-suicide.

Campus activists and others might refer to slights of one’s ethnicity or other cultural characteristics as “microaggressions,” and they might use various forums to publicize them. Here we examine this phenomenon by drawing from Donald Black’s theories of conflict and from cross-cultural studies of conflict and morality. We argue that this behavior resembles other conflict tactics in which the aggrieved actively seek the support of third parties as well as those that focus on oppression. We identify the social conditions associated with each feature, and we discuss how the rise of these conditions has led to large-scale moral change such as the emergence of a victimhood culture that is distinct from the honor cultures and dignity cultures of the past.

Suicide may be moralistic in nature—a response to conduct the perpetrator defines as deviant. Moralistic suicide can be explained with a general theory of social control. Donald Black’s theories of social control explain the handling of grievances with their social structure—or geometry—as defined by the social characteristics and relationships of those involved in a conflict. Here I draw on Black’s paradigm of pure sociology and theories of social control to identify the social structure of moralistic suicide. For example, moralistic suicide varies directly with social closeness and is greater in an upward direction than in a downward direction. This theory is simple, general, testable, and explains variation not addressed by previous theories of suicide.

This paper describes the pedogenically altered fluvial deposits comprising the Barzaman Formation, UAE. This formation is composed of a sequence of rocks dominated by variably cemented conglomerates thought to be middle Miocene to Pliocene in age. The well-established descriptive scheme currently used for describing the formation is reviewed and a simple visual descriptive lithological classification is proposed based on the three principal lithological components visible in a hand specimen: mottled white calcisiltite matrix/cement, palygorskite rich marl and clasts derived from the Oman Mountains (gabbro, chert and weathered ultramafic rock). Data on the mineralogy and microstructure of the rock constituents is presented and some implications for the geotechnical characterisation of the formation are briefly discussed.

There are a range of applications for bicontinuous metal micro and nanostructures including as porous electrodes for supercapacitors, in fuel cells and in advanced batteries. We have previously demonstrated a number of methods of generating metal nanostructures by electrodeposition into various templates including hexagonal surfactant phases and mesoporous silica. More recently we have been exploring the application of oil-in-water microemulsions as templates. We have found empirically that the formation of microstructure is strongly effected by the viscosity of the oil phase, the rate of metal electroreduction and the surface roughness of the substrate. We interpret these observations as reflecting a competition between growth of the metal around the oil droplet and the redistribution of the oil in front of the growing metal film. We are currently exploring bicontinuous and water-in-oil phases with the expectation that such templates will yield bicontinuous metal films with larger accessible surface areas. Preliminary results with water-in-oil phases appear to show the formation of bicontinuous nanostructured films on the 20 nm length scale.

The development of periodic nanostructures fabricated by self-assembly of surfactants and block co-polymers has opened up the possibility of generating periodic magnetic nanostructures of types not accessible by self-assembly of nano-particles. The fabrication of mesoporous silica thin films around self-assembled block co-polymers is well established. Common structures for such films are SBA-15 which consists of hexagonal arrays of cylindrical pores and SBA-16 which has face centered arrays of spherical voids. These pores are connected by 1-2 nm thick flaws in the continuous silica phase producing an effectively continuous porous phase. After removal of the block co-polymer template, electrodeposition into the mesoporous silica thin films produces arrays of 5-10 nm diameter nano-wires and nano-particles. We have demonstrated that such materials can be fabricated on a wide range of metal substrates. Characterization by Scanning Electron Microscopies shows that the mesoporous silica is well ordered over micron scale areas. Grazing Incidence Small Angle X-ray Scattering (GISAXS) studies shows diffraction spots, consistent with the entire film being well ordered. GISAXS also shows that the mesoporous silica films survive removal of the template and electrodeposition of nickel and cobalt into the mesoporous silica films. Such films are of interest for their magnetic properties, as the nanophase and scale can be independently varied. Further, the presence of nanowires inside an insulator suggests that these films might also be of interest as the current confining element for Confined Current Path-Current Perpendicular to Plane GMR sensors.