Improving the efficiency of organizational design in the oil and gas business

The article discusses a number of topical issues of modern organizational design. Through the analysis of the approaches of Russian and foreign scientists, the factors that need to be taken into account in organizational design are identified. Out of a multitude of factors, we have selected those that have the greatest impact in various options for the market and technological environment for an oil and gas company. Organizational schemes which can be recommended for organizing management in different market conditions are shown. A method to reconcile the influence of the basic and other factors in the organizational design process is proposed. A mechanism for constructing an organizational structure in modern conditions in oil and gas companies is proposed. In the conclusion, recommendations on the directions for further research on the problems of building organizational structures are given. Keywords: organizational structure; building organizational structures; competitiveness factors; organizational design.

Impact of Vapor Barrier on Moisture Content of Fiberboard Insulation in Log Structure

The paper is focused on a verification of the moisture content of fiberboard insulations in the multilayer loadbearing log wall designed with and without the vapor barrier. Experimental verification was done using a sample of the multilayer loadbearing log wall built in a research timber structure building under in-situ conditions. Indoor properties of the building met conditions for human occupancy. The experiment was performed for 2 years and 3 months. Aims of the fiberboard insulations moisture content verification in the walls were to verify the effect of vapor barrier in various periods of the year and verify excessive moisture in the fiberboard insulations, which is undesirable in terms of biodegradation. The results of measuring the moisture content showed that after a certain period, the difference of insulation moisture content in the wall including and excluding vapor barrier is negligible, as well as other results and conclusions for designing the composition of multilayer loadbearing log walls.

The Strong Minimalist Thesis

This article reviews and attempts to evaluate the various proposals for a strong minimalist thesis that have been at the core of the minimalist program for linguistic theory since its inception almost three decades ago. These proposals have involved legibility conditions for the interface between language and the cognitive systems that access it, the simplest computational operation Merge (its form and function), and principles of computational efficiency (including inclusiveness, no-tampering, cyclic computation, and the deletion of copies). This evaluation attempts to demonstrate that reliance on interface conditions encounters serious long-standing problems for the analysis of language. It also suggests that the precise formulation of Merge may, in fact, subsume the effects of those principles of efficient computation currently under investigation and might possibly render unnecessary proposals for additional structure building operations (e.g., Pair-Merge and FormSequence).

Deriving Major Fire Risk Evaluation Items Utilizing Spatial Information Convergence Technology in Dense Areas of Small Obsolete Buildings

As small obsolete buildings are exposed to high fire risks, governments are trying to evaluate their fire risks and preferentially improve fire protection performance for high risk buildings, however, the evaluation manpower and time are insufficient compared to the rapidly increasing number of obsolete buildings. Therefore, this study aimed to derive major fire risk index (FRI) evaluation items as part of developing a platform to quickly and efficiently evaluate fire risks in dense areas of small obsolete buildings utilizing spatial information convergence technology. To this end, 20 preliminary evaluation items specifically tailored to dense areas of small obsolete buildings were derived through a field survey, investigation of FRI evaluation items from existing works, and expert pre-reviews. Based on the derived 20 preliminary items, an importance survey was conducted with a total of 181 fire safety experts including fire officers, university professors, researchers, industry experts, and fire insurers. As a result, a total of 12 major evaluation items (e.g., outdoor fire extinguisher, distance to 119 Safety Center, building structure, building cladding, illegal alterations, illegal parking, and liquefied natural gas cylinder) were derived. Results can help to evaluate the fast and efficient fire risks in dense areas of small obsolete buildings.

Individual Differences in Structure Building: Impacts on Comprehension and Learning, Theoretical Underpinnings, and Support for Less Able Structure Builders

In this article, we highlight an underappreciated individual difference: structure building. Structure building is integral to many everyday activities and involves creating coherent mental representations of conversations, texts, pictorial stories, and other events. People vary in this ability in a way not generally captured by other better known concepts and individual difference measures. Individuals with lower structure-building ability consistently perform worse on a range of comprehension and learning measures than do individuals with higher structure-building ability, both in the laboratory and in the classroom. Problems include a range of comprehension processes, including encoding factual content, inhibiting irrelevant information, and constructing a cohesive situation model of a text or conversation. Despite these problems, recent research is encouraging in that techniques to improve the learning outcomes for low-ability structure builders have been identified. We argue that the accumulated research warrants the recognition of structure building as an important individual difference in cognitive functioning and that additional theoretical work is needed to understand the underpinnings of structure-building deficits.

What Neural Oscillations Can(not) Do for Syntactic Structure Building

Understanding what someone says requires relating words in the sentence to one another as instructed by grammatical rules of language. In recent years, a neurophysiological basis for this process has become a prominent topic of discussion in cognitive neuroscience. Current proposals about the neural mechanisms of syntactic structure building converge in assigning a key role to neural oscillations but differ in the exact function assigned to them. We discuss two types of approaches – oscillations for chunking and oscillations for multi-scale information integration – and evaluate their merits and limitations considering a fundamentally hierarchical nature of syntactic representations in natural language. We highlight insights that can provide a tangible starting point for a wide-scope neurocognitive model of syntactic structure building.