Improvement of oil and gas field development technology

During the period of depletion of the main oil reserves in fields entering the last stage of development due to the priority development of highly productive highly permeable reservoirs, an increasing proportion of residual reserves become difficult to recover.Therefore, it becomes relevant to use effective methods of increasing oil recovery in existing fields, most of the original volume of geological reserves remains in the deposits. One of these methods is unsteady waterflooding, which has proven its effectiveness in a number of fields.

The reintegration of losses in a wooden late baroque polychrome crucifix: issues and ways to approach the selection of materials

This work will review two different interventions of plastic and pictorial reintegration that a wooden late baroque polychrome sculpture has undergone. The Crucifix of Monte Giove, restored in the laboratory of the University of Urbino Carlo Bo, has unveiled large losses of the wood, some of which have altered the plastic forms and polychromy, and a shrinkage crack that has caused a deep vertical split in the torso and an alteration of the original volume. These issues have presented an opportunity for further discussion and study, relating to the potential solutions for each type of damage: the use of magnets to make the reconstructed elements movable and reversible and a filler for the wood’s crack to solve both the structural and the aesthetic issues. These two choices have been discussed analysing the critical approaches, the materials selection and the aesthetic results.

Gorky as an editor of his own texts (exemplified by his sketch V. I. Lenin)

The article examines various versions of M. Gorky’s character sketch V. I. Lenin, written in 1924. The sketch is of interest for many reasons. First, it appeared right after the death of the revolutionary leader and laid the foundation of the Lenin myth, actively propagated throughout Soviet history. Second, Gorky portrays Lenin as a larger-than-life personality. The writer thoroughly reworked his sketch following its first publication. Its second edition happened to be twice the original volume, with additional episodes and characters introduced for the first time. The principal methods applied by Gorky include stylistic corrections, expunging of certain fragments, repositioning of paragraphs, and transposition. The article provides numerous examples of alterations and additions in the text. However, considerable modifications driven by the publishers’ demand notwithstanding, the sketch remains essentially unchanged. Gorky’s self-editing was aimed at preserving the concept of Russian history with Lenin as its central figure.

Round baling - a new technology for storing and transporting of waste

The society is demanding that we find long-term solutions to the problem of future waste recycling. It is therefore that, i.e., life-cycle analyses of different products are performed more frequently. Source-sorting and reclamation of waste is now an obvious necessity. The contribution of BALA Press AB to the rational use of materials and the protection of the environment is a round bale press, a world-patented innovation which revolutionises the handling of waste. Garbage, residual waste and industrial materials can be compressed to a fraction of the original volume and enclosed in cylindrical bales.

Parnakh, Valentin Yakovlevich (1891–1951)

Brother of the celebrated poet Sofia Parnok, Valentin Parnakh was a Russo-Soviet dancer, jazz musician, actor, poet, and translator, a mover and shaker of the European avant-garde as Pablo Picasso’s portrait of him (1922) bears ready witness. Parnakh’s approach to artistic movement was truly synthetic, free of ideological dogma and academic convention, even though in Paris he published a sophisticated and original volume, Histoire de la Danse (History of Dance, 1932). Among the Russian apologists of eccentric and mechanical dances, Parnakh was the only one to compare Taylorist techniques with the new cultural exigencies of the proletariat, presenting Taylorism – in art – as the creative application of jazz dances such as ragtime, the shimmy, and fox-trot. He argued this just as the Soviet establishment was issuing its first instructions on how to eliminate these ‘decadent bourgeois dances of Western importation’ from the repertoire of workers’ clubs.

Medieval England 500–1500: A Reader, ed. Emilie Amt and Katherine Allen Smith. 2nd ed. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2018, xx, 426 pp., 40 b/w ill.

The copyright page contains several contradictions. It says both that this book was published in 2017 and in 2018; it provides as a title first Medieval England 1000–1500 (the title of the first edition, but that is not clearly explained), then Medieval England 500–1500. This anthology is available now in its second, considerably revised version, but we are not told when the original volume appeared in print (2000).

The use of human placenta for purification of normal and immune animal sera

There was described and efficient and economical approach for the removal of toxic substances from normal and immune sera from various species of animals with the use of human placenta tissue. Purification brings about to perceptible losses of neither serum-specific activity nor the original volume. Being simple the method does not require any special equipment and can be used in conditions of low-volume or in laboratory production of serum preparations. There are considered as well possible origins of serum toxicity as mechanism of antitoxic activity of placenta.

The Energy of the Untranslatables: Translation as a Paradigm for the Human Sciences

This article tells the story of a double adventure. Firstly, that of the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, which was published in 2004 by Editions du Seuil/Le Robert. This was an innovative tool that used the ‘untranslatables’ — defined as ‘not that which is not translated, but that which one never stops (not) translating’ — in order to explore the key symptoms of the differences between languages in the philosophies of Europe. Secondly, that of the translations and transpositions of this work, written originally in the French language (or metalanguage), into a dozen or so other languages, including English, Arabic, Ukrainian and Romanian, each of which brought to it a different set of concerns. The gesture of translating the original volume into different languages necessitates a genuine reflection on the weighty problem of the génie des langues (innate character or ‘genius’ of a language), and on translation itself as a form of philosophizing with differences.

The potential effects of percolating snowmelt on palynological records from firn and glacier ice

The effects of meltwater percolation on pollen in snow, firn and glacial ice are not fully understood and currently hamper the use of pollen in ice-core studies of paleoclimate. Several studies have suggested that, due to grain size, pollen is not mobilized by meltwater transport. However, these findings contradict many ice-core pollen studies that show pollen concentrations in snow and firn are much higher than concentrations found in the ice layers they eventually form. This study addresses one aspect of this question by investigating whether meltwater percolation can effectively transport pollen within a snowpack. We used nine Styrofoam coolers filled by natural snow accumulation. The coolers were tested in three groups of three replicates each to simulate different glacier snowpack conditions, and spiked at the surface with a known amount of Lycopodium marker spores. The snow was melted to two-thirds the original volume, sampled stratigraphically and tested for spore concentrations. Meltwater effluent was also collected and examined. Results show substantial vertical and horizontal spore transport during the experiment. Peak spore concentrations were found in the bottommost snow layer or in the meltwater effluent in eight of nine coolers, indicating that the majority of surface spores were transported through the snowpack via meltwater percolation and/or runoff.

Workspace Analysis and Parameter Optimization of 3-DOF Parallel Mechanism

A spatial 3-DOF translational parallel mechanism is analyzed. Its inverse kinematic model is established. The section view of the workspace of the parallel mechanism is presented via boundary search method under the defined constraints. Considering the workspace volume as the optimization object, the relationship between structural parameters and workspace volume is obtained and the structural parameters to be optimized are determined. Finally, the optimization configuration of the mechanism is obtained. The results show that the volume of the workspace increases 1.55 times as much as the original volume, which lay the foundation for the architecture design.