Late 1980s Research Articles

Offshore Tech Evolves for Deeper Waters, Deeper Reservoirs

_ Since the late 1930s, the offshore industry has moved from installing the first offshore platform in 14 ft of water to the ultradeepwater 20K era. Advances in seismic, drilling, and development technologies all helped move the industry from shallow waters to ultradeepwaters, from lower-pressure reservoirs to high-pressure/high-temperature (HP/HT) reservoirs, and beyond known hydrocarbon areas like the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) into frontier regions, like Guyana. Brent Gros, vice president of Chevron’s GOM business unit, told JPT there is a stark difference between the GOM of today and how it was when he first started working in the area 26 years ago. Now, he said, operating further from land in water depths of 4,000 to 7,000 ft is the norm. “We’re not really taking crew boats to those platforms, given the distance from shore. We operate as well at much higher pressures,” he said. Jayme Meier, ExxonMobil’s vice president of deepwater project delivery, echoed that sentiment. At the dawn of the offshore era, “anything that was in any amount of water was, by definition, deep water, because it was as far as you could go,” she told JPT. “And we are now at the stage where we are routinely doing things that are in 2000 m (6,560 ft) of water or more, and we continue to press boundaries and technical limits to be able to move further out in water depth.” As such, she said, the fundamental definition of deep water has shifted in the past quarter century. Where To Drill? “To find oil and gas resources, we rely on seismic, and we’ve seen huge advancements in seismic over the past 25 years,” Gros said. 3D seismic technology, pioneered half a century ago, sharpened the view into the world’s reservoirs, and new seismic processing methods have helped identify new opportunities. “Now we have ocean-bottom node surveys, which essentially take a lot of the noise out of surveys, allowing us to image deeper with a clearer image. We also have four-dimensional seismic, which helps us understand the performance of reservoirs through time,” he said. “If you compare the seismic capability today to what we had in the past, it’s like seeing the world with a new pair of glasses, and it really helps us understand potential prospects in a more-complex geological setting and pursue those opportunities in deeper water and deeper horizons than we previously would have been able to.” Deepwater Challenges Moving into ever deeper waters requires more tech and more-capable drilling rigs. It also requires precision, Meier noted. “Technology allows us to position a floating rig on the surface of the ocean. It’s got to be able to drill at very precise angles and precise locations, and significant extensions of technology were needed to enable that to happen. We’re at the point now where we’re even doing multizone completions on our wells in deep water,” she said. point now where we’re even doing multizone completions on our wells in deep water,” she said. She called deepwater “by far the most exciting space” to work in. It requires planning and designing for facilities that must withstand intense, harsh, and constantly changing conditions throughout its lifetime.

Effects of Platelet-Activating Factor (PAF) on the Mechanical Activities of Lower Urinary Tract and Genital Smooth Muscles.

Since its first discovery as a bioactive phospholipid inducing potent platelet aggregation, platelet-activating factor (PAF) has been shown to be involved in a wide variety of inflammatory and allergic disease states. Many pharmacological studies in the 1980s and 1990s also showed that PAF induces endothelium-dependent vascular relaxation and contraction of various smooth muscles (SMs), including those in the airway, gastrointestinal organs, and uterus. However, since the late 1990s, there have been few reports on the SM contractions induced by PAF. The lower urinary tract (LUT), particularly the urinary bladder (UB) has attracted recent attention in SM pharmacology research because patients with LUT dysfunctions including overactive bladder are increasing as the population ages. In addition, recent clinical studies have implicated the substantial role of PAF in the inflammatory state in LUT because its production increases with smoking and with cancer. However, the effects of PAF on mechanical activities of LUT SMs including UBSM have not been investigated to date. Recently, we found that PAF very strongly increased mechanical activities of UBSM in guinea pigs and mice, and partly elucidated the possible mechanisms underlying these actions of PAF. In this review, we describe the effects of PAF on LUT SMs by introducing our recent findings obtained in isolated UBSMs and discuss the physiological and pathophysiological significance. We also introduce our data showing the effects of PAF on the SM mechanical activities of genital tissues (prostate and vas deferens).

Relationship between Leadership Cultural Characteristics and Job Performance in Military Units

Leadership has always been a topic of discussion, and for the Volunteer Soldiers, the way of doing things vary from unit to unit due to the different styles of leadership. Scholars began to study leadership theories in the 1930s, starting with "trait theory", followed by "behavioral theory", "contingency theory", and more recently, a new type of leadership theory in the late 1970s (Bryman, 1993). The transformational leadership theory of the new leadership theory covers the characteristics, behaviors, and contexts of the previous theories, and provides leaders with concepts and measurement tools that they can follow. Domestic and international academic research has confirmed the strong correlation between transformational leadership and job satisfaction, motivation, and performance (Bass, 1985; Yukl, 1989). Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate what leadership styles volunteer noncommissioned officers use to lead their teams to achieve their performance goals and the correlation with job performance.

The alpha generation in the face of learning technologies

Different generations have different characteristics. The Baby Boomers Generation presents linear reasoning, following all stages of learning. Generation X adapts easily to technology. Generation Z, born in the late 90s and early 2000s, is the first to be born in a mostly digital and connected era. The Alpha Generation, made up of children born since 2010, was also born in the digital era, but their relationship with technology is much greater, as its use is intuitive. This bibliographical study aims to highlight the profile of the Alpha generation, its characteristics and its conduct towards the educational process, as well as the teaching and learning process of this new generation, which is characterized by immersion in digital technologies, investigating the emotional and social presence in it. The study shows that school spaces, public and private, must invest in technological resources and specialized professionals to promote quality education through digital media, as it will be imperative that new generations, from Alpha onwards, will be increasingly immersed in the context of digital technology.

High-field pulsed EPR spectroscopy under magic angle spinning.

In this work, we demonstrate the first pulsed electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) experiments performed under magic angle spinning (MAS) at high magnetic field. Unlike nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP), commonly performed at high magnetic fields and under MAS to maximize sensitivity and resolution, EPR is usually measured at low magnetic fields and, with the exception of the Spiess group work in the late 1990s, never under MAS, due to great instrumentational challenges. This hampers the investigation of DNP mechanisms, in which electron spin dynamics play a central role, because no experimental data about the latter under DNP-characteristic conditions are available. We hereby present our dedicated, homebuilt MAS-EPR probehead and show the pulsed MAS-EPR spectra of P1 center diamond defect recorded at 7 tesla. Our results reveal unique effects of MAS on EPR line shape, intensity, and signal dephasing. Time-domain simulations reproduce the observed changes in the line shapes and the trends in the signal intensity.

Social Welfare as “Legitimation”: National Health Insurance Service (NHIS) and the Politics of Health Reform in South Korea, from 1977 to the Time of COVID-19

With the perceived “success” of its K-COVID approach, relying heavily on the use of contact tracing, South Korea has received extensive praise since 2020. In part, this perception also extends to health coverage (NHIS), for which the nation has provided universal coverage since the late 1980s. This article re-examines the politics of Korean health care, looking at the circumstances under which the coverage was first adopted. At the time, it was enormously controversial, and there was a great deal of debate about how the government might pay for the system. Its cost-cutting measures continue to influence care (e.g. multiple beds per room) in ways that influence recent disease outbreaks such as MERS (2015) and COVID (2020-present).

A Brief History of Polyclonal Antibody Therapies Against Bacterial and Viral Diseases Before COVID-19.

The use of the serum or plasma of patients or animals who have recovered from an infectious disease, or had been immunized with a relevant antigen, to treat or prevent the same infection in others began in the late 1880s when French and German scientists uncovered, one step at a time, several of the elements of the immune system's response to infection. A key finding was that the damage caused by some bacteria depends upon their secreted toxins which can be neutralized by biologic agents. Antitoxins to diphtheria and tetanus began to be manufactured in large animals in France, Germany, and the US in the 1890s and were soon being used worldwide. The impact of diphtheria antitoxin on childhood mortality was profound. Shortly after the development of antitoxins, convalescent serum began to be used for its anti-bactericidal properties thus addressing serious infections caused by non-toxin-producing organisms. The effectiveness of antitoxins and antisera was demonstrated by examining mortality rates in hospitals before and after the introduction of antitoxins, by comparisons of treated and untreated patients, by comparing early and late treatment and dosage, by examining vital data mortality trends, and by several randomized and alternate assignment trials. Antitoxins continue to have a role in the rare cases of diphtheria and other conditions largely eradicated by immunization, but serum therapy nearly disappeared from the medical armamentarium with the development of antibiotics in the 1940s. Inasmuch as new human pathogens are now emerging with unprecedented regularity as seen in the recent COVID-19 pandemic, and because specific therapies are unlikely to be available for them, plasma-based antibody therapies are likely to again carve out a niche in infectious disease control.

Executive compensation and worker wages during the global trade collapse: Evidence from Japanese firms

Widening income inequality is a serious social concern in many countries. We examine the causal effect of a negative demand shock on executive compensation and worker wages using a quasi-natural experiment, considering Japanese firms that experienced a sudden and substantial export decline following the global financial crisis in the late 2000s. Worker wages tended to decline significantly more relative to executive compensation after the crisis in firms depending more on exports, causing a wider pay differential. We establish the robustness of our difference-in-difference results by considering selection into exporters, excluding sporadic exporters, and controlling for foreign ownership or liquidity.

Who determined the rules of the game in the Spanish financial reforms, 1970-1990?

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to analyze the Spanish regulatory reforms and to identify the key actors involved in the design and implementation of financial regulation and supervision. We examine the educational and professional profile of those at the helm of the main regulatory bodies (Ministers of Finance and the staff of the Bank of Spain) during the transition to democracy. The main hypothesis we wish to test is whether the reforms that took place in the 1970s and 1980s were carried out by people with a substantially different background to the protagonists of the reforms implemented during Franco’s regime. Our results show that the change in the regulators’ profile emerged in the late 1950s, with an increasingly influential role of the Bank of Spain’s Research Department, and that the reforms of the 1970s and 1980s were carried out by people with a solid academic and professional background, predominantly in economics.

A Reusable Past. Opportunities for the Utilization of Industrial Heritage in Salgótarján, Hungary

AbstractIndustrial heritage is not just the industrial landscape, buildings, and material objects, but also the highly complex cultural heritage created by industrial society, with many unique features. The former industrial towns of East-Central European countries have little memory of their early capitalist industrial past, and their socialist legacy is mostly seen as an unwanted and unwelcome burden. Industrial heritage preservation in Hungary was also adversely affected by the ideology of de-industrialization in the late 1980s, and this was compounded by struggles over the politics of memory. Salgótarján, as the seat of Nógrád County, is a city with county rights that has one of the worst social and economic indicators in the country, with dozens of slums, many of them on former industrial sites. The number of sites suitable for greenfield investment in the valley town is low, while the proportion of under-utilized brownfields is high. The real turning point in the development of the settlement was the opening of the mines and the mining boom in the second half of the 19th century. The opening of the mines was soon followed by the construction of larger industrial plants: the steel mill, the hollow-glass and later flat-glass factory, and the ironworks (stove factory). Initially, skilled workers were recruited from abroad, which laid the foundations for a unique society, as much of the population had no ties to the settlement, or even to Hungary—only to the work and their employer. The industrial society of Salgótarján formed a well-defined local community with a sense of identity. The management of the companies and factories, the network of workers' welfare institutions, the managed leisure programs and facilities, and of course the built environment of the colonies played a major role in all this. Under state socialism, the factories continued to operate with an artificially inflated workforce, and after the political regime change in 1989, the privatized plants closed down with dramatic abruptness, leading to social trauma and high unemployment in the settlement. The preservation and presentation of industrial heritage is also important for the city's identity while the built environment is undergoing a radical transformation, which is why buildings that are deemed worthy of preservation should be given a new function as soon as possible so that they may remain an integral part of the settlement.

Drivers and Impact of European Defence Market Integration: A Literature Meta-Synthesis with Economic Focus

ABSTRACT The Ukraine war, the aftermath of COVID-19, Brexit and shifting US geostrategic interests are putting pressure on the European defence situation, strategy and budgets. The current crises expose warfare capability gaps in the European armed forces and capacity constraints of the European defence industry after decades of the peace dividend. More nations are calling for stronger engagement of the EU in the defence sector to overcome these challenges and complete the European defence sector integration that started in the late 1990s. It is estimated that more cooperation in defence procurement and research could save up to 30% of the current €290 bn total EU27 defence budgets. Can this combination of recent factors provide new impulses towards a unified European defence market, more cooperation on defence procurement and industry consolidation? We conducted a literature review (‘meta-synthesis’) of 172 journal articles, studies and think-tank papers since 1995 to build a holistic picture. The analysis aims to describe the progress and challenges of European defence market integration from an economic viewpoint. It provides future researchers with a basic understanding of defence industrial challenges, motivations and economic drivers of European defence integration as well as of reasons for resistance and potential scenarios.

Equine Nuclear Medicine in 2024: Use and Value of Scintigraphy and PET in Equine Lameness Diagnosis

Scintigraphy and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) are both nuclear medicine imaging techniques, providing functional information of the imaged areas. Scintigraphy is a two-dimensional projected imaging technique that was introduced in equine imaging in the late 1970s. Scintigraphy allows imaging of large body parts and can cover multiple areas, remaining the only technique commonly used in horses for whole body imaging. PET is a cross-sectional imaging technique, first used in horses in 2015, allowing higher resolution three-dimensional functional imaging of the equine distal limb. This manuscript will cover current use and values of these two modalities in equine lameness diagnosis.

Observed APO Seasonal Cycle in the Pacific: Estimation of Autumn O2 Oceanic Emissions

AbstractIn this work, we investigated the seasonal cycle of atmospheric potential oxygen (APO), a unique tracer of air‐sea gas exchanges of molecular oxygen (O2) and carbon dioxide (CO2), expressed as APO = O2 + 1.1 × CO2. APO data were obtained from flask air samples collected since the late 1990s at three Japanese ground stations and on commercial cargo ships sailing between Japan and Australia/New Zealand, North America, and Southeast Asia. We also analyzed the APO spatial distribution and seasonal cycles with simulations from an atmospheric transport model using climatological oceanic O2 fluxes from an empirical product that relate O2 flux to ocean heat as input. Model simulations reproduced the observed APO seasonal cycles generally well, but with larger amplitudes and earlier occurrence of seasonal minima and maxima than in the observations. Moreover, the observed seasonal cycles exhibited larger APO enhancements than the simulations in autumn and early winter, especially in the North Pacific at 20°N–60°N. These enhancements remained when refining the comparison by adjusting the simulated APO peak‐to‐peak amplitudes and seasonal phases to the observations. This suggests additional O2 emissions in the North Pacific, not well expressed in the air‐sea O2 fluxes used as input for our model simulations. The average autumn enhancement at 40°N–60°N was approximately twice that measured at 20°N–40°N. Confirming previous studies, our results indicate two distinct mechanisms possibly contributing to the additional oceanic O2 emissions: outgassing from a subsurface shallow oxygen maximum at 20°N–40°N and autumn phytoplankton bloom at 40°N–60°N.

The Broken Human–Object Continuum: The Technological Future and Socialist Contradictions in Rhapsody of the Ming Tombs Reservoir (1958)

Abstract The third section of Rhapsody of the Ming Tombs Reservoir (Shisanling shuiku changxiangqu 十三陵水库畅想曲, 1958), the first film in Mao-era China to include elements of science fiction, envisions a technologically advanced future in the year 1978. While seemingly aligned with the rapid industrialization goal of the Great Leap Forward, the film’s techno-fantasy attracted blistering criticism. Focusing on the overlooked historical debate that followed the release of the film, this article argues that criticism regarding the visualization of a technological future reveals how seemingly legitimate imaginations of a communist future reflect internal contradictions within the socialist present. Reading the film and the debate it sparked within the context of technological development in the late 1950s, this article identifies one locus of criticism: the human–object relationship. During the construction of the reservoir, the film shows a harmonious human–object relationship, but the futuristic part of the film depicts that relationship as profoundly alienated. I argue that this discontinuity does not betray ignorance of or an intentional departure from socialist ideology; rather, it reflects ideological contradictions between intellectual and manual labor, egalitarianism and class difference, industrialization processes and revolutionary agendas. In its rhapsodic depiction of advanced devices that consolidate the division of knowledge, the film unintentionally lays bare a fundamental conflict that was undermining the socialist system in the real world.

Weakening of the interannual relationship between the winter Arctic Oscillation and eastern African precipitation in the late 1970s

Weakening of the interannual relationship between the winter Arctic Oscillation and eastern African precipitation in the late 1970s

Migration flows and concrete walls: an archaeological perspective on early migrant detention facilities. The C.P.T “Regina Pacis” (Italy, Puglia)

ABSTRACT Over the last few decades, Italy has been at the forefront of mass migration flows. Starting from the late 1990s, facilities for the detention and expulsion of undocumented migrants have been established. In this paper, we analyse one of the earliest examples of such structures in the Mediterranean: the former temporary holding facility (or C.P.T. Centro di Permanenza Temporanea) ‘Regina Pacis’ located in south-eastern Italy. In 1997, the structure was repurposed into one of the largest C.P.T in Italy until its closure in 2005. Through an approach that combines archaeology and ethnography, we aim to understand the role that material culture played in subjugating and controlling the life of the migrants, attempting to evaluate, at the same time, the impact that the facility had on its hosting community.

Power of photo-stress analysis in unravelling the mechanics of granular materials and its applications in interdisciplinary research

Granular materials, such as various grains and granulated powders, are essential in numerous industrial applications and natural processes, including the chemical, pharmaceutical, food, and materials processing industries. They also play a significant role in geotechnical phenomena like the shear-driven collapses of embankments and landslides, which can lead to extensive damage and disruptions. Despite a significant surge in research activities and advancements in discrete element modelling (DEM) tools since the late 1970s, understanding the mechanical characteristics of granular materials remains complex. Experimental techniques such as photo stress analysis (PSA), Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR), and X-ray tomography (XRT) offer valuable insights, yet there is still a lack of detailed information on how granular materials respond mechanically at the microscale under various loading conditions. This knowledge gap affects industrial product quality, equipment safety, production efficiency, operational costs, environmental compliance, and overall safety. In this paper, we initially focus on our scientific contributions to the development of photo stress analysis (PSA) in unravelling the load-transmission characteristics of granular materials of varying sizes and structures (two-dimensional and quasi-three-dimensional) under different mechanical loading environments and applications. Where relevant, discrete element modelling (DEM) complements PSA to enhance our understanding of granular mechanics. We then present the application of PSA to selected key interdisciplinary areas from our recent work, demonstrating the power of PSA. Despite current challenges in applying PSA to three-dimensional granular systems, the results reported here significantly advance our fundamental understanding of the particle-scale and micromechanical characteristics in granular mechanics and particulate engineering. This work highlights the potential of PSA in addressing various inter- and multidisciplinary research problems in the future.

Relationships between the Exiled Ukrainian and Polish Governments in the Realities of the Yalta-Potsdam System of International Relations in the Late 1940s and Early 1990s

Relationships between the Exiled Ukrainian and Polish Governments in the Realities of the Yalta-Potsdam System of International Relations in the Late 1940s and Early 1990s

Eviscerated to Revolutionary: Rethinking International Aid and Civil Society in Cambodia and Myanmar

International aid actors and their role in supporting civil society, particularly non-government organisations (NGOs), in Asia has attracted extensive debate. Some view donors’ New Policy Agenda to have de-politicised and “NGOised” civil society, undermining broader emancipatory movements. Such analyses, however, often take limited account of historical and political factors that are deeply influential. Cambodia and Myanmar offer unique insights into these debates; following decades of international isolation, both countries experienced vast influxes of aid, from the early 1990s and late 2000s respectively. Yet in 2024, civil society activism is eviscerated in Cambodia, while a broad alliance is pursing revolution in Myanmar against the 2021 military coup. Through a comparative analysis, this article examines how aid and civil society interact over an extended time, and what the radically different trajectories mean regarding the dynamics between international aid and civil society actors. The article concludes that although international aid had a distortionary impact, historical and political factors were far more consequential in shaping civil society in both countries, particularly the scale of informal, non-NGO activism, which has ultimately proven far more resilient and transformative.

Early polar-orbiting satellite-based fire remote sensing during the 1960s

ABSTRACT Satellite-based sensors such as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) now routinely provide a detailed picture of global fire activity on a daily basis. These systems explicitly included biomass burning as a phenomenon of interest, and their design was heavily influenced by experience gained with the comparatively primitive Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) first deployed on the TIROS-N satellite in the late 1970s. The AVHRR is generally recognized as the earliest spaceborne sensor to provide a middle infrared (MWIR) channel sensitive to actively burning vegetation fires and other high-temperature, sub-pixel thermal anomalies, forming the basis of countless fire studies before higher quality MODIS data became available. Here, we consider in the context of active fire monitoring a sensor much older than the AVHRR, namely the High Resolution Infrared Radiometer (HRIR) on board NASA’s Nimbus-I, -II, and -III satellites, launched in 1964, 1966, and 1969, respectively. This early imaging sensor had a single MWIR channel primarily intended for night-time meteorological observations (a complementary daytime near-infrared channel was added for Nimbus-III) that could potentially serve as a source of pre-AVHRR active fire data. To this end, we inspected night-time HRIR imagery acquired over the western United States and found unambiguous evidence of multiple confirmed wildfires in 1966. In addition, we found strong evidence of actively burning fires in Africa, specifically the Democratic Republic of the Congo, western Zambia, and northern Namibia, and in northern Australia, commensurate with their fire seasons. Our findings indicate that it was actually the HRIR that acquired the earliest MWIR imagery that could be used for identifying biomass burning from space, well over a decade before the first AVHRR was deployed. We found in addition that the retrieval of fire radiative power (FRP) from higher dynamic-range HRIR observations was potentially possible pending refined calibration.