Latest Era Research Articles

Evaluation of neonatal intensive care for extremely-low-birth-weight infants

Neonatal intensive care for extremely-low-birth-weight (ELBW, 500-999 g) infants must be evaluated to determine that it is effective, efficient, and available to those who need it. From the late 1970s until the late 1990s in the state of Victoria, Australia, neonatal intensive care has been increasingly effective, with large increases in the long-term survival rate from 25% in 1979-1980 to 73% in 1997, and in the quality-adjusted survival rate from 19% to 59% over the same time. Its efficiency has been relatively high and stable over time, comparing favourably with many other health-care programmes. It is increasingly available, with fewer than 10% of ELBW infants born outside level III perinatal centres in the latest era, and proportionally more ELBW infants being offered intensive care over time. Neonatal intensive care should be re-evaluated at intervals in the future to ensure that its effectiveness, efficiency and availability are maintained.

Registry of the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation: Twenty-second Official Adult Heart Transplant Report—2005

Registry of the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation: Twenty-second Official Adult Heart Transplant Report—2005

Stalinism and the Stalin Period after the “Archival Revolution”

Stalinism and the Stalin Period after the “Archival Revolution” Oleg Khlevniuk (bio) The latest general work on Stalinism illustrates an important trend of the past few years: historians to a greater extent than ever before have begun to study the phenomenon of Stalinism as an historical problem.1 In the past, arguments were waged over political-theoretical constructions, during the course of which some researchers attempted to set forth the rather meager amount of empirical evidence that existed about Stalinism, while others declined to do so. Now, comparative analyses of the Nazi and Stalinist dictatorships are based to a greater degree on genuine insight into the mechanisms by which power was exercised in both regimes.2 Numerous "sensations," such as the claim that Stalin was almost uninvolved with the system that bore his name, remain, one can only hope, a thing of the past. The main factor that allows us to call the past decade a distinctive period in the study of the history of Stalinism (as is the case, to be sure, in other areas of Soviet history as well) is the partial opening of the archives, a process that has become known as the "archival revolution." For the time being, the Stalin period is the latest era in Soviet history that can really be studied on the basis of archival materials. The results of archival investigations carried out in the last ten years make quite an impression. Such a large flood of information has appeared that even specialists cannot completely keep track of it. Preoccupied with their searches and discoveries, driven by (as a rule) friendly competition, historians, it appears, are not inclined to stop and ask basic questions. What have we gained from the archives? Where has the "revolution" led us, and do we need to change course? The decade-long "archival period" of work on Soviet history, which has affected the study of Stalinism first and foremost, has fully reconfirmed the significance and potential of archives and their place in the hierarchy of research priorities. Historians have overcome the syndrome of "archival over-expectation," and generally have come to understand what one can and cannot expect from the [End Page 319] archives.3 They have almost learned to use them in the same way as they used previously accessible sources before. This has to be considered one of the most important results of the decade. Comparisons between "pre-archival" and contemporary developments in the historiography reveal a closer connection between the scholarship of both periods than had been expected at the outset, when the archives had only begun to open. For this reason the most sophisticated research is being conducted in areas that had been at the forefront in the period before the opening of the archives. This continuity is demonstrated by the fundamental works of historians who already possessed a great deal of experience in their own fields and who actively took part in incorporating the archives into their work: R. W. Davies and Mark Harrison on economic history, Peter H. Solomon on the Stalinist legal system, and Sheila Fitzpatrick on social history.4 In Russia the work of agrarian historians such as Viktor Petrovich Danilov, Il'ia Evgenevich Zelenin, and N. A. Ivnitskii can serve as examples of such historiographical continuities. The most productive scholars of the previous period, these scholars together with Western colleagues (Roberta Manning, Lynne Viola, Robert Johnson, R. W. Davies, and S. G. Wheatcroft) focused their energies on publishing and annotating a large complex of documents pertaining to the history of the Soviet countryside, collectivization, and dekulakization.5 Our current knowledge of the archives suggests that many scholarly works could have been written even without archival materials and that those materials, like the sources that were available earlier, do not hold the answers to many questions. It is true, however, that the new materials have substantively enriched such research and have in a number of cases clarified previously disputed issues. Archival materials assume more significance in works that could not have been written earlier, given the absence of crucial information in the extant sources. For example, Lynne Viola's works on peasant uprisings during collectivization and OGPU operations against the...

Developments in UK cable-installation techniques to take account of environmental thermal resistivities

Accounts are given of the authoritative and novel recommendations concerning the current ratings of distribution cables which were promulgated by the ERA in 1969, and of the manner in which long-established rating and installation practices for transmission cables were transformed during the period 1962–1968. The second of those two accounts is preceded by a description of the evolution, composition and characteristics of the special backfills introduced during that period, provision of which is now obligatory for all buried CEGB transmission circuits.Attention is drawn to the dearth of information on the extent to which the latest ERA recommendations are being implemented; it is suggested that consideration should now be given to the possibility of wider application of some techniques now peculiar to one or other of the two main fields.

Progress and Conservation

Editor's Note: Texas Railroad Commissioner Byron Tunnell delivered the following speech at the June 15 dinner meeting of SPE's Gull Coast Section in Houston. The editors are grateful to Gulf Coast Section Member J. Donald Clark, with Union Oil of California, for soliciting a copy of the talk and for obtaining Commissioner Tunnell's permission to publish it in JOURNAL OF PETROLEUM TECHNOLOGY. Common Goals The more I study the problems involved in conservation, the more difficult it becomes to clearly distinguish the various roles of the Railroad Commission, the (Texas) Legislature, the courts, the industry as a whole and you as petroleum engineers. The Texas statutes charge the Commission to conserve Texas' natural resources of oil and gas by prevention of waste, and in so doing, to protect the rights of all owners of these hydrocarbons. I recently read in your JOURNAL OF PETROLEUM TECHNOLOGY an article by P. L. Essley, Jr., entitled "What is Reservoir Engineering?". Among other things, Essley states that "The goal of engineering is optimization. The purpose of reservoir engineering is to provide facts, information and knowledge necessary to control operations to obtain the maximum possible recovery from a reservoir at the least possible cost."Now both of these rather oversimplified statements may adequately state our respective purposes, but the tough part lies in the implementation. "Conservation" is not hoarding, but wise use, achieved by prevention of reasonably avoidable waste of hydrocarbons. "Waste" may be defined as the failure to recover, or to prevent the loss of, hydrocarbons. Conservation requires an accurate knowledge of the physical properties which govern the behavior of oil and gas. Engineers know that engineering requires this same accurate knowledge to achieve its objectives. Thus, it appears that engineers should be in possession of knowledge necessary to achieve practical conservation objectives, and should welcome the responsibility to their fellow man which possession of this knowledge properly requires they accept. Waste Prevention-Correlative Rights The advance of technical knowledge and the body of law relating to property rights clearly reveal a close relationship and interdependence between waste prevention and correlative rights. An individual's conduct is governed, to a substantial extent, by selfish motives. The individual is competitive by nature. When confronted with a situation and a set of accepted operating rules which permit him to manipulate operations to serve his self-interest, he will usually indulge in the permitted manipulations profitable to him. Such actions on the part of an individual are attributable to his competitive nature and to a natural desire to achieve the fullest protection of his property rights. In our modern form of society, this is hardly distinguishable from the instinctive "urge to survive".In consideration of this natural desire on the part of all people, it inevitably follows that advanced conservation practice requires, first, that the property rights of all owners in an oil and gas reservoir be adequately protected. Wasteful practices result from failure to adequately protect property rights. Once assured that their property rights are protected, the individual owners in the oil and gas reservoirs have a single and common objective to promote in the furtherance of their individual self-interest. That objective is to operate wells producing from the common accumulation of hydrocarbons so as to recover the maximum economic quantity of oil and gas. This concept of the interrelationship between conservation and correlative rights is so basic and so simple as to be almost axiomatic. No longer can waste prevention be considered as a subject separate from protection of correlative rights. Effective prevention of waste requires. as an essential prerequisite, the protection of property rights. In a short capsule of time, 35 years. tens of thousands of people oil producers, engineers, legislators, administrators, lawyers, property owners and others working in an uncharted field and with a still-developing science, hammered out and adopted conservation practices and regulations that already have preserved for us an enormous volume of petroleum resources. And the full benefit of conservation progress these past 35 years has yet to be fully realized. Reviews Essential It is true that time-lags or gaps have occurred. Hindsight, or Monday-morning quarterbacking, is being engaged in by those who should know better. However, the informed realize the unrelenting advance of technical knowledge demands constant reappraisal of statutes, practices and concepts relating to conservation. The latest era of reappraisal began in 1961 and 1962 with the advent of the Normanna and Port Acres decisions of the Texas Supreme Court. P. 759ˆ

Great Thinkers

Times have changed since Pfleiderer, in 1883, after summing up Neoplatonism in three contemptuous sentences, concludes, “In this convulsed state, entirely destitute of contents, consciousness has disappeared, and with it the very possibility of the religious relation, in favour of an orgiastic tumult of feeling.” Had Pfleiderer ever read a word of Plotinus or Proclus? If not, he had many to keep him company among the philosophers of his generation, though to be sure, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Hartmann realized the importance of the latest era in Greek philosophy. Jowett, in his introductions to Plato, never shows the slightest interest in what Platonism became under the Roman Empire. Edward Caird had certainly read Plotinus; but his lectures upon him in his Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, though highly praised at the time, are even more misleading than the ignorant neglect of writers like Pfleiderer.