Discipline

Specifically, this volume Intends to help the reader to understand the major technical and business considerations which make up each part of the life of a typical oil or gas field, and to demonstrate the link between the many disciplines involved. 

Given the costs of exploration ventures it is clear that much effort will be expended to avoid failure. A variety of disciplines are drawn in such as geology, geophysics. 

In summary, exploration activities require the integration of different techniques and disciplines. Clear definition of survey objectives is needed. When planning and executing an exploration campaign the duration of data acquisition and interpretation has to be taken into account. 

To optimise the design of a well it is desirable to have an accurate a picture as possible of the subsurface. Therefore, a number of disciplines will have to provide information... 

At point A, despite full management commitment to safety performance, with low employee commitment to safety, the number of accidents remains high employees only follow procedures laid out because they feel they have to. At the other extreme, point B, when employee commitment is high, the number of accidents reduces dramatically employees feel responsible for their own safety as well as that of their colleagues. Employee commitment to safety is an attitude of mind rather than a taught discipline, and can be enhanced by training and (less effectively) incentive schemes. 

A common objective of a data gathering programme is the acquisition of fluid samples. The detailed composition of oil, gas and water is to some degree reguired by almost every discipline involved in field development and production. 

The benefit of using the decision tree approach is that it clarifies the decision-making process. The discipline required to construct a logical decision tree may also serve to explain the key decisions and to highlight uncertainties. 

Although the topic of this paper easily extends to other disciplines, only eddy-current inspections will be eonsidered here. Eddy-current inspections do not typically capture spatial information with the signal however, there are large benefits to be found by keeping the spatial component integrated with the eddy-current signal. First, we will explore different approaches to adding spatial data to an eddy-current inspection. 

A general prerequisite for the existence of a stable interface between two phases is that the free energy of formation of the interface be positive were it negative or zero, fluctuations would lead to complete dispersion of one phase in another. As implied, thermodynamics constitutes an important discipline within the general subject. It is one in which surface area joins the usual extensive quantities of mass and volume and in which surface tension and surface composition join the usual intensive quantities of pressure, temperature, and bulk composition. The thermodynamic functions of free energy, enthalpy and entropy can be defined for an interface as well as for a bulk portion of matter. Chapters II and ni are based on a rich history of thermodynamic studies of the liquid interface. The phase behavior of liquid films enters in Chapter IV, and the electrical potential and charge are added as thermodynamic variables in Chapter V. 

We attempt to delineate between surface physical chemistry and surface chemical physics and solid-state physics of surfaces. We exclude these last two subjects, which are largely wave mechanical in nature and can be highly mathematical they properly form a discipline of their own. 

Progress in the theoretical description of reaction rates in solution of course correlates strongly with that in other theoretical disciplines, in particular those which have profited most from the enonnous advances in computing power such as quantum chemistry and equilibrium as well as non-equilibrium statistical mechanics of liquid solutions where Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics simulations in many cases have taken on the traditional role of experunents, as they allow the detailed investigation of the influence of intra- and intemiolecular potential parameters on the microscopic dynamics not accessible to measurements in the laboratory. No attempt, however, will be made here to address these areas in more than a cursory way, and the interested reader is referred to the corresponding chapters of the encyclopedia. 

Vibrational spectroscopy is an enomiously large subject area spamiing many scientific disciplines. The methodology, both experimental and theoretical, was developed primarily by physical chemists and has branched far and wide over the last 50 years. This chapter will mainly focus on its importance with regard to physical chemistry. 

Krim J K 1998 Fundamentals of friction MRS Bull. 20-1 (related articles in this issue of MRS Bulletin describe the status of several sub-disciplines of tribology)... 

It has become fashionable to prefix the names of disciplines with bio , as in biophysics, bioinfonnatics and so on, giving the impression that in order to deal with biological systems, a different kind of physics, or infonnation science, is needed. But there is no imperative for this necessity. Biological systems are often very complex and compartmentalized, and their scaling laws may be different from those familiar in inanimate systems, but this merely means that different emphases from those useful in dealing with large unifonn systems are required, not that a separate branch of knowledge should necessarily be developed. 

Chemoinfonnatics is a faiily new name for a discipline that, as we shall soon see, has been around for quite a while. Different people sometimes give rather divergent definitions of chemoinfoimatics. Before we discuss these different viewpoints, let us, for the time being, accept a rather broad and general definition ... 

Chetnoinformatics has matured to a sdentific discipline that will change - and in some cases has already changed - the way in which we perceive chemistry. The chemical and, in particular, the pharmaceutical industry are in high need of che-moinformatics specialists. Thus, this field has to be taught in academia, both in specialized courses on chemoinformatics and by integrating chemoinformatics into regular chemistry curricula. 

Chemistry, like any scientific discipline, relies heavily on experimental observations, and therefore on data. Until a few years ago, the usual way to publish information on recent scientific developments was to release it in books or journals. In chemistry, the enormous increase in the number of compounds and the data concerning them resulted in increasingly ineffective data-handling, on the side of the producers as well as the users. One way out of this disaster is the electronic processing, by computer methods, of this huge amount of data available in chemistry. Compared with other scientific disciplines that only use text and numbers for data transfer, chemistry has an additional, special challenge molecules. The molecular species consist of atoms and bonds that hold them together. Moreover, compounds... 

The visualization of volumetric properties is more important in other scientific disciplines (e.g., computer tomography in medicine, or convection streams in geology). However, there are also some applications in chemistry (Figure 2-125d), among which only the distribution of water density in molecular dynamics simulations will be mentioned here. Computer visualization of this property is usually realized with two or three dimensional textures [203]. 

Some of the concepts that chemists have introduced for the discussion of chemical reactivity are summarized below. Much of this will be common knowledge to readers that have studied chemistry they can easily skip this section. However, for readers from other scientific disciplines or whose chemical knowledge has become rusty, some fundamental concepts are presented here. 

Figure 9-1 shows the disciplines that contribute to machine learning techniques. 

Figure 9-1. Machine learning and the disciplines involved in this process.

Chemometrics is the discipline which deals wdth the application of statistical and, in a more general sense, of mathematical methods to chemical data. Chemometric methods are used for the extraction of chemical information from chemical data. 

Multivariate statistics is the discipline to analyze data, to elucidate the intrinsic structure within the data, and to reduce the number of variables needed to describe the data. 

It extends the usage of statistical methods and combines it with machine learning methods and the application of expert systems. The visualization of the results of data mining is an important task as it facilitates an interpretation of the results. Figure 9-32 plots the different disciplines which contribute to data mining. 

Bioinformatics is a relatively new discipline that is concerned with the collection, organisatic and analysis of biological data. It is beyond our scope to provide a comprehensive overvie of this discipline a few textbooks and reviews that serve this purpose are now available (s the suggestions for further reading). However, we will discuss some of the main rnethoc that are particularly useful when trying to predict the three-dimensional structure and fum tion of a protein. To help with this. Appendix 10.1 contains a limited selection of some of tf common abbreviations and acronyms used in bioinformatics and Appendix 10.2 lists sorr of the most widely used databases and other resources. 

To our knowledge, the results presented in this chapter provide the first example of enantioselective Lewis-acid catalysis of an organic reaction in water. This discovery opens the possibility of employing the knowledge and techniques from aqueous coordination chemistry in enantioselective catalysis. This work represents an interface of two disciplines hitherto not strongly connected. 

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