Big Data in the Oil and Gas Industry: A Promising Courtship

The energy industry remains one of the highest money-producing and investment industries in the world. The United States’ own economic stability depends greatly on the stability of oil and gas prices. Various factors affect the amount of money that will continue to be invested in producing oil. A main disadvantage to the oil and gas industry is its lack of technological adaptation. This weakens the industry because the surest measures are not currently being taken to produce oil in optimally efficient, safe, and cost-effective ways. Big data has gained global recognition as an opportunity to gather large volumes of information in real-time and translate data sets into actionable insights. In a low commodity price environment, saving time, reducing costs, and improving safety are crucial outcomes that can be realized using machine learning in oil and gas operations. Big data provides the opportunity to use unsupervised learning. For example, with this approach, engineers can predict oil wells’ optimal barrels of production given the completion data in a specific area. However, a caveat to utilizing big data in the oil and gas industry is that there simply is neither enough physical data nor data velocity in the industry to be properly referred to as “big data.” Big data, as it develops, will nonetheless significantly change the energy business in the future, as it already has in various other industries.Petroleum and Geosystems Engineerin

Adjustment and Developmental Outcomes of Students Engaged in Service Learning

In an effort to better understand the psychosocial and adjustment processes experienced by college students engaged in service learning, 22 randomly selected reflection journals were content-analyzed from a class of 44 child development students who had been engaged in service learning in a variety settings. Three of the themes that emerged in the journals involved students: feeling awkward during the first visits; feeling uncertain about redirecting children\u27s misbehavior; and having ambivalent feelings when bringing their service learning experiences to an end. The coping mechanisms and resources upon which students draw to successfully grow beyond these initial challenges are discussed, as well as practical suggestions for facilitators of the service learning experience

The FOMC in 1988: uncertainty's effects on monetary policy

Federal Open Market Committee ; Monetary policy

On the Stability of Group Formation: Managing the Conflict Within

This paper develops a positive analysis of stable group formation, highlighting the role of conflict management within groups. The analysis is based on a model of sequential conflict, starting with a "winner- take-all" contest for control of some resource. When a group forms, members pool their efforts in that contest and, if successful, apply the resource to a joint production process. While reducing the severity of conflict over the contestable resource relative to the case of individual conflict, the formation of groups adds another layer of conflict---that is, one between the members of the winning group over the distribution of their joint product. The effectiveness of conflict management in enabling groups to resolve this second layer of conflict in more "peaceful" ways involving less "social waste" has some important implications for the equilibrium structure of groups as well as for the allocation of resources.Endogenous group formation, competitive appropriation, conflict management.

The FOMC in 1989: walking a tightrope

Federal Open Market Committee

The economic consequences of reducing military spending

Defense contracts ; Economic policy

What is an "acceptable" rate of inflation?--a review of the issues

Inflation (Finance)