Understanding unconventional medicine

The phenomenon of unconventional medicine is an important feature of any contemporary society. Considering the increasing popularity of various forms of non-biomedical methods of healing among various groups of people, the necessity of an in-depth investigation of traditional, complementary and alternative therapies continues to grow. Existing terminology along with prevalence rates, legal status and historical development, vary greatly in European countries. The main reason behind the compilation of this publication was, therefore, to provide an overview of the field of unconventional medicine in Slovakia, where social science research into medicine has largely been neglected and only limited data exist in relation to medical practices and products, not associated with standard healthcare. Despite various concerns and controversies that have been raised regarding alternative medicine, the intent of the book is not to provoke criticism, the representatives of which are sufficiently represented in the public debate. Likewise, it does not try to reinforce the idealized and non-critical image of unconventional therapies, adopted by a number of alternative healthcare practitioners and providers. Rather than contribute to the polarization of the topic, the purpose of this monography is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the historical background of unconventional therapies, the main trends in this area, the patterns and reasons for the use of alternative medicine and the factors determining the efficacy of alternative therapies. The first section briefly introduces the historical development of the most notable forms of unconventional medicine in Slovakia, while highlighting various institutionalization and professionalization strategies, that have dominated over the last few decades. The second section mainly concerns a representative survey, investigating the patterns and trends of unconventional medicine use and concentrates on the execution of data on prevalence and types of non-conventional medicine, examining attitudes towards different topics related to alternative healthcare. Lastly, the book briefly enters the ongoing discussion as to how unconventional medicine might work and how efficacy is negotiated between the different actors involved in the healing process

POSSIBILITY FOR REFINERY NOVI SAD UNITS RECONSTRUCTION FOR HYDROGENATED VEGETABLE OIL PRODUCTION

The aim of the project is to design and construct the processing unit including necessary logistic facility capable to treat vegetable oils, sludge from eatable oils production, used cooking oil for production of renewable diesel (RD) component – hydrogenated vegetable oil (HVO). HVO meets CEN Technical Specification TS 15940:2012 [1] for paraffinic diesel thus may be blended into diesel fuel without any limit (except density); no special labeling at fuel retail stations is required. The proposal emphasizes the usage of the existing refining technology for proposed HVO production process, maximizing usage possibility of the existing units and/or equipment in Novi Sad refinery. The plant of 150 000 t/y has been considered, with hydro-treatment and hydro-isomerization as the two main processing units, with distillation section at its end maximizing renewable diesel production. This production also provides approx. 37 500 t/y of valuable by-products (bio-C1/C2, bio-LPG, bio-naphtha, bio-jet). The technology evaluation shows that the viability of the HVO project is strongly dependent on the availability of raw materials, their prices and purchase conditions

Multi-Task Learning of Object State Changes from Uncurated Videos

We aim to learn to temporally localize object state changes and the corresponding state-modifying actions by observing people interacting with objects in long uncurated web videos. We introduce three principal contributions. First, we explore alternative multi-task network architectures and identify a model that enables efficient joint learning of multiple object states and actions such as pouring water and pouring coffee. Second, we design a multi-task self-supervised learning procedure that exploits different types of constraints between objects and state-modifying actions enabling end-to-end training of a model for temporal localization of object states and actions in videos from only noisy video-level supervision. Third, we report results on the large-scale ChangeIt and COIN datasets containing tens of thousands of long (un)curated web videos depicting various interactions such as hole drilling, cream whisking, or paper plane folding. We show that our multi-task model achieves a relative improvement of 40% over the prior single-task methods and significantly outperforms both image-based and video-based zero-shot models for this problem. We also test our method on long egocentric videos of the EPIC-KITCHENS and the Ego4D datasets in a zero-shot setup demonstrating the robustness of our learned model

POSSIBILITY FOR REFINERY NOVI SAD UNITS RECONSTRUCTION FOR HYDROGENATED VEGETABLE OIL PRODUCTION

The aim of the project is to design and construct the processing unit including necessary logistic facility capable to treat vegetable oils, sludge from eatable oils production, used cooking oil for production of renewable diesel (RD) component – hydrogenated vegetable oil (HVO). HVO meets CEN Technical Specification TS 15940:2012 [1] for paraffinic diesel thus may be blended into diesel fuel without any limit (except density); no special labeling at fuel retail stations is required. The proposal emphasizes the usage of the existing refining technology for proposed HVO production process, maximizing usage possibility of the existing units and/or equipment in Novi Sad refinery. The plant of 150 000 t/y has been considered, with hydro-treatment and hydro-isomerization as the two main processing units, with distillation section at its end maximizing renewable diesel production. This production also provides approx. 37 500 t/y of valuable by-products (bio-C1/C2, bio-LPG, bio-naphtha, bio-jet). The technology evaluation shows that the viability of the HVO project is strongly dependent on the availability of raw materials, their prices and purchase conditions

Scenarios and their application in strategic planning

The article deals with the concept of scenario planning. Scenarios, as opposed to usual prediction methods, are focused on the identification of discontinuities in the development and help the organization cope with sudden changes and noticeably contribute to its survival. Contemporary methods of scenarios construction work on need to ensure flexibility of the strategic plan and get the firm ready for a quick reaction when set trigger points specifying the corresponding scenario come to pass. Processing of business environment information, known as Business Intelligence, becomes necessity. Based on the methodological platform, it describes in detail the stepwise process of scenario construction. The very process of scenario elaboration goes through six basic steps, Identification of risk factors and determination of their importance; Selection of key risks which, according to the company’s opinion, fundamentally influence fulfilment of strategic goals; Formulation of basic scenarios and testing their consistency; Determination of probability of scenarios occurrence and Performing a “gap analysis” for the sake of determining the extent of strategic goals fulfilment. There are various types of scenarios which might be respected due to the development of entrepreneurial environment introduced and discussed. Respecting the indicated risk factors and their influence on key risks of the financial plan, the spread of scenarios is being drafted. It is typical of business practice to work with 3–4 scenarios. Besides determining the impact of a risk on the firm’s performance (the rate of fulfilling set strategic goals), the probability assessment of each scenario is also necessary. Outputs from constructed scenarios are to be worked up into a particular strategic option, which may be used as a qualified base for the strategic decision- making process.The practical application shows how the methodology used raises flexibility in strategic planning of the firm

Monte Carlo Simulation in Risk Analysis of Investment Projects

At present time, when the rate of risk is increasing, achieving higher quality of investment decision-making by integrating risk and uncertainty factors could positively affect economical results and firm's prosperity. Firstly this article characterizes shortcomings of investment decision making connected with over optimism of people, preparing and evaluating investment projects. Important tool, which could contribute to removing, or at least weakening of these shortcomings, represents Monte Carlo simulation. To description of content Monte Carlo simulation in framework of risk analysis, its problem aspects, advantages and disadvantages is devoted main part of the article. The practical illustration of solving real investment problem from the field of oil industry through Monte Carlo simulation is also involved.investment decision-making, risk analysis, Monte Carlo simulation

Whether integrating refining and petrochemical business can provide opportunities for development of petrochemical industry in Serbia

Since the beginning of 90s of last century both the petroleum industry and petrochemical industry have operated in difficult circumstances. In particularly, margins of petroleum and petrochemical industry were exacerbated during global economic crisis in 2008-2009 years. At that time, as one option that could be the solution, the global analysts had started to more intense investigate the benefits of Refining-Petrochemical Integration. Shortly afterwards, more and more petroleum refineries and petrochemical manufacturers began to see the future in this kind of operational, managerial, marketing and commercial connection. This paper evaluates, in particular, the achieved level of integration of refinery and petrochemical businesses in Central and South-Eastern Europe. And specifically, the paper identifies current capabilities and future chances of linking this kind of integration between Serbian refining and petrochemical players. The viability of integration between possible actors and benefits of every single refining-petrochemical interface in Serbia depend on many factors, and therefore each integrated system is unique and requires prior serious Cost Benefit Analysis