Spot the Miner: Do Clothes Really Make the (Wo)man?

Coal mining is an industry that is associated with hard physical labor and harsh mental conditions. Modern artistic projects involving portraits of miners evolve as artists' responses to political and economic changes in the mining industry, which is currently in decline, and place a major focus on miner communities, rather than individual miners. This article presents an overview of relevant selected artistic projects, and supplements them with a small mini-gallery sketched by the author. The mini-gallery viewers have been invited to test their perception of miners based on a series of charcoal portraits representing men and women dressed in mining workwear and everyday clothes. Who in this mini-gallery is a miner, what serves as the basis for the respondents' guesswork, and, overall, how different is today’s perception of miners from those of the past centuries? Three main factors are outlined as potentially relevant for identifying miners: mining workwear, gender, and facial expression. The readers can compare their intuitive reactions with the results from an online experiment, which was presented in Norwegian, Russian, and English and collected 136 responses. Although the presence of mining workwear and male gender still carry a strong association with miners, the results reveal certain differences across Norway, Russia, and the United States. The article is interdisciplinary and combines aspects of art history, social studies and psychology with an artistic project

AGING, FATIGUE AND DURABILITY OF RUBBER VIBRATION ISOLATION ELEMENTS

This paper deal with shock and vibration insulators, which usually are performed from the elastomeric (rubber-like) materials. Elastomeric materials give many engineering advantages due to their capability of absorbing input energy much better than engineering materials, high elasticity, good dynamic properties, low volume compressibility, a linear relationship between stress and strain up to strain of 15% ÷ 20%, resistance to aggressive environmental factors. Elastomeric materials are widely used in machine building, shipbuilding, civil engineering, aviation and aerospace as compensation devices, vibration dampers, shock absorbers. Laminated elastomers, consisting of interleaved thin layers of elastomer and rigid reinforcing layers are also successfully used as bearing, joints, dampers, compensating devices, shock-absorbers. Such structures have many advantages: ability to endure high stress (>200 MPa), ease of maintenance, non- necessity for lubrication, vibration and noise reduction, ability to work in a very dirty, dusty, abrasive environment. The disadvantage of elastomeric material are aging, i.e. changing its properties over time. In this paper the influence of aging of elastomeric materials on the damping properties of shock absorbers is considered based on the mechanical models of elastomers - Maxwell and Burgers modes. Fatigue endurance, i.e. the ability to withstand mechanical actions for a long time is studied based on experiments on dynamic shear with laminated rubber-metal structures. The experiments show that such structures have a very high fatigue life - up to 100 million cycles

Russian feminitives: what can corpus data tell us?

Recent years have seen considerable debate concerning Russian feminitives, i.e. derived formations that designate female professionals, such as advokatka, advokatša, advokatessa, ženščina-advokat or advokat-ženščina that all refer to female lawyers. In this article, we investigate the use of feminitives based on data from the Araneum Russicum Maximum corpus and the Russian National Corpus. It is shown that the choice of feminitive to some extent depends on the morphophonological properties of the base word. It is furthermore argued that suffixed feminitives are more frequent than compounds like ženščina-advokat and advokat-ženščina, and that the distribution has changed over time. Suffixed feminitives reveal a stronger tendency to combine with gender-related epithets (e.g., obajatel’naja agentka ‘charming agent’), while the type ženščina-X is frequently used with the epithet pervyj ‘first’. Our article is an empirical study of the actual use of feminitives in corpus data, which we hope will inform future metalinguistic discussion and prescriptivist thinking about feminitives in Russian

The interaction problems between large and small business in modern conditions

The development of market relations, changes of the conditions in the business environment encourage the enterprises to look for new management methods and to improve forms of interaction. In this regard, the identification of the interaction of large and small businesses, as well as the evaluation of their relation development seems important and urgent problem in modern conditions. The purpose of the survey – the study of the interaction of large and small businesses, as well as the evaluation of the relations between them. The study was conducted on the basis of a comprehensive and systematic approach in which methods of comparative, retrospective, statistical, mathematical analysis are used. In accordance with the purpose there are identified the prerequisites for the development of large and small businesses, features and their functioning problems, and the links between them. The most common form of interaction of large and small enterprises were identified - outsourcing, franchising, leasing, subcontracting, venture financing, the establishment of regional cooperation forms of large and small businesses. However, the cooperative processes of large and small business in Russia developed are not enough today.The authors identified factors that impede the growth of Russian production, offered recommendations for the development of large and small businesses, justified the state's role in this process. In addition, they described the mechanism of state support of small business, including organizational, financial, information and consulting components

Methodological basis for the preservation and restoration of existing memorial complexes in the reconstruction of urban environment on the example of the city of Rostov-on-Don

The paper deals with the problem of the memorial complex as well as the importance of its preservation and reconstruction in the context of urban environment restoration. It forms the concept of the memorial complex and its role in the urban fabric. In considering the issue of the memorial complex, its effect on the urban layout is identified. Basing on the memorial function of complexes their key features are defined, and the reasons for their preservation and restoration are identified

Are there Analytical Adjectives in Russian? Evidence from a Corpus Study and Experimental Data

In the scholarly literature there has been a discussion on whether modern Russian is developing more analytical tendencies, with special attention to new nominal compounds such as VIP-zal 'VIP lounge', veb- stranica ‘web page’. Traditionally, such units are described in terms of “analytical adjectives”, which covers all nominal non-inflectional units related to a head noun (Panov 1960, 1971). The data analyzed in this article suggest that what has previously been described as “analytical adjectives” constitutes at least three different patterns: 1) nominal [N[N]] compounds that roughly represent two groups: type (a) where the first component (modifier) should be a loan word (units like internet, veb, top, etc., the head noun of such compounds can be of Russian origin); type (b) where the second component (head noun) tends to be a loan word, whereas the modifier can be of Russian origin (this type is characteristic of names and titles like Gorbačev-fond ‘The Gorbachev foundation’) 2) appositions that mostly include abbreviations and names of styles and can be used both pre-positionally and post-positionally to the head noun (units like VIP); 3) a contracted pattern (potential stump compounds, or blends, like internacional-sem’ja from the inflectional adjective internacional’nyj ‘international’ and the noun semja ‘family’). The third pattern was productive in Soviet discourse (cf. zapčasti from zap[asnyje] ‘replacement’ časti ‘parts’) and seems to be regaining productivity. The presence of these three patterns affects not only the system of Russian word-formation but also the Russian grammatical system in general, since it evokes various intermediate cases between adjectives and compounding elements. We present a very general overview of the aforementioned patterns based on the data from a corpus study, an Internet study and a linguistic experiment

EYE TRACKING AND AUTONOMIC NERVOUS SYSTEM REACTIVITY DURING PERCEPTION OF VISUAL ENVIRONMENTS OF DIFFERENT COMFORT

Participants included 50 individuals of age20.5. Oculo-motor reactions and sympathetic skin response (SSR) have been monitored during perception of visual stimuli of different comfort. The research is unique in that sympathetic skin response registration is realized at the same time with eye tracking, giving thus an opportunity of analyzing cognitive visual-motor activity while viewing images and related physiological parameters, which reflect the autonomic nervous system (ANS) functional status. Activation of the ergotropic brain system has been found during uncomfortable stimuli perception that is to provide vegetative mobilizationof organizm. When comfort visual stimuli were presented to participants the trophotropic brain system was activated, indicating relaxing influence of the stimuli. An eye tracking analysis revealed an increase of dynamic and static parameters during uncomfortable images perception. This increase characterizes high tension of visual functional system. A correlational analysis has revealed diverse and significant relations between eye tracking and SSR measures in comfort stimuli perception. This relies upon consensual functioning of the ANS and oculo-motor system, providing optimal mode of visual analyzer

First results from an experiment excluding three sizes classes of herbivores from tundra vegetation in southern Yamal, Russia

Plant-herbivore relationships are important for the functioning of tundra ecosystems. Here, we report the first results from an exclosure experiment that, something very few studies have done, separated the impact of three sizes of herbivores (small, medium and large) on nine functional groups of plants in the low arctic tundra of the Yamal Peninsula (Russia). Herbivore faeces counts in the exclosures and pictures from automatic cameras proved that the experimental setup worked. The majority of plant groups did not respond to exclusion of herbivores, supporting our expectation that vegetation responses in tundra are generally too slow to be measured during one growing season. The plant groups with highest growth rates and palatability (forbs and grasses) increased their biomass in meadows associated to tall willow shrubs when reindeer were excluded. This result was expected based on studies from other arctic regions. Our results also suggested that willow meadows and forb tundra, which are focal habitat for herbivores, are resilient and have the capacity to increase their biomass over a short term. We expect this experiment to provide valuable information on how different plant functional types and habitats with different growing conditions and importance to herbivores respond to relaxed grazing pressure from a variety of tundra herbivores