scholarly journals Trends in Polymers 2017/2018: Polymer Synthesis

Polymers ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernhard V.K.J. Schmidt

Polymer synthesis is a substantial area in polymer science and marks the starting point for all sorts of polymer materials that have a plethora of applications in everyday life but also in academic research [...]

Polymers ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (24) ◽  
pp. 4327
Author(s):  
Yassine EL-Ghoul ◽  
Fahad M. Alminderej ◽  
Fehaid M. Alsubaie ◽  
Radwan Alrasheed ◽  
Norah H. Almousa

Academic research regarding polymeric materials has been of great interest. Likewise, polymer industries are considered as the most familiar petrochemical industries. Despite the valuable and continuous advancements in various polymeric material technologies over the last century, many varieties and advances related to the field of polymer science and engineering still promise a great potential for exciting new applications. Research, development, and industrial support have been the key factors behind the great progress in the field of polymer applications. This work provides insight into the recent energy applications of polymers, including energy storage and production. The study of polymeric materials in the field of enhanced oil recovery and water treatment technologies will be presented and evaluated. In addition, in this review, we wish to emphasize the great importance of various functional polymers as effective adsorbents of organic pollutants from industrial wastewater. Furthermore, recent advances in biomedical applications are reviewed and discussed.


2004 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-37
Author(s):  
Alex Demirovic
Keyword(s):  

The starting point of Demirovic's text is Adorno’s idea that concepts as forms of thinking are constellations of power. Differently from many interpretations of Adorno as resigned, Demirovic shows that this assumption enables Adorno to give his own theory the character of interventions in the ideological consensus of everyday life with regard to emancipation.


Author(s):  
K. Kalotay ◽  
A. Sulstarova

The former Soviet Union disintegrated three decades ago. That momentous 1991 was not only the starting point for independence of the countries of the post-Soviet space but also the starting point for their transformation from centrally planned economy to capitalism, often with local specificities. At the moment of writing this article aiming at analysing the long-term, structural characteristics of inward and outward foreign direct investment (FDI), these 12 economies are facing new COVID-19-related challenges, different from the problems of transformation undertaken in the past decades. After a brief literature survey, in which the main issues raised by academic research are highlighted, the article analyses the long-term trends and the main characteristics (geographical and sectoral) of FDI, with special reference to greenfield project announcements from 2003 on (the starting year of data availability). It also explores how much economic development was based on either attracting inward or promoting outward FDI or both. The performance of the 12 post-Soviet economies is controlled against the performance of other transition economies such as the Baltic States, South-East Europe and/or the Visegrad Group. The article concludes that indeed efforts towards using inward or outward FDI for development has been modest, even if in inflows one can observe some convergence with the other transition economies, which have been relying more wittingly using FDI for their development.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 391-401
Author(s):  
Ida Galli ◽  
Roberto Fasanelli

When we are interested in the image of a social object, we are interested in what individuals have perceived about that object, the ways in which they have interpreted those perceptions, and what they think about that object. Fully agreeing with the idea that the use of iconographic stimuli can enhance the traditional methods and techniques that are used to study any social representation, in this article, two techniques will be presented. The first, the prototypical stimuli technique, was proposed in the second half of the 1980s by Galli and Nigro. The second technique, iconographic stimuli, creatively integrate images and words in a single tool, was designed more recently to study the social representation of culture by Galli, Fasanelli, and Schember. Researches here reviewed clearly shows that the image has the great power to attract to itself the very objects depicted, a power that the word often does not possess. It is images that make people reflect, help them to think about issues concerning the fundamental aspects of everyday life. The work here presented, carried out in first person by the writer, as well as by all the other authors who are concentrating their efforts in this direction, only represents a starting point of reflection. New and more articulated studies will be able to support with heuristic evidence what so far seems to be configured as a suggestive hypothesis, which in any case will require a wider and shared interdisciplinary effort.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yash Chauhan ◽  
Prateek Singh

Coins recognition systems have humungous applications from vending and slot machines to banking and management firms which directly translate to a high volume of research regarding the development of methods for such classification. In recent years, academic research has shifted towards a computer vision approach for sorting coins due to the advancement in the field of deep learning. However, most of the documented work utilizes what is known as ‘Transfer Learning’ in which we reuse a pre-trained model of a fixed architecture as a starting point for our training. While such an approach saves us a lot of time and effort, the generic nature of the pre-trained model can often become a bottleneck for performance on a specialized problem such as coin classification. This study develops a convolutional neural network (CNN) model from scratch and tests it against a widely-used general-purpose architecture known as Googlenet. We have shown in this study by comparing the performance of our model with that of Googlenet (documented in various previous studies) that a more straightforward and specialized architecture is more optimal than a more complex general architecture for the coin classification problem. The model developed in this study is trained and tested on 720 and 180 images of Indian coins of different denominations, respectively. The final accuracy gained by the model is 91.62% on the training data, while the accuracy is 90.55% on the validation data.


Author(s):  
Stephan Jürgens

The starting point for this article is an artist-led practice developed by choreographer João Fiadeiro during the past two decades, which has been designated as "Composition in Real Time" (CTR). The interesting point about this methodology is that it has been applied in performance composition and in arts education by its author himself; but also in such diverse fields as anthropology, sociology, neurosciences, and economy by scientists and academics in collaboration with Fiadeiro. The authors of this article have conducted a long-lasting case study on the artistic process of Fiadeiro in the framework of an ERC-funded interdisciplinary arts and cognition project. We present our resulting novel approach to researching contemporary dance work through the creation and production of animated infographic films. Along with leading PaR theorists we argue that the utilization of adequate artistic techniques and methods in academic research can successfully reveal how unique creative ideas and conceptual structures come into being in the creative processes of today's contemporary artists. The article discusses specific excerpts of the provided animated infographic films to show how we digitally re-constructed Fiadeiro’s conceptual and imaginative universe, and how our findings can address both an academic and interested lay audience. SOLOS study: I am sitting in a different room you are in now from BlackBox Art&Cognition on Vimeo. SOLOS study: I was here from BlackBox Art&Cognition on Vimeo. Graphic models developed by João Fiadeiro from BlackBox Art&Cognition on Vimeo.


Author(s):  
Alexey Sitnikov

The article deals with the social phenomenology of Alfred Schütz. Proceeding from the concept of multiple realities, the author describes religious reality, analyses its relationship with everyday, theoretical, and mythological realities, and identifies the areas where they overlap and their specifics. According to Schütz’s concept, reality is understood as something that has a meaning for a human being, and is also consistent and certain for those who are ‘inside’ of it. Realities are structurally similar to one another as they are similar to the reality that is most obvious for all human beings, i.e., the world of everyday life. Religious reality has one of the main signs of genuine reality, that of internal consistency. Religious reality has its own epoché (special ascetic practices) which has similarities with the epoché of the theoretical sphere since neither serve practical objectives, and imply freedom from the transitory issues of everyday life. Just as the theoretical sphere exists independently of the life of a scientist in the physical world and is needed to transfer results to other people, so the religious reality depends on ritual actions and material objects in its striving for the transcendent. Individual, and especially collective, religious practices are performed physically and are inextricably linked with the bodily ritual. The article notes that although Schütz’s phenomenological concept of multiple realities has repeatedly served as a starting point for the development of various social theories, its heuristic potential has not been exhausted. This allows for the further analyzing and development of topical issues such as national identity and its ties with religious tradition in the modern era, when religious reality loses credibility and has many competitors, one of which is the modern myth of the nation. Intersubjective ideas of the nation that are socially confirmed as the self-evident reality of everyday life cause complex emotions and fill human lives, thus displacing religious reality or forcing the latter to come into complex interactions with the national narrative.


Author(s):  
Aleksandra Lidzba ◽  
Krystian Suchorab

People’s sex life is very often, if not always, taboo in everyday life. The theming of this area of life is made possible by various linguistic means that allow one to speak about this content. Phraseological units also serve this purpose. The starting point of this article is the definition of phrasemes according to Burger (2015:11): “Firstly, they [phraseologisms] consist of more than one word; secondly, the words are not put together for this one occasion, but are combinations of words that we, as German speakers, know exactly in this combination (possibly with variants), similar to how we know German words as individual items”. In addition, it is noteworthy that thanks to the characteristic of idiomaticity (cf. Fleischer 1982:30), this taboo is particularly reinforced. At the center of our analysis are phrasemes related to sex life. The research material was taken from German and Polish dictionaries. The purpose of the presentation is to create a typology of thematic areas which are characterized with the help of phrasemes relating to sex life in German and Polish. The article is based on the following definition of a taboo: “an unwritten law that forbids doing certain things based on certain beliefs within a society” (Duden 2015:1735).


Author(s):  
Ewa Okoń-Horodyńska

The chapter deals with the search for the sources of broadly understood creativity in solving various problems: social, political, practical (related to everyday life), family, economic, culture, religious, etc. wherever traditional approaches proved ineffective. These creative solutions - unconventional and having their practical application - became innovations. How multi-dimensional one's predispositions to solve problems are affects the person's capabilities to develop innovations. In view of the growing importance of gender studies, the already mentioned elements should be supplemented with one more - gender. Hence, the concept of Innovative Gender is introduced where men and women are granted equality of measures, opportunities, and situations encompassed by the innovation genome model. The starting point for Innovative Gender research is the establishment of four dedicated matrixes containing information (variables) that describes a given area, taking into account gender issuer, with collaboration playing a major role here.


Polymers ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 1142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phuong Nguyen-Tri ◽  
Payman Ghassemi ◽  
Pascal Carriere ◽  
Sonil Nanda ◽  
Aymen Amine Assadi ◽  
...  

Atomic force microscopy (AFM) has been extensively used for the nanoscale characterization of polymeric materials. The coupling of AFM with infrared spectroscope (AFM-IR) provides another advantage to the chemical analyses and thus helps to shed light upon the study of polymers. This paper reviews some recent progress in the application of AFM and AFM-IR in polymer science. We describe the principle of AFM-IR and the recent improvements to enhance its resolution. We also discuss the latest progress in the use of AFM-IR as a super-resolution correlated scanned-probe infrared spectroscopy for the chemical characterization of polymer materials dealing with polymer composites, polymer blends, multilayers, and biopolymers. To highlight the advantages of AFM-IR, we report several results in studying the crystallization of both miscible and immiscible blends as well as polymer aging. Finally, we demonstrate how this novel technique can be used to determine phase separation, spherulitic structure, and crystallization mechanisms at nanoscales, which has never been achieved before. The review also discusses future trends in the use of AFM-IR in polymer materials, especially in polymer thin film investigation.


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