Бесконечные равнины, светлые берёзовые перелески, тихие реки и задумчивые озёра, насыщенные хвойным духом сосновые боры вдоль Оби. Такой предстаёт нам природа Новосибирской области. Но природа нашего края формировалась в течение долгих геологических эпох, и её облик не раз менялся. О том, какой она была тысячи, миллионы лет назад, могут поведать нам данные палеонтологии — науки о вымерших животных и растениях, о развитии органического мира в ходе геологической истории Земли.

Динозавры в наш технический век? Моря в нашем степном краю? Да, и останки доисторических животных, и слолы исчезнувших морей смогут найти ребята увлеченные и пытливые. Но свою научно-популярную книгу ведущий широко известной и любимой ребятами телевизионной передачи «Не за тридевять земель» адресует не только юным исследователям. Ведь любознательность, целеустремленность, умение кропотливо трудиться и фантазировать нужны в любом деле

The subject of project management has become one of the most common themes in the recent past, and that is due to the increase in the number of mega projects worldwide and the development of modern technology in all areas of knowledge, which requires new methods of project management to cope with fast-pace developing.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill accident (variously referred to as the BP oil spill/disaster or the Macondo blowout) commenced on April 20th, 2010 on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect drilling platform. The ensuing fire aboard the drilling platform claimed eleven lives. Following the explosion and sinking of the fl oating oil rig, a sea-fl oor oil gusher fl owed for 87 days, until it was capped on July 15th, 2010. Th e total discharge has been estimated at 4.9 million barrels (780,000 m3), and the event was considered by some authorities to be the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry. 

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) platform drilling the Macondo well in Mississippi Canyon Block 252 exploded, killing 11 workers and injuring another 17. The DWH oil spill resulted in nearly 5 million barrels (approximately 200 million gallons) of crude oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico (GoM). The full impacts of the spill on the GoM and the people who live and work there are unknown but expected to be considerable, and will be expressed over years to decades.

Over the past two decades, private companies have made increasing efforts at the global level to promote corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the environmental, labor, and human rights realms. This book traces private sector initiatives at the global, or international, level to promote social and environmental standards applicable to the mining sector.

Objectives:

• This section deals with detailed study of the principles of data warehousing, data mining, and knowledge discovery.

• The availability of very large volumes of such data has created a problem of how to extract useful, task-oriented knowledge.

• The aim of data mining is to extract implicit, previously unknown and potentially useful patterns from data.

• Data warehousing represents an ideal vision of maintaining a central repository of all organizational data.

• Centralization of data is needed to maximize user access and analysis.

Coal is still a dominant fuel in America, Australia, China, Mongolia and Russia, but more and more countries are abandoning coal and turning to alternative sources of energy, increasingly renewable energy provided by wind, wave or solar power. So now is an opportune time to take stock of the impact that coal and coal mining have had on countries around the world. Some 48 countries have institutions recording or commemorating that history in the form of museums, heritage centres or preserved colliery sites, of which this book considers 432 examples. It is not a straightforward account of the history of coal mining but rather an examination of how that history has been presented by different institutions and cultures.

Today, the advances in discrete modeling make it tempting to attempt to construct models that are more and more complicated by including a large number of geological structures and rock types with different properties. This leads to a dilemma if the model result is to have practical use in rock engineering (Hart, 1990): on one hand, the simulation of a large number of fractures and rock types with different properties satisfies the conceptualization of the rock mass structures and characteristics;