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Whenever a theological doctrine is given renewed attention after having been ignored or marginalized for a long period of time, a number of disagreements are bound to arise. The recent renaissance of Trinitarian theology is no exception to this rule. Theologians have quarrelled over a number of issues, including the revisability of the divine names, the appropriateness of the language of person and the practical consequences of the doctrine of the Trinity. But on one matter, at least, we can point to a fairly wide consensus: most recent writers seem convinced that the language of relationality has something important to contribute to Trinitarian doctrine. This term is central for a number of authors, including Leonardo Boff, Colin Gunton, Robert Jenson, Elizabeth Johnson, Walter Kasper, Catherine Mowry LaCugna, Jiirgen Moltmann and Alan Torrance. While these writers are certainly not unified in their understanding and their assessment of this term, they all endorse its importance in the construction of Trinitarian theology.

Numerous developments in automation have made the modern mobile offshore drilling unit a marvel of engineering achievement and a model of efficiency. Yet, even with the surge in advancements, kick detection, which can be comparatively elementary for a fixed drilling unit, has proven significantly more difficult to master on a vessel which subject to wave motion and currents. A lack of consensus on universal standards and regulations have left kick detection largely ignored. But further, the lack of innovation has been coupled with drilling in greater water depths which are subject to the use of longer risers with greater volume and weight. Thus, in addition to the complications of dynamic environments are the material requirements to properly intervene during an influx event. Operators and shipyards have kept pace with these material issues by designing larger, smarter vessels with greater capacities and better controls systems to cope with the complexities of drilling in deepwater environments. Despite the best efforts and ballooning costs, influx events continue to occur because an operating envelope and a universal philosophy for deepwater kick detection have yet to be established.With the primary driver for deepwater and ultra-deepwater drilling being to access the most productive formations possible, a recipe is formed such that a slight variation between formation pressure and fluid pressure has the potential to draw a significant hydrocarbon volume into the well bore. When well control procedures are initiated, a series of checks take place which, though proven and reliable for detecting kicks, consume valuable response time and potentially aggravate the initial problem. After an influx has been confirmed, remedial work often takes days and sometimes weeks to recondition the well for drilling. Whether in terms of personnel, equipment, facility, environment, or finance, the risk presented to the drilling operation by influx and loss events is substantial. Therefore, an advanced approach should be adopted which views kick/loss detection as a safety critical measurement and incorporates a modern, control system based design philosophy with established methods to overcome shortcomings. This paper will describe experiences, challenges, and approaches to solving the problems related to creating an advanced early kick detection system suitable for floating mobile offshore drilling units. Necessary components, operational considerations, and design limitations will be discussed. Additionally, a discussion will offered on the current state of regulatory requirements related to kick detection and considerations for future standards.

This article argues that the emergence of a trans-disciplinary discourse of 'visual culture' must be understood as, above all, a constitutively urban phenomenon. More specifically, it is in the historically new form of the capitalist metropolis, as described most famously by Simmel, that the 'hyper-stimulus' of modern visual culture has its social and spatial conditions. Paradoxically, however, it is as a result of this that visual culture studies is also intrinsically 'haunted' by a certain spectre of the invisible: one rooted in those forms of 'real abstraction' which Marx identifies with the commodity and the money form. Considering, initially, the canonical urban visual forms of the collage and the spectacle, these are each read in a certain relation to Simmel's account of metropolitan life and of the money form, and, through this, to what the author claims are those forms of social and spatial abstraction that must be understood to animate them. Finally, the article returns to the entanglement of the visible and invisible entailed by this, and concludes by making some tentative suggestions about something like a paradoxical urban 'aesthetic' of abstraction on such a basis.

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For Georg Lukács in his Theory of the Novel, if the abstraction inherent in the act of theorization itself is demanded in some way by the novel form, it is because in “the created reality” of the latter “totality can be systematized only in abstract terms.” Yet equally the novel is evidently distinguished by a new kind of concreteness: a devotion to what Hegel called the “unendingly particular.” Such a dialectic “without synthesis” between its abstract and concrete tendencies is the very historical condition of the novel form. Contra Lukács's own later attempt to redeem a less tragic conception of the novel under the name of realism, this essay seeks to rethink his early debt to Hegel's account of the novel and the subsequent reworking of its terms within a Marxist framework—one that sees in Marx's Capital a refunctioning of Hegel's Spirit as the “real abstraction” of Capital itself: that “self-moving substance which is Subject” in the “shape of money.” For such a reading, the novel is thus to be grasped by critical theory as expressive of what Henri Lefebvre describes as a “predominance of the abstract in modern art [that] accompanies the extension of … the unlimited power of money and capital, very abstract and terribly concrete at one and the same time.” Here modes of abstraction are less a flight from reality and more an index of the various social forms of “real abstraction” constitutive of the “unrepresentable” totality of modernity itself.