The U.S. Coal Industry: Market Structure & Implications

The U.S. coal mining industry was once a booming industry which created and defined communities, particularly in Appalachia. The industry has, however, transformed significantly in the last couple of decades with the passage of environmental policies, with competition from the Shale Revolution, from changes in company ownership, and from mine safety regulation. Overall, the coal industry during this time has experienced a massive decline in production and employment. This dissertation is composed of three papers that investigate these mechanisms and their role in understanding market structure, coal transactions and prices, and mine safety outcomes. Motivated by the shutdowns of U.S. coal mines, Chapter 1 uses data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) and hand-compiled coal parent company data, to conduct short- and long-run coal mine survival analyses using mine-plant transaction data. It hypothesizes that utilities that faced higher delivery coal prices were more likely to replace coal-fired with natural gas powered generators. Conditional on the overall U.S. natural gas to coal price trend as well as proxies for mine and plant exposure to environmental policies, the two-stage least squares results indicate that the mean difference in coal delivery price in 2010 between Appalachian mines and other mines causes the mine-plant survival rate to differ by 12.1 percentage points over the 2010-2020 period. Chapter 1 concludes that the mass exits of coal mines in Appalachia arose primarily because underground mines typical of Appalachia are more expensive to operate than surface mines typical of other regions. Following Chapter 1, Chapter 2 looks more closely at how coal markets for electricity generation are concentrated and localized within the United States, particularly Appalachia. Using mine-power plant transaction-level data over the 2009-2019 period from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) and hand-compiled data on operating companies’ parent companies and individual owners, Chapter 2 shows that an average power plant sources coal from 4 parents and that around 30% of power plants source coal from a single coal parent. It finds that, conditional on the overall trend, local concentration in Appalachia increased coal delivery prices, with power plants paying up to 9.6% more for coal when sourcing exclusively from a monopolist parent company. Using the same hand-compiled research as Chapters 1 & 2, Chapter 3 investigates coal mine safety and the behavior of coal mine safety violators. This Chapter covers 2002-2018, also using data from the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and the United States Energy Information Administration (EIA). It was inspired by the passage of the federal Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response (MINER) Act of 2006, which aimed to improve mine safety in the United States after the deadly Sago mine disaster. It finds that while some underground mines were reported to be less negligent after the Act, safety did not improve uniformly across all mines. Finally, Chapter 3 finds that financially constrained parent companies regardless of listing status are responsible for exposing their miners to more potentially fatal working conditions

Designing disability : symbols, space, and society

xvi, 223 p. : ill. ; 24 cm

Making Disability Modern : Design Histories

Buku ini berisi pemikiran berbagai macam disiplin ilmu dan perspektif nasional untuk mengkaji bagaimana objek dan ruang yang dirancang membantu disabilitas mulai dari rumah hingga fasilitas umum. Penulis juga mengungkapkan peran sosial dari benda-benda yang dirancang bagi penyandang disabilitas, seperti tongkat berjalan, kursi roda, dan kaki palsu. Bagaimana barang-barang tersebut mempengaruhi psikologi dan pengalaman sosial penyandang disabilitas.ix, 250 p. : ill. ; 23,5 c

Deciphering Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Transmission and Early Envelope Diversification by Single-Genome Amplification and Sequencing▿

Accurate identification of the transmitted virus and sequences evolving from it could be instrumental in elucidating the transmission of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) and in developing vaccines, drugs, or microbicides to prevent infection. Here we describe an experimental approach to analyze HIV-1 env genes as intact genetic units amplified from plasma virion RNA by single-genome amplification (SGA), followed by direct sequencing of uncloned DNA amplicons. We show that this strategy precludes in vitro artifacts caused by Taq-induced nucleotide substitutions and template switching, provides an accurate representation of the env quasispecies in vivo, and has an overall error rate (including nucleotide misincorporation, insertion, and deletion) of less than 8 × 10−5. Applying this method to the analysis of virus in plasma from 12 Zambian subjects from whom samples were obtained within 3 months of seroconversion, we show that transmitted or early founder viruses can be identified and that molecular pathways and rates of early env diversification can be defined. Specifically, we show that 8 of the 12 subjects were each infected by a single virus, while 4 others acquired more than one virus; that the rate of virus evolution in one subject during an 80-day period spanning seroconversion was 1.7 × 10−5 substitutions per site per day; and that evidence of strong immunologic selection can be seen in Env and overlapping Rev sequences based on nonrandom accumulation of nonsynonymous mutations. We also compared the results of the SGA approach with those of more-conventional bulk PCR amplification methods performed on the same patient samples and found that the latter is associated with excessive rates of Taq-induced recombination, nucleotide misincorporation, template resampling, and cloning bias. These findings indicate that HIV-1 env genes, other viral genes, and even full-length viral genomes responsible for productive clinical infection can be identified by SGA analysis of plasma virus sampled at intervals typical in large-scale vaccine trials and that pathways of viral diversification and immune escape can be determined accurately