Long-term evolution of highly alkaline steel slag drainage waters

© 2015, Springer International Publishing Switzerland. The disposal of slag generated by the steel industry can have negative consequences upon the surrounding aquatic environment by the generation of high pH waters, leaching of potentially problematic trace metals, and rapid rates of calcite precipitation which smother benthic habitats. A 36-year dataset was collated from the long-term ambient monitoring of physicochemical parameters and elemental concentrations of samples from two steel slag leachate-affected watercourses in northern England. Waters were typified by elevated pH ( > 10), high alkalinity, and were rich in dissolved metals (e.g. calcium (Ca), aluminium (Al), and zinc (Zn)). Long-term trend analysis was performed upon pH, alkalinity, and Ca concentration which, in addition to Ca flux calculations, were used to highlight the longevity of pollution arising as a result of the dumping and subsequent leaching of steel slags. Declines in calcium and alkalinity have been modest over the monitoring period and not accompanied by significant declines in water pH. If the monotonic trends of decline in alkalinity and calcium continue in the largest of the receiving streams, it will be in the region of 50–80 years before calcite precipitation would be expected to be close to baseline levels, where ecological impacts would be negligible

To the Dictionary and Beyond! The Personification of Corporations in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 134 S. Ct. 2751 (2014)

In March of 2010, President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which provides that group health plans must provide coverage for certain forms of preventative care and screenings for women. Regulations promulgated pursuant to this provision, commonly known as the contraceptive mandate, required coverage for all FDA-approved contraceptive methods without cost sharing. Two closely held corporations sued the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). The suit was based on the owners’ opposition to abortion, which was rooted in their sincerely held religious beliefs. The plaintiffs sought to enjoin enforcement of the contraceptive mandate to the extent it required them to facilitate access to the four contraceptive methods they found objectionable. In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., the United States Supreme Court held that corporations are persons within the meaning of RFRA and the contraceptive mandate burdened the corporations’ exercise of religion. This Note argues the Court correctly decided Hobby Lobby in holding that corporations are persons under RFRA. It reviews the legal background of the contraceptive mandate, RFRA, and the Dictionary Act, as well as cases where courts have held that corporations are persons within the meaning of a statute, and cases holding that corporations have racial identities and are thus capable of bringing racial discrimination suits. This Note analyzes the Court’s use of the Dictionary Act and compares the decision in Hobby Lobby to case law holding that corporations have racial identities under federal civil rights statutes. Finally, this Note analyzes the Court’s holding that Dictionary Act was applicable and that corporations are persons capable of exercising religion, with a special focus on the similarities between cases holding that corporations are persons within the meaning of RFRA, and cases holding that corporations are persons within the meaning of civil rights legislation

Religious Liberty vs. Discrimination: Striking a Balance When Business Owners Refuse Service to Same-Sex Couples Due to Religious Beliefs

Same-sex marriage is now legal in all fifty states, which has created a same-sex wedding industry. Some business owners, who do not believe in discrimination based on sexual orientation, nevertheless have religious beliefs that forbid them from participating in same-sex marriage ceremonies and celebrations by providing goods and services for those ceremonies and celebrations. This comment argues for passage of a statute which adequately protects business owners who have religious objections to same-sex marriage, but does not provide for blanket discrimination against the LGBT community. The comment argues this goal is feasible if the statute is narrowly tailored to encompass only businesses in the wedding industry engaged in wedding-related business transactions. The comment further argues that the same statute can also ensure LGBT individuals are not discriminated against in conducting regular business activities. Finally, the comment proposes a sample statute successfully accomplishing the dual objectives of protecting religious liberty and banning discrimination based on sexual orientation

Implementing the FRBR Conceptual Model in the Variations Music Discovery System

The Variations/FRBR project, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services from 2008 to 2011, is designed to fully implement the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) conceptual model in the production Variations music discovery system at IU. The project will provide an innovative discovery platform for musical materials on our campus, and will serve as a model for the development of other FRBRized library catalogs. This presentation will discuss the goals and accomplishments of the project, particular challenges our project team has encountered in turning a conceptual model into a concrete data model with an XML binding, and other technical issues surrounding the move from a MARC-based library catalog to a FRBR-based one

Time Critical Social Mobilization: The DARPA Network Challenge Winning Strategy

It is now commonplace to see the Web as a platform that can harness the collective abilities of large numbers of people to accomplish tasks with unprecedented speed, accuracy and scale. To push this idea to its limit, DARPA launched its Network Challenge, which aimed to "explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems." The challenge required teams to provide coordinates of ten red weather balloons placed at different locations in the continental United States. This large-scale mobilization required the ability to spread information about the tasks widely and quickly, and to incentivize individuals to act. We report on the winning team's strategy, which utilized a novel recursive incentive mechanism to find all balloons in under nine hours. We analyze the theoretical properties of the mechanism, and present data about its performance in the challenge.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figure

Robust Market Equilibria with Uncertain Preferences

The problem of allocating scarce items to individuals is an important practical question in market design. An increasingly popular set of mechanisms for this task uses the concept of market equilibrium: individuals report their preferences, have a budget of real or fake currency, and a set of prices for items and allocations is computed that sets demand equal to supply. An important real world issue with such mechanisms is that individual valuations are often only imperfectly known. In this paper, we show how concepts from classical market equilibrium can be extended to reflect such uncertainty. We show that in linear, divisible Fisher markets a robust market equilibrium (RME) always exists; this also holds in settings where buyers may retain unspent money. We provide theoretical analysis of the allocative properties of RME in terms of envy and regret. Though RME are hard to compute for general uncertainty sets, we consider some natural and tractable uncertainty sets which lead to well behaved formulations of the problem that can be solved via modern convex programming methods. Finally, we show that very mild uncertainty about valuations can cause RME allocations to outperform those which take estimates as having no underlying uncertainty.Comment: Extended preprint of an article accepted to AAAI-20. Contains supplementary material as appendices. Due to figures, this manuscript is best printed in colo

Targeted Resource Recovery from Mine Waters by Selective Ion Exchange

Waste stockpiles generated as a result of mining cause long-term damage to the environment and can continue to act as a source of pollution for decades beyond mine closure. Current treatment options tend to focus predominantly on Fe removal and may not properly target other trace metal species that may also be present, e.g. Ni, Mn, Co, Cu; metals with an intrinsic recovery value. As such, this thesis explores the potential application of ion exchange resins to selectively recover metals from mine waters, with the hope that by viewing the wastes as a resource rather than a problem, an incentive is provided to deal with this globally significant pollution source. A range of commercially available ion exchange resins of different chemical functionality were screened for their selective metal recovery performance under a range of pH and [SO42-] conditions. Of the most suitable resins, fixed-bed breakthrough modelling was used to describe their extractive abilities under dynamic operation, and to define optimum operating conditions. Of particular note, a resin was identified which was capable of truly selective Cu recovery from the complex waste stream. The extent to which metals could be recovered from resins after extraction was determined through elution studies, and the composition of eluents was tailored to maximise the concentration of solutions recovered. For one of the resins, a two-stage elution process was proposed for the selective recovery of Co and Ni as two separate, concentrated product streams; a highly desirable separation given the high value of each metal. The reusability of each resin was determined through cyclic adsorption and desorption studies to assess process sustainability, and where appropriate, resin degradation mechanisms were explored. Finally, a bench-scale system was operated to explore the potential of a coupled-column system design for continuous treatment and resource recovery