Review of Survey activities 2004

The Review of Survey activities presents a selection of 18 papers reflecting the wide spectrum of activities of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, from the microbial to the plate tectonic level.Activities in Denmark: The Survey's activities in Denmark are documented by 11 papers. The main themes are petroleum- and groundwater-related topics and Quaternary geology but neotectonics of the Baltic Shield and new methods in provenance studies of sandstones are also touched upon.Activities in Greenland: The Survey's activities in Greenland and the North Atlantic are covered by six articles focusing on climate research, the mineral potential of the Precambrian basement terranes in West Greenland and on the possibility of exploiting dimension stones.Other countries: During 2004, the Survey carried out work in more than 20 countries outside Denmark, Greenland and the Faroe Islands. In this report a project on developing small-scale mining in Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan is described

Quantifying capital goods for collection and transport of waste

The capital goods for collection and transport of waste were quantified for different types of containers (plastic containers, cubes and steel containers) and an 18-tonnes compacting collection truck. The data were collected from producers and vendors of the bins and the truck. The service lifetime and the capacity of the goods were also assessed. Environmental impact assessment of the production of the capital goods revealed that, per tonne of waste handled, the truck had the largest contribution followed by the steel container. Large high density polyethylene (HDPE) containers had the lowest impact per tonne of waste handled. The impact of producing the capital goods for waste collection and transport cannot be neglected as the capital goods dominate (&gt;85%) the categories human-toxicity (non-cancer and cancer), ecotoxicity, resource depletion and aquatic eutrophication, but also play a role (&gt;13%) within the other impact categories when compared with the impacts from combustion of fuels for the collection and transport of the waste, when a transport distance of 25 km was assumed. </jats:p

Mean Field Approaches to Independent Component Analysis

We develop mean field approaches for probabilistic independent component analysis (ICA). The sources are estimated from the mean of their posterior distribution and the mixing matrix (and noise level) is estimated by maximum a posteriori (MAP). The latter requires the computation of (a good approximation to) the correlations between sources. For this purpose we investigate three increasingly advanced mean field methods: variational, linear response and adaptive TAP and test the resulting algorithms on a number of problems. On synthetic data the advanced mean field approaches are able to recover the correct mixing matrix in cases where the variational mean field theory fails. For hand-written digits, sparse encoding is achieved using non-negative source and mixing priors. For speech, the mean field method is able to separate in the underdetermined (overcomplete) case of two sensors and three sources. One major advantage of the proposed method is its generality and implementational simplicity. Finally, we point out several possible extensions of the approaches developed here