Shareholder Employment at Red Dog Mine

Under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, Iñupiat of northwest Alaska organized as shareholders in the NANA1 Regional Corporation, Inc., and received title to 2,258,836 acres, including rights to the rich Red Dog zinc deposit. In 1982, NANA signed a joint-venture agreement with Teck2 to develop the mine, including provisions for preferential hire for qualified NANA shareholders. The agreement aimed for 100% shareholder hire by 2001. As of 2010, Teck had 220 NANA shareholders in full-time employment, which is 53 percent of the workforce. Other mines around the world have similar indigenous or local hire agreements with mixed success. The Voisey’s Bay mine sets the high mark for Canada with an Aboriginal hire rate of 54 percent (AETG 2008), followed by Ekati diamond mine at 50 percent (BHP Billiton 2011). So the track record for indigenous employment at Red Dog is high by global standards, although it falls short of NANA and Teck’s goal. What are the continuing barriers to increasing shareholder hire, retention and promotion

Composable computation in discrete chemical reaction networks

We study the composability of discrete chemical reaction networks (CRNs) that stably compute (i.e., with probability 0 of error) integer-valued functions $f:\mathbb{N}^d\to\mathbb{N}$. We consider output-oblivious CRNs in which the output species is never a reactant (input) to any reaction. The class of output-oblivious CRNs is fundamental, appearing in earlier studies of CRN computation, because it is precisely the class of CRNs that can be composed by simply renaming the output of the upstream CRN to match the input of the downstream CRN. Our main theorem precisely characterizes the functions $f$ stably computable by output-oblivious CRNs with an initial leader. The key necessary condition is that for sufficiently large inputs, $f$ is the minimum of a finite number of nondecreasing quilt-affine functions. (An affine function is linear with a constant offset; a quilt-affine function is linear with a periodic offset)

Artin Group Presentations Arising from Cluster Algebras

In 2003, Fomin and Zelevinsky proved that finite type cluster algebras can be classified by Dynkin diagrams. Then in 2013, Barot and Marsh defined the presentation of a reflection group associated to a Dynkin diagram in terms of an edge-weighted, oriented graph, and proved that this group is invariant (up to isomorphism) under diagram mutations. In this paper, we extend Barot and Marsh's results to Artin group presentations, defining new generator relations and showing mutation-invariance for these presentations.Comment: 26 pages, 7 figures, comments are welcom

"O Brave New World": A Change in the Weather.

The concept of "Waterfronts" becomes a powerful poetic metaphor. A point of departure and arrival in understanding arts practises. The ebb and flow between definitions of Nature and Culture. The littoral from which evolutionary transition is made. Referencing The Tempest by William Shakespeare (1564 -1616) some paintings by Turner and the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519), this presentation considers how Public Art in the context of urban and social development may start to engage the issue of Climate Change. It will also explore our relationship with water from different perspectives, as a learning process

Multipath Parameter Estimation from OFDM Signals in Mobile Channels

We study multipath parameter estimation from orthogonal frequency division multiplex signals transmitted over doubly dispersive mobile radio channels. We are interested in cases where the transmission is long enough to suffer time selectivity, but short enough such that the time variation can be accurately modeled as depending only on per-tap linear phase variations due to Doppler effects. We therefore concentrate on the estimation of the complex gain, delay and Doppler offset of each tap of the multipath channel impulse response. We show that the frequency domain channel coefficients for an entire packet can be expressed as the superimposition of two-dimensional complex sinusoids. The maximum likelihood estimate requires solution of a multidimensional non-linear least squares problem, which is computationally infeasible in practice. We therefore propose a low complexity suboptimal solution based on iterative successive and parallel cancellation. First, initial delay/Doppler estimates are obtained via successive cancellation. These estimates are then refined using an iterative parallel cancellation procedure. We demonstrate via Monte Carlo simulations that the root mean squared error statistics of our estimator are very close to the Cramer-Rao lower bound of a single two-dimensional sinusoid in Gaussian noise.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (26 pages, 9 figures and 3 tables

Arts in ecology: questions of foresight

First, to reflect upon the title, ‘Music and Arts in Action’. We might, for certain purposes, consider a coming together of art forms and disciplines. Not the crossovers, mergers and interdisciplinary dialectical fusions we are familiar with, but a convergence or, as the biochemist E. O. Wilson (1999) termed it, a ‘consilience’, a leaping together of different knowledge. Perhaps this is akin to the Nobel physicist David Bohm’s ‘Dialogue – A proposal’ (Bohm, et al, 1991), in which processes, forms and structures synthesise as a creative act? And so we move from the co-joining action of the word ‘and’ to the dynamic agency of ‘in’. Here we may find meaning in ‘…in Action’, the act, or intervention that provokes and evokes a new culture, or a new society, perhaps as the artist Joseph Beuys (1990) aimed for in his concept of ‘Social Sculpture’. Furthermore, that notion of dynamism embedded in ‘in Action’ introduces the ideas of movement, change and transformation – from one place to another, from one time to another, or from one state of being to another. ‘Far from equilibrium’ (Prigogne and Stengers, 1984), this relational interdependence may be understood as that embodied by whole systems ecology, or the process, pattern and structure of Music and Arts. Here and now is where this paper starts, by considering the ways in which this dialogue with and between Music and Arts might, in Action, create questions of foresight and ‘ennobling questions’ (Haley, 2008) that may contribute to many futures becoming. The key message is that environmental, social and cultural sustainability require creative, imaginative and positive approaches, and that the arts can contribute to these

Explaining the decline in the auction rate securities market

Auction rate securities are an example of a relatively obscure financial market instrument that has been caught up in the recent negative sentiment affecting the financial markets. This article examines these securities and sheds some light on recent events.Auctions ; Securities ; Financial markets