Eureka and beyond: mining's impact on African urbanisation

This collection brings separate literatures on mining and urbanisation together at a time when both artisanal and large-scale mining are expanding in many African economies. While much has been written about contestation over land and mineral rights, the impact of mining on settlement, notably its catalytic and fluctuating effects on migration and urban growth, has been largely ignored. African nation-states’ urbanisation trends have shown considerable variation over the past half century. The current surge in ‘new’ mining countries and the slow-down in ‘old’ mining countries are generating some remarkable settlement patterns and welfare outcomes. Presently, the African continent is a laboratory of national mining experiences. This special issue on African mining and urbanisation encompasses a wide cross-section of country case studies: beginning with the historical experiences of mining in Southern Africa (South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe), followed by more recent mineralizing trends in comparatively new mineral-producing countries (Tanzania) and an established West African gold producer (Ghana), before turning to the influence of conflict minerals (Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone)

Corporate Social Responsibility and the Mining Sector in Southern Africa: A Focus on Mining in Malawi, South Africa and Zambia

The research conducted by the Bench Marks Foundation on mining in Southern provides SADC governments, mining companies and local mining community stakeholders with information and guidance on issues to consider in the process of empowerment and sustainable development through corporate social responsibility. At the same time it also alerts the global world of the human rights shortfalls that are being practised in the SADC mining communities

Mining in Alaska - environmental impact and pollution control

Environmental factors affecting mining are difficult to establish in Alaska due to the absence of large scale hard rock mining activities at the present time. Currently, experience is gathered from (and to a large degree based on) construction of above ground facilities such as roads, pipelines, and buildings. Past mining activities appear to have had little lasting effect on the natural environment, the exceptions being mine tailings and surface structures. This report, sponsored by the U. S. Bureau of Mines, present general engineering activities, considers the interaction of permafrost and underground mining, summarizes available literature and indicates possible environmental problems that might be encountered in Alaska based on Scandinavian experiences in large-scale northern mining operations. How the Scandinavians are solving their problems is also discussed.This paper was sponsored by the U. S. Bureau of Mines, Contract No. 0133059.Abstract -- Acknowledgements -- Table of contents -- List of illustrations -- List of tables -- Introduction -- Climatic parameters -- Alaska climatic regions -- Construction and mining activities in the Arctic -- General -- Cold weather construction practices -- Permafrost and underground mining operations -- Environmental considerations -- Mining and exploration parameters -- Conclusions -- Recommendations -- Bibliography -- Appendices -- Appendix A: Bibliography - Lost River area -- Appendix B: Mining and environmental considerations as practiced in Norway and Sweden -- Appendix C: Mining vs. the environment -- Figure 1. Alaska climatic regions -- Figure 2. Index map showing mining districts examined -- List of tables -- Table 1. Dates of break-up and freeze-up

Efficient Analysis of Pattern and Association Rule Mining Approaches

The process of data mining produces various patterns from a given data source. The most recognized data mining tasks are the process of discovering frequent itemsets, frequent sequential patterns, frequent sequential rules and frequent association rules. Numerous efficient algorithms have been proposed to do the above processes. Frequent pattern mining has been a focused topic in data mining research with a good number of references in literature and for that reason an important progress has been made, varying from performant algorithms for frequent itemset mining in transaction databases to complex algorithms, such as sequential pattern mining, structured pattern mining, correlation mining. Association Rule mining (ARM) is one of the utmost current data mining techniques designed to group objects together from large databases aiming to extract the interesting correlation and relation among huge amount of data. In this article, we provide a brief review and analysis of the current status of frequent pattern mining and discuss some promising research directions. Additionally, this paper includes a comparative study between the performance of the described approaches.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1312.4800; and with arXiv:1109.2427 by other author

Social Indicators for Arctic Mining

This paper reviews and assesses the state of the data to describe and monitor mining trends in the pan-Arctic. It constructs a mining index and discusses its value as a social impact indicator and discusses drivers of change in Arctic mining. The widely available measures of mineral production and value are poor proxies for economic effects on Arctic communities. Trends in mining activity can be characterized as stasis or decline in mature regions of the Arctic, with strong growth in the frontier regions. World prices and the availability of large, undiscovered and untapped resources with favorable access and low political risk are the biggest drivers for Arctic mining, while climate change is a minor and locally variable factor. Historical data on mineral production and value is unavailable in electronic format for much of the Arctic, specifically Scandinavia and Russia; completing the historical record back to 1980 will require work with paper archives. The most critically needed improvement in data collection and reporting is to develop comparable measures of employment: the eight Arctic countries each use different definitions of employment, and different methodologies to collect the data. Furthermore, many countries do not report employment by county and industry, so the Arctic share of mining employment cannot be identified. More work needs to be done to develop indicator measures for ecosystem service flows. More work also needs to be done developing conceptual models of effects of mining activities on fate control, cultural continuity and ties to nature for local Arctic communities