Mining and (sustainable) local communities : transforming Ravensthorpe, Western Australia

This chapter examines local community experiences, understandings and changes attending the presence of mining activity, in particular as occurred in the Shire of Ravensthorpe in the South West of Western Australia (WA). It does so by drawing on an extensive ethnographic study spanning the development, opening, and closure of BHP Billiton’s Ravensthorpe Nickel Operation (RNO). Given that the negative consequences of mining activity are most evident and complex at the local level, it is crucial that we understand and address how communities (and the individuals and families who are both part of and are shaped by communities) experience the impacts of mining. Though difficult to measure, social and cultural dimensions of mining at the local scale, as this chapter demonstrates, are central to our understanding of mining as a curse or cure.

Using the SWAP to connect water, human rights and mining

It is important that industries’ water interactions respect the human right to water. Historically, within the mining industry there has been a disconnect between the management of sites’ internal water interactions and the consequences of their external impacts, including human rights impacts. This poses a challenge for the mining industry as it attempts to put the Ruggie Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights into practice, particularly as United Nations has recently recognised the human right to water. A technical framework such as the Minerals Council of Australia’s Water Accounting Framework (WAF) can help to bridge this disconnect and to integrate human rights considerations into business practice by connecting a site’s external and internal water interactions and by encouraging regular monitoring of performance. However, at present the connection is limited since the WAF lacks the capability to formalise a site’s social water context. This work presents the Social Water Assessment Protocol (SWAP), a scoping tool consisting of a set of questions organised into taxonomic themes that capture a site’s social water context and that can be combined with the WAF to better connect human rights with mine water interactions.

Measuring patient flow variations : a cross-organisational process mining approach

Variations that exist in the treatment of patients (with similar symptoms) across different hospitals do substantially impact the quality and costs of healthcare. Consequently, it is important to understand the similarities and differences between the practices across different hospitals. This paper presents a case study on the application of process mining techniques to measure and quantify the differences in the treatment of patients presenting with chest pain symptoms across four South Australian hospitals. Our case study focuses on cross-organisational benchmarking of processes and their performance. Techniques such as clustering, process discovery, performance analysis, and scientific workflows were applied to facilitate such comparative analyses. Lessons learned in overcoming unique challenges in cross-organisational process mining, such as ensuring population comparability, data granularity comparability, and experimental repeatability are also presented.

Rabobank : a process mining case study BPI Challenge 2014 report

The increased interest in the area of process improvement persuaded Rabobank Group ICT in examining its own Change-process in order to improve its competitiveness. The group is looking for answers about the effectiveness of changes applied as part of this process, with particular interest toward the presence of predictive patterns and their parameters. We conducted an analysis of the log using well established process mining techniques (i.e. Fuzzy Miner). The results of the analysis conducted on the log of the process show that a visible impact is missing.

An orientation to early childhood education for sustainability and research : framing the text

This publication arose from the interests of the chapter authors, ‘a small group of thoughtful people’ almost all of whom participated in one or both Transnational Dialogues in Research in Early Childhood Education for Sustainability, held in Stavanger, Norway in 2010 and Brisbane, Australia in 2011 (Refer Appendix 1 for list of participants). These meetings were the first time that a critical mass of researchers from vastly different parts of the globe - Norway, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand at the inaugural meeting, with additional participants from Korea, Japan and Singapore attending the second - had come together to debate, discuss and share ideas about research and theory in the emerging field of Early Childhood Education for Sustainability (ECEfS. Some of the researchers who joined these Transnational Dialogues, had met serendipitously at earlier conferences and meetings, or corresponded via email, but many had never met face-to-face. Now a significant number are contributing authors in this text. It is a testament to these researchers’ interest in this agenda that they mostly self-funded their travel and other costs to attend the Transnational Dialogues research meetings. While most chapter authors come from the field of early childhood education, a few are more aligned with education for sustainability/environmental education, while a much smaller number are already working at the intersection of early childhood education and education for sustainability. What we share as a group is a range of perspectives and orientations to research and to the research focus at the heart of this book - young children and their actual and potential capabilities as agents of change for sustainability. As researchers, regardless of experience and perspectives, participants knew they had something extra to offer - their expertise as researchers - providing scholarly insights into the work of practitioners, applying critically reflective lenses to curricula, pedagogies and assumptions, testing of ideas and theories, and presenting a sense for where ECEfS might fit or, indeed, go beyond norms and orthodoxies. This is a text, then, for both researchers and those whose primary interests lie in daily interactions with children, families and communities.

Social water assessment protocol : a step towards connecting mining, water and human rights

The human right to water has recently been recognised by both the United Nations General Assembly and the Human Rights Council. As the mining industry interacts with water on multiple levels, it is important that these interactions respect the human right to water. Currently, a disconnect exists between mine site water management practices and the recognition of water from a human rights perspective. The Minerals Council of Australia (MCA) Water Accounting Framework (WAF) has previously been used to strengthen the connection between water management and human rights. This article extends this connection through the use of a Social Water Assessment Protocol (SWAP). The SWAP is scoping tool consisting of a set of questions classified into taxonomic themes under leading topics with suggested sources of data that enable mine sites to better understand the local water context in which they operate. Three of the themes contained in the SWAP – gender, Indigenous peoples and health – are discussed to demonstrate how the protocol may be useful in assisting mining companies to consider their impacts on the human right to water.

Social licence to operate and the coal seam gas industry : lessons from social issues in established mining operations?

The recent growth of the coal seam gas industry has increased pressure on regional communities. Debate surrounding the industry is intense and a social licence to operate has yet to be granted to the industry in its entirety. This article presents an analysis of social issues surrounding the coal seam gas industry, making comparisons between two case studies: the Ranger and Jabiluka mines and the Yandicoogina mine. It presents the results of a desktop study, focussed on three topics: community identity; procedural justice and distributive justice, which provides a means for comparison and draws attention to central concerns. It is found that: power imbalances; changing community identities; potentially inequitable distributions of long term benefits and the process to distribute those benefits and negative perceptions of the industry as a whole serve to undermine the provision of a social licence to operate by communities and has the potential to impose significant negative impacts on companies within the industry.

Mining business process deviance : a quest for accuracy

This paper evaluates the suitability of sequence classification techniques for analyzing deviant business process executions based on event logs. Deviant process executions are those that deviate in a negative or positive way with respect to normative or desirable outcomes, such as non-compliant executions or executions that undershoot or exceed performance targets. We evaluate a range of feature types and classification methods in terms of their ability to accurately discriminate between normal and deviant executions both when deviances are infrequent (unbalanced) and when deviances are as frequent as normal executions (balanced). We also analyze the ability of the discovered rules to explain potential causes and contributing factors of observed deviances. The evaluation results show that feature types extracted using pattern mining techniques only slightly outperform those based on individual activity frequency. The results also suggest that more complex feature types ought to be explored to achieve higher levels of accuracy.

Time, space, and text in the elementary school digital writing classroom

Theorists of multiliteracies, social semiotics, and the New Literacy Studies have drawn attention to the potential changing nature of writing and literacy in the context of networked communications. This article reports findings from a design-based research project in Year 4 classrooms (students aged 8.5-10 years) in a low socioeconomic status school. A new writing program taught students how to design multimodal and digital texts across a range of genres and text types, such as web pages, online comics, video documentaries, and blogs. The authors use Bernstein’s theory of the pedagogic device to theorize the pedagogic struggles and resolutions in remaking English through the specialization of time, space, and text. The changes created an ideological struggle as new writing practices were adapted from broader societal fields to meet the instructional and regulative discourses of a conventional writing curriculum.

Robotic explosive charging in mining and construction applications

Describes the development and testing of a robotic system for charging blast holes in underground mining. The automation system supports four main tactical functions: detection of blast holes; teleoperated arm pose control; automatic arm pose control; and human-in-the-loop visual servoing. We present the system architecture, and analyse the major components, Hole detection is crucial for automating the process, and we discuss theoretical and practical aspects in detail. The sensors used are laser range finders and cameras installed in the end effector. For automatic insertion, we consider image processing techniques to support visual servoing the tool to the hole. We also discuss issues surrounding the control of heavy-duty mining manipulators, in particular, friction, stiction, and actuator saturation.

A discourse analysis on how the sustainability agenda is defined within the mining industry

The mining industry has positioned itself within the sustainability agenda, particularly since the establishment of the International Council of Mining and Minerals (ICMM). However, some critics have questioned this position, since mining requires the extraction of non-renewable finite resources and commercial mining companies have the specific responsibility to produce profit. Complicating matters is that terms that represent the sustainability such as ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable development’ have multiple definitions with varying degrees of sophistication. This work identifies eleven sustainability agenda definitions that are applicable to the mining industry and organises them into three tiers: first, Perpetual Sustainability, that focuses on mining continuing indefinitely with its benefits limited to immediate shareholders; second, Transferable Sustainability, that focuses on how mining can benefit society and the environment and third, Transitional Sustainability, that focuses on the intergenerational benefits to society and the environment even after mining ceases. Using these definitions, a discourse analysis was performed on sustainability reports from member companies of the ICMM and the academic journal Resources Policy. The discourse analysis showed that in both media the definition of the sustainability agenda was focussed on Transferable Sustainability, with the sustainability reports focused on how it can be applied within a business context while the academic journal took a broader view of mining’s social and environmental impacts.

Data mining the relationship between road crash and skid resistance

Road asset managers are seeking analysis of the whole road network to supplement statistical analyses of small subsets of homogeneous roadway. This study outlines the use of data mining capable of analyzing the wide range of situations found on the network, with a focus on the role of skid resistance in the cause of crashes. Results from the analyses show that on non-crash-prone roads with low crash rates, skid resistance contributes only in a minor way, whereas on high-crash roadways, skid resistance often contributes significantly in the calculation of the crash rate. The results provide evidence supporting a causal relationship between skid resistance and crashes and highlight the importance of the role of skid resistance in decision making in road asset management.