Safety and health in mines: the rise of bureaucracy in the coal mining industry and its results as evidenced by the public enquiry into an accident at Houghton Main Colliery

This thesis is concerned with certain aspects of the Public Inquiry into the accident at Houghton Main Colliery in June 1975. It examines whether prior to the accident there existed at the Colliery a situation in which too much reliance was being placed upon state regulation and too Iittle upon personal responsibility. I study the phenomenon of state regulation. This is done (a) by analysis of selected writings on state regulation/intervention/interference/bureaucracy (the words are used synonymously) over the last two hundred years, specifically those of Marx on the 1866 Committee on Mines, and (b) by studying Chadwick and Tremenheere, leading and contrasting "bureaucrats" of the mid-nineteenth century. The bureaucratisation of the mining industry over the period 1835-1954 is described, and it is demonstrated that the industry obtained and now possesses those characteristics outlined by Max Weber in his model of bureaucracy. I analyse criticisms of the model and find them to be relevant, in that they facilitate understanding both of the circumstances of the accident and of the Inquiry . Further understanding of the circumstances and causes of the accident was gained by attendance at the lnquiry and by interviewing many of those involved in the Inquiry. I analyse many aspects of the Inquiry - its objectives. structure, procedure and conflicting interests - and find that, although the Inquiry had many of the symbols of bureaucracy, it suffered not from " too much" outside interference. but rather from the coal mining industry's shared belief in its ability to solve its own problems. I found nothing to suggest that, prior to the accident, colliery personnel relied. or were encouraged to rely, "too much" upon state regulation.

Porous tin film synthesized by electrodeposition and the electrochemical performance for lithium-ion batteries

Porous tin films as anode for lithium-ion batteries are electrodeposited on graphite paper. Homogeneous tin films with significant void space accommodate the volume change during tin lithiation/delithiation. Through adjusting the electrodeposition currents and time, the morphologies and void space of tin films on graphite paper are controllable. At fixed electrodeposition current densities, the prolonged electrodeposition time plays the role in growing big tin particles and resulting the disappearance of void space among tin particles. The increased electrodeposition current plays the role to increase the quantity of tin seeds in thickness of tin film, and the void space among tin particles remains but the thick film limits its electrochemical performance. The tin films electrodeposited at an optimized current densities and for an optimized electrodeposition time, present the best electrochemical performance, because the tin nanoparticles are well dispersed on graphite substrate including void space. The tin film electrodeposited at 0.2 A cm-2 for 2 min shows the capacity of 1.0 mAh cm-2 after 50 charge/discharge cycles. The void space of tin film is very important for the best capacity and cyclic ability. The metallic tin film produced at 0.4 A cm-2 for 3 min remains the uniform and microporous structure after charge/discharge for 50 cycles.

A computational approach to measuring the correlation between expertise and social media influence for celebrities on microblogs

Existing approaches of social influence analysis usually focus on how to develop effective algorithms to quantize users' influence scores. They rarely consider a person's expertise levels which are arguably important to influence measures. In this paper, we propose a computational approach to measuring the correlation between expertise and social media influence, and we take a new perspective to understand social media influence by incorporating expertise into influence analysis. We carefully constructed a large dataset of 13,684 Chinese celebrities from Sina Weibo (literally 'Sina microblogging'). We found that there is a strong correlation between expertise levels and social media influence scores. In addition, different expertise levels showed influence variation patterns: high-expertise celebrities have stronger influence on the 'audience' in their expertise domains.