Bang and bust: almost everything you wanted to know about sex and the mining boom (but were afraid to ask)

Recent growth and expansion of the fly-in/fly-out (FIFO) model of mining in remote rural Australia has led to concerns about the health and well-being of those employed by the mines and those in the small rural communities where they are based. A particular concern has been the potential disruption to sexual norms in mining towns and increases in sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and HIV.

Mining, sex work and STIs: why force a connection?

Can the mining boom be blamed for the rising rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in some states? The Australian Medical Association thinks so, with its Queensland president Dr Richard Kidd attributing rising rates of gonorrhoea, syphilis and chlamydia in Queensland and Western Australia to bored and cashed-up miners.

Julia Gillard, Big Pharma, patent law and public health

It takes a lot of bravery for governments to stand up to big business. But the Gillard government has shown a lot of guts during its tenure. It stood up to Big Tobacco in the battle over plain packaging of tobacco products and has defended individuals and families affected by asbestos. It took on Big Oil in its Clean Energy Future reforms and stood up to the resource barons with the mining tax. The government is now considering Big Pharma - the pharmaceutical industry and their patents – and has launched several inquiries into patent law and pharmaceutical drugs...

The hidden injuries of mining: Frontier cultural conflict

This chapter addresses a topic of growing significance to green criminology - the harmful effects of mining on local communities and the environment (Ruggiero and South 2013; White 2013a). While mining has long been recognised as an agent of environmental harm (White 2013a), less recognised is that its global expansion also has harmful effects on localised patterns of violence, work and community life in mining towns. Australia provides an excellent case study for exploring some of these mining impacts.

Water management capacity building to support rapidly developing mining economies

Many developing countries are experiencing rapid expansion in mining with associated water impacts. In most cases mining expansion is outpacing the building of national capacity to ensure that sustainable water management practices are implemented. Since 2011, Australia's International Mining for Development Centre (IM4DC) has funded capacity building in such countries including a program of water projects. Five projects in particular (principally covering experiences from Peru, Colombia, Ghana, Zambia, Indonesia, Philippines and Mongolia) have provided insight into water capacity building priorities and opportunities. This paper reviews the challenges faced by water stakeholders, and proposes the associated capacity needs. The paper uses the evidence derived from the IM4DC projects to develop a set of specific capacity-building recommendations. Recommendations include: the incorporation of mine water management in engineering and environmental undergraduate courses; secondments of staff to suitable partner organisations; training to allow site staff to effectively monitor water including community impacts; leadership training to support a water stewardship culture; training of officials to support implementation of catchment management approaches; and the empowerment of communities to recognise and negotiate solutions to mine-related risks. New initiatives to fund the transfer of multi-disciplinary knowledge from nations with well-developed water management practices are called for.

Mining Money: the generative capacities of scientific and legal knowledge practices in the making of resource economies

In 1997 a scandal associated with Bre-X, a junior mining firm, and its prospecting activities in Indonesia, exposed to public scrutiny the ways in which mineral exploration firms acquire, assess and report on scientific claims about the natural environment. At stake here was not just how investors understood the provisional nature of scientific knowledge, but also evidence of fraud. Contemporaneous mining scandals not only included the salting of cores, but also unreliable proprietary sample preparation and assay methods, mis-representations of visual field estimates as drilling results and ‘overly optimistic’ geological reports. This paper reports on initiatives taken in the wake of these scandals and prompted by the Mining Standards Task Force (TSE/OSC 1999). For regulators, mandated to increase investor confidence in Canada’s leading role within the global mining industry, efforts focused first and foremost upon identifying and removing sources of error and wilfulness within the production and circulation of scientific knowledge claims. A common goal cross-cutting these initiatives was ‘a faithful representation of nature’ (Daston and Galison 2010), however, as the paper argues, this was manifest in an assemblage of practices governed by distinct and rival regulative visions of science and the making of markets in claims about ‘nature’. These ‘practices of fidelity’, it is argued, can be consequential in shaping the spatial and temporal dynamics of the marketization of nature.

A primer for the Environmental Impact Assessment of mining at seafloor massive sulfide deposits

Seafloor massive sulfides (SMS) contain commercially viable quantities of high grade ores, making them attractive prospect sites for marine mining. SMS deposits may also contain hydrothermal vent ecosystems populated by high conservation value vent-endemic species. Responsible environmental management of these resources is best achieved by the adoption of a precautionary approach. Part of this precautionary approach involves the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) of exploration and exploitative activities at SMS deposits. The VentBase 2012 workshop provided a forum for stakeholders and scientists to discuss issues surrounding SMS exploration and exploitation. This forum recognised the requirement for a primer which would relate concepts underpinning EIA at SMS deposits. The purpose of this primer is to inform policy makers about EIA at SMS deposits in order to aid management decisions. The primer offers a basic introduction to SMS deposits and their associated ecology, and the basic requirements for EIA at SMS deposits; including initial data and information scoping, environmental survey, and ecological risk assessment. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.

VentBase:Developing a consensus among stakeholders in the deep-sea regarding environmental impact assessment for deep-sea mining-A workshop report

Mining seafloor massive sulfides for metals is an emergent industry faced with environmental management challenges. These revolve largely around limits to our current understanding of biological variability in marine systems, a challenge common to all marine environmental management. VentBase was established as a forum where academic, commercial, governmental, and non-governmental stakeholders can develop a consensus regarding the management of exploitative activities in the deep-sea. Participants advocate a precautionary approach with the incorporation of lessons learned from coastal studies. This workshop report from VentBase encourages the standardization of sampling methodologies for deep-sea environmental impact assessment. VentBase stresses the need for the collation of spatial data and importance of datasets amenable to robust statistical analyses. VentBase supports the identification of set-asides to prevent the local extirpation of vent-endemic communities and for the post-extraction recolonization of mine sites. © 2013.

A primer for use of genetic tools in selecting and testing the suitability of set-aside sites protected from deep-sea seafloor massive sulfide mining activities

Seafloor massive sulfide (SMS) mining will likely occur at hydrothermal systems in the near future. Alongside their mineral wealth, SMS deposits also have considerable biological value. Active SMS deposits host endemic hydrothermal vent communities, whilst inactive deposits support communities of deep water corals and other suspension feeders. Mining activities are expected to remove all large organisms and suitable habitat in the immediate area, making vent endemic organisms particularly at risk from habitat loss and localised extinction. As part of environmental management strategies designed to mitigate the effects of mining, areas of seabed need to be protected to preserve biodiversity that is lost at the mine site and to preserve communities that support connectivity among populations of vent animals in the surrounding region. These "set-aside" areas need to be biologically similar to the mine site and be suitably connected, mostly by transport of larvae, to neighbouring sites to ensure exchange of genetic material among remaining populations. Establishing suitable set-asides can be a formidable task for environmental managers, however the application of genetic approaches can aid set-aside identification, suitability assessment and monitoring. There are many genetic tools available, including analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences (e.g. COI or other suitable mtDNA genes) and appropriate nuclear DNA markers (e.g. microsatellites, single nucleotide polymorphisms), environmental DNA (eDNA) techniques and microbial metagenomics. When used in concert with traditional biological survey techniques, these tools can help to identify species, assess the genetic connectivity among populations and assess the diversity of communities. How these techniques can be applied to set-aside decision making is discussed and recommendations are made for the genetic characteristics of set-aside sites. A checklist for environmental regulators forms a guide to aid decision making on the suitability of set-aside design and assessment using genetic tools. This non-technical primer document represents the views of participants in the VentBase 2014 workshop.

Efficient mining of discriminative molecular fragments

Frequent pattern discovery in structured data is receiving an increasing attention in many application areas of sciences. However, the computational complexity and the large amount of data to be explored often make the sequential algorithms unsuitable. In this context high performance distributed computing becomes a very interesting and promising approach. In this paper we present a parallel formulation of the frequent subgraph mining problem to discover interesting patterns in molecular compounds. The application is characterized by a highly irregular tree-structured computation. No estimation is available for task workloads, which show a power-law distribution in a wide range. The proposed approach allows dynamic resource aggregation and provides fault and latency tolerance. These features make the distributed application suitable for multi-domain heterogeneous environments, such as computational Grids. The distributed application has been evaluated on the well known National Cancer Institute’s HIV-screening dataset.

The Tasmanian law reports : cases determined in the Supreme Court of Tasmania.

Earlier reports in: Reports of cases determined in the Supreme Court of Tasmania / Herbert Nicholls and W. J. T. Stops.

Military implications of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea : hearing before the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate, One Hundred Eighth Congress, second session, April 8, 2004.

Distributed to some depository libraries in microfiche.

U.S. foreign policy and the law of the sea : hearings before the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-seventh Congress, second session, June 17, August 12, and September 16, 1982.

Mode of access: Internet.

The status of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, spring 1980 : hearing before the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-sixth Congress, second session, April 17, 1980.

Mode of access: Internet.

The Mining world index of current literature

Subtitle varies slightly