“Late Antique” Mining Community in the North Kharga Oasis (Egypt)

The North Kharga Oasis Darb Ain Amur Survey (NKODAAS) has been exploring the extreme northern area and western extension of Kharga Oasis in order to locate and document hitherto undiscovered and unrecorded archaeological sites and material. The archaeological sites identified during the course of the survey are varied, including rock art, routes, mines, quarries, water dumps, wells, shelters, hamlets, and settlements. The site presented here is a Roman/“Late Antique” complex, including a church and several related areas of settlement and industrial activity devoted to alum mining and sandstone quarrying, that played a role in the history of the economy and landscape of Kharga Oasis.

Information Limits for Community Detection in Hypergraph with Label Information

In network data mining, community detection refers to the problem of partitioning the nodes of a network into clusters (communities). This is equivalent to identifying the cluster label of each node. A label estimator is said to be an exact recovery of the true labels (communities) if it coincides with the true labels with a probability convergent to one. In this work, we consider the effect of label information on the exact recovery of communities in an m-uniform Hypergraph Stochastic Block Model (HSBM). We investigate two scenarios of label information: (1) a noisy label for each node is observed independently, with 1−αn as the probability that the noisy label will match the true label; (2) the true label of each node is observed independently, with the probability of 1−αn. We derive sharp boundaries for exact recovery under both scenarios from an information-theoretical point of view. The label information improves the sharp detection boundary if and only if αn=n−β+o(1) for a constant β>0.

The new expertise required for designing safe tailings storage facilities

The global mining community has seen a dangerous sequence of failures in tailings dams, beginning with Mount Polley mine, followed by the Samarco, Cadia Valley and Córrego do Feijão mines. This sequence of failures began on August 4, 2014, at the Mount Polley tailings storage facility in British Columbia, Canada. The initial failure in the embankment at the Mount Polley tailings storage facility had substantial impact on the global mining industry. The Independent Expert Engineering Investigation and Review Panel (IEEIRP) tasked with the investigation of the breach in the tailings dam at Mount Polley made major contributions for new guidelines. The incident has given rise to comprehensive recommendations for best available tailings technologies (BAT) based on principles such as the elimination of surface water from impoundments with the promotion of unsaturated conditions in the tailings through drainage provisions. The application of these BAT principles for the surface storage of tailings leads to the use of filtered tailings technology. Filtered tailings technology or “dry stack tailings” can satisfy each of the BAT components when the impoundment is properly designed and constructed. The implementation of the best available technologies for the physical stability (BAT-PS) of tailings impoundments competes directly with the best available technologies for the chemical stability (BAT-CS) of reactive tailings that may produce acid and metalliferous drainage. The new expertise in mine waste management required to achieve both BAT-PS and BAT-CS are discussed in the present paper.

Fictional representations of rural Québec in The Night Manager, Autour d’Éva and Sur la 132

In John le Carré’s The Night Manager (1993), the main character, Jonathan Pine, after fleeing Cairo and having resided in Zurich and Cornwall, retreats for several months to a remote mining community called Espérance, in the Abitibi region, north of Val d’Or, in the province of Québec. Pine, hiding under the alias of Jacques Beauregard, is hired as a cook at the Château Babette hotel. His stay in Abitibi covers the whole of Chapter 9. He will later pursue his mission in the Bahamas. Le Carré’s humoristic representation of regional Québec contrasts with his darker caricatures of Switzerland, and especially the Bahamas. It also contrasts with the dark portrayal of Québec’s rural regions in Québec novels Autour d’Éva (2016), by Louis Hamelin, and Sur la 132 (2012), by Gabriel Anctil.

Environmental Health Risk Perception: Adaptation of a Population-Based Questionnaire from Latin America

BACKGROUND: Environmental risk assessments and interventions to mitigate environmental risks are essential to protect public health. While the objective measurement of environmental hazards is important, it is also critical to address the subjective perception of health risks. A population’s perception of environmental health hazards is a powerful driving force for action and engagement in safety and health behaviors and can also inform the development of effective and more sustainable environmental health policies. To date, no instruments are available to assess risk perception of environmental health hazards in South America even though there are many concerning issues in the region, including mining. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to adapt and validate an environmental health risk perception questionnaire in a Chilean population affected by mining activity among other risks frequently reported in Latin American countries and included the collection of information on trust on public information sources. METHODS: We adapted an Australian risk perception questionnaire for validation in an adult population from a Chilean mining community. This adaptation included two blinded translations (direct, inverse), a pre-test study (n = 20) and a review by environmental health experts. Principal Component Analyses (PCA) was used to identify factors within major domains of interest. The Bartlett test of sphericity, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure and the Cronbach α test were used to assess the instrument’s validity and reliability. The instrument was pilot tested in 205 adults from a mining community in Chañaral. RESULTS: The final adapted questionnaire proved to be a good instrument to measure risk perception in a community chronically exposed to mining waste. For community risks, four factors explained 59.4% of the variance. “Global Issues” (30.2%) included air pollution, contamination of mining, ozone layer depletion and vector diseases. For personal risks, the first two components explained 59.5% of the variance, the main factor (36.7%) was “unhealthy behaviors within the household”. For trust in information, the first factor (36.2%) included as main sources “Media and authorities”. The Cronbach α ranged between 0.68 and 0.75; and the KMO test between 0.7 to 0.79 for community and personal risks and trust. CONCLUSIONS: The final questionnaire is a simple, reliable and useful instrument that can assist in evaluating environmental health risk perceptions in Latin American countries.