Books on the topic 'Facet extraction'

The scientific literature and clinical dental practice have in the extraction of the lower third molar an area of wide interest. In fact, parallel to the presence of prejudices and false beliefs on the part of patients, there is also a great variability of scientific opinions among professionals in the field, both in relation to the indications for extraction, diagnostic aids, and intra- and post-operative management. Our text aims to merge the awareness given by clinical experience with the knowledge of an evidence-based dental culture, proposing itself as a stimulus for in-depth study for students, professionals and enthusiasts of the subject. The multimedia digital resources (photos and videos) of some dental procedures can be freely consulted via the QR code on the cover.

This chapter examines Google's aims to dominate the global market for information services and data. Drawing from the suggestion that “information is the new oil of the Internet and the currency of the digital world,” it explores how Google's various endeavors seek to control each facet of the data market: data production, data extraction, data refinement, data infrastructure and distribution, and demand. It shows that there is no equivalent company that has ever been capable of dominance in each facet of the oil economy to the extent that Google leads in the data economy. The chapter also discusses the commodification of information in the modern internet economy and argues that Google's interest in internet freedom and connectivity lies in the fact that its survival (in the political economy sense of the word) depends on getting more and more people online to use its complimentary services.

Underlying the management of revenues from natural resource extraction is a set of assumptions about how abundant and how valuable these resources are. Nevertheless, existing approaches to measuring the value of extractive resources are seriously flawed. This paper proposes two avenues for improving them. It explains how a multidimensional approach to measuring resource wealth can be used to identify the policy challenges that a country might face as it sets out its strategy for managing extractive revenues. It also provides a rethinking of the valuation of extractive wealth by integrating environmental considerations. Extractive activities can at times incur a great loss of (renewable) opportunity income, either directly or indirectly, because of their environmental impact. By analysing a range of examples from across the globe, this paper extracts key lessons on the true value of extractives and why it matters for policy makers, civil society, and international donors today.

Abstract In the face of new extraction, communities in Latin America’s hydrocarbon and mining regions use participatory institutions to challenge extraction. In some cases, communities act within the formal participatory spaces, while in others, they organize “around” or “in reaction to” the institutions, using participatory procedures as a focal point for the escalation of conflict. Communities select their strategies in response to the participatory challenges they confront. Those challenges are associated with contestation over the boundaries that determine access to the participatory institutions. Contestation over the line between subnational authority vis-à-vis central-state jurisdictions heightens communities’ challenge of initiating a participatory process. Disagreement over the territorial delineation of communities impacted by planned extraction creates the challenge of gaining inclusion in participatory events, for formally nonimpacted communities. Finally, disputes over the boundary that sets representatives of an affected community apart from the community at large intensify the community’s challenge of conveying a position on extraction. This analysis of thirty major extractive conflicts in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru in the 2000s and 2010s examines community uses of public hearings built into environmental licensing, state-led prior consultations with native communities, and local popular consultations, or referenda.

Dentistry involves the study, diagnosis, prevention, and/or treatment of diseases, disorders, and conditions of the oral cavity, including the teeth, gums, and tissues. Dentistry is thought to be one of the first areas of specialization to emerge from medicine, with evidence of drilled teeth dating back 9,000 years. The most common conditions treated within dentistry involve tooth decay (dental caries) and gum disease (periodontal disease), with common dental procedures including x-rays, restorative treatments (such as fillings, crowns, and bridges), prosthetics (dentures), orthodontics (such as teeth braces), tooth extraction and endodontic (root canal) therapy. Dentistry also involves public health work such as the encouragement of oral disease prevention through dental hygiene and check-ups....

This chapter presents and justifies the use of both a dictionary corpus and a newspaper corpus. The dictionary corpus is used because of the role of the dictionary as linguistic authority in France, and the stable status of the Anglicisms included in it. For the newspaper data, the study benefited from the French text-mining tool named Sulci, originally designed for the corpus and thesaurus analysis of the daily newspaper Libération, which allowed extraction of all the dictionary-unattested forms in one year’s issues. In fact, this study is the first to use an electronic corpus to analyze the influence exerted by English over French. The advantages and disadvantages of the semi-automatic extraction of only dictionary-unsanctioned words of English origin are discussed in detail. The chapter includes the selection criteria for what counts as a borrowed item to be collected in the appended database.

This chapter discusses oral and maxillofacial surgery in the A&E department, including, The paediatric OMFS patient, Overview of maxillofacial trauma, Mandibular fractures, Zygomatic fractures, Orbital floor fractures, Maxillary fractures, Nose, naso-ethmoidal, and frontal bone fractures, Face and scalp soft tissue injuries, Penetrating injuries to the neck, Intra-oral injuries, Dento-alveolar trauma, Dento-alveolar infections, Post-extraction complications, Head and neck soft tissue infections, Salivary gland diseases, and Miscellaneous conditions

Congolese logging camps are places where mud, rain, fuel smugglers, and village roadblocks slow down multinational timber firms; where workers wage wars against trees while evading company surveillance deep in the forest; where labor compounds trigger disturbing colonial memories; and where blunt racism, logger machismo, and homoerotic desires reproduce violence. In Rainforest Capitalism Thomas Hendriks examines the rowdy world of industrial timber production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to theorize racialized and gendered power dynamics in capitalist extraction. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Congolese workers and European company managers as well as traders, farmers, smugglers, and barkeepers, Hendriks shows how logging is deeply tied to feelings of existential vulnerability in the face of larger forces, structures, and histories. These feelings, Hendriks contends, reveal a precarious side of power in an environment where companies, workers, and local residents frequently find themselves out of control. An ethnography of complicity, ecstasis, and paranoia, Rainforest Capitalism queers assumptions of corporate strength and opens up new ways to understand the complexities and contradictions of capitalist extraction.

Countries face both challenges and opportunities in using their extractive industries to achieve more inclusive development—particularly in the developing world. Extractive industries have shaped economies, societies, and politics of nations—for good and bad. Today’s wealthiest nations owe a part of their high living standards to the extractive industries. Yet while a large national income can result from resource wealth, it can also be associated with acute social inequality and deep poverty—the polar opposite of inclusive development. Many developing countries struggle to diversify their economies, and create redistributive fiscal systems, in ways that reduce poverty, inequality, and social division. The very worst cases see violent conflict and civil war. The expression ‘resource curse’ has in turn become common coin. This chapter lays out the framework of the book for the reader, and describes the motive and contribution of the individual chapters to the narrative thread woven throughout.

Realizing energy justice in Africa requires targeting the difficulties that the continent faces. Energy justice is a concept emanating from three philosophical notions, namely distributive justice, procedural justice, and recognition justice. The practical challenges of achieving energy justice are illustrated well in the coal and oil industries of Africa, a continent plagued by the resource curse. Moreover, despite being energy-poor, African countries often export their mined fossil fuels, providing other parts of the world with the energy necessary to live productive and dignified lives. These considerations, in conjunction with Africa’s history of colonialism and the concomitant denial of people’s rights require distinct approaches to distributive, procedural, and recognition justice in extractive industries. This chapter outlines these approaches and explores uniquely African responses to some of the injustices that prevail in Africa’s extractive industries.

This volume analyzes different facets of democratic struggles in these challenging times. Its first section addresses the democratization process in Mongolia, one of the least-studied cases of post-Cold War democratization. The second section broadens the analysis to cover democratic struggles in other parts of the world and considers in particular the governance of natural resources, which is a key concern for Mongolia and other countries that rely economically on the extractive sector. Its contributors are drawn from a range of different countries, disciplines and career stages. They use different approaches and methodologies in highly complementary ways to shed light on underexamined facets of democracy from a variety of perspectives.

This chapter discusses oral and maxillofacial surgery in the clinic, including, Mandible fractures, Orbital floor fractures, Zygoma fractures, Maxillary fractures, Nose, naso-ethmoidal, and frontal bone fractures, Face and scalp soft tissue injuries, Dento-alveolar: assessment for extractions, Dento-alveolar: impacted teeth, Dento-alveolar: jaw pathologies, Temporomandibular joint problems, Oral and facial pain, Management of oral lesions, Management of neck lumps, Skin tumours, Work-up for major head and neck oncoplastic surgery, Reviewing head and neck cancer patients, Salivary gland diseases, Orthognathic patients, and Miscellaneous conditions in the clinic

This chapter on oral and maxillofacial surgery describes intra-oral and face nerve blocks. Operations include biopsies and excision of small lesions, simple and surgical tooth extraction, apicectomy, odontogenic cyst enucleation and marsupilialization, intra-oral implant insertion, maxillary sinus floor elevation, submandibular duct stone removal, sublingual gland excision, repair of facial laceration including parotid duct repair and facial nerve repair, lateral canthotomy and cantholysis, intermaxillary fixation, open reduction internal fixation (ORIF) of mandible, mandibular condyle, zygomatic complex, repair of orbital floor and wall, access for bicoronal flap, bilateral sagittal split osteotomy, maxillary osteotomy, temporal mandibular joint (TMJ) arthrocentesis, eminoplasty and condyloplasty and disc procedures, pectoralis major myocutaneous flap, radial forearm free flap harvest, osteocutaneous iliac crest flap harvest and, fibula free flap harvest.

This article deals with the topic of sublanguage, the original language grammar subset, which informs various text outputs. Despite routine deviance from standard languages, quite often sublanguage grammatical patterns draw heavily from standard languages. Machine translation, database extraction from texts, and natural language generation are some ways of sublanguage processing. The definition of controlled language projects the difference between itself and sublangauge. The former is described as a restricted set of natural language, engineered to facilitate communication between expert native speakers and either non-expert natives or expert non-natives. However, the difference lies in the fact that controlled language is not a natural subset, unlike sublangauge. Unlike sublanguage that works like a general language in not restricting its sentences, controlled language sets an upper limit, typically around twenty-five. Contrast between controlled language and sublanguage assumes theoretical importance.

The Inca Empire directed significant resources and labor toward the extraction of metals from the provinces. Using the case studies of Porco (silver), Viña del Cerro (copper), and the Tarapacá Valley (copper and silver), this chapter explores some of the strategies used by the Inca in obtaining metallurgical wealth. These case studies show that, as suggested by ethnohistoric sources, silver mining and subsequent purification were directly overseen by the state. In contrast to models of more indirect state involvement typically proposed for copper production, these case studies demonstrate that the Inca actively invested in expanding production of this metal, despite the fact that it was not necessarily destined for use in the imperial heartland. I propose several ways that the production of silver and copper enmeshed local people in relations of hierarchy, obligation, and reciprocity as they became subjects of the Inca Empire.

This chapter discusses the impact of Stalin's death on 5 March 1953 on the Gulag. Stalin's passing, the ensuing power struggle, and the existing reformist tendencies within the Gulag all contributed to the substantive reforms that would quickly and permanently alter the Soviet penal system. By 1960 the Gulag empire would be drastically reduced in size and economic importance. Its organizational structure would be decentralized to a significant degree. Reeducation as opposed to labor extraction would be proclaimed the top priority of the Gulag. Ultimately, the reforms of 1953–60 were just as monumental in terms of transforming the Soviet penal system as those of 1930–37. In many respects, in fact, they worked to roll back the reforms of the 1930s, which in general had made the penal system larger, more economically focused, and deadlier.

Many low-income countries continue to describe their monetary policy framework in terms of targets on monetary aggregates. This chapter extends the New Keynesian model to provide a role for ‘M’ in the conduct of monetary policy, and examine the conditions under which some adherence to money targets is optimal. In the spirit of Poole (1970), this role is based on the incompleteness of information available to the central bank, a pervasive issue in these countries. Ex ante announcements and forecasts for money growth are consistent with a Taylor rule for the relevant short-term interest rate. Ex post, the policymaker must choose his relative adherence to interest rate and money growth targets. The chapter shows that some adherence to previously set money targets can emerge endogenously from the signal extraction problem faced by the central bank. The chapter also provides an analytical representation of the factors influencing the degree of optimal target adherence.

This concluding chapter returns to the conjectures developed in Chapter 2, extracting insights from the book’s empirical chapters to explore how context shapes the authority of ICs. While several of the conjectures were confirmed, others were not. We focus in particular on the limited impact of IC design features, the distinctive challenges faced by international criminal tribunals, and by ICs created during the post-Cold War era. The final section revisits the distinction between IC authority and IC power. We explain why IC authority is likely to remain fragile, and we revisit our claim that authority can not only increase but also stagnate or diminish over time.

Odontogenic infections often arise from dental caries (usually the mandibular teeth) or from dental extraction. Acute necrotizing ulcerative gingivitis (ANUG) is more common in immunocompromised patients. These infections may spread into the parapharyngeal and retropharyngeal spaces, involving the airway and mediastinum. Airway management is critical as odontogenic infections can compromise airways via mass effect. Complications include the following: abscess, facial or orbital cellulitis/abscess, intracranial invasion, Ludwig’s angina, Lemierre syndrome, carotid artery erosion, descending necrotizing mediastinitis, airway compromise, hematogenous dissemination to distant organs, intraoral or dentocutaneous fistula formation, and cardiovascular disease. Antibiotics are not a substitute for definitive airway management. In addition, many cases of odontogenic infection will require surgical drainage, either at the bedside in the emergency department or in the operating room. Prior to this, consider using a nerve block to obtain anesthesia to the affected area of the face. Patients with necrotizing infections need emergent surgery with wide local debridement.

In Planetary Longings eminent cultural theorist Mary Louise Pratt posits that the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first mark a turning point in the human and planetary condition. Examining the forces of modernity, neoliberalism, coloniality, and indigeneity in their pre- and postmillennial forms, Pratt reflects on the crisis of futurity that accompanies the millennial turn in relation to environmental disaster and to the new forms of thinking it has catalyzed. She turns to 1990s Latin American vernacular culture, literary fiction, and social movements, which simultaneously registered neoliberalism’s devastating effects and pursued alternate ways of knowing and living. Tracing the workings of colonialism alongside the history of anticolonial struggles and Indigenous mobilizations in the Americas, Pratt analyzes indigeneity both as a key index of coloniality, neoliberal extraction, and ecological destruction, and as a source for alternative modes of thought and being. Ultimately, Pratt demonstrates that the changes on either side of the millennium have catalyzed new forms of world-making and knowledge-making in the face of an unknowable and catastrophic future.

In this investigation of the psychological relationship between shape and time, Leyton argues compellingly that shape is used by the mind to recover the past and as such it forms a basis for memory. Michael Leyton's arguments about the nature of perception and cognition are fascinating, exciting, and sure to be controversial. In this investigation of the psychological relationship between shape and time, Leyton argues compellingly that shape is used by the mind to recover the past and as such it forms a basis for memory. He elaborates a system of rules by which the conversion to memory takes place and presents a number of detailed case studies—in perception, linguistics, art, and even political subjugation—that support these rules. Leyton observes that the mind assigns to any shape a causal history explaining how the shape was formed. We cannot help but perceive a deformed can as a dented can. Moreover, by reducing the study of shape to the study of symmetry, he shows that symmetry is crucial to our everyday cognitive processing. Symmetry is the means by which shape is converted into memory. Perception is usually regarded as the recovery of the spatial layout of the environment. Leyton, however, shows that perception is fundamentally the extraction of time from shape. In doing so, he is able to reduce the several areas of computational vision purely to symmetry principles. Examining grammar in linguistics, he argues that a sentence is psychologically represented as a piece of causal history, an archeological relic disinterred by the listener so that the sentence reveals the past. Again through a detailed analysis of art he shows that what the viewer takes to be the experience of a painting is in fact the extraction of time from the shapes of the painting. Finally he highlights crucial aspects of the mind's attempt to recover time in examples of political subjugation. Bradford Books imprint

I argue in this chapter that despite its ultimate social, economic, and moral bankruptcy, communism imposed on Poland after 1945 sowed the seeds of the country’s economic success after 1989. The old, feudal social structures were bulldozed to snap Poland out of growth-inhibiting extractive society equilibrium, creating a classless society, boosting social mobility, and securing good quality of education for all. Forced industrialization and unprecedented labour movements supported solid GDP growth rates in Poland until the 1960s, but low returns on investment, lack of technological progress, and external shocks caused declining growth rates in the 1970s, and economic stagnation in the 1980s. I conclude that the assumption that if Poland had returned to capitalism after 1945, it would have developed as quickly as the West, is simplistic. I show that a capitalist Poland would have faced significant challenges to growth, and convergence with the West would not have been guaranteed.

This chapter provides an overview of social and environmental performance and management practices in the oil and gas industries, outlining the evolution of international companies’ approaches over the last twenty years within the wider extractive industries context. The chapter reviews what social and environmental management amongst such companies means in practice, and highlights some of the unresolved issues emerging. While most companies now model their approach to social and environmental management on international norms, they face a variety of drivers to their practices. These range from complying with international standards in order to gain access to finance, to complying with new host country legislation and regulation, and gaining and maintaining a good reputation and a ‘social licence to operate’. This chapter argues that the complexity of these drivers problematizes the portrayal of the industry’s social and environmental performance as ‘voluntary’ corporate social responsibility, and renders the latter term somewhat misleading.

The primate prefrontal cortex sits at the top of the sensory, motor, and outcome processing hierarchies of the neocortex. It transforms sensory inputs into motor outputs, determining the response that is appropriate given the current context and desired outcome. This transformation involves conditional rules. The dorsal prefrontal cortex supports the learning of behavioural sequences, where the next action is conditional on the previous one. The ventral prefrontal cortex supports associations between objects, where the choice of one object is conditional on the presence of another object. However, because hierarchical processing supports the extraction of abstract representations, the primate prefrontal cortex is able to represent conditional rules that are abstract, meaning that they apply irrespective of the specific inputs. The selective advantage is that by learning these rules, primates can solve new problems rapidly when they have the same conditional logic as prior problems. The human prefrontal cortex has the same fundamental organization as in other primates. The dorsal prefrontal cortex supports the understanding of sequences and the ventral prefrontal cortex supports the ability to learn semantic associations. Thus the human prefrontal cortex has co-opted and elaborated mechanisms that were present in ancestral primates. These mechanisms can be used for new ends. For example, words have been associated with objects so as to communicate with others. This means that to understand human intelligence it is necessary to take into account the fact that the abstract rules are transmitted verbally from one generation to another.

What has called so many young people to the field of global health is the passion to be a force for change, to work on the positive side of globalization, and to be part of a movement for human rights. This passion stems from the knowledge that the world is not OK. Impoverished people are suffering and dying from treatable diseases, while the wealthy live well into their 80s and 90s. These disparities exist between and within countries. COVID-19 has further demonstrated the need for global equity and our mutual interdependence. Yet the road to health equity is long. People living in countries and communities marred by slavery, colonialism, resource extraction, and neoliberal market policies have markedly less access to health care than the wealthy. Developing equitable health systems requires understanding the history and political economy of communities and countries and working to adequately resource health delivery. Equitable health care also requires strong advocacy for the right to health. In fact, the current era in global health was sparked by advocacy—the activist movement for AIDS treatment access, for the universality of the right to health and to a share of scientific advancement. The same advocacy is needed now as vaccines and treatments are developed for COVID-19. This book centers global health in principles of equity and social justice and positions global health as a field to fulfill the universal right to health.

The proposed new geological era, The Anthropocene (a.k.a. Age of Humans, Age of Man), marking human domination of the planet long called Mother Earth, is truly The Age of the Motherfucker. The ecocide of the Anthropocene is the responsibility of Man, the Western- and masculine-identified corporate, military, intellectual, and political class that masks itself as the exemplar of the civilized and the human. The word motherfucker was invented by the enslaved children of White slave masters to name their mothers’ rapist/owners. Man’s strategic motherfucking, from the personal to the planetary, is invasion, exploitation, spirit-breaking, extraction and toxic wasting of individuals, communities, and lands, for reasons of pleasure, plunder, and profit. Ecocide is attempted deicide of Mother Nature-Earth, reflecting Man’s goal to become the god he first made in his own image. The motivational word Motherfucker has a flip side, further revealing the Anthropocene as it signifies an outstanding, formidable, and inexorable force. Mother Nature-Earth is that “Mutha’ ”—one defying translation into heteropatriarchal classifications of gender, one capable of overwhelming Man, and not the other way around. Drawing upon Indigenous and African American scholarship; ecofeminism; ecowomanism; green activism; femme, queer, and gender non-binary philosophies; literature and arts; Afrofuturism; and popular culture, Call Your “Mutha’ ” contends that the Anthropocene is not evidence of Man’s supremacy over nature, but that Mother Nature-Earth, faced with disrespect, is going away. It is imperative now to call the “Mutha’ ” by decolonizing land, bodies, and minds, ending rapism, feeding the green, renewing sustaining patterns, and affirming devotion to Mother Nature-Earth.

A History of the Ozarks, Vol. 2: The Conflicted Ozarks focuses on the long era of Civil War and Reconstruction, stretching roughly from the 1850s through the 1880s. The book begins with an analysis of slavery (the most thorough examination of the institution in the region to date) and the secession crisis. Almost half the book deals with the four years of civil warfare, including a summary of the formal, battlefield war in the Ozarks and an examination of various facets of the home front, from guerrilla fighters to the role of women. It also features the most comprehensive portrait of the long Reconstruction era in the Ozarks, including a comparison of political Reconstruction in Arkansas and Missouri as well as an extended treatment of social and economic reconstruction that chronicles railroad building, manufacturing, extractive industry, and the development of educational institutions in the postwar years. In addition to the continuation of volume 1’s argument that the story of the Ozarks is mostly an unexceptional, regional variation of the American story, volume 2 is built on the thematic concept of multiple layers of conflict in the region--divisions over slavery, wartime violence and its stubborn continuation in the Reconstruction era, and the continuing conflicted identity of the Ozarks as part southern and part midwestern, part Union and part Confederate, part modern and part backwoods.

The 2°C target for global warming had been under severe scrutiny in the run-up to the climate negotiations in Paris in 2015 (COP21). Clearly, with a remaining carbon budget of 470–1,020 GtCO2eq from 2015 onwards for a 66% probability of stabilizing at concentration levels consistent with remaining below 2°C warming at the end of the 21st century and yearly emissions of about 40 GtCO2 per year, not much room is left for further postponing action. Many of the low stabilization pathways actually resort to the extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere (known as negative emissions or Carbon Dioxide Removal [CDR]), mostly by means of Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS): if the biomass feedstock is produced sustainably, the emissions would be low or even carbon-neutral, as the additional planting of biomass would sequester about as much CO2 as is generated during energy generation. If additionally carbon capture and storage is applied, then the emissions balance would be negative. Large BECCS deployment thus facilitates reaching the 2°C target, also allowing for some flexibility in other sectors that are difficult to decarbonize rapidly, such as the agricultural sector. However, the large reliance on BECCS has raised uneasiness among policymakers, the public, and even scientists, with risks to sustainability being voiced as the prime concern. For example, the large-scale deployment of BECCS would require vast areas of land to be set aside for the cultivation of biomass, which is feared to conflict with conservation of ecosystem services and with ensuring food security in the face of a still growing population.While the progress that has been made in Paris leading to an agreement on stabilizing “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and “pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C” was mainly motivated by the extent of the impacts, which are perceived to be unacceptably high for some regions already at lower temperature increases, it has to be taken with a grain of salt: moving to 1.5°C will further shrink the time frame to act and BECCS will play an even bigger role. In fact, aiming at 1.5°C will substantially reduce the remaining carbon budget previously indicated for reaching 2°C. Recent research on the biophysical limits to BECCS and also other negative emissions options such as Direct Air Capture indicates that they all run into their respective bottlenecks—BECCS with respect to land requirements, but on the upside producing bioenergy as a side product, while Direct Air Capture does not need much land, but is more energy-intensive. In order to provide for the negative emissions needed for achieving the 1.5°C target in a sustainable way, a portfolio of negative emissions options needs to minimize unwanted effects on non–climate policy goals.

The American West at Risk summarizes the dominant human-generated environmental challenges in the 11 contiguous arid western United States - America's legendary, even mythical, frontier. When discovered by European explorers and later settlers, the west boasted rich soils, bountiful fisheries, immense, dense forests, sparkling streams, untapped ore deposits, and oil bonanzas. It now faces depletion of many of these resources, and potentially serious threats to its few "renewable" resources. The importance of this story is that preserving lands has a central role for protecting air and water quality, and water supplies--and all support a healthy living environment. The idea that all life on earth is connected in a great chain of being, and that all life is connected to the physical earth in many obvious and subtle ways, is not some new-age fad, it is scientifically demonstrable. An understanding of earth processes, and the significance of their biological connections, is critical in shaping societal values so that national land use policies will conserve the earth and avoid the worst impacts of natural processes. These connections inevitably lead science into the murkier realms of political controversy and bureaucratic stasis. Most of the chapters in The American West at Risk focus on a human land use or activity that depletes resources and degrades environmental integrity of this resource-rich, but tender and slow-to-heal, western U.S. The activities include forest clearing for many purposes; farming and grazing; mining for aggregate, metals, and other materials; energy extraction and use; military training and weapons manufacturing and testing; road and utility transmission corridors; recreation; urbanization; and disposing of the wastes generated by everything that we do. We focus on how our land-degrading activities are connected to natural earth processes, which act to accelerate and spread the damages we inflict on the land. Visit www.theamericanwestatrisk.com to learn more about the book and its authors.

The book is about one of the biggest economic success stories that one has hardly ever heard about. It is about a perennially backward, poor, and peripheral country, which over the last twenty-five years has unexpectedly become Europe’s and a global growth champion and joined the ranks of high-income countries during the life of just one generation. It is about the lessons learned from its remarkable experience for other countries in the world, the conditions that keep countries poor, and challenges that countries need face to grow and become high-income. It is also about a new growth model that this country—Poland—and its peers in Central and Eastern Europe and elsewhere need to adopt to continue to grow and catch up with the West for the first time ever. The book emphasizes the importance of the fundamental sources of growth—institutions, culture, ideas, and leaders—in economic development. It argues that a shift from an extractive society, where the few rule for the benefit of the few, to an inclusive society, where many rule for the benefit of many, was the key to Poland’s success. It asserts that a newly emerged inclusive society will support further convergence of Poland and Central and Eastern Europe with the West and help sustain the region’s Golden Age, but moving to the core of the European economy will require further reforms and changes in Poland’s developmental DNA.

It is commonly recognized that in pursuit of climate justice we must navigate many conflicting claims over natural resources. This has long been obvious in the case of fossil fuels and greenhouse gas sinks including the atmosphere and forests; but it is ever more apparent that responses to climate change also threaten to spur new competition over land and extractive resources. This makes climate change an instance of a broader, more enduring and—for many—all too familiar problem: the problem of human conflict over how the natural world should be cared for, protected, shared, used, and managed. This work develops a new theory of global egalitarianism for natural resources, rejecting both permanent sovereignty and equal division, which is then used to examine the problem of climate change. It formulates principles of resource right designed to protect the ability of all human beings to satisfy their basic needs as members of self-determining political communities, where it is understood that the genuine exercise of collective self-determination is not possible from a position of significant disadvantage in global wealth and power relations. These principles are used to address the question of where to set the ceiling on future greenhouse gas emissions and how to share the resulting emissions budget, in the face of conflicting claims to fossil fuels, climate sinks, and land. It is also used to defend an unorthodox understanding of responsibility for climate change as a problem of global justice, based on its provenance in historical injustice concerning natural resources.

Hard coal mining is characterised by features that pose numerous challenges to its current operations and cause strategic and operational problems in planning its development. The most important of these include the high capital intensity of mining investment projects and the dynamically changing environment in which the sector operates, while the long-term role of the sector is dependent on factors originating at both national and international level. At the same time, the conditions for coal mining are deteriorating, the resources more readily available in active mines are being exhausted, mining depths are increasing, temperature levels in pits are rising, transport routes for staff and materials are getting longer, effective working time is decreasing, natural hazards are increasing, and seams with an increasing content of waste rock are being mined. The mining industry is currently in a very difficult situation, both in technical (mining) and economic terms. It cannot be ignored, however, that the difficult financial situation of Polish mining companies is largely exacerbated by their high operating costs. The cost of obtaining coal and its price are two key elements that determine the level of efficiency of Polish mines. This situation could be improved by streamlining the planning processes. This would involve striving for production planning that is as predictable as possible and, on the other hand, economically efficient. In this respect, it is helpful to plan the production from operating longwalls with full awareness of the complexity of geological and mining conditions and the resulting economic consequences. The constraints on increasing the efficiency of the mining process are due to the technical potential of the mining process, organisational factors and, above all, geological and mining conditions. The main objective of the monograph is to identify relations between geological and mining parameters and the level of longwall mining costs, and their daily output. In view of the above, it was assumed that it was possible to present the relationship between the costs of longwall mining and the daily coal output from a longwall as a function of onerous geological and mining factors. The monograph presents two models of onerous geological and mining conditions, including natural hazards, deposit (seam) parameters, mining (technical) parameters and environmental factors. The models were used to calculate two onerousness indicators, Wue and WUt, which synthetically define the level of impact of onerous geological and mining conditions on the mining process in relation to: —— operating costs at longwall faces – indicator WUe, —— daily longwall mining output – indicator WUt. In the next research step, the analysis of direct relationships of selected geological and mining factors with longwall costs and the mining output level was conducted. For this purpose, two statistical models were built for the following dependent variables: unit operating cost (Model 1) and daily longwall mining output (Model 2). The models served two additional sub-objectives: interpretation of the influence of independent variables on dependent variables and point forecasting. The models were also used for forecasting purposes. Statistical models were built on the basis of historical production results of selected seven Polish mines. On the basis of variability of geological and mining conditions at 120 longwalls, the influence of individual parameters on longwall mining between 2010 and 2019 was determined. The identified relationships made it possible to formulate numerical forecast of unit production cost and daily longwall mining output in relation to the level of expected onerousness. The projection period was assumed to be 2020–2030. On this basis, an opinion was formulated on the forecast of the expected unit production costs and the output of the 259 longwalls planned to be mined at these mines. A procedure scheme was developed using the following methods: 1) Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) – mathematical multi-criteria decision-making method, 2) comparative multivariate analysis, 3) regression analysis, 4) Monte Carlo simulation. The utilitarian purpose of the monograph is to provide the research community with the concept of building models that can be used to solve real decision-making problems during longwall planning in hard coal mines. The layout of the monograph, consisting of an introduction, eight main sections and a conclusion, follows the objectives set out above. Section One presents the methodology used to assess the impact of onerous geological and mining conditions on the mining process. Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) is reviewed and basic definitions used in the following part of the paper are introduced. The section includes a description of AHP which was used in the presented analysis. Individual factors resulting from natural hazards, from the geological structure of the deposit (seam), from limitations caused by technical requirements, from the impact of mining on the environment, which affect the mining process, are described exhaustively in Section Two. Sections Three and Four present the construction of two hierarchical models of geological and mining conditions onerousness: the first in the context of extraction costs and the second in relation to daily longwall mining. The procedure for valuing the importance of their components by a group of experts (pairwise comparison of criteria and sub-criteria on the basis of Saaty’s 9-point comparison scale) is presented. The AHP method is very sensitive to even small changes in the value of the comparison matrix. In order to determine the stability of the valuation of both onerousness models, a sensitivity analysis was carried out, which is described in detail in Section Five. Section Six is devoted to the issue of constructing aggregate indices, WUe and WUt, which synthetically measure the impact of onerous geological and mining conditions on the mining process in individual longwalls and allow for a linear ordering of longwalls according to increasing levels of onerousness. Section Seven opens the research part of the work, which analyses the results of the developed models and indicators in individual mines. A detailed analysis is presented of the assessment of the impact of onerous mining conditions on mining costs in selected seams of the analysed mines, and in the case of the impact of onerous mining on daily longwall mining output, the variability of this process in individual fields (lots) of the mines is characterised. Section Eight presents the regression equations for the dependence of the costs and level of extraction on the aggregated onerousness indicators, WUe and WUt. The regression models f(KJC_N) and f(W) developed in this way are used to forecast the unit mining costs and daily output of the designed longwalls in the context of diversified geological and mining conditions. The use of regression models is of great practical importance. It makes it possible to approximate unit costs and daily output for newly designed longwall workings. The use of this knowledge may significantly improve the quality of planning processes and the effectiveness of the mining process.