Libri sul tema "Mixed variables"

Research on the effects of concealing a stigmatized identity on health outcomes is remarkably mixed, with results showing both health costs and benefits to concealing. This chapter reviews the literature and presents a framework for conceptualizing the moderators and mediators of the concealment–health relationship. It is proposed that people who reveal their stigmatized identity within supportive environments reap health benefits, whereas those living in more hostile environments benefit by greater concealment. However, if concealment leads to greater cognitive burden, then negative health outcomes can occur. If people do disclose their stigmatized identity, the confidants they choose, the level of social support received, and the negativity of the reactions will all influence the relationship between disclosure and health outcomes. Future research is needed to clarify which variables are most important for health and to examine differences between identity types and environments.

This review explores whether and how imbalances in the number of men and women—the sex ratio—affects mating competition. I evaluate the available evidence against two hypotheses: a mating supply and demand hypothesis, which predicts mate competition to increase when mates are scarce, and predictions from a ‘faithful as your options’ hypothesis, which suggests mate competition should increase with a surplus of mates because the returns to mating effort are greatest. Men’s mating effort consistently increased with a surplus of mates, supporting the ‘faithful as your options’ hypothesis, but results for women’s mating effort were mixed. Some measures supported the mating supply and demand hypothesis, some supported the ‘faithful as your options’ hypothesis, and some found no relationship with the sex ratio. Socioeconomic development may explain variation in sex ratio effects for women if men are better able to constrain women’s mating effort in traditional societies, or other variables, like variation in mate quality, may better explain women’s mate competition.

This research examines the effects of ethnic fractionalization and globalization on individual-level propensities toward generalized trust and cooperation at the national level. Conclusions regarding both ethnic-fractionalization and globalization remain mixed as to their influence on prosocial behavior. This chapter explores the relationship between these variables in Kenya, a country with an extremely heterogeneous population that has increased integration with the global economy over the past decade. Literate Kenyan male and female adults, ages 18 to 60, from two of Kenya’s largest ethnic groups, the Luo and Kikuyu, participated in an experimental public goods game in which players contribute to, and benefit from, a national account. Results are consistent with the argument that it is not ethnic fractionalization per se that is associated with lower cooperation but increased ethnic inequality. The implications of these findings are that trust and cooperation are highly contextually based and influenced by social and environmental factors.

This essay explores the adequacy of Sidgwick’s contrast between the egocentrism of ancient ethics and the impartiality of modern ethics by evaluating the resources of eudaimonists, especially Aristotle and the Stoics, to defend a cosmopolitan conception of the common good. Adapting ideas from Broad, we might contrast the scope and weight of ethical concern, distinguishing ethical conceptions that are parochial with respect to both scope and weight, conceptions that are cosmopolitan with respect to both scope and weight, and mixed conceptions that combine universal scope and variable weight. Aristotle’s conception of the common good appears doubly parochial. By contrast, the Stoic conception of the common good is purely cosmopolitan. But the Stoics have trouble providing a eudaimonist defense of their cosmopolitanism. However, Aristotelian eudaimonism has resources to justify a mixed conception. Mixed cosmopolitanism may be cosmopolitanism enough.

Cognitive impairment is common following stroke. The clinical course and presentation are variable in vascular dementia, but the diagnosis can often be tied to recent vascular events or to progressive white matter lesions on MRI. Because there is considerable overlap between patients with vascular and Alzheimer’s type dementia, both acetylcholinesterase inhibitors and memantine have been tried off-label to treat the cognitive symptoms of vascular dementia with mixed results.

AbstractCryoglobulinaemia is characterized by the presence in the blood of proteins showing the that precipitate when serum is cooled. Clinically recognised cryoprecipitates are predominantly immunoglobulin-containing. In Type 1 cryoglobulinaemia, the precipitate is formed from a monoclonal paraprotein, usually IgG. In Type 2, a monoclonal IgM binds IgG to form a mixed precipitate. Type 3 cryoglobulins do not contain a monoclonal element.Type 1 cryoglobulins are a rare cause of renal disease, but cause a membranoproliferative glomerulonephritis (MPGN) with nephrotic syndrome and haematuria and usually with severe cutaneous involvement.Type 2 is most typically associated with renal disease, again characterized by MPGN and haematuria, with variable cutaneous signs and vasculitis in other organs. Many cases are associated with Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection – but not all.Therapeutic approaches include optimal antiviral regimen, immunosuppressive therapy (corticosteroids, rituximab, and cytotoxic agents), and plasma exchange. Treatment of HCV-related mixed cryoglobulinaemia vasculitis should be adjusted according to the clinico-biological presentation.

This chapter sorts out some of the ideas that are sometimes mixed together under the rubric of “social disorganization.” It argues that (1) social disorganization is really not an independent variable or a theory; (2) rather, it is a composite image of the “delinquency area”—the part of town that also has very high crime rates; and (3) this composite image can be disentangled and then clarified, allowing students to learn it and researchers to sharpen their findings. The chapter extracts four distinct images of the delinquency area in the effort to clarify the topic, help people learn it, and assist researchers.

Decision-theoretic ideas arise in two areas of biology: risk-sensitive foraging, and the theory of evolution in variable environments. The former concerns the actual behavioural choices that organisms make, the latter the ‘choices’ made by natural selection. A natural suggestion is that both sorts of choices can be modelled in terms of expected utility maximization, the standard theory of rational decision in the face of risk. However, this is only true under particular model assumptions; it does not hold in situations involving a combination of aggregate and idiosyncratic risk. Mixed strategies further complicate the relation between rational and biologically optimal risk preferences. This implies a limit on the validity of the organism-as-rational-agent heuristic as a tool for understanding evolved behaviour.

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science. Please check back later for the full article.The concept of statistical downscaling or empirical-statistical downscaling became a distinct and important scientific approach in climate science in recent decades, when the climate change issue and assessment of climate change impact on various social and natural systems have become international challenges. Global climate models are the best tools for estimating future climate conditions. Even if improvements can be made in state-of-the art global climate models, in terms of spatial resolution and their performance in simulation of climate characteristics, they are still skillful only in reproducing large-scale feature of climate variability, such as global mean temperature or various circulation patterns (e.g., the North Atlantic Oscillation). However, these models are not able to provide reliable information on local climate characteristics (mean temperature, total precipitation), especially on extreme weather and climate events. The main reason for this failure is the influence of local geographical features on the local climate, as well as other factors related to surrounding large-scale conditions, the influence of which cannot be correctly taken into consideration by the current dynamical global models.Impact models, such as hydrological and crop models, need high resolution information on various climate parameters on the scale of a river basin or a farm, scales that are not available from the usual global climate models. Downscaling techniques produce regional climate information on finer scale, from global climate change scenarios, based on the assumption that there is a systematic link between the large-scale and local climate. Two types of downscaling approaches are known: a) dynamical downscaling is based on regional climate models nested in a global climate model; and b) statistical downscaling is based on developing statistical relationships between large-scale atmospheric variables (predictors), available from global climate models, and observed local-scale variables of interest (predictands).Various types of empirical-statistical downscaling approaches can be placed approximately in linear and nonlinear groupings. The empirical-statistical downscaling techniques focus more on details related to the nonlinear models—their validation, strengths, and weaknesses—in comparison to linear models or the mixed models combining the linear and nonlinear approaches. Stochastic models can be applied to daily and sub-daily precipitation in Romania, with a comparison to dynamical downscaling. Conditional stochastic models are generally specific for daily or sub-daily precipitation as predictand.A complex validation of the nonlinear statistical downscaling models, selection of the large-scale predictors, model ability to reproduce historical trends, extreme events, and the uncertainty related to future downscaled changes are important issues. A better estimation of the uncertainty related to downscaled climate change projections can be achieved by using ensembles of more global climate models as drivers, including their ability to simulate the input in downscaling models. Comparison between future statistical downscaled climate signals and those derived from dynamical downscaling driven by the same global model, including a complex validation of the regional climate models, gives a measure of the reliability of downscaled regional climate changes.

This article considers two functional data analysis settings where sparsity becomes important: the first involves only measurements at a relatively sparse set of points and the second relates to variable selection in a functional case. It begins with a discussion of two data sets that fall into the ‘sparsely observed’ category, the ‘growth’ data and the ‘nephropathy’ data, both of which are used to illustrate alternative approaches for analysing sparse functional data. It then examines different classes of methods that can be applied to functional data, such as basis functions, mixed-effects models and local smoothing techniques, as well as specific methodologies for dealing with sparse functional data in the principal components, clustering, classification, and regression settings. Finally, it describes two approaches for performing regressions involving a functional predictor and a scalar response: SASDA (sequential algorithm for selecting design automatically) and FLiRTI (Functional Linear Regression That’s Interpretable).

There is now a vast comparative literature on Northern development assistance, its purposes, composition, structures, motives, and effectiveness. These writings often include French aid within their comparative framework. But they present a mixed picture of the French case, with qualitative studies portraying it as “deviant,” and variable-led analyses viewing it as “representative.” Drawing on specialist interviews, this chapter challenges these comparative perspectives and, at a time when fresh approaches to international development are desperately needed, paves the way for wider consideration of French ideas on aid. It begins with an overview of the comparative literature on Northern aid before reviewing the comparative scholarship on French assistance. It shows how these writings have missed out on the agenda-setting dimension of French aid, notably its capacity to act as a “model” for other donors and lay the groundwork for future comparative research. It concludes by reconciling “conflicting” views of the French case.

The aim of the study was to determine the influence of different disturbances (both natural and anthropogenic) on species composition and stand structure of old-growth mixed mountain forests in the Western Carpathians. These stands are usually dominated by beech, fir and spruce, mixed in different proportions. The tree main species represent different growth strategies, and they compete against each other. The longevity of trees makes the factors influencing the stand structure difficult to identify, even during longitudinal studies conducted on permanent research plots. That is why dendroecological techniques, based upon the annual variability of tree rings, are commonly used to analyze the disturbance histories of old-growth stands. Dendroecological methods make it possible to reconstruct the stand history over several centuries in the past by analyzing the frequency, intensity, duration and spatial scale of disturbances causing the death of trees. Combining the dendroecological techniques with the detailed measurements of stand structure, snag volume, CWD volume, and the analyses of regeneration species composition and structure allows us to identify the factors responsible for the changes in dynamics of mixed mountain forests. Various disturbance agents affect some species selectively, while some disturbances promote the establishment of tree seedlings of specific species by modifying environmental conditions. Describing the disturbance regime requires a broad scope of data on stand structure, on dead wood and tree regeneration, while various factors affecting all the stages of tree growth should be taken into consideration. On the basis of the already published data from permanent sample plots, combined with the available disturbance history analyses from the Western Carpathians, three research hypotheses were formulated. 1. The species composition of mixed mountain forests has been changing for at least several decades. These directional changes are the consequence of simultaneous conifer species decline and expansion of beech. 2. The observed changes in species composition of mixed mountain forests are the effect of indirect anthropogenic influences, significantly changing tree growth conditions also in the forests that are usually considered natural or near-natural. Cumulative impact of these indirect influences leads to the decrease of fir share in the tree layer (spruce decline has also been observed recently),and it limits the representation of this species among seedlings and saplings. The final effect is the decrease of fir and spruce share in the forest stands. 3. Small disturbances, killing single trees or small groups of trees, and infrequent disturbances of medium size and intensity dominate the disturbance regime in mixed mountain forests. The present structure of beech-fir-spruce forests is shaped both by complex disturbance regime and indirect anthropogenic influences. The data were gathered in permanent sample plots in strictly protected areas of Babia Góra, Gorce, and Tatra National Parks, situated in the Western Carpathians. All plots were located in the old-growth forest stands representing Carpathian beech forest community. The results of the measurements of trees, snags, coarse woody debris (CWD) and tree regeneration were used for detailed description of changes in the species composition and structure of tree stands. Tree ring widths derived from increment cores were used to reconstruct the historical changes in tree growth trends of all main tree species, as well as the stand disturbance history within the past two to three hundred years. The analyses revealed complex disturbance history in all of the three forest stands. Intermediate disturbances of variable intensity occurred, frequently separated by the periods of low tree mortality lasting from several decades up to over one hundred years. The intervals between the disturbances were significantly shorter than the expected length of forest developmental cycle, in commonly used theories describing the dynamics of old-growth stands. During intermediate disturbances up to several dozen percent of canopy trees were killed. There were no signs of stand-replacing disturbances, killing all or nearly all of canopy trees. The periods of intense tree mortality were followed by subsequent periods of increased sapling recruitment. Variability in disturbance intensity is one of the mechanisms promoting the coexistence of beech and conifer species in mixed forests. The recruitment of conifer saplings depended on the presence of larger gaps, resulting from intermediate disturbances, while beech was more successful in the periods of low mortality. However, in the last few decades, beech seems to benefit from the period of intense fir mortality. This change results from the influence of long-term anthropogenic disturbances, affecting natural mechanisms that maintain the coexistence of different tree species and change natural disturbance regimes. Indirect anthropogenic influence on tree growth was clearly visible in the gradual decrease of fir increments in the twentieth century, resulting from the high level of air pollution in Europe. Synchronous decreases of fir tree rings’ widths were observed in all three of the sample plots, but the final outcomes depended on the fir age. In most cases, the damage to the foliage limited the competitive abilities of fir, but it did not cause a widespread increase in tree mortality, except for the oldest firs in the BGNP (Babia Góra National Park) plot. BGNP is located in the proximity of industrial agglomeration of Upper Silesia, and it could be exposed to higher level of air pollution than the other two plots. High level of fir regeneration browsing due to the deer overabundance and insufficient number of predators is the second clear indication of the indirect anthropogenic influence on mixed mountain forests. Game impact on fir regeneration is the most pronounced in Babia Góra forests, where fir was almost completely eliminated from the saplings. Deer browsing seems to be the main factor responsible for limiting the number of fir saplings and young fir trees, while the representation of fir among seedlings is high. The experiments conducted in fenced plots located in the mixed forests in BGNP proved that fir and sycamore were the most preferred by deer species among seedlings and saplings. In GNP (Gorce National Park) and TNP (Tatra National Park), the changes in species composition of tree regeneration are similar, but single firs or even small groups of firs are present among saplings. It seems that all of the analysed mixed beech-fir-spruce forests undergo directional changes, causing a systematic decrease in fir representation, and the expansion of beech. This tendency results from the indirect anthropogenic impact, past and present. Fir regeneration decline, alongside with the high level of spruce trees’ mortality in recent years, may lead to a significant decrease in conifers representation in the near future, and to the expansion of beech forests at the cost of mixed ones.

This is the third book in the EPT Teaching, Research and Extension Collection. The purpose of the seminar is to dialogue with researchers in the field of EFA, enabling the exchange of interinstitutional experiences. The organization of this work consists of a transcript of the opening conference given by the respected professional education researcher, Prof. Dr. Dante Henrique Moura (IFRN), who provided master students, teachers and other participants, a class on the advances and setbacks in EPT. The exquisite debate of the researcher professor, Dr. Alexandre Ferry (Cefet-MG) was also transcribed, which in a very didactic way, provides a better understanding of the terminological inaccuracies that make up the EFA. The other texts that consolidate the collection are the results of research carried out by teachers and students, the Master in Technological Education (Cefet-MG) and the Master in Professional and Technological Education (ProfEPT) from IFMG and IF Sudeste de Minas. And, also, by professors from the Federal University of Uberlândia (UFU), from other courses at Cefet-MG, as well as from other institutions such as Faculdade Pitágoras and Puc-Minas. The themes that make up this volume are quite variable and broad, as is the field of professional and technological education. The idea of the subtitle: multidisciplinary views, translates well the meaning of the work. It is a network of knowledge that gets mixed up in a hybrid connection, showing the reader that science is not linear, nor is it watertight.

<p><b>Bentonites</b> are rocks mostly consisting of swelling clay minerals. They were first described from the Cretaceous Benton Shale near Rock River, Wyoming, USA. </p> <p> Because of their useful properties (e.g. highly adsorbent, cation exchanging, swelling), bentonites have many uses, in industry (among them as drilling mud, purification agent, binder, adsorbent, paper production), culture (for e.g. pottery) and medicine/cosmetics/cat litter, civil engineering, and in the future even in the disposal of high-level nuclear waste. </p> <p> Particular chemical characteristics of bentonite clay minerals are rather variable but critically determine their suitability for a particular application. </p> <p> The 15 specialist authors discuss bentonite terminology, classification and genesis and use in eight chapters. Individual chapters deal with the methods bentonites are analysed with, their properties and performance in terms of parameters such as cation exchange capactiy, rheology, coagulation concentraion, water uptake capacity, free swelling, and electrical resistivity (amongst others). </p> <p> A chapter is dedicated to the sources of bentonites, the technology employed to produce them, and how quality control is carried out both in the mine and the laboratory. A further chapter is dedicated to methods of processing the mined material, different activation methods, drying, grinding, and purification. </p> <P> Use cases for bentonites are discussed in a chapter of its own. References, a section on norms and standards, and a list of abbreviations complete the text. </p> <p> The volume addresses students, researchers, and professionals in the mineral industry dealing with bentonite and their clay-mineral constituents, quality assessement and control, and persons that use bentonites in their products. </p>

Renal osteodystrophy (ROD) is a term that encompasses the various consequences of chronic kidney disease (CKD) for the bone. It has been divided into several entities based on bone histomorphometry observations. ROD is accompanied by several abnormalities of mineral metabolism: abnormal levels of serum calcium, phosphorus, parathyroid hormone (PTH), vitamin D metabolites, alkaline phosphatases, fibroblast growth factor-23 (FGF-23) and klotho, which all have been identified as cardiovascular risk factors in patients with CKD. ROD can presently be schematically divided into three main types by histology: (1) osteitis fibrosa as the bony expression of secondary hyperparathyroidism (sHP), which is a high bone turnover disease developing early in CKD; (2) adynamic bone disease (ABD), the most frequent type of ROD in dialysis patients, which is at present most often observed in the absence of aluminium intoxication and develops mainly as a result of excessive PTH suppression; and (3) mixed ROD, a combination of osteitis fibrosa and osteomalacia whose prevalence has decreased in the last decade. Laboratory features include increased serum levels of PTH and bone turnover markers such as total and bone alkaline phosphatases, osteocalcin, and several products of type I collagen metabolism products. Serum phosphorus is increased only in CKD stages 4-5. Serum calcium levels are variable. They may be low initially, but hypercalcaemia develops in case of severe sHP. Serum 25-OH-vitamin D (25OHD) levels are generally below 30 ng/mL, indicating vitamin D insufficiency or deficiency. The international KDIGO guideline recommends serum PTH levels to be maintained in the range of approximately 2-9 times the upper normal normal limit of the assay and to intervene only in case of significant changes in PTH levels. It is generally recommended that calcium intake should be up to 2 g per day including intake with food and administration of calcium supplements or calcium-containing phosphate binders. Reduction of serum phosphorus towards the normal range in patients with endstage kidney failure is a major objective. Once sHP has developed, active vitamin D derivatives such as alfacalcidol or calcitriol are indicated in order to halt its progression.

En la contemporaneidad el objeto cerámico transgrede el sentido primero de su forma tradicional, y lleva al observador a transitar una nueva manera de valoración. La cerámica reconocida como arte, manifiesta las particularidades de los lenguajes artísticos, se asumen impertinencias en el manejo de sintaxis que no le son propias, pero que se integran a las artes del fuego. Las nuevas tecnologías actúan como agentes transformadores ampliando la inserción de la cerámica en nuevos espacios, artistas de otras disciplinas se apropian del barro en cuanto material, resaltando los recursos plásticos de la materia formante como discurso estético. A su vez, la expansión cualitativa y cuantitativa generada a partir del acceso extendido a los nuevos recursos tecnológicos que propician el consumo de imágenes, trasciende todas las esferas, y está presente en lo público y lo privado. De esta manera, la imagen en sus diferentes funciones, transita múltiples contextos simultáneamente, que van de la publicidad a la obra de arte, de lo persuasivo e impersonal a la construcción de sentido y la apropiación identitaria. En este contexto, se diluyen en las artes plásticas los límites formales entre los soportes y los lenguajes artísticos. Las obras se nutren y migran entre diversas fuentes y medios, cuyo resultado es un multipluralismo de intenciones y realizaciones que impiden que el arte sea capturado en una sola dimensión. El entrecruzamiento de disciplinas como la fotografía, la cerámica, las impresiones y la imagen digital nos han proporcionado diversos campos de indagación para instrumentar e implementar nuevas estrategias que permitan ampliar las posibilidades expresivas. El universo del discurso gráfico, desde la serigrafía vitrificable y el fotográfico, desde la fotocerámica, interactúan como disciplinas de tránsito y relación al intervenir las imágenes digitales e integrar su reproducción al cuerpo cerámico. Explorar estas alternativas tecnológicas y expresivas en las producciones de cerámica artística y funcional contemporánea y analizar los resultados, constituyeron las cuestiones nucleares del proyecto 11B220 “Alternativas expresivas y tecnológicas en la cerámica contemporánea: Serigrafía y fotocerámica. Mixes procedimentales”. Dicha investigación partió de conocimientos preexistentes sobre las técnicas de impresión sobre superficie cerámica que definieron las variables a considerar. Se profundizó en los orígenes de las técnicas y sus variados usos, y se buscó el ajuste de las diferentes modalidades, puestas a prueba mediante la constatación empírica.

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.