Saturday, 31 January 2015

mining: the politics

The politics around 'extraction' has been heating up:
Jay Doubleyou: the idea of progress for the esl classroom
Jay Doubleyou: the men who made us spend: part three
Jay Doubleyou: the story of stuff

The industry is fighting back:
Videos | Minerals Education Coalition

UNITED STATES:



Mineral Usage Statistics | Minerals Education Coalition



Mining Videos - Modern.

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Mining Matters in your Everyday Life - YouTube

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Phosphate Mining In Florida - YouTube



The disconnect on the importance of mining - YouTube

BUT:

Where Have All the Mountains Gone?

In this week before I Love Mountains Day (an annual day of lobbying, rallying, and marching in Frankfort), it is more important than ever to be conscious of where our energy comes from and what we can do to protect our mountains and
our people from the atrocities of mountaintop removal mining. This practice of accessing coal from the mountains of the Appalachian region consists of literally blowing off the top of the mountain with explosives to get to the thin layer of coal underneath. The environmental effects of this practice are fairly apparent. Mountaintop removal mining has affected over 400,000 acres of land in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia combined, including over 1,200 miles of streambeds. In the state of Kentucky alone, over 724 miles of streams have been destroyed and more than 150 square miles of mountains are now flat due to this process. Even though coal companies are technically required to restore the destroyed land area to its former quality through the process of reclamation, this process rarely repairs much damage at all—if any. Currently, reclamation practices simply convert these ancient forests into grasslands; the original level of biodiversity and life could not possibly be restored for thousands of years. In mining permit applications, coal companies are required to specifically describe what the land will be used for post-mining (e.g. recreational use, commercial use, agricultural use, etc.); however, many permits are approved without such details.
More time efficient than underground mining, mountaintop removal requires significantly fewer “miners” and is considerably cheaper for the coal companies carrying out such projects. While coal production
rose in the decade between 1987 and 1997 by more than 30%, the number of workers employed in mining occupations actually dropped by 29%. Hence, despite arguments from locals that protesters of this form of mining are taking jobs away from the region, mountaintop removal mining in itself takes jobs away from Appalachians, causing damage to the local economy. Furthermore, although it may make sense for a region rich in coal to reap the financial benefits of such richness, the fact of the matter is that all of such assets are given over to the coal companies, leaving the region containing the mineral-saturated land impoverished. For instance, in the state of West Virginia, the top fifteen coal-producing counties are some of the poorest in the entire nation—despite producing 15% of coal in the U.S. One only needs to take a quick glance at poverty rates in counties where mountaintop removal is prevalent to notice that something is not quite right. As of the year 2000, the majority of counties of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia that contained mountaintop removal sites had poverty rates of over 20%; an entire fifth of these counties’ populations were living under the poverty line.

Where Have All the Mountains Gone? | HEAL
iLoveMountains.org — Learn more about mountaintop removal coal mining -- End Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining
Plundering Appalachia - The Tragedy of Mountaintop-Removal Coal Mining :: The Issue
Destroying Mountains | Beyond Coal
Mining the Mountains | EcoCenter: Energy | Smithsonian



Apple's icloud is Blowing up Appalachian Mountains - Green Pages News 08.05.12 with Katie Patrick from Katie Patrick on Vimeo.

AUSTRALIA:



Anti-carbon tax campaign ramped up - YouTube
AMEC Mining Tax Ad - YouTube



STW Group | Minerals Council of of Australia 'Keep Mining Strong'



The mining-tax scare website is an excellent case study | Alex White
New campaign highlights good side of mining | Mining Australia

BUT:

Under cover of racist myth, a new land grab in Australia

Claims of child abuse are proving a fertile pretext to menace the Aboriginal communities lying in the way of uranium mining




John Pilger The Guardian, Friday 24 October 2008
Jump to comments (218)

Its banks secured in the warmth of the southern spring, Australia is not news. It ought to be. An epic scandal of racism, injustice and brutality is being covered up in the manner of apartheid South Africa. Many Australians conspire in this silence, wishing never to reflect upon the truth about their society's Untermenschen, the Aboriginal people.

The facts are not in dispute: thousands of black Australians never reach the age of 40; an entirely preventable disease, trachoma, blinds black children as epidemics of rheumatic fever ravage their communities; suicide among the despairing young is common. No other developed country has such a record. A pervasive white myth, that Aborigines leech off the state, serves to conceal the disgrace that money the federal government says it spends on indigenous affairs actually goes towards opposing native land rights. In 2006, some A$3bn was underspent "or the result of creative accounting", reported the Sydney Morning Herald. Like the children of apartheid, the Aboriginal children of Thamarrurr in the Northern Territory receive less than half the educational resources allotted to white children.

In 2005, the UN committee on the elimination of racial discrimination described the racism of the Australian state, a distinction afforded no other developed country. This was in the decade-long rule of the conservative coalition of John Howard, whose coterie of white supremacist academics and journalists assaulted the truth of recorded genocide in Australia, especially the horrific separations of Aboriginal children from their families. They deployed arguments not dissimilar to those David Irving used to promote Holocaust denial.

Smear by media as a precursor to the latest round of repression is long familiar to black Australians. In 2006, the flagship current affairs programme of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Lateline, broadcast lurid allegations of "sex slavery" among the Mutitjulu people in the Northern Territory. The programme's source, described as an "anonymous youth worker", was later exposed as a federal government official whose "evidence" was discredited by the Northern Territory chief minister and the police.

The ABC has never retracted its allegations, claiming it has been "exonerated by an internal inquiry". Shortly before last year's election, Howard declared a "national emergency" and sent the army to the Northern Territory to "protect the children" who, said his minister for indigenous affairs, were being abused in "unthinkable numbers".

Last February, with much sentimental fanfare, the new prime minister, Labor's Kevin Rudd, made a formal apology to the first Australians. Australia was said to be finally coming to terms with its rapacious past and present. Was it? "The Rudd government," noted a Sydney Morning Herald editorial, "has moved quickly to clear away this piece of political wreckage in a way that responds to some of its own supporters' emotional needs, yet it changes nothing. It is a shrewd manoeuvre."

In May, barely reported government statistics revealed that of the 7,433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors as part of the "national emergency", 39 had been referred to the authorities for suspected abuse. Of those, a maximum of just four possible cases of abuse were identified. Such were the "unthinkable numbers". They were little different from those of child abuse in white Australia. What was different was that no soldiers invaded the beachside suburbs, no white parents were swept aside, no white welfare was "quarantined". Marion Scrymgour, an Aboriginal minister in the Northern Territory, said: "To see decent, caring [Aboriginal] fathers, uncles, brothers and grandfathers, who are undoubtedly innocent of the horrific charges being bandied about, reduced to helplessness and tears, speaks to me of widespread social damage."

What the doctors found they already knew - children at risk from a spectrum of extreme poverty and the denial of resources in one of the world's richest countries. Having let a few crumbs fall, Rudd is picking up where Howard left off. His indigenous affairs minister, Jenny Macklin, has threatened to withdraw government support from remote communities that are "economically unviable". The Northern Territory is the only region where Aborigines have comprehensive land rights, granted almost by accident 30 years ago. Here lie some of the world's biggest uranium deposits. Canberra wants to mine and sell it.

Foreign governments, especially the US, want the Northern Territory as a toxic dump. The Adelaide to Darwin railway that runs adjacent to Olympic Dam, the world's largest uranium mine, was built with the help of Kellogg, Brown & Root - a subsidiary of American giant Halliburton, the alma mater of Dick Cheney, Howard's "mate". "The land grab of Aboriginal tribal land has nothing to do with child sexual abuse," says the Australian scientist Helen Caldicott, "but all to do with open slather uranium mining and converting the Northern Territory to a global nuclear dump."

What is unique about Australia is not its sun-baked, derivative society, clinging to the sea, but its first people, the oldest on earth, whose skill and courage in surviving invasion, of which the current onslaught is merely the latest, deserve humanity's support.


John Pilger: Under cover of racist myth, a new land grab in Australia | Comment is free | The Guardian
Breaking the great Australian silence

The mining industry today makes profits of a billion dollars a week on Indigenous land.
In the lucky country of Australia apartheid is alive and kicking | John Pilger | Comment is free | The Guardian



Utopia - A film by John Pilger - Official trailer - YouTube
John Pilger's Utopia: watch the world exclusive trailer - video | Film | The Guardian
Utopia (2013 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Home | UTOPIA

BRITAIN:


News article

UK companies offer full range of services to mining industry



Countries wishing to develop their own mining capabilities should look to the UK’s world-leading strengths in innovative solutions, education and training provision.

From:

First published:
11 October 2013
Part of:


UK companies are internationally renowned for delivering expertise across the entire span of the global mining sector.
Thanks to Britain’s world-famous mining heritage — forged in the heat of the Industrial Revolution — the UK has a long-established reputation for first-class engineering, construction and infrastructure capabilities. And, today, London is known as a global centre of mining finance, underpinned by recognised regulatory and legal frameworks, which provides liquidity to international projects of every size. In 2012, UK-listed mining companies had a total market capitalisation of $425bn — more than any other financial market in the world.
Yet mining is a complex, wide-ranging and high value opportunity industry with diverse needs — one that uses British innovation to deliver solutions across every part of the sector, from financing through to maintenance services.
This includes feasibility and development studies; legal, advisory, accountancy, tax and audit services; risk management, project management, best practice, environmental, logistics, legacy management and closure-planning services and communications strategies.
For example, a global team from UK-based professional services firmDeloitte provided strategical and tactical support to Rio Tinto’s Simandou Project and integrated infrastructure operations in Guinea. This included end business operating model design, programme planning, study coordination, contracting strategy, regional economic development and contracting management advice — as well as integrated communications to joint venture partners.
It is this ability to deliver cross-sector skills and services which has put UK firms at the forefront of the global mining industry.















UK companies offer full range of services to mining industry - News articles - GOV.UK

BUT:

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The Coal War - Panorama - YouTube
Why did margaret thatcher close the coal mines in England and wales, when she was the prime minister?
John Prescott: Margaret Thatcher closed the mines out of sheer political spite - John Prescott - Mirror Online
BBC News - Cabinet papers reveal 'secret coal pits closure plan'
Margaret Thatcher wanted to crush the miners. That's all she wanted | Politics | theguardian.com
Wilson closed more coal mines than Thatcher | Conservative Home
Ten myths about Margaret Thatcher exploded – Telegraph Blogs
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what makes us human: noam chomsky and human languages

An 11-minute programme from the BBC looking at how we learn language and where is comes from:

Barry Smith on Noam Chomsky and Human Language

Listen in pop-out player

Barry Smith argues that language is out most important uniquely human attribute. It doesn't just help us communicate it helps us to think. He makes the case for the distinctiveness of human language against the limited signalling systems of other animals. He looks at Noam Chomsky's idea of a universal grammar - that there is something in the human brain that gives us an innate ability to produce language from very early in our lives. And he talks to experts on other intelligent animals - Prof. Nicola Clayton and Prof. Robin Dunbar - to ask how human language and imagination compares with that of birds and primates.



Available now
11 minutes

Broadcast


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History of Ideas Open University promotion
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Podcast


BBC Radio 4 - A History of Ideas, Barry Smith on Noam Chomsky and Human Language



http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02hdy9f
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Sunday, 25 January 2015

mining: the basics

Simple English Wikipedia is a good start:
Mining - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And the Wikipedia entry itself provides a very good overview:
Mining - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Diagrams are an excellent way to understand how things work:



Limestone Industry, Kentucky Geological Survey

a graphic illustrates the underground mining methods and surface mining methods

Methods of Mining. University of Kentucky



shaft mine: types of mines -- Kids Encyclopedia | Children's Homework Help | Kids Online Dictionary | Britannica

More diagrams at:
mining diagram - Google Search

Videos are also very helpful.
Here is mining explained rather too simply, perhaps:



Minecraft: How to Mine Effectively [Diamonds, Iron, Coal etc] - YouTube

Here are some very old educational videos on gold mining in the United States:
South Dakota Saga - 1940 Gold Mining Educational Documentary - Val73TV - YouTube
Copper Mining and Smelting - 1949 Educational Documentary - Ella73TV - YouTube
mining educational - YouTube

Here's a very clear - more modern! - video on how to get gold:



How To Get Gold - YouTube

And here's another video on 'precious metals':



Gold Ore, Silver Ore and Platinum Group Metals Ore Explained - YouTube

This looks at coal:


AMERICA REVEALED | Where Does Our Coal Come From? | PBS - YouTube

Meanwhile...

The latest news is that prices for resources may be going down - but the good news for the mining industry is that new areas are being opened up:
Mining News, Mining Companies & Market Information - MINING.com
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taboo words in the media

This blog has looked at taboo words in the ESL classroom:
Jay Doubleyou: teaching taboo vocab in the esl classroom

Lately, there has been a lot of noise in the UK media about the country's top-selling newspaper
- a 'red-top' because it's front page has a red banner for the name of the paper:




But it's also famous for its 'top-less' ladies on the first inside page, known as 'Page Three' girls:



And it seemed that last week the Sun was 'quietly dropping' the feature:



Death of the Page 3 girl - FT.com
Is the Sun's scrapping of Page 3...

Now that the Sun has axed Page 3 girls, will Britain ever be the same?

109 comments 19 January 2015 23:31

Word is that Friday’s edition of The Sun was the last to have a topless woman on Page 3 – thereby closing a chapter of British cultural history. Immortalised, perhaps, in the following sketch from Yes, Prime Minister:-


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PM: Don’t tell me about the press, I know exactly who reads the papers: The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by people who actually do run the country; the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; the Financial Times is read by people who own the country; The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; and The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.

Sir Humphrey: Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?

Bernard: Sun readers don’t care who runs the country, as long as she’s got big tits.


Now that the Sun has axed Page 3 girls, will Britain ever be the same? » Spectator Blogs

But it's back:
BBC News - Sun's Page Three 'returns' as paper takes swipe at rivals

And here's a debate about the whole campaign against Page Three:
Should the campaign against Page 3 be abandoned? | Comment is free | The Observer



Page 3: Why I started a campaign to block boobs in The Sun - Telegraph

One aspect of this debate is that the Sun likes to show half-naked women on the one hand...
... but on the other, it doesn't like to use certain words which would describe these ladies:

This is called 'prudery' - if not hypocrisy:



No more t*ts in the Sun – a campaign we can all get behind | Life and style | The Guardian

The whole area of 'taboo words' gets rather ridiculous - and can be made to look really ridiculous, as the stand-up comedian George Carlin pointed out back in the 1970s:
George Carlin – The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television | Genius
George Carlin - 7 dirty words (best part) - YouTube

In fact, it became quite political in the United States:
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Tuesday, 20 January 2015

SAT tests are 'weakening our democracy"

From this month's Nation magazine:

Standardized Tests Are Weakening Our Democracy

In The Tyranny of the Meritocracy, Lani Guinier argues that the SATs have become “accurate reflectors of wealth and little else.”


By Richard D. Kahlenberg
JANUARY 6, 2015



Two decades ago, Lani Guinier became a liberal icon when President Bill Clinton proposed—and then withdrew, under conservative pressure—her nomination to head of the Justice Department’s civil-rights division.

The Tyranny of the Meritocracy:
Democratizing Higher Education in America
By Lani Guinier
Beacon Press, 176 pp, $24.95


A racially charged 1993 Wall Street Journalop-ed unfairly labeled Guinier a “quota queen,” a term, Yale Law Professor Stephen Carter noted, that “resonates mellifluously with welfare queen.” Worse was Clinton’s reaction. The president and his nominee had been law school classmates at Yale, and Clinton attended Guinier’s wedding. Yet in withdrawing her nomination, Clinton unjustly characterized Guinier’s advocacy of efforts to ensure minority voting rights “undemocratic.”

Guinier went on to become Harvard Law School’s first black female professor and a thoughtful author of several books on race, gender and inequality in higher education. Her latest book is The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America. As the subtitle suggests, Guinier turns Clinton’s unfair characterization of her writings on its head, advocating more democracy, not less, in American universities and life. And far from endorsing racial quotas, she suggests that affirmative action is a poor substitute for rethinking our admissions process from top to bottom.

Basing decisions about who is admitted to college on an individual’s merit rather than allocating seats based on patronage or favoritism or lineage is properly seen as a major advancement. Guinier does not want to destroy the concept of merit, but to “redefine” it to go beyond “student performance on standardized tests.” She suggests we shift “from honoring testocratic merit to honoring democratic merit.”

“Democratic merit,” Guinier explains, goes far beyond examining test scores to look at the skills and commitment among student applicants that our democracy requires. Invoking Harvard economist Amartya Sen, Guinier writes that merit is “an incentive system that rewards the actions a society values.” Today, she says, our society should value people who combine two sets of attributes: (1) knowing how to solve problems, which requires not just cognitive skills but also the ability to collaborate with others, and to think creatively; and (2) a “commitment to building a better society for more people” rather than just pursuing one’s own selfish ends.

Guinier argues that the heavy reliance on standardized test scores in college admissions is deeply problematic on many levels. The tests are designed not to tell whether an individual will contribute to the strength of our democracy but only how he or she will perform academically in the freshman year. “If all we cared about is how well you do in your first year of college, we would have college programs that last only one year, right?” she quips. And SATs don’t even explain first-year grades very well, she says, citing economist Jesse Rothstein’s finding that SAT scores explain 2.7 percent of the variance in freshman grades.

Moreover, although the SAT was meant to be a way to move beyond admissions based on connections to instead identify Thomas Jefferson’s “natural aristocracy of talent and virtue,” today, Guinier argues, “the SAT scores are accurate reflectors of wealth and little else.” Georgetown researchers Anthony Carnevale and Jeff Strohl have found that on average, the most socioeconomically advantaged students score 399 points higher than the least advantaged on the SATs 400–1600 scale.

On top of this, the SAT fails to measure creativity, collaboration, grit and many other factors that University of Chicago economist James Heckman and others have found to be more closely connected to long-term success for many students than cognitive skills alone.

Finally, Guinier writes, the testocracy “values perfect scores but ignores character.” Indeed, because doing well on the SAT is seen as a product of talent and hard work, the winners often lack the sense that they owe anyone else anything. The old inherited elite sometimes recognized that the accident of birth triggered a need to give back. “The new elite, on the other hand, feels that it has earned its privileges based on intrinsic, individual merit,” Guinier writes, and therefore feel no “obligation or shame.”

As a result, our testocracy fails to produce what our democracy needs, Guinier argues. Leading colleges claim to serve the public interest, which is why they receive enormous tax breaks. Princeton University’s informal motto, for example, is “Princeton in the Nation’s Service and in the Service of All Nations.” That commitment is what justifies an estimated $45,000 per-pupil tax subsidy of Princeton students. And yet in a recent year, more than half of Princeton graduating students went into investment banking or consulting, careers “lacking in any element of social service,” Guinier notes.

In an interesting twist, Guinier, who used to be a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, suggests that Justice Clarence Thomas’s opposition to affirmative action “is right—but for the wrong reasons.” Guinier suggests affirmative action “has failed because it has not gone far enough to address the unfairness of both our current merit system and its wealth-driven definition of merit.”

Affirmative action tends to “simply mirror the values of the current view of meritocracy,” Guinier notes. Colleges tend to admit “the children of upper-middle[-]class parents of color who have been sent to fine prep schools just like the upper-middle[-]class white students.” Universities often seek what Guinier calls “cosmetic diversity” of wealthy black students, many of whom are recent immigrants. One study, she notes, finds that “more than 90 percent of parents of Harvard’s African students had advanced degrees.”

Minority students might serve as “canaries” in the defective mine, putting all on notice that the system of merit unfairly mirrors wealth. But by “admitting a small opening for a select few students of color,” affirmative action policies actually help buttress the larger unfair apparatus, she charges.

Guinier suggests that universities, rather than considering race as a way of papering over deeper inequalities, should turn to a more transformative model of admissions, which is illustrated by the Posse Foundation. Founded in 1989 by Debbie Bial, Posse seeks to identify students of all colors from disadvantaged neighborhoods who embody democratic merit. Through intensive interviews and group projects, Posse picks students who show grit, who demonstrate that they can collaborate with others, think creatively and show leadership. Many of these students end up involved in public service. The former admissions dean of Middlebury College told Guinier he strongly supports Posse. “What’s more important,“ he asked her: “someone with all As or someone with some Bs who goes out and makes a difference in the world?”

Standardized Tests Are Weakening Our Democracy | The Nation
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