According to Naudé and Krugell (2003a) South Africa's cities are too small, dispersed, and over concentrated. In South Africa, households in the country's urban areas have average incomes almost thrice as high as the households in rural areas. More than 70% of South Africa's GDP is produced in only 19 urban areas (Naudé and Krugell 2003b). In Naudé and Krugell (2003a) it is stated that the rank-size rule shows that South Africa's urban agglomerations are too small and the cities mainly offer urbanization economies rather than localization economies. The main focus of this study will be looking at the specialization and diversity of South African cities. The aim is to determine whether certain cities should specialise in certain sectors, which they are currently involved in or should they add to their city and become more diverse and specialize in other sectors in order to promote economic growth. Many believe that a city which is more diverse would grow faster than a city specialising in a certain and thus be more beneficial to the economy than a specialized city would. This paper would like to address this phenomenon with regard to South African cities / Thesis (M.Com. (Economics))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2006.

This study focuses on the Alberta environmental site assessment process for salt contamination resulting from pipeline failures in the boreal forest of Alberta. A complex saltwater spill site is used as a case study to determine the effects of various parameters of interest, including electrical conductivity and sodium adsorption ratio. This study reviews the practical efficacy of the Alberta environmental site assessment process to ensure sites meet the legislated requirement for remediation closure in a timely and environmentally sound manner. The study includes a comparison of various parameters of interest on a case study site collected over a three-year period and reviews available remediation alternatives. The study provides a summary interpretation of how the existing regulatory process affects decisions to ensure site decontamination and sustainability of the boreal forest ecosystem where the upstream oil and gas industry operate, and includes recommendations for policy improvement.

According to Naudé and Krugell (2003a) South Africa's cities are too small, dispersed, and over concentrated. In South Africa, households in the country's urban areas have average incomes almost thrice as high as the households in rural areas. More than 70% of South Africa's GDP is produced in only 19 urban areas (Naudé and Krugell 2003b). In Naudé and Krugell (2003a) it is stated that the rank-size rule shows that South Africa's urban agglomerations are too small and the cities mainly offer urbanization economies rather than localization economies. The main focus of this study will be looking at the specialization and diversity of South African cities. The aim is to determine whether certain cities should specialise in certain sectors, which they are currently involved in or should they add to their city and become more diverse and specialize in other sectors in order to promote economic growth. Many believe that a city which is more diverse would grow faster than a city specialising in a certain and thus be more beneficial to the economy than a specialized city would. This paper would like to address this phenomenon with regard to South African cities / Thesis (M.Com. (Economics))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2006.

Diss. Univ. Kiel, 1999.

Diss. Nr. 3134 Wirtschaftswiss. St. Gallen, 2005. / Literaturverz.

Alpha matting is one of the key techniques in image processing and is used to extract accurate foreground from a still image or video sequences. Chroma keying is a special case of alpha matting with a solid background color. Color spill is one of the difficulties in chroma keying, and it has not been effectively solved by current methods. Sometimes, an image contains both reflected regions and transparent regions. When the foreground in such images is chroma keyed, reflection on the foreground is often falsely treated as transparency and causes unreal foreground extraction and composition. This problem is called color spill. Color spill suppression aims to extract the opaque foreground with the correct transparency descriptor (i.e. alpha value) and remove the reflected background color on it. When the background color presented on the foreground is simultaneously caused by reflection and transparency, color spill suppression becomes extremely challenging. It is because that the reflection removal and the actual transparency estimation is a dilemma. Our proposed method for color spill suppression is to separate reflected regions from transparent regions, and process reflected regions as foreground while keeping transparency unchanged at the same time. In this thesis, we propose a novel method for color spill suppression for chroma keying. The quality of the estimated alpha matte could be significantly improved. In our approach, we suppress color spill by using the polarization and the optical flow algorithm based on disparity estimation. Specifically, we make the assumption that reflection changes more than transparency when the scene is captured by a binocular camera with a polaroid filter. Based on this assumption, we took stereo images with polarization filter, registered stereo images by optical flow and conducted the variance analysis on histograms of input images to separate transparency and reflection. Our experiments show that the opaque foreground with background color spill can be reliably extracted while the real transparency can be kept.

Title: Media framing of the Norilsk oil spill Author: Daria Tsymbal Supervisor: Mgr. Jan Miessler, Department of Media Studies, Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism (ICSJ) Abstract: This study examines how the Norilsk oil spill in May 2020 was framed within four factors of Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT): 1. Severity of the damage; 2. Crisis responsibility; 4. Crisis history; 5. Relationship history. Also, this study examines how media ownership and closeness of the media to the government influence the framing of Norilsk Oil Spill. Using content analyses, three Russian newspapers were analyzed - Novaya Gazeta, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, and Kommersant. The results demonstrated differences in usage and frequency of frames according to media ownership and closeness to the government. Also, findings revealed that there are differences in framing concerning time frame. This thesis provides evidence that four factors in SCCT concepts (Severity of the damage, Crisis responsibility, Crisis history, Relationship history) can serve as frames in media framing analyses of crises. In addition, this study provides information for crisis managers and media professionals on how one particular crisis may be differently framed in different newspapers. Keywords: Media, crisis communication,...

Please read the abstract in the thesis. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / gm2014 / Paraclinical Sciences / Unrestricted

archives@tulane.edu / During the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill in 2010, approximately 0.5 billion liters (3.1 million barrels) of oil were released into the northern Gulf of Mexico during the largest marine oil spill in history . A significant portion of the released oil was weathered into residues by physical, photochemical, and biological processes prior to landing on 1773 km of coastline, including 754 km of marsh shoreline in Louisiana. Researchers endeavored to describe effects of oil residues in the soil on salt marsh organisms and communities. Many studies focused on two pillars of salt marsh ecology: the microbial communities through which a large portion of the salt marsh food web is connected and Spartina alterniflora, a foundational species of Gulf Coast salt marshes. In this dissertation I describe how cryptic, or difficult to observe, elements of salt marsh ecology, like microbial communities and plant genetics, respond to oil residues in the environment. Using a suite of field, growth chamber, and greenhouse experiments I show that these microbial communities are difficult to characterize and may respond to other factors more strongly than they do to oil residues. I present evidence that the plant is resilient to oil in the environment, and changes in its microbiome, but exerts a measurable influence on the biodegradation of oil residues and the microbiome in the soil. This dissertation provides a greater understanding of the complexity of the salt marsh response to an oil spill. / 1 / Stephen K. Formel

Under hösten 2022 infördes en ny läroplan i den svenska grundskolan, i vilken undervisning om och för hållbar utveckling får ett större utrymme än tidigare. Dagligen uppstår spill i form av textila rester i slöjdundervisningen och vi ställer oss frågan om dessa kan fungera som en resurs i hållbarhetsundervisningen inom slöjdämnet. Syftet med studien är att få kunskap om hur textila restmaterial hanteras inom slöjdundervisningen, samt i vilken grad lärares hantering av textila restmaterial kan kopplas till olika dimensioner av hållbar utveckling. Studien presenterar resultat från en enkätundersökning med både kvantitativa och kvalitativa inslag där 169 deltagare medverkat, samt fyra kvalitativa intervjuer. Resultatet visar att deltagarna i stor utsträckning sparar textilt restmaterial och att deras motiv och lärandemål kopplat till förhållningssättet kan relateras till hållbar utveckling. Avslutningsvis diskuteras slöjdämnets tradition kring sparsamhet och traditionens bakomliggande motiv, samt skillnaden mellan att spara och att faktiskt ta tillvara textilt restmaterial.