Th.--Sci. phys.--Lille 1, 1978. N°: 438.

Thesis (Professional Degree)--University of Missouri, School of Mines and Metallurgy, 1925. / The entire thesis text is included in file. Typescript. Title from title screen of thesis/dissertation PDF file (viewed October 9, 2009) Includes bibliographical references.

Abstract Due to the vast amount of information we are faced with, summarization has become a critical necessity of everyday human life. Given that a large fraction of the electronic documents available online and elsewhere consist of short texts such as Web pages, news articles, scientific reports, and others, the focus of natural language processing techniques to date has been on the automation of methods targeting short documents. We are witnessing however a change: an increasingly larger number of books become available in electronic format. This means that the need for language processing techniques able to handle very large documents such as books is becoming increasingly important. This thesis addresses the problem of summarization of novels, which are long and complex literary narratives. While there is a significant body of research that has been carried out on the task of automatic text summarization, most of this work has been concerned with the summarization of short documents, with a particular focus on news stories. However, novels are different in both length and genre, and consequently different summarization techniques are required. This thesis attempts to close this gap by analyzing a new domain for summarization, and by building unsupervised and supervised systems that effectively take into account the properties of long documents, and outperform the traditional extractive summarization systems typically addressing news genre.

The web 2.0 era has ushered an unprecedented amount of interactivity on the Internet resulting in a flood of user-generated content. This content is often unstructured and comes in the form of blog posts and comment discussions. Users can no longer keep up with the amount of content available, which causes developers to start relying on natural language techniques to help mitigate the problem. Although many natural language processing techniques have been employed for years, automatic text summarization, in particular, has recently gained traction. This research proposes a graph-based, extractive text summarization system called SPORK (Summarization Pipeline for Online Repositories of Knowledge). The goal of SPORK is to be able to identify important key topics presented in multi-document texts, such as online comment threads. While most other automatic summarization systems simply focus on finding the top sentences represented in the text, SPORK separates the text into clusters, and identifies different topics and opinions presented in the text. SPORK has shown results of managing to identify 72\% of key topics present in any discussion and up to 80\% of key topics in a well-structured discussion.

Recent publications on ethanol production and purification shows optimized energy and water consumptions as low as 22,000 Btu/gal ethanol and 1.54 gal water/gal ethanol respectively using multieffect distillation. Karuppiah, et al use column rating and mathematical optimization methods and shortcut design models to design evaluate and optimize the energy and water consumption. In this work, we compare shortcut design and rigorous simulation models for an ethanol purification distillation system, and we show that distillation systems based on shortcut design underestimate the true energy and water consumption of the distillation system. We then use ASPEN Plus, to design a multieffect distillation system and an extractive distillation system using rigorous simulation and compare the two for energy and water consumptions. We show that the extractive distillation system has lower steam and cooling water consumptions and consequently lower energy and water consumptions than multieffect distillation in corn-to-ethanol production and purification. We also show that the extractive distillation system is cheaper than the multieffect distillation system on a cost per gal ethanol basis. This work gives an energy consumption of 29987 Btu/gal ethanol and water consumptions 2.82 gal/gal ethanol for the multieffect distillation system at a manufacturing cost of $3.03/gal ethanol. For the extractive distillation system, we calculate an energy consumption of 28199 Btu/gal ethanol and a water consumption of 2.79 gal/gal ethanol at a manufacturing cost of $2.88/gal ethanol. / Master of Science

Yes / Extractive economies can use the natural resource dividend for infrastructure and sustainable development though this involves overcoming many challenges. The original contribution of this chapter is to see BRICS as natural resource rich economies that have not yet signed up to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). The paper reports original analysis of relationship between resource dependence and human development index for the period 1990 to 2015 which suggests that non-resource rich countries tend to have higher values of HDI than resource rich countries. Using in depth case studies of two countries that have joined EITI (namely Norway and Mongolia) and two emerging economies that have not joined the EITI (Botswana and Chile) and one of the BRICS (namely Brazil), this chapter highlights some of the successes and challenges in using the natural resource wealth to transform economic and social development outcomes. Governance indicators of these cases suggest that transparency initiatives can be helpful but they should be part of a larger programme of transparency and institutional development. The analysis highlights that the links between extractive economies, policies, institutions and human development outcomes are complex and require long term policies and commitments. Three specific policy issues for BRICS are identified. / UNDP, FCO

En 2002, l’Initiative pour la transparence dans l’industrie extractive (ITIE) est lancée par le Premier Ministre britannique en réponse à la campagne Publiez ce que vous payez (PCQVP). Celle-ci avait participé à la mise sur agenda de la malédiction des ressources, un ensemble de maux économiques et socio-politiques qui pèsent sur de nombreux Etats riches en ressources naturelles. L'ITIE reprend l’une des préconisations de PCQVP, à savoir l’injonction à la transparence : la publication des revenus pétroliers, gaziers ou miniers permettrait aux citoyens de demander des comptes à leurs dirigeants pour la gestion de la manne générée par l’extraction de matières premières. L’exercice de transparence de l’ITIE, à laquelle les états riches en ressources naturelles adhèrent librement, consiste à réconcilier les paiements déclarés par les entreprises extractives d’une part et les recettes déclarées par l’Etat d’autre part. Il s’appuie par ailleurs sur une gouvernance tripartite inédite dans l’industrie extractive : organisations de la société civile, compagnies extractives et gouvernements négocient ensemble pour déterminer les exigences du standard ITIE. Comment des acteurs d’horizons divers sont-ils venus à partager cet intérêt commun et que peut nous apprendre ce consensus sur la notion de transparence et ses usages contemporains dans les politiques de coopération internationale ? Cette recherche raconte l’histoire d’une conquête normative, ses enjeux, ses acteurs, ses batailles afin de réfléchir – par le biais du renouvellement des attributs de légitimité de ceux qui concourent à définir la norme – à la refonte de l’autorité politique dans le système international. / The British Prime Minister launched the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) in 2002 in response to the transnational Publish What You Pay campaign (PWYP). The NGOs, which are member of the PWYP coalition, had been fighting the resource curse by advocating for more transparency in the extractive industries. They argued that empowering citizens of resource rich countries by informing them about the wealth generated by extraction would help insure that those extractive revenues were properly accounted for. The EITI took over this idea and gathered representatives from civil society organisations, extractive companies and governments to design a global standard which resource rich countries can voluntarily decide to comply with. the EITI standard is based on a reconciliation of payments declared by companies on the one hand and revenues declared by the state on the other. The reports that come out of this reconciliation process are then disseminated and can lead to a general public discussion about the way extractive rents are managed. What lead actors from different backgrounds, with often conflicting interests, to agree on a transparency norm and what can this consensus tell us about the notion of transparency and its present (and profuse) use in international development programmes ? This thesis investigates the reasons for the emergence of the transparency norm and its fast diffusion on the international scene in the last 10 to 15 years. It also looks at some of the concrete practices that resulted from this normative evolution, which contributes to a thinking about the renewal of political authority in the international system.

In Peru, the rapid expansion of extractive activities has led to increased mobilization by peasant communities. In remote rural areas, the mediating efforts of the state between communities and corporations are often weak, and corporations have played an important role in dealing with communities’ demands and protests through different strategies. These processes are illustrative of a broader trend in which private corporations engage in governance processes by assuming state-like functions in relation to citizens. This study investigates how communities’ mobilization and scope of influence is affected by their interactions with corporations. Based on interviews and written primary sources, the study provides a detailed empirical account of the multifaceted relations and negotiations between corporations and communities in the context of two macro-economically significant Peruvian mining projects – Rio Blanco and Las Bambas. In this way, the study contributes to the empirical and theoretical debates on the political role of corporations and the implications for social movements and democratic influence. The study shows that the presence of private corporations alters the conditions for mobilization by creating opportunities as well as constraints, with significant impact on mobilization structures and framing of demands. However, communities relate to those opportunities and constraints differently, depending on how state-society relations and other forms of private dynamics have played out historically at the subnational level.

This doctoral thesis presents a critical analysis of the global debate on the ‘good governance’ of the extractive resources sectors. Its starting point is that over the past decade this debate has seen a remarkable elevation, while at the same time the governance concept itself has been subjected to critique. To understand how the sector-focused ‘good governance’ agenda compares against this critique, the thesis uses a conceptual framework that identifies the different uses of this concept. Against this background, it reviews the main scholarly debates on the opportunities and challenges of countries producing extractive resources and identifies four critical questions, which it then sets out to answer. The main argument is that the global debate on the ‘good governance’ of the extractive resources sectors has been built on the widely endorsed conclusion that ‘good institutions’ make for better outcomes and that therefore producer countries need to improve their sector institutions. However, this seemingly obvious conclusion has ignored the complexity and confusion around ‘governance’ and ‘institutions’ that prevails across the broader social science literature. This argument is based on the answers the thesis provides to four critical questions: what are institutions; how do institutions change; how are they enforced; and do existing institutions matter for the design of interventions aimed at improving institutions. The thesis lays open that the policy conclusions of the global debate are premised on the dominance of a particular reference point paired with a particular methodology where the emphasis has been on, first, identifying the types of institutions that have apparently led to desired results, and then to promote these as a means to steer towards these results. It concludes that this focus has premised the global agenda on a false sense of clarity on what producer countries ought to be improving.

Mazama, Washington is a small community, with a population of 230 residents, nestled in the Methow Valley near the North Cascades mountain range. Mazama is home to delicate ecosystems, thriving wildlife, a river integral to salmon recovery, and a local economy that is largely dependent on outdoor recreation. Also home to Mazama is an environmental campaign, brought forth by community-wide resistance to industrial mining proposals in the valley. The campaign, called the Methow Headwaters Campaign, is advocating for the protection of 340,079 acres of federal land from mineral withdraws. The campaign mobilized following an exploratory drilling proposal by a Canadian industrial-scale mining company, Blue River Resources Ltd, to mine on Flagg Mountain—a mountain located less than two miles from the town of Mazama. Because of the Mining Act of 1872, Blue River Resources Ltd. can earn one-hundred-percent interest from the Flagg Mountain project, while the Mazama community—largely based on a local recreational economy—bears the social, environmental, and economic burdens brought with these mining operations. This thesis examines how natural resource governance has been shaped in the Methow Valley at various scales, ultimately resulting in the social contestation of extractive development in Mazama in the early 21st century. This thesis argues that the community-led campaign to withdraw land from mineral withdraws attempts to “re-scale” environmental governance through a democratizing shift in political and ecological control.