Capital investment in natural resource extraction has fuelled an unprecedented rush to secure hydrocarbon and mining concessions and contracts throughout the Andes-Amazon-Chaco region leading to increased tensions and conflict with lowland indigenous groups residing in the areas that contain subsoil resources. This thesis explores resource extraction and conflict through an ethnography of state-society interactions over proposed hydrocarbon extraction in Bolivia. It asks, how does a “post-neoliberal state” combine commitments to indigenous people, the environment and the redistributive development of natural resource wealth, and how do social movements and other actors respond? In answering this question, the thesis examines how hydrocarbon expansion has affected the country’s most important gas producing region (the Department of Tarija), indigenous Guaraní society and indigenous Weenhayek society, both in their internal relationships and in their historically uneasy negotiations with the central state. By paying particular attention to the Guaraní and Weenhayek it also asks how far a national “government of social movements” has favoured or not the concerns and political projects of indigenous groups that are generally not well represented in the social movements that undergird this new state. In this vein, this research seeks to shed light on a series of contradictions and incongruities that characterise extractive-led economies with an end to contributing to debates about the possibility of combining more socially and environmentally sound modes of production, new forms of democracy, self governance and popular participation.

Variations in the yield, chemical composition, antibacterial, and antioxidant properties of the essential oils of Rosmarinus officinalis L. cultivated in Alice, Eastern Cape of South Africa over a period of 12 months using the solvent-free microwave extraction and traditional hydrodistillation methods were evaluated. The GC-MS analyses of the essential oils revealed the presence of 33 compounds with 1,8-cineole, a-pinene, camphor, verbenone, bornyl acetate and camphene constituting about 80 percent of the oils throughout the period of investigation, with the solvent-free microwave extraction method generally yielding more of the major components than the hydrodistillation method. Each of the major components of the oils varied in quantity and quality of yield at different periods of the year. The method of extraction and time of harvest are of importance to the quantity and quality of essential oil of Rosmarinus officinalis. Higher amounts of oxygenated monoterpenes such as borneol, camphor, terpene- 4-ol, linalool, a-terpeneol were present in the oil of SFME in comparison with HD. However, HD oil contained more monoterpene hydrocarbons such as a-pinene, camphene, β-pinene, myrcene, a-phellanderene, 1,8-cineole, trans- β-ocimene, γ-teprinene, and cis-sabinene hydrate than SFME extracted oil. Accumulation of monoterpene alcohols and ketones was observed during maturation process of Rosmarinus leaves. Quantitative evaluation of antibacterial activity, minimum inhibitory concentration values were determined using a serial microplate dilution method. The essential oils obtained using both methods of extraction were active against all the bacteria tested at a concentration of 10 mg mL-1. The minimum inhibitory concentrations for the SFME extracted oils ranged between 0.23 and 1.88 mg mL-1, while those of the HD extracted oils varied between 0.94 and 7.5 mg mL-1, thus suggesting that the oil obtained by solvent free microwave extraction was more active against bacteria than the oil obtained through hydrodistillation. The antioxidant and free radical scavenging activity of the obtained oils were tested by means of 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl radical (DPPH+) assay and β- carotene bleaching test. In the DPPH+ assay, while the free radical scavenging activity of the oil obtained by SFME method showed percentage inhibitions of between 48.8 percent and 67 percent, the HD derived oil showed inhibitions of between 52.2 percent and 65.30 percent at concentrations of 0.33, 0.50 and 1.0 mg mL-1, respectively. In the β-carotene bleaching assay, the percentage inhibition increased with increasing concentration of both oils with a higher antioxidant activity of the oil obtained through the SFME than the HD method. Thin layer chromatography (TLC) was used to analyze the chemical composition of the extracts using three eluent solvent systems of varying polarities i. e. CEF, BEA and EMW and sprayed with vanillin-sulfuric acid. The chemical composition of the different extracts was similar with the exception of methanol and water extracts which had only one or two visible compounds after treating with vanillin-spray reagent. To evaluate the number of antibacterial compounds present in the fractions, bioautography was used against two most important nosocomial microorganisms. S. aureus (Gram positive) and E. coli (Gram negative). Nearly all the crude serial extraction fractions contained compounds that inhibited the growth of E. coli. The hexane extract had the most lines of inhibition followed by ethyl acetate. Bioassay-guided fractionation against E. coli was used to isolate antibacterial compounds. The largest number of antibacterial compounds occurred in the hexane fraction. Furthermore we tried to complete the characterization by extracting and studying other biologically important plant metabolites such as phenolic compounds to evaluate the antioxidant capacity of Rosmarinus extracts.

Orientador: Rubens Maciel Filho / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Química / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-18T17:22:09Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 CohenPaternina_LiaMargarita_M.pdf: 3628516 bytes, checksum: 16200d398e141c7876209c1a40dd5580 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011 / Resumo: O álcool etílico, também conhecido como bioetanol, apresenta características positivas para ser utilizado como combustível em larga escala, como custo relativamente baixo, ser menos poluente quando comparado com os combustíveis de origem fóssil e poder ser produzido a partir de uma matriz renovável por meio da fermentação de produtos de origem vegetal. O processo de fermentação alcoólica convencional é caracteristicamente inibitório, porque o álcool etílico produzido inibe o crescimento das células de leveduras, diminuindo o rendimento do processo. Portanto, o estudo do processo de produção de bioetanol, visando o aumento da eficiência de cada uma das etapas do processo é essencial. Neste contexto, este trabalho tem como objetivo a simulação de um processo de produção de bioetanol baseado no conceito de fermentação extrativa a vácuo, na qual o etanol é retirado do meio fermentativo ao mesmo tempo em que é produzido, permitindo assim, que sua concentração no reator permaneça em níveis baixos durante o processo. Além disso, foi acoplada uma unidade de absorção para recuperação do etanol arrastado pela corrente de gases de fermentação. Este estudo foi realizado no simulador comercial ASPEN PLUS®. Para o cálculo das propriedades termodinâmicas no simulador, utilizou-se o modelo de equilíbrio termodinâmico NRTL-HOC (Non-Random Two-Liquid - Hayden-O'Connell), já que este descreveu adequadamente o comportamento da maioria dos sistemas binários presentes no processo. Através das análises de sensibilidade realizadas em estado estacionário, determinou-se as faixas de operação ótimas de cada unidade de processo (flash, coluna de absorção, entre outras.). Assim, foi determinando, que o processo de fermentação extrativa a vácuo apresentou maiores rendimentos (97,23%) frente ao processo convencional (96,59%) quando calculados com uma porcentagem de conversão de 93%. Para obter resultados mais reais na simulação do processo, foi programada uma unidade de fermentação baseada na modelagem matemática da fermentação alcoólica encontrada na literatura, a qual inclui parâmetros cinéticos estimados a partir de dados experimentais. Finalmente, esta unidade programada no modulo ASPEN CUSTOM MODELER foi exportada e acoplada à simulação do processo executada em ASPEN PLUS®. Com isso, foi possível simular um processo mais eficiente devido à diminuição da inibição celular causada pelo produto, além de recuperar o etanol arrastado pelos gases de fermentação / Abstract: The ethanol, also known as bioethanol, shows positive characteristics for being used as a large scale fuel, mainly because of the relatively low cost, low pollutant impact compared to fossil fuels and its feasibility of being produced from a renewable matrix through fermentation of vegetable origin products. The conventional fermentation process is typically inhibitory since the produced ethanol inhibits the yeast cells growth, reducing the yield of process. Therefore, improving the efficiency of bioethanol production is essential for reducing the production costs and it is necessary the study of each process step especially the fermentation one. In this context, this study aims the simulation of a bioethanol production process based on the concept of vacuum extractive fermentation in which the production and removal of ethanol occurs simultaneously, allowing low concentration levels into the during the process. In addition, it was coupled an absorption unit to recover the ethanol carried by the fermentation gases. This study was conducted in the commercial simulator ASPEN PLUS®. It was used the thermodynamic equilibrium model NRTL-HOC (Non Random Two Liquid- Hayden-O'Connell)for the estimation of thermodynamic properties in the simulator since it adequately describes the behavior of most binary systems present in the process. Through the sensitivity analysis performed in steady state, it was determined the optimum operating ranges of each process unit (flash, absorption column, among others.). Therefore, it was determined that the vacuum extractive fermentation process had higher yields (97.23%) compared to the conventional process (96.59%) when calculated with a conversion percentage of 93%. It was programmed, for obtaining the most accurate process simulation results, a fermentation unit based on a fermentation mathematical modeling found in the literature, which includes the kinetic parameters estimated from experimental data. Finally, this unit programmed into ASPEN CUSTOM MODELER module was exported and coupled to the simulation process executed in ASPEN PLUS®. As a result, it was possible to simulate a more efficient process due to the decreased in the cell inhibition caused by the product and it was recovered the ethanol dragged by the fermentation gases / Mestrado / Desenvolvimento de Processos Químicos / Mestre em Engenharia Química

While Electronic Medical Records provide extensive information about patients, the vast amounts of data cause issues in attempts to quickly retrieve valuable information needed to make accurate assumptions and decisions directly concerned with patients’ health. This search process is naturally time-consuming and forces health professionals to focus on a labor intensive task that diverts their attention from the main task of applying their knowledge to save lives. With the general aim of potentially relieving the professionals from this task of finding information needed for an operational decision, this thesis explores the use of a general BERT model for extractive summarization of Swedish medical records to investigate its capability in extracting sentences that convey important information to MRI physicists. To achieve this, a domain expert evaluation of medical histories was performed, creating the references summaries that were used for model evaluation. Three implementations are included in this study and one of which is TextRank, a prominent unsupervised approach to extractive summarization. The other two are based on clustering and rely on BERT to encode the text. The implementations are then evaluated using ROUGE metrics. The results support the use of a general BERT model for extractive summarization on medical records. Furthermore, the results are discussed in relation to the collected reference summaries, leading to a discussion about potential improvements to be made with regards to the domain expert evaluation, as well as the possibilities for future work on the topic of summarization of clinical documents.

Harmful substances containing acid or neutral rock drainages (ARD and NRD) are a major challenge related to the management of extractive industry wastes. This issue is particularly related to deposits containing sulphide minerals, which are prone to oxidization under the influence of atmospheric oxygen and water. The drainage quality depends mainly on the mineralogical and chemical composition of the extractive wastes, and especially on the ratio of acid-producing and neutralizing minerals, combined with reactions catalysed by microbes. Since harmful drainages play a major role in the generation of environmental issues for extractive industry, the accurate prediction of the drainage quality is of utmost importance. To design appropriate extractive waste facilities and drainage management, the characterisation of extractive wastes and assessment of the behaviour of the waste material is essential already before the actual mining activities start. Several methods have been developed to characterize extractive waste materials and to predict their short and long term behaviour, including e.g. geochemical laboratory tests, static tests and longer term kinetic tests, and geochemical modelling. The characterisation methods for assessing the ARD risk can be divided into static and kinetic tests. Static tests are short term laboratory analyses, usually used for preliminary investigation and screening. Kinetic tests are longer term tests, revealing information on the time scale of drainage events. Commonly used static tests for ARD prediction include acid–base accounting (ABA) tests and the net acid generation (NAG) test. Since acid and neutralisation potential largely depend on the ratio and quality of acid-producing and neutralizing minerals, mineralogical calculations could also be used for ARD prediction. The mobility of potentially harmful substances from extractive waste can be preliminary assessed using different geochemical laboratory tests, including selective extraction and leaching methods. The most commonly used selective extraction method in Finland is the aqua regia (AR) extraction. In addition to some silicates and secondary precipitate minerals, it is intended to dissolve elements bound especially to sulphide phases. A less commonly used method for element mobility prediction is the analysis of the single addition NAG test leachate. In this study, several Finnish waste rock sites were investigated and the performances of different preliminary drainage quality test methods evaluated and compared. The assessed acid production potential methods included the ABA test as presented in the standard EN 15875, the single addition NAG test as presented in the AMIRA guidebook, and a SEM mineralogy-based calculation. The assessed methods for element mobility prediction included the single addition NAG test leachate analysis and the AR extraction. According to the results, pyrrhotite seems to be the main mineral contributing to acid production, and the silicate minerals the main contributors to the neutralisation potential at the most Finnish waste rock sites. Since silicate minerals appear to have a significant role in ARD prevention, the behaviour of these minerals in mining environment should be more thoroughly investigated. In the investigated Finnish waste rocks, Co, Cr, Cu and Ni often occurred as elevated concentrations, and the most widely abundant harmful elements in the waste rock drainages were Co, Cu, Ni and Zn. The results suggest that an acid production prediction based on SEM mineralogical calculation is at least as accurate as the commonly used static laboratory methods. The AR extraction indicates well which elements might occur as elevated concentrations in the drainage. Also the NAG test leachate analysis performed well in element mobility assessment, but only when the NAG test leachate was sufficiently acidic, the leachate pH being below of 3-6, depending on the element of interest.

The natural resource curse is a widely debated phenomenon usually proposing a connection between large extractive resource wealth and substandard economic performance. This paper concerns the connection between large extractive resource wealth and the potential for its effects on long term political stability. Using Venezuela as a case study, this paper delves into the political history of Venezuela, plagued by endemic political instability, and attempts to test the political aspect of the resource curse, analysing history with a focus on the oil industry. The conclusion is that there is a clear connection between oil price volatility and political instability, but only evident starting in the latter half of the 20th -century. Further research into specific regimes, eras, as well as comparative analyses between Venezuela and other states is required to provide additional answers in regard to specific causes for political instability in the early 20th -century and the pre-oil period.

For over a century, corporations engaged in the extractive industries in Africa have operated without ethical rules. They have been notoriously fingered for rampant environmental, labour, health and human rights violations, including land despoliation, forced displacement, environmental pollution, cultural infringements and, sometimes, deaths. While the responsibility for regulating companies and protecting human and peoples’ rights primarily rests with states, they have often been unable or unwilling to do so effectively. Amidst these persisting challenges, the phenomenal rise of transnational corporations in the global economy have rendered more complex the gaps in global governance by presenting new challenges that make territorial regulation by single countries impracticable. While victims groan, contestations about the human rights obligations of corporations have allowed extractive and other companies to fly below the radar of accountability; thereby, enabling extractive businesses to ride roughshod over communities and the environment. After several United Nations-led initiatives to address the adverse impacts of corporations, they have proven insufficient to hold companies accountable for violations in the extractive sector. This thesis, therefore, is a dispassionate attempt to explore the role of the African regional human rights system as an important complementary level of normative and institutional governance for regulating abusive corporate conduct and advancing human rights accountability in the extractive industries. It adopts an African approach to corporate human rights accountability in critically evaluating the contours of the corporate accountability discourse. It problematises the near-total reliance on inadequate domestic action in host states for regulating powerful corporate conglomerates in this age of globalisation and highlights the limits of extraterritorial regulation by home states in addressing transborder abuses. After a careful assessment, it finds that African human rights norms and regional mechanisms can play a key part in regulating abusive corporate practices and protecting the human rights and environmental wellbeing of resource-rich communities affected by the extractive industries in Africa. / Thesis (LLD)--University of Pretoria, 2021. / German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst - DAAD) / Centre for Human Rights / LLD / Unrestricted

Increased use of renewable energy sources in the generation of electricity isa crucial component of transitioning to a less polluting energy system in the United States. Technologies like solar photovoltaic cells and wind turbines are being deployed at a rapid rate around the country, which means that an increasing portion of the public is becoming aware of renewable energy systems. The construction of these new industrial facilities has resulted in a variety of public reactions, positive and negative. Citizen opposition has been widely observed toward a variety of renewable energy facilities, and citizen groups can influence policy-making at the national, state,and local levels. Further research is needed to understand under what circumstances the public may take oppositional stances. To examine this topic, I analyze public perceptions of renewable energy using three different datasets. First, I used data from a survey conducted in 2014 in five communities in Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho experiencing renewable energy development(n=906). This dataset allowed me to untangle what factors help explain both individual as well as community-level variation in support for renewable energy. Second, I employed nationally representative survey data (n=13, 322)collected from 2008 to 2015 to examine the influence of a number of factors hypothesized to shape individuals’ level of support for renewable energy policies including socio-demographic characteristics, political beliefs, belief in anthropogenic climate change, and nearby extractive industry activities. Last, I analyzed discourse about renewable energy in sixty-one semi-structured interviews with individuals representing various community sectors in three energy-producing rural communities in Utah. My research findings, on a whole, suggest that several place-based factors are significant in shaping public opinion about renewable energy, including community experience with renewable energy and local economic reliance on extractive industries. I also find pervasive climate skepticism across study sites. These findings indicate the need for broad-based and non-partisan discursive frames for renewable energy. Last, these findings speak to the importance of the ‘just transitions’ concepts, and the need to incorporate those communities most marginalized by the current system of fossil fuels extraction and production as society moves forward toward a cleaner energy economy.

This master thesis deals with automatic summarization of text and how semantic folding can be used as a similarity measure between sentences in the TextRank algorithm. The method was implemented and compared with two common similarity measures. These two similarity measures were cosine similarity of tf-idf vectors and the number of overlapping terms in two sentences. The three methods were implemented and the linguistic features used in the construction were stop words, part-of-speech filtering and stemming. Five different part-of-speech filters were used, with different mixtures of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The three methods were evaluated by summarizing documents from the Document Understanding Conference and comparing them to gold-standard summarization created by human judges. Comparison between the system summaries and gold-standard summaries was made with the ROUGE-1 measure. The algorithm with semantic folding performed worst of the three methods, but only 0.0096 worse in F-score than cosine similarity of tf-idf vectors that performed best. For semantic folding, the average precision was 46.2% and recall 45.7% for the best-performing part-of-speech filter. / Det här examensarbetet behandlar automatisk textsammanfattning och hur semantisk vikning kan användas som likhetsmått mellan meningar i algoritmen TextRank. Metoden implementerades och jämfördes med två vanliga likhetsmått. Dessa två likhetsmått var cosinus-likhet mellan tf-idf-vektorer samt antal överlappande termer i två meningar. De tre metoderna implementerades och de lingvistiska särdragen som användes vid konstruktionen var stoppord, filtrering av ordklasser samt en avstämmare. Fem olika filter för ordklasser användes, med olika blandningar av substantiv, verb och adjektiv. De tre metoderna utvärderades genom att sammanfatta dokument från DUC och jämföra dessa mot guldsammanfattningar skapade av mänskliga domare. Jämförelse mellan systemsammanfattningar och guldsammanfattningar gjordes med måttet ROUGE-1. Algoritmen med semantisk vikning presterade sämst av de tre jämförda metoderna, dock bara 0.0096 sämre i F-score än cosinus-likhet mellan tf-idf-vektorer som presterade bäst. För semantisk vikning var den genomsnittliga precisionen 46.2% och recall 45.7% för det ordklassfiltret som presterade bäst.

The Philippines is a food extractive enclave in the bust stage of export-oriented aquaculture, and this globalization agenda has had several negative impacts. Aquaculture has not expanded fish and marine foods but threatens national food security by integrating Philippine aquatic resources into the globalized food chain. Following structural adjustment policies imposed beginning in the 1980s, the Philippines shipped massive levels of animal protein to world markets, but this country has grown less food self-sufficient. During the decades that shrimp aquaculture has boomed and busted in the Philippines, the living conditions of Filipino families have steadily worsened. This study of three Panguil Bay fishing communities of Northern Mindanao demonstrates that the survival of subsistent artisan fisher households is now threatened because export-oriented producers have severely degraded the ecosystem upon which they rely. Moreover, women and children are inequitably threatened by the ecological and economic changes that have accompanied the Philippine global aquaculture agenda. In reality, capitalist commodity chains of export-oriented aquaculture externalize to households and to nature much of the true cost of producers and of ecological degradation. As a result, malnourished and impoverished Philippine fishing households subsidize global aquaculture commodity chains. While Filipino fisher households can no longer afford local food costs, their hidden inputs into capitalist commodity chains keep prices of luxury seafoods cheap in rich core countries. / Ph. D.