COVID-19: lessons for developing and commissioning new mining technologies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For many of us in the regionally distributed and interconnected mining industries, the pandemic impacts were earlier and broader than most. PDAC, the mining mega-convention that descends on Toronto each spring, started 2020 as per any other year, but by the end of the week the world had changed. Sanitiser bottles appeared on tables, elbow bumps replaced handshakes, and the airports on the trip home were a mix of caution and carnage; a sign of the new reality to which we had now entered. COVID-19 had rapidly spread from being an isolated“Wuhan” virus, and many projects still had field personnel undertaking commissioning and service activities. In the space of a week in March 2020, the focus shifted from urgently completing tasks to evacuating staff back to safety as expeditiously as practicable. Clients were generally supportive of such movements, with similar strategies playing out within their operations. Movements were quickly constrained by pandemic restrictions, and the plane tickets, hotel beds and shipping containers were invariably prioritised for essential operations. Despite high opinions of our indispensability, we ceded priority in most jurisdictions to the public health response. It was only once personnel were back safely in their home cities or in hotel quarantine, stakeholder meetings had been urgently convened across myriad not-yet-ubiquitous online platforms, and formal written correspondence had been exchanged flagging the start of the disruption, that the reality set in; how to continue and complete mining project installations on the opposite side of the continent or world, with operations and suppliers suspended or furloughed, and no certainty as to when personnel and equipment mobility may resume? With very few precedents to draw upon in any of our working careers, the well-intended responses to these disruptions were varied in success, but in any case, will prove formative to how we act in future crises. Whilst we cannot predict with certainty when, where and how the next disaster will occur, it is incumbent on all to take the hard learned lessons of COVID-19 and have disaster response and recovery plans that are updated and reflect our real, lived experiences.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".