Introduction Archaeological investigations of landfills have revealed that biodegradable wastes can be found — virtually intact — 25 years after burial. We know that landfills contain bacteria with the metabolic capability to degrade many of the materials that are common components of municipal refuse. The persistence for decades of degradable materials in the presence of such organisms appears...

This paper examines the amount of grandfathering needed for an emissions trading scheme (ETS) to have a neutral impact on firm profits. We provide a simple formula to calculate profit-neutral grandfathering in an asymmetric Cournot model with a general demand function. Using this formula, we obtain estimates of profit-neutral grandfathering for the electricity, cement, newsprint and steel indus...

Under anaerobic conditions, organic pollutants in wastewater are degraded by microbes producing methane and carbon dioxide. The degradation process is effective compared to the more conventional aerobic processes and produces only 5-10% of sludge. This saves considerably on cost associated with the sludge disposal. Among anaerobic technologies, the most popular ones is the upflow anaerobic slud...

We introduce a framework for quality assurance of corpora, and apply it to the Reuters Multilingual Corpus (RCV2). The results of this quality assessment of this standard newsprint corpus reveal a significant duplication problem and, to a lesser extent, a problem with corrupted articles. From the raw collection of some 487,000 articles, almost one tenth are trivial duplicates. A smaller fractio...

Not long ago, I e-mailed Donald McNeil, Jr. I wanted to know how many HIV/AIDS articles the New York Times reporter had written over the years. “Fiddling with the Times’ website and internal library . . . produces 201 to 495,” McNeil replied. “I think it’s safe to say I’ve written 400 stories about AIDS.” At the end of this piece I’ll share McNeil’s favorite, but for now I’ll state the obvious....