We examine the effectiveness of bonuses and fines in an ‘inspection game’ where an employer can learn the effort of a worker through costly inspection. Standard game theoretic analysis predicts that fines discourage shirking, whereas bonuses encourage shirking. In contrast, ownpayoff effects suggest that both fines and bonuses discourage shirking. In an experiment we find that fines are more ef...

The energy required to crush rocks is proportional to the amount of new surface area that is created; hence, a very important percentage of the energy consumed to produce construction aggregates is spent in producing non-commercial fines. Data gathered during visits to quarries, an extensive survey and laboratory experiments are used to explore the role of mineralogy and fracture mode in fines ...

Each year, millions of tons of agricultural residues such as wheat straw are produced worldwide. In this paper, we describe ongoing efforts to solve technological, infrastructural, and economic challenges to using this straw for bioenergy and bioproducts. Among these challenges, silica in straw forms a low-melting point eutectic with potassium, causing excessive slagging deposits in boilers. Th...

A by-product of the construction aggregate industry is fines or dust that contain trace elements such as zinc and copper and significant amounts of iron, aluminum, silica and potassium. Beneficial uses for these materials have been proposed such as replenishing depleted soils and amendment in mixtures of organic byproducts prior to composting. To evaluate the beneficial uses in composting, outd...

In terms of storage capacity and containment efficiency, deep saline aquifers are among the best candidates for CO2 storage. However, salt precipitation in the wellbore vicinity and fines mobilization ensued from in situ mineral dissolution could impair CO2 injectivity and reduce the quality and capacity of deep saline reservoirs for CO2 storage. The mechanisms of salt precipitation and its imp...

The collection of delinquent fines is a vast and ongoing public administration challenge. In the UK, unpaid fines amount to more than a half billion pounds. Managing noncompliant accounts and dispatching bailiffs to collect fines in person is costly. This paper reports the results of a large randomized controlled trial designed to test the effectiveness of mobile phone text messaging as an alte...

The models that were analyzed using FLAC version 4.0 (FLAC, 2000) are shown on Figure 5.1. The models have different soil types: loose silty sand with 20% fines content (Figures 5.1a and 5.1b), soft clay (Figure 5.1c), and silt (Figure 5.1d). Hence, the determination of the parameters is different for each model. The following sections discuss the determination of the parameters used in the ana...