For the last twenty years conferences concerning rare earth materials have been held in the U.S.A. every 18 to 24 months. In general these conferences have dealt with the science of these materials, and only one or two sessions (~10% of the papers) were concerned with industrial and commercial aspects.

Kaolin is a commercial term used to describe white clay composed essentially of kaolinite, Al&010(OH)g. The term is typically used to refer to both the raw clay and the refined commercial product. This manual describes the laboratory assessment of ‘non-plastic’ kaolin (sometimes known as china clay); plastic kaolinitic clays (or ball clay) are dealt with elsewhere in this series of manuals. Although originally valued for use in the manufacture of whiteware ceramics, the principal use of kaolin is now in the filling and coating of paper. The mineral is also used to a lesser extent as a filler in paint, rubber and plastics, as well as in a wide range of other applications. Kaolins are distinguished from other clays by whiteness, and fine, controllable particle size. It is generally necessary to process kaolin from the crude state in order to optimise these highly commercial properties <...>

This tutorial is concerned with applications of information theory concepts in statistics, in the finite alphabet setting. The information measure known as information divergence or Kullback-Leibler distance or relative entropy plays a key role, often with a geometric flavor as an analogue of squared Euclidean distance, as in the concepts of I-projection, I-radius and I-centroid. The topics covered include large deviations, hypothesis testing, maximum likelihood estimation in exponential families, analysis of contingency tables, and iterative algorithms with an “information geometry” background. Also, an introduction is provided to the theory of universal coding, and to statistical inference via the minimum description length principle motivated by that theory. <...>

Ingenieurgeologie ist eine komplexe, interdisziplinare Wissenschaft, die das Verhalten von Lockerund Festgesteinen einzeln und im Gebirgsverband entsprechend den genetisch bedingten Materialeigenschaften im Hinblick auf eine ganzheitliche Losung von Ingenieur- und Umweltproblemen erforscht.