Alberta Energy Regulator approves Northback request to explore for coal at Grassy Mountain
The Alberta Energy Regulator has approved Northback Holdings' request to explore for coal at Grassy Mountain along the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains.
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Australia-based Northback had applied to the AER for a coal exploration program, along with deep drilling permit and temporary diversion licence, at Grassy Mountain, and on Thursday afternoon made public its decision to approve the three applications, with conditions.
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In its decision, the AER concluded that the applications meet all regulatory requirements and that the exploration program is in the public interest. The program will have 'positive social and economic impacts,' it said.
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'The Exploration Program, in addition to refining Northback's understanding of the Grassy Mountain coal deposit, will provide the Piikani and Stoney Nakoda First Nations and Albertans with additional information about the Grassy Mountain coal deposit,' said the AER in Thursday's decision.
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'The Exploration Program will contribute to the ongoing evaluation of this coal resource and, based on our assessment, will do so in an orderly, efficient, and environmentally responsible manner.'
The AER's decision follows public hearings on the application in Pincher Creek in December and Calgary in January, when the AER heard from those wanting the jobs and other economic benefits of a mine and those concerned about its environmental impacts.
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Alberta premier faces angry town hall on province's coal policy
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Burnaby watch repair business finds new life after demise of Hudson's Bay stores
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Please try again Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. 'It's been heartbreaking to think, originally, that we were going to have to lay off all our staff, but, with London Drugs coming on board, we tried to stay open in The Bay as long as we possibly could as we transition to the London Drugs locations.' It's a fresh start for a small company that endured some bumpy last few years inside Hudson's Bay stores. Their sales went through Hudson's Bay cash registers. As HBC struggled to do regular maintenance on elevators and air conditioning systems, it also started missing regular payments to licensees, including Skews' business. 'It was really poorly managed towards the end,' said Skews. On Time Service is smaller than it once was, but still draws thousands of customers with a niche need. The original company, founded by Skews' father in 1979, was called TimeHouse and it operated in Woodward's stores. 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It's been painstaking work, for instance, for Boston's library to scan and curate dozens of New England's French-language newspapers that were widely read in the late 19th and early 20th century by Canadian immigrant communities from Quebec. Now that such text is of use as training data, it helps bankroll projects that librarians want to do anyway. 'We've been very clear that, 'Hey, we're a public library,'' Chapel said. 'Our collections are held for public use, and anything we digitized as part of this project will be made public.' Harvard's collection was already digitized starting in 2006 for another tech giant, Google, in its controversial project to create a searchable online library of more than 20 million books. Google spent years beating back legal challenges from authors to its online book library, which included many newer and copyrighted works. It was finally settled in 2016 when the U.S. Supreme Court let stand lower court rulings that rejected copyright infringement claims. Now, for the first time, Google has worked with Harvard to retrieve public domain volumes from Google Books and clear the way for their release to AI developers. Copyright protections in the U.S. typically last for 95 years, and longer for sound recordings. How useful all of this will be for the next generation of AI tools remains to be seen as the data gets shared Thursday on the Hugging Face platform, which hosts datasets and open-source AI models that anyone can download. The book collection is more linguistically diverse than typical AI data sources. Fewer than half the volumes are in English, though European languages still dominate, particularly German, French, Italian, Spanish and Latin. A book collection steeped in 19th century thought could also be 'immensely critical' for the tech industry's efforts to build AI agents that can plan and reason as well as humans, Leppert said. Wednesdays Columnist Jen Zoratti looks at what's next in arts, life and pop culture. 'At a university, you have a lot of pedagogy around what it means to reason,' Leppert said. 'You have a lot of scientific information about how to run processes and how to run analyses.' At the same time, there's also plenty of outdated data, from debunked scientific and medical theories to racist narratives. 'When you're dealing with such a large data set, there are some tricky issues around harmful content and language,' said Kristi Mukk, a coordinator at Harvard's Library Innovation Lab who said the initiative is trying to provide guidance about mitigating the risks of using the data, to 'help them make their own informed decisions and use AI responsibly.' ———— The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI access to part of AP's text archives.
