Sharing the Burden of Adaptation Financing: An Assessment of the Contributions of Countries

Climate change may cause most harm to countries that contribute least to greenhouse gas emissions. This paper identifies deontology, solidarity and consequentialism as the principles that can serve as a basis for a fair international burden sharing scheme of adaptation costs. We translate these principles into criteria that can be applied in assigning contributions of individual countries, namely historical responsibility, equality and capacity to pay. Specific political and scientific choices are discussed, highlighting implications for international burden-sharing. Combining historical responsibility and capacity to pay seems a promising starting point for international negotiations on the design of burden-sharing schemes. From the numerical assessment, it is clear that UNFCCC Annex I countries carry the greatest burden under most scenarios, but contributions differ substantially subject to the choice of an indicator for capacity to pay. The total financial contribution by the Annex I countries could be in the range of $55-68 billion annually.Adaptation Financing, Burden-Sharing, Historical Responsibility

On the use of installed base information for spare parts logistics: a revieuw of ideas and industry practice

Demand for spare parts is often difficult to forecast using historical data only. In this paper, we give an overview of installed based information and provide several ways in which installed base forecasting can be used. We discuss cases of installed based forecasting at four companies and list the issues involved. Moreover, we provide some models to assess the value of installed base information and conclude that forecasts of spare parts demand and return can be made considerably more timely and accurate by using installed base information

Competitive Capacity Investment under Uncertainty

We consider a long-term capacity investment problem in a competitive market under demand uncertainty. Two firms move sequentially in the competition and a firm’s capacity decision interacts with the other firm’s current and future capacity. Throughout the investment race, a firm can either choose to plan its investments proactively, taking into account possible responses from the other firm, or decide to respond reactively to the competition. In both cases, the optimal decision at each period is determined according to an ISD (Invest, Stayput, Disinvest) policy. We develop two algorithms to efficiently derive proactive ISD policies for the leader and follower firms. Using data from the container shipping market (2000-2015), we show that the optimal capacity determined by our competitive strategy is consistent with the realized investments in practice. By revealing strategical flexibility of proactive strategies, our results demonstrate that firms in the competition can gain more capacity and profit through such a strategy. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we explore the impact of different market conditions and investment irreversibility levels on capacity strategies. In particular, by comparing the results of competitive strategies and strategies that separate firms into different markets, we show that both firms can benefit from the competition and that market downturns likely lead to investment cascades

High flexibility of DNA on short length scales probed by atomic force microscopy

The mechanics of DNA bending on intermediate length scales (5–100 nm) plays a key role in many cellular processes, and is also important in the fabrication of artificial DNA structures, but previous experimental studies of DNA mechanics have focused on longer length scales than these. We use high-resolution atomic force microscopy on individual DNA molecules to obtain a direct measurement of the bending energy function appropriate for scales down to 5 nm. Our measurements imply that the elastic energy of highly bent DNA conformations is lower than predicted by classical elasticity models such as the worm-like chain (WLC) model. For example, we found that on short length scales, spontaneous large-angle bends are many times more prevalent than predicted by the WLC model. We test our data and model with an interlocking set of consistency checks. Our analysis also shows how our model is compatible with previous experiments, which have sometimes been viewed as confirming the WLC

Synthetic Data for English Lexical Normalization: How Close Can We Get to Manually Annotated Data?

Social media is a valuable data resource for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, standard NLP tools were often designed with standard texts in mind, and their performance decreases heavily when applied to social media data.One solution to this problem is to adapt the input text to a more standard form, a task also referred to as normalization. Automatic approaches to normalization have shown that they can be used to improve performance on a variety of NLP tasks. However, all of these systems are supervised, thereby being heavily dependent on the availability of training data for the correct language and domain. In this work, we attempt to overcome this dependence by automatically generating training data for lexical normalization. Starting with raw tweets, we attempt two directions, to insert non-standardness (noise) and to automatically normalize in an unsupervised setting. Our best results are achieved by automatically inserting noise. We evaluate our approaches by using an existing lexical normalization system; our best scores are achieved by custom error generation system, which makes use of some manually created datasets. With this system, we score 94.29 accuracy on the test data, compared to 95.22 when it is trained on human-annotated data. Our best system which does not depend on any type of annotation is based on word embeddings and scores 92.04 accuracy. Finally, we perform an experiment in which we asked humans to predict whether a sentence was written by a human or generated by our best model. This experiment showed that in most cases it is hard for a human to detect automatically generated sentences

Advancing presence and changes in body size of brown shrimp <i>Crangon crangon</i> on intertidal flats in the western Dutch Wadden Sea, 1984–2018

Upon settlement after a pelagic larval phase, brown shrimp Crangon crangon depend on intertidal flats. During low as well as high tide the young brown shrimp play roles as predators of meiofauna and as prey for fish and birds. Unlike the biol- ogy of the commercially important adults, knowledge on these juveniles remains sketchy. Here we provide an analysis of 35 years (1984–2018) of brown shrimp monitoring in May–June on intertidal flats in the westernmost Dutch Wadden Sea. Intertidal shrimp densities were sampled bi-weekly at three stations during low tide, using sampling corers. We show that over this 35-year period the appearance of shrimp on mudflats advanced by 12 days (− 0.34 days yr−1). Simultaneously, densities on 7 May increased by more than 2.4 times, from 28 shrimp m−2 in 1984 to 69 shrimp m−2 in 2018. Across years, mean shrimp length decreased from 12.6 to 10.7 mm, but length in early May did not change. The advancement in settle- ment and the increasing shrimp densities correlated with increases in the seawater temperatures in April more than during earlier times of the year. We propose four interpretations of these changes: (1) shrimp settle on the mudflat when they reach a certain ‘threshold’ length, (2) settlement of shrimp is controlled by a critical period of ‘threshold’ temperature sensitivity, (3) timing of shrimp settlement is a response to food availability on mudflats or (4) a direct response to inferred predation pressure. The different interpretations will lead to different scenarios of change in a warming world

eCommerce for Reverse Logistics

The focus of the proposed panel will be on issues pertaining e-commerce and reverse logistics activities, which typically include operations for collection, selection and decision making for the optimal recovery option (reuse, remanufacture or recycle) of post-retail or surplus products nearing obsolescence

Invasive oysters as new hosts for native shell-boring polychaetes: Using historical shell collections and recent field data to investigate parasite spillback in native mussels in the Dutch Wadden Sea

Biological invasions can have manifold effects on native biota, including impacts on species interactions in invaded ecosystems. Among those are effects on parasite-host interactions, for example in cases where invaders serve as a new host for native parasites, leading to an amplification of the parasite population which may ultimately result in increased infection levels in the original native hosts (parasite spillback). In this study, we investigated the potential spillback of the native shell-boring polychaete Polydora ciliata from invasive Pacific oysters (Crassostrea (Magallana) gigas) to native mussels (Mytilus edulis) in the Dutch Wadden Sea. A field survey in the intertidal revealed that the majority of P. ciliata can nowadays be found in the shells of live but also dead Pacific oysters and much less in shells of other potential host species: mussels and periwinkles (Littorina littorea). Using a unique historical shell collection based on long-term sampling programmes in the intertidal and subtidal of the western Dutch Wadden Sea, we compared P. ciliata infections in mussels before and after the invasion of the Pacific oyster by means of x-ray scans. Both for the intertidal and subtidal, we did not detect differences in prevalence of P. ciliata in mussels between pre- and post-invasion periods. This suggests that the invasion of the Pacific oyster may not have caused a strong spillback to mussels regarding P. ciliata and thus the invasion probably had little indirect infection-mediated effects on the condition and fitness of native mussels. Instead, the acquisition of native P. ciliata by the invasive oysters suggests that they may themselves be affected by the new infections and this may warrant further research

Physiotherapy for patients with lateral ankle sprains. A prospective survey of practice patterns in Dutch primary health care

The goal of this study is to describe treatment patterns by Dutch physiotherapists for patients with lateral ankle sprains, and to compare them with assumptions on expected treatment that are derived from the literature. For this purpose, data of 251 patients with a sprain of the ankle were compared with a reference group of 16,823 patients with different medical diagnoses. Data concerned patient characteristics, treatment sessions, goals pursued (defined in terms of impairments and disabilities), and interventions applied by physiotherapists. As expected, important treatment goals for these patients were to reduce swelling, improve stability of the joint and muscle power, and enhance mobility. Bandaging and exercise were frequently used. Contrary to expectations, little emphasis was found on instructions for home exercises and on reduction of disability in the last phase of treatment. Ultrasound and shortwave therapy were applied more frequently than expected. Regarding the essential aspects of functional treatment, a moderate degree of correspondence was found between actual treatment of patients with sprained ankles and assumptions on expected treatment. The discrepancies found between theory and practice may stimulate physiotherapists to reconsider these aspects of their treatment.</p