Managing coastal environments under climate change: pathways to adaptation

This paper deals with the question of how to manage vulnerable coastal systems so as to make them sustainable under present and future climates. This is interpreted in terms of the coastal functionality, mainly natural services and support for socio-economic activities. From here we discuss how to adapt for long term trends and for short terms episodic events using the DPSIR framework. The analysis is presented for coastal archetypes from Spain, Ireland and Romania, sweeping a range of meteo-oceanographic and socio-economic pressures, resulting in a wide range of fluxes among them those related to sediment. The analysis emphasizes the variables that provide a higher level of robustness. That means mean sea level for physical factors and population density for human factors. For each of the studied cases high and low sustainability practices, based on stakeholders preferences, are considered and discussed. This allows proposing alternatives and carrying out an integrated assessment in the last section of the paper. This assessment permits building a sequence of interventions called adaptation pathway that enhances the natural resilience of the studied coastal systems and therefore increases their sustainability under present and future conditions.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Fuzzy memoization for floating-point multimedia applications

Instruction memoization is a promising technique to reduce the power consumption and increase the performance of future low-end/mobile multimedia systems. Power and performance efficiency can be improved by reusing instances of an already executed operation. Unfortunately, this technique may not always be worth the effort due to the power consumption and area impact of the tables required to leverage an adequate level of reuse. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate a novel way of understanding multimedia floating-point operations based on the fuzzy computation paradigm: performance and power consumption can be improved at the cost of small precision losses in computation. By exploiting this implicit characteristic of multimedia applications, we propose a new technique called tolerant memoization. This technique expands the capabilities of classic memoization by associating entries with similar inputs to the same output. We evaluate this new technique by measuring the effect of tolerant memoization for floating-point operations in a low-power multimedia processor and discuss the trade-offs between performance and quality of the media outputs. We report energy improvements of 12 percent for a set of key multimedia applications with small LUT of 6 Kbytes, compared to 3 percent obtained using previously proposed techniques.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Towards Automatic Learning of Heuristics for Mechanical Transformations of Procedural Code

The current trend in next-generation exascale systems goes towards integrating a wide range of specialized (co-)processors into traditional supercomputers. However, the integration of different specialized devices increases the degree of heterogeneity and the complexity in programming such type of systems. Due to the efficiency of heterogeneous systems in terms of Watt and FLOPS per surface unit, opening the access of heterogeneous platforms to a wider range of users is an important problem to be tackled. In order to bridge the gap between heterogeneous systems and programmers, in this paper we propose a machine learning-based approach to learn heuristics for defining transformation strategies of a program transformation system. Our approach proposes a novel combination of reinforcement learning and classification methods to efficiently tackle the problems inherent to this type of systems. Preliminary results demonstrate the suitability of the approach for easing the programmability of heterogeneous systems.Comment: Part of the Program Transformation for Programmability in Heterogeneous Architectures (PROHA) workshop, Barcelona, Spain, 12th March 2016, 9 pages, LaTe

Telecommunications policies: Measurement and determinants

This paper presents new data on telecommunications reform for a cross section of countries. We measure telecommunications reform along two dimensions: entry barriers and regulatory independence. This data set is combined with a comprehensive set of performance, institutional and political data to analyze the determinants of telecommunications policies. We find that entry barriers are positively associated with the degree to which countries have an interventionist legal tradition, but they are unrelated to the partisan ideology of reforming governments. We also find that countries with weak protection of investors' quasi-rents by other means, and countries with a larger incumbent are more prone to create independent regulatory agencies, although this last result is statistically weaker.Telecommunications policies; Liberalization; Regulation;

Ultrasensitive Label-Free Nanosensing and High-Speed Tracking of Single Proteins

: Label-free detection, analysis, and rapid tracking of nanoparticles is crucial for future ultrasensitive sensing applications, ranging from understanding of biological interactions to the study of size-dependent classical-quantum transitions. Yet optical techniques to distinguish nanoparticles directly among their background remain challenging. Here we present amplified interferometric scattering microscopy (aiSCAT) as a new all-optical method capable of detecting individual nanoparticles as small as 15 kDa proteins that is equivalent to half a GFP. By balancing scattering and reflection amplitudes the interference contrast of the nanoparticle signal is amplified 1 to 2 orders of magnitude. Beyond high sensitivity, a-iSCAT allows high-speed image acquisition exceeding several hundreds of frames-per-second. We showcase the performance of our approach by detecting single Streptavidin binding events and by tracking single Ferritin proteins at 400 frames-per-second with 12 nm localization precision over seconds. Moreover, due to its extremely simple experimental realization, this advancement finally enables a cheap and routine implementation of label-free all-optical single nanoparticle detection platforms with sensitivity operating at the single protein level.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Solving the Klein-Gordon equation using Fourier spectral methods: A benchmark test for computer performance

The cubic Klein-Gordon equation is a simple but non-trivial partial differential equation whose numerical solution has the main building blocks required for the solution of many other partial differential equations. In this study, the library 2DECOMP&FFT is used in a Fourier spectral scheme to solve the Klein-Gordon equation and strong scaling of the code is examined on thirteen different machines for a problem size of 512^3. The results are useful in assessing likely performance of other parallel fast Fourier transform based programs for solving partial differential equations. The problem is chosen to be large enough to solve on a workstation, yet also of interest to solve quickly on a supercomputer, in particular for parametric studies. Unlike other high performance computing benchmarks, for this problem size, the time to solution will not be improved by simply building a bigger supercomputer.Comment: 10 page

Regulatory ambivalence and the limitations of pharmaceutical policy in Spain

Broadly speaking, pharmaceutical policy in Spain has been unable to control either the price or the volume of drugs prescribed. Limited attempts have been made to bring together the regulation of the pharmaceutical market and policies, in pursuit of the desired goals of efficiency and quality. This paper assesses the regulation of the Spanish pharmaceutical market over the last two decades by examining regulation and policy and the available empirical evidence on their appreciable effects, and presents recommendations for policy design. Our findings suggest that policies aiming to improve efficiency and quality have not managed to contain costs, while cost-effectiveness is still overlooked. We argue that future policies should encourage broader participation in the decision-making processes and promote a higher degree of competition, especially from generic drugs.Spain, generic penetration, reference pricing, negative lists, pharmaceutical regulation

Uniqueness of Coalitional Equilibria

We provide an existence and a uniqueness result for coalitional equilibria of a game in strategic form. Both results are illustrated for a public good game and a homogeneous Cournot-oligopoly game.Existence and uniqueness of coalitional equilibrium, Game in strategic form

Ownership structure and accountability: the case of the privatization of the Spanish tobacco monopoly, 1887–96.

This paper analyses the case of the privatization of the Spanish tobacco monopoly, focusing on the period between 1887 and 1896, which corresponds to the first leasing contract between the state and the Spanish Tobacco Company and it is concerned with two different issues. First, it deals with the effects of privatization on accountability.The main question examined is whether public and private ownership entail different approaches to the way in which managers are accountable to owners, and the impact this issue had on corporate reporting. Second, it is concerned with exploring the determinants of accounting disclosure. Here, the basic issue is to understand the factors shaping changes in corporate reporting during the period of study.Accounting history; Corporate Reporting; Privatization; Tobacco Monopoly; Spain;

Telecommunications policies: Determinants and impact

This paper presents new data, in the form of four indices, on liberalization policies and the independence of regulators for a cross-section of countries. These indices are combined with a comprehensive set of performance, institutional and political data to analyze both the determinants and the impact of telecommunications policies. The authors find that liberalization policies are negatively associated with the degree to which countries have an interventionist tradition, but not with the partisan ideology of reforming countries per se. They also find that countries where the institutional endowment constrains less the behavior of the executive bodies, and countries with a stronger incumbent, are more prone to create truly independent regulatory agencies. There is weak evidence that the creation of independent regulatory agencies has a positive effect on network penetration when the endogeneity of regulatory independence is taken into account.telecommunications; liberalization; institutions;