Modelling Individual Evacuation Decisions during Natural Disasters: A Case Study of Volcanic Crisis in Merapi, Indonesia

As the size of human populations increases, so does the severity of the impacts of natural disasters. This is partly because more people are now occupying areas which are susceptible to hazardous natural events, hence, evacuation is needed when such events occur. Evacuation can be the most important action to minimise the impact of any disaster, but in many cases there are always people who are reluctant to leave. This paper describes an agent-based model (ABM) of evacuation decisions, focusing on the emergence of reluctant people in times of crisis and using Merapi, Indonesia as a case study. The individual evacuation decision model is influenced by several factors formulated from a literature review and survey. We categorised the factors influencing evacuation decisions into two opposing forces, namely, the driving factors to leave (evacuate) versus those to stay, to formulate the model. The evacuation decision (to stay/leave) of an agent is based on an evaluation of the strength of these driving factors using threshold-based rules. This ABM was utilised with a synthetic population from census microdata, in which everyone is characterised by the decision rule. Three scenarios with varying parameters are examined to calibrate the model. Validations were conducted using a retrodictive approach by performing spatial and temporal comparisons between the outputs of simulation and the real data. We present the results of the simulations and discuss the outcomes to conclude with the most plausible scenario

TOK channels use the two gates in classical K⁺ channels to achieve outward rectification

TOKs are outwardly rectifying K+ channels in fungi with two pore-loops and eight transmembrane spans. Here, we describe the TOKs from four pathogens that cause the majority of life-threatening fungal infections in humans. These TOKs pass large currents only in the outward direction like the canonical isolate from Saccharomyces cerevisiae (ScTOK), and distinct from other K+ channels. ScTOK, AfTOK1 (Aspergillus fumigatus), and H99TOK (Cryptococcus neoformans grubii) are K+ -selective and pass current above the K+ reversal potential. CaTOK (Candida albicans) and CnTOK (Cryptococcus neoformans neoformans) pass both K+ and Na+ and conduct above a reversal potential reflecting the mixed permeability of their selectivity filter. Mutations in CaTOK and ScTOK at sites homologous to those that open the internal gates in classical K+ channels are shown to produce inward TOK currents. A favored model for outward rectification is proposed whereby the reversal potential determines ion occupancy, and thus, conductivity, of the selectivity filter gate that is coupled to an imperfectly restrictive internal gate, permitting the filter to sample ion concentrations on both sides of the membrane

APRICOT: A Dataset of Physical Adversarial Attacks on Object Detection

Physical adversarial attacks threaten to fool object detection systems, but reproducible research on the real-world effectiveness of physical patches and how to defend against them requires a publicly available benchmark dataset. We present APRICOT, a collection of over 1,000 annotated photographs of printed adversarial patches in public locations. The patches target several object categories for three COCO-trained detection models, and the photos represent natural variation in position, distance, lighting conditions, and viewing angle. Our analysis suggests that maintaining adversarial robustness in uncontrolled settings is highly challenging, but it is still possible to produce targeted detections under white-box and sometimes black-box settings. We establish baselines for defending against adversarial patches through several methods, including a detector supervised with synthetic data and unsupervised methods such as kernel density estimation, Bayesian uncertainty, and reconstruction error. Our results suggest that adversarial patches can be effectively flagged, both in a high-knowledge, attack-specific scenario, and in an unsupervised setting where patches are detected as anomalies in natural images. This dataset and the described experiments provide a benchmark for future research on the effectiveness of and defenses against physical adversarial objects in the wild.Comment: 23 pages, 14 figures, 3 tables. Updated version as accepted to ECCV 202

Doping, European Law and the Implications of Meca-Medina

The ruling of the European Court of Justice in the anti-doping case of Meca Medina v. The Commission has important implications for athletes, domestic governing bodies, international federations and supra-national actors such as WADA and the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Meca-Medina has been criticised as an unwelcome interference by the courts in the legitimate activities of sporting organisations, but after Bosman it was fanciful to argue that those organisations should be ‘above the law’ and the courts should have no jurisdiction over their activities. That said, there is a stark difference between the courts having jurisdiction over sports’ decisions and being willing to overturn them - the courts have been, and remain, willing to defer to the expertise of sporting organisations. However, the ECJ’s ruling in MOTOE confirms that the courts will intervene in appropriate circumstances. In order to avoid sanction on competition law grounds sports organisations must thus be able to justify their provisions on (for example) what is an unacceptable level of nandrolone, show that athletes’ fundamental rights such as the right to a fair hearing have been respected, and ensure that any sanctions imposed upon athletes who fall foul of doping regulations are proportionate to the offence committed

Asymmetric organocatalysis of the addition of acetone to 2-nitrostyrene using N-diphenylphosphinyl-1,2-diphenylethane-1,2-diamine (PODPEN)

The highly enantioselective addition of acetone to 2-nitrostyrene, using N–diphenylphosphinyl-trans-1,2-diphenylethane-1,2-diamine (PODPEN) as catalyst, is described

Challenging the assumptions of social entrepreneurship education and repositioning it for the future: wonders of cultural, social, symbolic and economic capitals

Purpose: Social entrepreneurship education (SEE) is gaining increasing attention globally. This paper aims to focus on how SEE may be better understood and reconfigured from a Bourdieusian capital perspective with an emphasis on the process of mobilising and transforming social entrepreneurs’ cultural, social, economic and symbolic resources. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on qualitative research with a sample of social entrepreneurship educators and mentors, the authors generate insights into the significance of challenging assumptions and establishing values and principles and hence that of developing a range of capitals (using the Bourdieusian notion of capital) for SEE. Findings: The findings highlight the significance of developing a range of capitals and their transformative power for SEE. In this way, learners can develop dispositions for certain forms of capitals over others and transform them to each other in becoming reflexive social agents. Originality/value: The authors respond to the calls for critical thinking in entrepreneurship education and contribute to the field by developing a reflexive approach to SEE. The authors also make recommendations to educators, who are tasked with implementing such an approach in pursuit of raising the next generations of social entrepreneurs.Higher Education Entrepreneurship Group of SEEDA (South East England Development Agency)

Complex circular subsidence structures in tephra deposited on large blocks of ice: Varða tuff cone, Öræfajökull, Iceland

Several broadly circular structures up to 16 m in diameter, into which higher strata have sagged and locally collapsed, are present in a tephra outcrop on southwest Öræfajökull, southern Iceland. The tephra was sourced in a nearby basaltic tuff cone at Varða. The structures have not previously been described in tuff cones, and they probably formed by the melting out of large buried blocks of ice emplaced during a preceding jökulhlaup that may have been triggered by a subglacial eruption within the Öræfajökull ice cap. They are named ice-melt subsidence structures, and they are analogous to kettle holes that are commonly found in proglacial sandurs and some lahars sourced in ice-clad volcanoes. The internal structure is better exposed in the Varða examples because of an absence of fluvial infilling and reworking, and erosion of the outcrop to reveal the deeper geometry. The ice-melt subsidence structures at Varða are a proxy for buried ice. They are the only known evidence for a subglacial eruption and associated jökulhlaup that created the ice blocks. The recognition of such structures elsewhere will be useful in reconstructing more complete regional volcanic histories as well as for identifying ice-proximal settings during palaeoenvironmental investigations

Third revision of the global surface seawater dimethyl sulfide climatology (DMS-Rev3)

This is the final version. Available on open access from Copernicus Publications via the DOI in this recordCode and data availability: ​​​​​​​The data used for creating the climatology, along with the algorithm, can be found in the online repository: https://doi.org/10.17632/hyn62spny2.1 (Mahajan, 2021).This paper presents an updated estimation of the bottom-up global surface seawater dimethyl sulfide (DMS) climatology. This update, called DMS-Rev3, is the third of its kind and includes five significant changes from the last climatology, L11 (Lana et al., 2011), that was released about a decade ago. The first change is the inclusion of new observations that have become available over the last decade, creating a database of 873 539 observations leading to an ∼18-fold increase in raw data as compared to the last estimation. The second is significant improvements in data handling, processing, and filtering, to avoid biases due to different observation frequencies which result from different measurement techniques. Thirdly, we incorporate the dynamic seasonal changes observed in the geographic boundaries of the ocean biogeochemical provinces. The fourth change involves the refinement of the interpolation algorithm used to fill in the missing data. Lastly, an upgraded smoothing algorithm based on observed DMS variability length scales (VLS) helps to reproduce a more realistic distribution of the DMS concentration data. The results show that DMS-Rev3 estimates the global annual mean DMS concentration to be ∼2.26 nM (2.39 nM without a sea-ice mask), i.e., about 4 % lower than the previous bottom-up L11 climatology. However, significant regional differences of more than 100 % as compared to L11 are observed. The global sea-to-air flux of DMS is estimated at ∼27.1 TgS yr-1, which is about 4 % lower than L11, although, like the DMS distribution, large regional differences were observed. The largest changes are observed in high concentration regions such as the polar oceans, although oceanic regions that were under-sampled in the past also show large differences between revisions of the climatology. Finally, DMS-Rev3 reduces the previously observed patchiness in high productivity regions. Copyright

An Estimate of Avian Mortality at Communication Towers in the United States and Canada

Avian mortality at communication towers in the continental United States and Canada is an issue of pressing conservation concern. Previous estimates of this mortality have been based on limited data and have not included Canada. We compiled a database of communication towers in the continental United States and Canada and estimated avian mortality by tower with a regression relating avian mortality to tower height. This equation was derived from 38 tower studies for which mortality data were available and corrected for sampling effort, search efficiency, and scavenging where appropriate. Although most studies document mortality at guyed towers with steady-burning lights, we accounted for lower mortality at towers without guy wires or steady-burning lights by adjusting estimates based on published studies. The resulting estimate of mortality at towers is 6.8 million birds per year in the United States and Canada. Bootstrapped subsampling indicated that the regression was robust to the choice of studies included and a comparison of multiple regression models showed that incorporating sampling, scavenging, and search efficiency adjustments improved model fit. Estimating total avian mortality is only a first step in developing an assessment of the biological significance of mortality at communication towers for individual species or groups of species. Nevertheless, our estimate can be used to evaluate this source of mortality, develop subsequent per-species mortality estimates, and motivate policy action