Australia's country towns 2050: what will a climate adapted settlement pattern look like?

Abstract This report considers the impact of anticipated climate change on Australia’s inland towns and centres to the year 2050. It examines the ways in which non-coastal settlements will be affected by the primary, secondary and tertiary impacts of climate change, including the impact of extreme climate events, a warming and drying climate over much of southern Australia and increased costs associated with both structural economic change and accelerated degradation of infrastructure. The research finds that climate change is likely to have a wide range of impacts on Australia’s system of inland settlement and that not all of these impacts are likely to be adverse. The published literature highlights the fact that some industries – including wool production, grains, viticulture and some grazing – are likely to benefit from climate change. While this is not the case in all instances, the fact that some industries will be enhanced runs contrary to both commonly held expectations and public discourse. In other sectors of the economy and society, technological change and/or investment in infrastructure will overcome many of the climate-change related challenges that have the potential to place the wellbeing of inland centres at risk. This project found that rural and regional centres across Australia will be affected by climate change in different ways, depending upon: Their industry structure; Their geographic location, especially their degree of remoteness; Their climatic conditions now and in the year 2030; and, The resource endowments of communities – and especially their stock of human, social, physical, fiscal and economic capital. The project reviewed the national and international literature on climate change adaptation to consider the vulnerability of individual inland centres. A vulnerability index was developed that was able to distinguish places that are more, and less, vulnerable to the negative impacts of climate change. This analysis was undertaken as a first step toward better understanding the differential impacts of climate change on the inland settlement system, and with a full awareness of the critiques of such approaches. The modelling highlighted that places that are remote confront some of the greatest risks from climate change, and that many – but not all – Indigenous communities are especially vulnerable. Detailed field work was undertaken in five case studies across Australia – Alice Springs, NT; Junee, NSW; Horsham, Victoria; Waikerie, South Australia; Moura, Queensland – in order to understand the steps taken by inland centres to plan and prepare for climate change. The research found that many persons within rural and regional communities do not accept that human-induced climate change is a reality, and that in consequence preparations for change are patchy. However, in many rural economies contemporary ‘good practice’ in farming or grazing is entirely consistent with the measures needed to plan for climate change. The fieldwork also highlighted the fact that while it is possible to model the potential impact of climate change, such measures overlook the commitment and willingness of groups to address this challenge. Finally, we conclude that climate change will contribute to the shifting nature of Australia’s inland settlement system to the year 2050 but that it will be just one of a number of factors contributing to change. Other factors, including global markets, demographic change, the relative prosperity of individual industries, and the investment decisions of government will be important also. Please cite this report as: Beer, A, Tually, S, Kroehn, M, Martin, J, Gerritsen, R, Taylor, M, Graymore, M, and Law, J, 2013, Australia’s country towns 2050: What will a climate adapted settlement pattern look like? National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility, Gold Coast, pp.139.Abstract This report considers the impact of anticipated climate change on Australia’s inland towns and centres to the year 2050. It examines the ways in which non-coastal settlements will be affected by the primary, secondary and tertiary impacts of climate change, including the impact of extreme climate events, a warming and drying climate over much of southern Australia and increased costs associated with both structural economic change and accelerated degradation of infrastructure. The research finds that climate change is likely to have a wide range of impacts on Australia’s system of inland settlement and that not all of these impacts are likely to be adverse. The published literature highlights the fact that some industries – including wool production, grains, viticulture and some grazing – are likely to benefit from climate change. While this is not the case in all instances, the fact that some industries will be enhanced runs contrary to both commonly held expectations and public discourse. In other sectors of the economy and society, technological change and/or investment in infrastructure will overcome many of the climate-change related challenges that have the potential to place the wellbeing of inland centres at risk. This project found that rural and regional centres across Australia will be affected by climate change in different ways, depending upon: Their industry structure; Their geographic location, especially their degree of remoteness; Their climatic conditions now and in the year 2030; and, The resource endowments of communities – and especially their stock of human, social, physical, fiscal and economic capital. The project reviewed the national and international literature on climate change adaptation to consider the vulnerability of individual inland centres. A vulnerability index was developed that was able to distinguish places that are more, and less, vulnerable to the negative impacts of climate change. This analysis was undertaken as a first step toward better understanding the differential impacts of climate change on the inland settlement system, and with a full awareness of the critiques of such approaches. The modelling highlighted that places that are remote confront some of the greatest risks from climate change, and that many – but not all – Indigenous communities are especially vulnerable. Detailed field work was undertaken in five case studies across Australia – Alice Springs, NT; Junee, NSW; Horsham, Victoria; Waikerie, South Australia; Moura, Queensland – in order to understand the steps taken by inland centres to plan and prepare for climate change. The research found that many persons within rural and regional communities do not accept that human-induced climate change is a reality, and that in consequence preparations for change are patchy. However, in many rural economies contemporary ‘good practice’ in farming or grazing is entirely consistent with the measures needed to plan for climate change. The fieldwork also highlighted the fact that while it is possible to model the potential impact of climate change, such measures overlook the commitment and willingness of groups to address this challenge. Finally, we conclude that climate change will contribute to the shifting nature of Australia’s inland settlement system to the year 2050 but that it will be just one of a number of factors contributing to change. Other factors, including global markets, demographic change, the relative prosperity of individual industries, and the investment decisions of government will be important also

Bootstrapping a hedonic price index: experience from used cars data

Every hedonic price index is an estimate of an unknown economic parameter. It depends, in practice, on one or more random samples of prices and characteristics of acertain good. Bootstrap resampling methods provide atool for quantifying sampling errors. Following some general reflections on hedonic elementary price indices, this paper proposes acase-based, amodel-based, and awild bootstrap approach for estimating confidence intervals for hedonic price indices. Empirical results are obtained for adata set on used cars in Switzerland. Asimple and an enhanced adaptive semi-logarithmic model are fit to monthly samples, and bootstrap confidence intervals are estimated for Jevons-type hedonic elementary price indice

Electronic Spectra of Polyacetylenes

The low‐temperature emission spectra in rigid glass solutions of several substituted polyacetyelnes have been investigated. All the compounds phosphoresced with decay lifetimes ranging from 0.01 to 0.3 second. None of the compounds with less than four triple bonds fluoresced except diphenyl acetylene. All compounds with four triple bonds did fluoresce. An explanation is offered for this phenomenon. Some new absorption measurements were made on dimethyl diacetylene, dimethyl triacetylene, and dimethyl tetraacetylene. The polarization of the transition between 32 000 and 40 000 cm—1 in a single crystal of dimethyl triacetylene was found to be along the axis of the molecules. These results and those of previous investigators show that the energy level arrays of the molecules can be related and that they vary systematically as the number of triple bonds increases. This is in accord with expectation on the basis of simple molecular orbital theory.An assignment of the symmetries of the electronic wave functions is proposed on the basis of the positions and intensities of the bands.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/70740/2/JCPSA6-25-4-745-1.pd

The role of dietary restriction in the construction of identity in the Graeco-Roman world

This thesis will attempt both to explore the phenomenon of dietary restriction within the context of Graeco-Roman antiquity and to prove that it existed in an intimate and causal relationship with the construction, maintenance and perception of cultural, political and religious identity. It will be the contention of this thesis that in the same way as social and ethnic groups may seek to utilise indigenous cuisines and particular modes of food consumption as social markers to define and negotiate notions of identity and as a way of asserting these notions within the context of a period of social transition, population migration and cultural hybridisation, so too may forms of dietary restriction serve an analogous function. The thesis will examine this phenomenon primarily through the literature of the Classical, Hellenistic and Roman periods. Its geographical background will be the Italian peninsula and the Greek speaking East. Chronologically the scope of the study will focus predominantly upon the first and second centuries A.D, a period rich in both cultural interaction and tension, but, owing to the particular cultural and philosophical strands that were current during this period, and the specific concerns of authors writing during this period, the material under contemplation will in fact range from the Homeric texts to Porphyry. These tensions throw into sharp relief the problems of defining the nature and limits of group and individual identity within a sprawling and heterogeneous ethnic melting pot. The thesis will examine such phenomena as vegetarianism, the taboos and anxieties surrounding the bean, the ambiguous status of fish, the dietary legislation of the Jewish people and the restrictions that were placed upon the consumption of alcohol. These particular instances of dietary restriction serve as examples of dietary flash points, when differing dietary ideologies act as potent illustrations of the simmering undercurrents of ethnic, racial and cultural tensions that existed in the ancient world

Disseminating Broadcast Archives: Exposing WGBH Materials for Scholarly Use

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Fedora User Group PresentationsDate: 2009-05-21 08:30 AM – 10:00 AMThe WGBH Media Library and Archives is currently prototyping an online archive of moving image content. Funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the project seeks to serve scholars in their efforts to incorporate media into their research and communications activities. WGBH Boston is the single greatest producer of programming for PBS. Our archive holds the master copies of television and radio programs dating back to the 1950s. Not only do we hold final programs, we also hold all of the numerous interviews, stock footage, music, producer's notes, and images that went into the making of the films. As these materials are used and re-used, the relationships between assets become increasingly complex. These relationships, however, are vital information necessary for a researcher to interpret and understand our archive. In addition to the complexity of our collection, our project must consider the needs of traditional, text-oriented scholars and the rising generation of "digital natives" for whom content format is not a boundary. To that end, we are incorporating annotation, citation and other workflow tools to facilitate the use of moving images in scholarly work. We are currently prototyping a Fedora-backed online archive incorporating search, browse, data visualization, and web services. We will present the open source infrastructure behind our web project which includes Fedora, Solr and a PHP front end. Our Fedora content model addresses the specific needs of a moving image archive, allowing for the expression of complex relationships between conceptual and instantiated assets. In addition, it allows us to express the myriad permutations and oddities occurring within broadcast asset relationships. We will share lessons learned and new challenges regarding the representation of archival moving image collections online, the unique cataloging and metadata needs of the online researcher, and barriers to the use of online archives by scholarly researchers. Finally, we will cover technical challenges involving storage and delivery of long form video content, rights management, and user authentication and sustainable business models.The Andrew W. Mellon Foundatio

Lower-rim ferrocenyl substituted calixarenes: new electrochemical sensors for anions

New ferrocene substituted calix[4 and 5]arenes have been prepared and the crystal structure of a lower-rim substituted bis ferrocene calix[4]arene (7) has been elucidated. The respective ferrocene/ferrocenium redox-couples of compounds 6 (a calix[4]arene tetra ferrocene amide) and 8 (a calix[5]arene pentaferrocene amide) are shown to be significantly cathodically perturbed in the presence of anions by up to 160 mV in the presence of dihydrogen phosphate

Risk Assessment of Spent Nuclear Fuel Facilities Considering Climate Change

Natural hazards have the capability to affect technological installations, triggering multiple failures and putting the population and the surrounding environment at risk. Global climate change introduces an additional and not negligible element of uncertainty to the vulnerability quantification, threatening to intensify (both in terms of frequency and severity) the occurrence of extreme climate events. Sea level extremes and extreme coastal high waters are expected to change in the future as a result of both changes in atmospheric storminess and mean sea level rise, as well as extreme precipitation events. These trends clearly suggest a parallel increase in the risks affecting technological installations and the subsequent need for mitigation measures to enhance the reliability of existing systems and to improve the design standards of new facilities. In spite of this situation, the scientific research in this field lacks robust and reliable tools for this kind of assessment, often relying on the adoption of oversimplified models or strong assumptions, which affect the credibility of the results. The main purpose of this study is to provide a novel and general model for the evaluation of the risk of exposure of spent nuclear fuel stored in a facility subject to flood hazard, investigating the potential and limitations of Bayesian networks (BNs) in this field. The network aims to model the interaction between extreme weather conditions and the technological installation, as well as the propagation of failures within the system itself, taking into account the dependencies among the different components and the occurrence of human error. A real-world application concerning the nuclear power station of Sizewell B in East Anglia, in the United Kingdom, is extensively described, together with the models and data set used. Results are presented for three different time scenarios in which climate change projections have been adopted to estimate future risk

Robust vulnerability analysis of nuclear facilities subject to external hazards

Natural hazards have the potential to trigger complex chains of events in technological installations leading to disastrous effects for the surrounding population and environment. The threat of climate change of worsening extreme weather events exacerbates the need for new models and novel methodologies able to capture the complexity of the natural-technological interaction in intuitive frameworks suitable for an interdisciplinary field such as that of risk analysis. This study proposes a novel approach for the quantification of risk exposure of nuclear facilities subject to extreme natural events. A Bayesian Network model, initially developed for the quantification of the risk of exposure from spent nuclear material stored in facilities subject to flooding hazards, is adapted and enhanced to include in the analysis the quantification of the uncertainty affecting the output due to the imprecision of data available and the aleatory nature of the variables involved. The model is applied to the analysis of the nuclear power station of Sizewell B in East Anglia (UK), through the use of a novel computational tool. The network proposed models the direct effect of extreme weather conditions on the facility along several time scenarios considering climate change predictions as well as the indirect effects of external hazards on the internal subsystems and the occurrence of human error. The main novelty of the study consists of the fully computational integration of Bayesian Networks with advanced Structural Reliability Methods, which allows to adequately represent both aleatory and epistemic aspects of the uncertainty affecting the input through the use of probabilistic models, intervals, imprecise random variables as well as probability bounds. The uncertainty affecting the output is quantified in order to attest the significance of the results and provide a complete and effective tool for risk-informed decision making

Interpretable Medical Image Classification using Prototype Learning and Privileged Information

Interpretability is often an essential requirement in medical imaging. Advanced deep learning methods are required to address this need for explainability and high performance. In this work, we investigate whether additional information available during the training process can be used to create an understandable and powerful model. We propose an innovative solution called Proto-Caps that leverages the benefits of capsule networks, prototype learning and the use of privileged information. Evaluating the proposed solution on the LIDC-IDRI dataset shows that it combines increased interpretability with above state-of-the-art prediction performance. Compared to the explainable baseline model, our method achieves more than 6 % higher accuracy in predicting both malignancy (93.0 %) and mean characteristic features of lung nodules. Simultaneously, the model provides case-based reasoning with prototype representations that allow visual validation of radiologist-defined attributes.Comment: MICCAI 2023 Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Interventio

Hierarchical Bayesian Inversion for Quantification of Mixed Aleatory and Epistemic Uncertainties in Model Parameters

The 20th working conference of the IFIP Working Group 7.5 on Reliability and Optimization of Structural Systems (IFIP 2022) will be held at Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, September 19-20, 2022.Uncertainties in the model parameters need to be properly characterized for the reliable and economic performance assesment of structures using a numerical model. Since not all parameters are trivial to measure directly, inverse uncertainty quantification (UQ) techniques, which infer the non-determinism in the model parameters by the measurments of the structural responses, are often necessary. Among such techniques, the class of Bayesian methods has been widely accepted as a coherent probabilistic approach to handle uncertainties in the inverse UQ. However, the main drawback of the conventional Bayesian methods is that they cannot quantify the inherent variability in the model parameters which causes the random failure of the structure. To fill this gap, the hierarchical Bayesian methods have gained increasing attention, in which a proability distribution is assigned to the model parameters to characterize their variability while its hyperparameters are treated as epistemic uncertainty and updated through Bayesian scheme. The first author and his co-workers have recently developed the hierarchical Bayesian approach using the staircase density function (SDF). This approach can consider the lack-of-knowledge on the distribution formats as epistemic uncertainty and infer the true-but-unknown distribution by updating the hyperparameters of SDF. This paper amis to illustrate its fundamental ideas and demonstrate its applicability to the estimation of a broad range of distributions through simple numerical test examples