A Price Worth Paying: The Case for Controlling Marine Emissions in the Pearl River Delta

The Pearl River Delta (PRD) is a region with a single airshed, but different administrative and legal practices for controlling air quality. Under the Regional Cooperation Plan on Building a Quality Living Area (QLA Plan) released in June 2012 the Governments of Hong Kong, Guangdong and Macau have outlined a strategy to collaborate in reducing emissions from vessels throughout the PRD. This report provides evidence designed to assist policymakers in the region with this objective. It focuses on regulating toxic exhaust emissions from ocean-going vessels (OGVs) -- the most significant contributors of marine emissions. The findings show that marine sources of sulphur dioxide (SO2) emissions currently account for 519 premature deaths per annum in the PRD. These deaths could be reduced by 91% should an Emission Control Area (ECA) mandating the use of fuels with lower sulphur content be introduced. The report also demonstrates that three less comprehensive control measures would also reduce OGV emissions and associated public health impacts by 41-62%. Policymakers are encouraged to introduce these measures as stepping-stones on the way to establishment of an ECA for the PRD

Is diversity good?

Prominent ethical and policy issues such as affirmative action and female enrollment in science and engineering revolve around the idea that diversity is good. However, even though diversity is an ambiguous concept, a precise definition is seldom provided. We show that diversity may be construed as a factual description, a craving for symmetry, an intrinsic good, an instrumental good, a symptom, or a side effect. These acceptions differ vastly in their nature and properties. The first one cannot lead to any action and the second one is mistaken. Diversity as intrinsic good is a mere opinion, which cannot be concretely applied; moreover, the most commonly invoked forms of diversity (sexual and racial) are not intrinsically good. On the other hand, diversity as instrumental good can be evaluated empirically and can give rise to policies, but these may be very weak. Finally, symptoms and side effects are not actually about diversity. We consider the example of female enrollment in science and engineering, interpreting the various arguments found in the literature in light of this polysemy. Keywords: ethics, policy, higher education, female students, minority students, affirmative actionComment: 7 page

The transportation, transformation and (bio)accumulation of pharmaceuticals in the terrestrial ecosystem

Soil dwelling organisms, plants and many primary consumers in food webs face the challenge of exposure to contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) present in terrestrial systems, including thousands of substances derived from pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs). The recent increase in the consumption of modern human or veterinary drugs has resulted in a surge of anthropogenic pharmaceuticals, frequently introduced into terrestrial environments via untreated/treated wastewater. Pharmaceuticals display diverse degradation and accumulation behaviours in receiving bodies, however their impact on soils has, at large, been overlooked. Details about adsorption, absorption, degradation and uptake behaviours, as well as the fate and actual environmental impact of pharmaceuticals are a prerequisite before the traditional transportation prediction models originally designed for the aquatic environment can be extrapolated to terrestrial systems. Without this knowledge, our ability for informed risk assessments and the resultant implementation of contamination management strategies of soils will remain limited. This review discusses the current knowledgebase pertaining the introduction of pharmaceuticals to soils via wastewater irrigation or the application of biosolids. The focus on the transportation, transformation and accumulation of pharmaceuticals through the food chain highlights the urgent need to strengthen our capabilities concerning their detection and characterization in the terrestrial ecosystem.</p

Attitudes of referees in a multidisciplinary journal: An empirical analysis

This paper looks at 10 years of reviews in a multidisciplinary journal, The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS), which is the flagship journal of social simulation. We measured referee behavior and referees' agreement. We found that the disciplinary background and the academic status of the referee have an influence on the report time, the type of recommendation and the acceptance of the reviewing task. Referees from the humanities tend to be more generous in their recommendations than other referees, especially economists and environmental scientists. Second, we found that senior researchers are harsher in their judgments than junior researchers, and the latter accept requests to review more often and are faster in reporting. Finally, we found that articles that had been refereed and recommended for publication by a multidisciplinary set of referees were subsequently more likely to receive citations than those that had been reviewed by referees from the same discipline. Our results show that common standards of evaluation can be established even in multidisciplinary communities

Academic team formation as evolving hypergraphs

This paper quantitatively explores the social and socio-semantic patterns of constitution of academic collaboration teams. To this end, we broadly underline two critical features of social networks of knowledge-based collaboration: first, they essentially consist of group-level interactions which call for team-centered approaches. Formally, this induces the use of hypergraphs and n-adic interactions, rather than traditional dyadic frameworks of interaction such as graphs, binding only pairs of agents. Second, we advocate the joint consideration of structural and semantic features, as collaborations are allegedly constrained by both of them. Considering these provisions, we propose a framework which principally enables us to empirically test a series of hypotheses related to academic team formation patterns. In particular, we exhibit and characterize the influence of an implicit group structure driving recurrent team formation processes. On the whole, innovative production does not appear to be correlated with more original teams, while a polarization appears between groups composed of experts only or non-experts only, altogether corresponding to collectives with a high rate of repeated interactions