Paris When It Sizzles: What Agenda 21 Can Tell Us about the Likely Success of the Paris Agreement

The Paris Agreement seeks to address the problem of climate change, a pressingly urgent issue, and one that is extraordinarily difficult to tackle. A primary mitigation mechanism is the requirement that member countries report their nationally determined contributions (“NDCs”) goals and provide metrics for measuring progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This is a “bottom-up” mechanism that does not bind parties to particular emissions targets, but acts to shift party behavior by making progress transparent. To predict the potential effectiveness of this mechanism, this Comment investigates the effectiveness of a similar mechanism contained in Agenda 21, a plan of action for sustainable development adopted in 1992. Agenda 21 initially appeared to be effective. Similarly, the initial reporting by countries pursuant to the Paris Agreement NDC requirement indicates that it is similarly procedurally effective. However, Agenda 21 has failed to meet its goal of solving the problems of poverty and environmental degradation. A more successful outcome for the Paris Agreement may rest on how it differs from Agenda 21, including its more legally obligatory nature, its more focused goal, and its NDC ambition “ratcheting” mechanism

Implementing a health research communication program in a low resource country: Experience from Uganda’s Makerere University School of Public

This field note presents what transpired in 18 months joint health research communication project at Makerere University School of Public Health. The project was the first of this nature at the university, in Uganda and probably in East Africa. Information on how the project was conceived, implemented and its results is given. It gives an overview of a communication framework that resulted from the process that informs anyone considering investing in research communication in a low resource institution or country. The note provides key themes of advocacy, community and user participation, influencing policy, fundraising and networking that arose from observations, interaction and activities and a situation review of the post project. It concludes that research communication in Uganda is still low and ill coordinated.  Cette note de champ présente ce qui s'est passé dans le projet de communication recherche 18 mois mixte sur la santé à Makerere University School of Public Health. Le projet a été le premier de cette nature à l'Université, en Ouganda et probablement en Afrique de l'est. Informations sur la façon dont le projet a été conçu, mis en œuvre et de ses résultats est donné. Il donne un aperçu d'un cadre de communication qui résulte du processus qui informe toute personne tenant compte investir dans la communication de la recherche dans une institution de faibles ressources ou un pays. La note fournit les thèmes clés de la défense, la participation communautaire et l'utilisateur, peuvent influencer les politiques, la collecte de fonds et de réseautage qui découle des observations, interaction, des activités et une situation d'examen du projet post. Il conclut que la communication de la recherche en Ouganda est encore faible et mal coordonnée

Cysteamine as a future intervention in cystic fibrosis against current and emerging pathogens : a patient-based ex vivo study confirming its antimicrobial and mucoactive potential in sputum

Date of Acceptance: 07/08/2015 Acknowledgement This study was funded by Scottish Enterprise Encompass Kick Start Award KSB001.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Roles of frontal and temporal regions in reinterpreting semantically ambiguous sentences

Semantic ambiguity resolution is an essential and frequent part of speech comprehension because many words map onto multiple meanings (e.g., bark, bank). Neuroimaging research highlights the importance of the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and the left posterior temporal cortex in this process but the roles they serve in ambiguity resolution are uncertain. One possibility is that both regions are engaged in the processes of semantic reinterpretation that follows incorrect interpretation of an ambiguous word. Here we used fMRI to investigate this hypothesis. 20 native British English monolinguals were scanned whilst listening to sentences that contained an ambiguous word. To induce semantic reinterpretation, the disambiguating information was presented after the ambiguous word and delayed until the end of the sentence (e.g., the teacher explained that the BARK was going to be very damp). These sentences were compared to well-matched unambiguous sentences. Supporting the reinterpretation hypothesis, these ambiguous sentences produced more activation in both the LIFG and the left posterior inferior temporal cortex. Importantly, all but one subject showed ambiguity-related peaks within both regions, demonstrating that the group-level results were driven by high inter-subject consistency. Further support came from the finding that activation in both regions was modulated by meaning dominance. Specifically, sentences containing biased ambiguous words, which have one more dominant meaning, produced greater activation than those with balanced ambiguous words, which have two equally frequent meanings. Because the context always supported the less frequent meaning, the biased words require reinterpretation more often than balanced words. This is the first evidence of dominance effects in the spoken modality and provides strong support that frontal and temporal regions support the updating of semantic representations during speech comprehension

Iridium-catalysed ortho-directed deuterium labelling of aromatic esters – an experimental and theoretical study on directing group chemoselectivity

Herein we report a combined experimental and theoretical study on the deuterium labelling of benzoate ester derivatives, utilizing our developed iridium N-heterocyclic carbene/phosphine catalysts. A range of benzoate esters were screened, including derivatives with electron-donating and -withdrawing groups in the para- position. The substrate scope, in terms of the alkoxy group, was studied and the nature of the catalyst counter-ion was shown to have a profound effect on the efficiency of isotope exchange. Finally, the observed chemoselectivity was rationalized by rate studies and theoretical calculations, and this insight was applied to the selective labelling of benzoate esters bearing a second directing group

QueryForm: A Simple Zero-shot Form Entity Query Framework

Zero-shot transfer learning for document understanding is a crucial yet under-investigated scenario to help reduce the high cost involved in annotating document entities. We present a novel query-based framework, QueryForm, that extracts entity values from form-like documents in a zero-shot fashion. QueryForm contains a dual prompting mechanism that composes both the document schema and a specific entity type into a query, which is used to prompt a Transformer model to perform a single entity extraction task. Furthermore, we propose to leverage large-scale query-entity pairs generated from form-like webpages with weak HTML annotations to pre-train QueryForm. By unifying pre-training and fine-tuning into the same query-based framework, QueryForm enables models to learn from structured documents containing various entities and layouts, leading to better generalization to target document types without the need for target-specific training data. QueryForm sets new state-of-the-art average F1 score on both the XFUND (+4.6%~10.1%) and the Payment (+3.2%~9.5%) zero-shot benchmark, with a smaller model size and no additional image input.Comment: Accepted to Findings of ACL 202

Can Forel–Ule Index Act as a Proxy of Water Quality in Temperate Waters? Application of Plume Mapping in Liverpool Bay, UK

The use of ocean colour classification algorithms, linked to water quality gradients, can be a useful tool for mapping river plumes in both tropical and temperate systems. This approach has been applied in operational water quality programs in the Great Barrier Reef to map river plumes and assess trends in marine water composition and ecosystem health during flood periods. In this study, we used the Forel–Ule colour classification algorithm for Sentinel-3 OLCI imagery in an automated process to map monthly, annual and long-term plume movement in the temperate coastal system of Liverpool Bay (UK). We compared monthly river plume extent to the river flow and in situ water quality data between 2017–2020. The results showed a strong positive correlation (Spearman’s rho = 0.68) between the river plume extent and the river flow and a strong link between the FUI defined waterbodies and nutrients, SPM, turbidity and salinity, hence the potential of the Forel–Ule index to act as a proxy for water quality in the temperate Liverpool Bay water. The paper discusses how the Forel–Ule index could be used in operational water quality programs to better understand river plumes and the land-based inputs to the coastal zones in UK waters, drawing parallels with methods that have been developed in the GBR and Citclops project. Overall, this paper provides the first insight into the systematic long-term river plume mapping in UK coastal waters using a fast, cost-effective, and reproducible workflow. The study created a novel water assessment typology based on the common physical, chemical and biological ocean colour properties captured in the Forel–Ule index, which could replace the more traditional eutrophication assessment regions centred around strict geographic and political boundaries. Additionally, the Forel–Ule assessment typology is particularly important since it identifies areas of the greatest impact from the land-based loads into the marine environment, and thus potential risks to vulnerable ecosystems

The Ursinus Weekly, February 13, 1978

Ursinus news in brief: Two named to raise funds; Killer pot suspected; Anti-white bias charged; College tax break rift; Male, married, healthy • History 101 exam: Investigation continues, two to five suspected • Task force presents preliminary results • Comment • Letters to the editor • Time and testing • Spend Summer in Spain • Students attend New York play • A Painstaking approach • Casino night • As you like it is coming • Kiss: A Musical (?) Extravaganza • More negative comments • Henry\u27s drama group attends grade school • Erroneous zones • Ursinus basketball playoff bound? • Women\u27s b-ball • Censorship • Bad news Bearacudashttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/weekly/1081/thumbnail.jp