Neo-Atlantis: Dutch Responses to Five Meter Sea Level Rise

What would happen to the Netherlands if, in 2030, the sea level starts to rise and eventually, after 100 years, a sea level of five meters above current level would be reached? Two socio-economic scenarios are developed from a literature review and by interviews with researchers and practicionersin the domains of social sciences, economics, civil engineering, and land use planning. One scenario describes what would happen in a future characterised by a trend towards further globalisation, marketisation and high economic growth, while the other scenario happens in a future under opposite trends. Under both scenarios, the Southwest and Northwest of the Netherlands – already now below seal level - would be abandoned because of sea level rise. Although most experts believe that geomorphology and current engineering skills allow to largely maintain the territorial integrity of the Netherlands, there are some reasons to assume that this is not likely to happen. Social processes that precede important political decisions – such as the growth of the belief in the reality of SLR and the framing of such decision in a proper political context (policy window) – evolve slowly. Although a flood disaster would speed up decision-making, the general expectation is that decisions would come too late in view of the rate of SLR and the possible pace of construction of works.Extreme sea level rise, The Netherlands, flood defences

Should You Disclose a Data Breach via Social Media? Evidence from US Listed Companies

Data breaches represent one of the main concerns for executives across all sectors. Data breaches open a period of crisis for the affected firm and require them to disclose complex information to a variety of stakeholders in a timely and proper manner. This paper investigates the relationship between social media disclosure of a data breach and its cost, as proxied by the response of the affected firm’s stock price. Using an event study methodology on a sample of 32 data breaches from 29 US publicly-traded firms from 2011 to 2014, we find that social media disclosure exacerbates the negative stock price’ s response to the announcement. However, such a negative association is contingent on firm’s visibility on traditional media with social media disclosure having a beneficial effect for low-visibility companies

Faint Infrared Flares from the Microquasar GRS 1915+105

We present simultaneous infrared and X-ray observations of the Galactic microquasar GRS 1915+105 using the Palomar 5-m telescope and Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer on July 10, 1998 UT. Over the course of 5 hours, we observed 6 faint infrared (IR) flares with peak amplitudes of $\sim 0.3-0.6$ mJy and durations of $\sim 500-600$ seconds. These flares are associated with X-ray soft-dip/soft-flare cycles, as opposed to the brighter IR flares associated with X-ray hard-dip/soft-flare cycles seen in August 1997 by Eikenberry et al. (1998). Interestingly, the IR flares begin {\it before} the X-ray oscillations, implying an ``outside-in'' origin of the IR/X-ray cycle. We also show that the quasi-steady IR excess in August 1997 is due to the pile-up of similar faint flares. We discuss the implications of this flaring behavior for understanding jet formation in microquasars.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures Accepted for publication in ApJ Letter

MaCoCu:Massive collection and curation of monolingual and bilingual data: focus on under-resourced languages

We introduce the project MaCoCu: Massive collection and curation of monolingual and bilingual data: focus on under-resourced languages, funded by the Connecting Europe Facility, which is aimed at building monolingual and parallel corpora for under-resourced European languages. The approach followed consists of crawling large amounts of textual data from selected top-level domains of the Internet, and then applying a curation and enrichment pipeline. In addition to corpora, the project will release the free/open-source web crawling and curation software used.</p

MaCoCu:Massive collection and curation of monolingual and bilingual data: focus on under-resourced languages

We introduce the project MaCoCu: Massive collection and curation of monolingual and bilingual data: focus on under-resourced languages, funded by the Connecting Europe Facility, which is aimed at building monolingual and parallel corpora for under-resourced European languages. The approach followed consists of crawling large amounts of textual data from selected top-level domains of the Internet, and then applying a curation and enrichment pipeline. In addition to corpora, the project will release the free/open-source web crawling and curation software used.</p

Maximising Synergy among Tropical Plant Systematists, Ecologists, and Evolutionary Biologists

Closer collaboration among ecologists, systematists, and evolutionary biologists working in tropical forests, centred on studies within long-term permanent plots, would be highly beneficial for their respective fields. With a key unifying theme of the importance of vouchered collection and precise identification of species, especially rare ones, we identify four priority areas where improving links between these communities could achieve significant progress in biodiversity and conservation science: (i) increasing the pace of species discovery; (ii) documenting species turnover across space and time; (iii) improving models of ecosystem change; and (iv) understanding the evolutionary assembly of communities and biomes