If the tide is rising, who pays for the ark?

Two common goals of this meeting are to arrest the effects of sea level rise and other phenomena caused by Greenhouse Gases from anthropogenic sources ("GHG",) and to mitigate the effects. The fundamental questions are: (1) how to get there and (2) who should shoulder the cost? Given Washington gridlock, states, NGO's and citizens such as the Inupiat of the Village of Kivalina have turned to the courts for solutions. Current actions for public nuisance seek (1) to reduce and eventually eliminate GHG emissions, (2) damages for health effects and property damage—plus hundreds of millions in dollars spent to prepare for the foregoing. The U.S. Court of Appeals just upheld the action against the generators of some 10% of the CO2 emissions from human activities in the U.S., clearing the way for a trial featuring the state of the art scientific linkage between GHG production and the effects of global warming. Climate change impacts on coastal regions manifest most prominently through sea level rise and its impacts: beach erosion, loss of private and public structures, relocation costs, loss of use and accompanying revenues (e.g. tourism), beach replenishment and armoring costs, impacts of flooding during high water events, and loss of tax base. Other effects may include enhanced storm frequency and intensity, increased insurance risks and costs, impacts to water supplies, fires and biological changes through invasions or local extinctions (IPCC AR4, 2007; Okmyung, et al., 2007). There is an increasing urgency for federal and state governments to focus on the local and regional levels and consistently provide the information, tools, and methods necessary for adaptation. Calls for action at all levels acknowledge that a viable response must engage federal, state and local expertise, perspectives, and resources in a coordinated and collaborative effort. A workshop held in December 2000 on coastal inundation and sea level rise proposes a shared framework that can help guide where investments should be made to enable states and local governments to assess impacts and initiate adaptation strategies over the next decade. (PDF contains 5 pages

Location, Location, Location Should Be Environment, Environment, Environment : A Market-Based Tool to Simplify Environmental Considerations in Residential Real Estate

The most important rule of real estate (location, location, location) should be upgraded to the three E’s: environment, environment, environment. What we value in real estate is the natural and human environment of a site and its structures. A home is typically an American’s most significant asset; thus, environmental issues should be of interest, primarily because the effects of environmental degradation can cause devaluation while simultaneously imposing substantial expenses (such as cleanup, health care, and relocation) on the population. The real costs of ignoring the environment are life-threatening health and safety issues, including lung damage and cancer resulting from radon exposure, (which the EPA estimates kills 20,000 people per year), and indoor air pollution (from Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), for example), the effects of mold and polluted water, and heart and lung conditions related to poor air quality, result in thousands of premature deaths each year. Environmental issues include both anthropogenic sources and naturally occurring phenomena. The problem is that, for some buyers, sellers and professionals, obtaining accurate data is difficult. Many know there are issues, but they are unable to get straight-forward, manageable information. Some do not want to know of the issues, and others are overwhelmed. Complicating the matter for everyone is the reality that the laws related to disclosure and duties to prevent or mitigate harm vary significantly by jurisdiction, creating unpredictable rights and duties that range from caveat emptor to duties of reasonable inquiry. Consistency between jurisdictions is of greater importance than ever because of the mobility of the population. Even with guidance and reports from the EPA, the tools available to the majority of individuals seeking to make this most significant purchase, the real estate market does not address the health and safety risks caused by environmental degradation. Given this deficit in information, we propose a voluntary checklist to alert consumers, owners, and professionals of environmental issues that can impose significant costs for health care, remediation, and property devaluation. Knowledge of the issues should reduce disputes, and, over time, consumers may demand properties that are safer, with economic variables that are better quantified. That in turn should encourage sellers, builders and producers to satisfy the expectations of the consuming public with greener and more sustainable housing

Manufacturing knowledge sharing in PLM: a progression towards the use of heavy weight ontologies

The drive to maximize the potential benefits of decision support systems continues to increase as industry is continually driven by the competitive needs of operating in dynamic global environments. The more extensive information support tools which are becoming available in the PLM world appear to have great potential but require a substantial overhead in their configuration. However, sharing information and knowledge in cross-disciplinary teams and across system and company boundaries is not straightforward and there is a clear need for more effective frameworks for information and knowledge sharing if new product development processes are to have effective ICT support. This paper presents a view of the current status of manufacturing information sharing using light-weight ontologies and goes on to discuss the potential for heavyweight ontological engineering approaches such as the Process Specification Language (PSL). It explains why such languages are needed and how they provide an important step towards process knowledge sharing. Machining examples are used to illustrate how PSL provides a rigorous basis for process knowledge sharing and subsequently to illustrate the value of linking foundation and domain ontologies to provide a basis for multi-context knowledge sharing

Modelling and simulation of flame cutting for steel plates with solid phases and melting

The goal of this work is to describe in detail a quasi-stationary state model which can be used to deeply understand the distribution of the heat in a steel plate and the changes in the solid phases of the steel and into liquid phase during the flame cutting process. We use a 3D-model similar to previous works from Thiebaud [1] and expand it to consider phases changes, in particular, austenite formation and melting of material. Experimental data is used to validate the model and study its capabilities. Parameters defining the shape of the volumetric heat source and the power density are calibrated to achieve good agreement with temperature measurements. Similarities and differences with other models from literature are discussed

Pennsylvania Folklife Vol. 27, No. 2

• Gentlemen of the Road: Outlaw-Heroes of Early Pennsylvania in Life & Legend • Patent Medicine in Pennsylvania Before 1906: A History Through Advertising • Raising a Tobacco Shed • Bicentennial Exhibitions and Publications in Germany • Work and Work Attitudes: Folk-Cultural Questionnaire No. 50https://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/pafolklifemag/1076/thumbnail.jp

Towards the ontology-based consolidation of production-centric standards

Production-­centric international standards are intended to serve as an important route towards information sharing across manufacturing decision support systems. As a consequence of textual-­based definitions of concepts acknowledged within these standards, their inability to fully interoperate becomes an issue especially since a multitude of standards are required to cover the needs of extensive domains such as manufacturing industries. To help reinforce the current understanding to support the consolidation of production-­centric standards for improved information sharing, this article explores the specification of well-defined core concepts which can be used as a basis for capturing tailored semantic definitions. The potentials of two heavyweight ontological approaches, notably Common Logic (CL) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) as candidates for the task, are also exposed. An important finding regarding these two methods is that while an OWL-­based approach shows capabilities towards applications which may require flexible hierarchies of concepts, a CL-­based method represents a favoured contender for scoped and facts-­driven manufacturing applications

Neurochemistry Predicts Convergence of Written and Spoken Language: A Proton Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy Study of Cross-Modal Language Integration

Recent studies have provided evidence of associations between neurochemistry and reading (dis)ability (Pugh et al., 2014). Based on a long history of studies indicating that fluent reading entails the automatic convergence of the written and spoken forms of language and our recently proposed Neural Noise Hypothesis (Hancock et al., 2017), we hypothesized that individual differences in cross-modal integration would mediate, at least partially, the relationship between neurochemical concentrations and reading. Cross-modal integration was measured in 231 children using a two-alternative forced choice cross-modal matching task with three language conditions (letters, words, and pseudowords) and two levels of difficulty within each language condition. Neurometabolite concentrations of Choline (Cho), Glutamate (Glu), gamma-Aminobutyric (GABA), and N- acetyl-aspartate (NAA) were then measured in a subset of this sample (n = 70) with Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS). A structural equation mediation model revealed that the effect of cross-modal word matching mediated the relationship between increased Glu (which has been proposed to be an index of neural noise) and poorer reading ability. In addition, the effect of cross-modal word matching fully mediated a relationship between increased Cho and poorer reading ability. Multilevel mixed effects models confirmed that lower Cho predicted faster cross-modal matching reaction time, specifically in the hard word condition. These Cho findings are consistent with previous work in both adults and children showing a negative association between Cho and reading ability. We also found two novel neurochemical relationships. Specifically, lower GABA and higher NAA predicted faster cross-modal matching reaction times. We interpret these results within a biochemical framework in which the ability of neurochemistry to predict reading ability may at least partially be explained by cross-modal integration