Barriers to adaptation to sea-level rise

Abstract Increasingly there is recognition from researchers and policy makers that there are legal, institutional and cultural barriers to climate change adaptation that will need to be addressed if we are able to adapt efficiently and equitably. However, there is a limited body of evidence and few examples of how barriers to adaptation to sea level rise emerge and are addressed in local contexts. Focusing on sea level rise in Australia, this project undertakes inquiry into legal, institutional and cultural barriers to adaptation in two ways. The first is an investigation of barriers to climate change adaptation in general by analysing a unique body of evidence in a systematic document analysis of over eight hundred pages of submissions to the Australian Productivity Commission’s inquiry to barriers to adaptation. The second was an in-depth investigation into community perceptions of one particular barrier - uncertainty about responsibility for adaptation - in two case study areas: Eurobodalla in New South Wales and Mornington Peninsula in Victoria. The study found that, according to key actors in climate change adaptation in Australia, there are 5 five key kinds of barriers to adaptation: governance, policy, uncertainty, resources, and psychosocial factors. The governance barrier of uncertainty about roles and responsibilities across levels of government and sectors was seen to be one of the most important barriers to adaptation. The subsequent empirical research into community preferences for the distribution of responsibility for key adaptation tasks revealed that there was strong support for a significant role for government in all aspects of adaptation. There is recognition that adaptation to sea level rise should be a shared responsibility, but with distinct roles for each level of government. Local government was seen to be best placed to manage public assets, regulate decisions about private assets, and lead and coordinate public input for local planning. Federal government was viewed as the most appropriate entity to take responsibility for information provision on the risks of sea level rise, and to bear most of the costs of adaptation. State governments, while not viewed as the primary responsible entity for any of these key tasks, was seen to have a role in coordinating adaptation actions across local government areas

Role of Gbx2 expression in cranial nerve V development

Abstract only availableGbx2 is a member of the Gbx family of homeobox genes that encodes for the transcriptional factors Gbx1 and Gbx2. The amino acid sequence of Gbx2 is highly conserved across multiple species (e.g. mice, zebrafish, chicken, and frogs) with nearly 100% sequence identity between the Gbx2 homeodomains of the aforementioned species. Expression studies have shown that Gbx2 is expressed early during gastrulation in the posterior neural plate (Bouillet et al., 1995) and prospective anterior hindbrain (Niss and Leutz, 1998). The function of Gbx2 in mice and zebrafish has been extensively studied with loss-of-function as well as hypomorphic models in both species. Results of these studies have shown that the Gbx2 homeobox gene is required for normal development of the isthmic organizer at the midbrain hindbrain boundary (MHB) that is responsible for patterning the midbrain and the anterior hindbrain. The hindbrain controls many basic life functions such as breathing and heartbeat. In early vertebrate development, the hindbrain is partitioned into seven or eight distinct segments called rhombomeres (r). Rhombomeres give rise to differentiated brain regions such as the cerebellum, pons, and medulla oblongata. Previous studies had shown that cranial nerve V (nV), derived from r2 and r3, fails to develop normally in Gbx2 hypomorphic mice. The nV motor axons innervate several muscles, including those in the jaw required to suckle and masticate. These Gbx2 hypomorphic mice die immediately after birth presumably due to an inability to nurse on their mother as wild-type mice do. Our preliminary studies have shown that zebrafish Gbx2 also affects nV development. Our research this summer was focused around examining if mouse Gbx2 can rescue the abnormalities in nV caused by injecting morpholino. To accomplish this, we will attempt to rescue the hindbrain phenotype in zebrafish embryos by simultaneously injecting zebrafish morpholino with synthesized mouse Gbx2 mRNA.Life Sciences Undergraduate Research Opportunity Progra

P5_6 A Race in Space

By comparing solar and laser radiation sources, each driving a nano-satellite of mass 1 gram, we find that the solar sail is more advantageous up to 9.5 AU, and the laser sail is better beyond this distance. We also find that the laser sail has a constant acceleration throughout, but the solar sail acceleration decreases at a velocity of 150,000 ms-1

Beyond Software Watermarking: Traitor-Tracing for Pseudorandom Functions

Software watermarking schemes allow a user to embed an identifier into a piece of code such that the resulting program is nearly functionally-equivalent to the original program, and yet, it is difficult to remove the identifier without destroying the functionality of the program. Such schemes are often considered for proving software ownership or for digital rights management. Existing constructions of watermarking have focused primarily on watermarking pseudorandom functions (PRFs). In this work, we revisit the definitional foundations of watermarking, and begin by highlighting a major flaw in existing security notions. Existing security notions for watermarking only require that the identifier be successfully extracted from programs that preserve the exact input/output behavior of the original program. In the context of PRFs, this means that an adversary that constructs a program which computes a quarter of the output bits of the PRF or that is able to distinguish the outputs of the PRF from random are considered to be outside the threat model. However, in any application (e.g., watermarking a decryption device or an authentication token) that relies on PRF security, an adversary that manages to predict a quarter of the bits or distinguishes the PRF outputs from random would be considered to have defeated the scheme. Thus, existing watermarking schemes provide very little security guarantee against realistic adversaries. None of the existing constructions of watermarkable PRFs would be able to extract the identifier from a program that only outputs a quarter of the bits of the PRF or one that perfectly distinguishes. To address the shortcomings in existing watermarkable PRF definitions, we introduce a new primitive called a traceable PRF. Our definitions are inspired by similar definitions from public-key traitor tracing, and aim to capture a very robust set of adversaries: namely, any adversary that produces a useful distinguisher (i.e., a program that can break PRF security), can be traced to a specific identifier. We provide a general framework for constructing traceable PRFs via an intermediate primitive called private linear constrained PRFs. Finally, we show how to construct traceable PRFs from a similar set of assumptions previously used to realize software watermarking. Namely, we obtain a single-key traceable PRF from standard lattice assumptions and a fully collusion-resistant traceable PRF from indistinguishability obfuscation (together with injective one-way functions)