18,197 research outputs found
Sea level rise adaptation: emerging lessons for local policy development
Many coastal communities across the United States are beginning to plan for climate-related sea level rise. While impacts and solutions will vary with local conditions, jurisdictions which have begun this process seem to pass through three common stages when developing policy for local sea level rise adaptation: l) building awareness about local sea level rise threats, 2) undertaking analyses of local vulnerabilities, and 3) developing plans and policies to deal with these vulnerabilities. The purpose of this paper is to help advance community dialogue and further inform local decision-makers about key elements and steps for addressing climate-related sea level rise. It summarizes the results of a project the Marine Policy Institute (MPI) undertook during 2011-12 to review experiences from fourteen U.S. coastal jurisdictions representing a variety of city, county, and state efforts with sea level adaptation. There are many more initiatives underway than those reflected in this sample, but the âfocus jurisdictionsâ were selected because of the extensive information publically available on their experiences and lessons being learned that could provide insights for coastal communities, especially in Southwest Florida
Examining the Status of Men of Color in California Community Colleges: Recommendations for State Policymakers
This report documents specific policy interventions that can be implemented in California to improve outcomes for men of color in community colleges. These recommendations were presented to the Assembly Select Committee on the Status of Boys and Men of Color in October 2013
Lateral transfer in Stochastic Dollo models
Lateral transfer, a process whereby species exchange evolutionary traits
through non-ancestral relationships, is a frequent source of model
misspecification in phylogenetic inference. Lateral transfer obscures the
phylogenetic signal in the data as the histories of affected traits are mosaics
of the overall phylogeny. We control for the effect of lateral transfer in a
Stochastic Dollo model and a Bayesian setting. Our likelihood is highly
intractable as the parameters are the solution of a sequence of large systems
of differential equations representing the expected evolution of traits along a
tree. We illustrate our method on a data set of lexical traits in Eastern
Polynesian languages and obtain an improved fit over the corresponding model
without lateral transfer.Comment: Improvements suggested by reviewer
Wage Determination in Russia: An Econometric Investigation
Using a firm level dataset from four regions of Russia covering 1996/97, an investigation was carried out into how the surplus created within the firm is divided between profits and wages. An efficient bargaining framework based on the work of Svejnar (1986) is employed which takes into account the alternative wage or outside option available to employees in the firm as well as the value added per employee. Statistical differences in the share of the surplus taken by employees employed in state, private and mixed forms of firms are found. In addition, the results prove sensitive to the presence of outliers and influential observations. A variety of diagnostic methods are employed to identify these influential observations and robust methods are employed to lessen the influence of them. Whereas in practice some of the diagnostic and robust methods utilised proved incapable of identifying or accommodating the gross outlier(s) in the data, the more successful methods included robust regression, Winsorising, the Hadi and Siminoff algorithm, Cook's Distance and Covratio.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39679/3/wp295.pd
Establishing an analogue population for the most distant galaxies
Lyman break analogues (LBAs) are local galaxies selected to match a more
distant (usually z~3) galaxy population in luminosity, UV-spectral slope and
physical characteristics, and so provide an accessible laboratory for exploring
their properties. However, as the Lyman break technique is extended to higher
redshifts, it has become clear that the Lyman break galaxies (LBGs) at z~3 are
more massive, luminous, redder, more extended and at higher metallicities than
their z~5 counterparts. Thus extrapolations from the existing LBA samples
(which match z=3 properties) have limited value for characterising z>5
galaxies, or inferring properties unobservable at high redshift. We present a
new pilot sample of twenty-one compact star forming galaxies in the local
(0.05<z<0.25) Universe, which are tuned to match the luminosities and star
formation volume densities observed in z>~5 LBGs. Analysis of optical emission
line indices suggests that these sources have typical metallicities of a few
tenths Solar (again, consistent with the distant population). We also present
radio continuum observations of a subset of this sample (13 sources) and
determine that their radio fluxes are consistent with those inferred from the
ultraviolet, precluding the presence of a heavily obscured AGN or significant
dusty star formation.Comment: 13 pages, MNRAS accepte
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