When the snow stops : how climate change impacts alpine competitive advantage and innovation

Every year, over 130 million people go on ski vacations worldwide. Half of them visit the biggest skiing hotspot in the world – the Alps. However, climate change now poses a significant threat to prosperity and income there, as winters are becoming shorter, infrequent and less reliable. By the end of this century, 70% less snow is projected for altitudes below 1500 m. This thesis discusses how executives assess exogenous threats, particularly the risks from climate change, and provides action plans for high and low altitude resorts to remain profitable. A quantitative survey across potential tourists and eleven semi-structured interviews with industry experts and resort executives served as primary research to enrich current knowledge. Interviews revealed that when executives have high conviction about climate change, their product offering becomes more diversified making the resort more resilient to threats. Yet, destinations universally invest in snow production equipment. Alpine tourists, including current non-skiers, show ongoing interest in skiing activities, so this is an expedient investment. Nevertheless, climate change creates a disparate impact for ski resorts. Low altitude resorts will struggle to remain profitable as costs for technical snow production rise with every increase in temperature. Thus, they should maintain some ski alpine offerings at higher elevations and invest in novel markets with additional attractive activities for resorts at lower elevations. High altitude resorts will profit from climate change, as tourists will retreat to snow reliable resorts. Hence, these resorts should maintain sustainable competitive advantages by investing in snow reliability, accommodation capacities and infrastructure.Anualmente, mais de 130 milhões de pessoas saem de férias de esqui em todo o mundo. No entanto, as alterações climáticas representam, agora, uma ameaça significativa à prosperidade e ao rendimento do local. Até o final deste século, as projeções apontam para uma redução de 70% da neve para altitudes abaixo de 1500 m. Esta tese examina como os executivos avaliam as ameaças exógenas, particularmente os riscos das alterações climáticas, e apresenta planos de ação para que os resorts de alta e baixa altitude permaneçam lucrativos. Uma pesquisa quantitativa com mais de 300 respostas de potenciais turistas e onze entrevistas semiestruturadas com especialistas do setor e executivos de resorts serviu como pesquisa primária. As entrevistas revelaram que, quando os executivos têm grande convicção sobre as alterações climáticas, a sua oferta de produtos torna-se mais diversificada, tornando o resort mais resistente às ameaças. No entanto, as mudanças climáticas criam um impacto díspar para as estações de esqui. Os resorts de baixa altitude vão ter dificuldades em permanecer lucrativos, pois os custos para a produção técnica de neve aumentam a cada incremento de temperatura. Assim, eles devem manter algumas ofertas de esqui alpino em altitudes mais altas e investir em novos mercados com atividades atraentes adicionais para resorts em altitudes mais baixas. Os resorts de alta altitude vão beneficiar das alterações climáticas, pois os turistas vão retirar-se para resorts de maior fiabilidade de neve. Portanto, estes devem manter vantagens competitivas sustentáveis investindo na confiabilidade da neve, capacidade de acomodação e infra-estruturas

Acanthamoeba polyphaga-Enhanced Growth of Mycobacterium smegmatis

Background: Mycobacterium smegmatis is a rapidly-growing mycobacterium causing rare opportunistic infections in human patients. It is present in soil and water environments where free-living amoeba also reside, but data regarding M. smegmatis-amoeba relationships have been contradictory from mycobacteria destruction to mycobacteria survival. Methodology/Principal Findings: Using optic and electron microscopy and culture-based microbial enumeration we investigated the ability of M. smegmatis mc 2 155, M. smegmatis ATCC 19420 T and M. smegmatis ATCC 27204 organisms to survive into Acanthamoeba polyphaga trophozoites and cysts. We observed that M. smegmatis mycobacteria penetrated and survived in A. polyphaga trophozoites over five-day co-culture resulting in amoeba lysis and the release of viable M. smegmatis mycobacteria without amoebal cyst formation. We further observed that amoeba-co-culture, and lysed amoeba and supernatant and pellet, significantly increased five-day growth of the three tested M. smegmatis strains, including a four-fold increase in intra-amoebal growth. Conclusions/Significance: Amoebal co-culture increases the growth of M. smegmatis resulting in amoeba killing by replicating M. smegmatis mycobacteria. This amoeba-M. smegmatis co-culture system illustrates an unusual paradigm in the mycobacteria-amoeba interactions as mycobacteria have been mainly regarded as amoeba-resistant organisms. Using these model organisms, this co-culture system could be used as a simple and rapid model to probe mycobacterial factors implicated in the intracellular growth of mycobacteria

Hierarchical Segmentation of Polarimetric SAR Images Using Heterogeneous Clutter Models

International audienceIn this paper, heterogeneous clutter models are used to describe polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data. The KummerU distribution is introduced to model the PolSAR clutter. Then, a detailed analysis is carried out to evaluate the potential of this new multivariate distribution. It is implemented in a hierarchical maximum likelihood segmentation algorithm. The segmentation results are shown on both synthetic and high-resolution PolSAR data at the X- and L-bands. Finally, some methods are examined to determine automatically the "optimal" number of segments in the final partition

Effect of visit-to-visit variation of heart rate and systolic blood pressure on outcomes in chronic systolic heart failure: results from the Systolic Heart Failure Treatment With the If Inhibitor Ivabradine Trial (SHIFT) trial

Background: Elevated resting heart rate (HR) and low systolic blood pressure (SBP) are related to poor outcomes in heart failure (HF). The association between visit-to-visit variation in SBP and HR and risk in HF is unknown. Methods and Results: In Systolic Heart Failure Treatment with the If inhibitor ivabradine Trial (SHIFT) patients, we evaluated relationships between mean HR, mean SBP, and visit-to-visit variations (coefficient of variation [CV]=SD/mean×100%) in SBP and HR (SBP-CV and HR-CV, respectively) and primary composite endpoint (cardiovascular mortality or HF hospitalization), its components, all-cause mortality, and all-cause hospitalization. High HR and low SBP were closely associated with risk for primary endpoint, all-cause mortality, and HF hospitalization. The highest number of primary endpoint events occurred in the highest HR tertile (38.8% vs 16.4% lowest tertile; P<0.001). For HR-CV, patients at highest risk were those in the lowest tertile. Patients in the lowest thirds of mean SBP and SBP-CV had the highest risk. The combination of high HR and low HR-CV had an additive deleterious effect on risk, as did that of low SBP and low SBP-CV. Ivabradine reduced mean HR and increased HR-CV, and increased SBP and SBP-CV slightly. Conclusions: Beyond high HR and low SBP, low HR-CV and low SBP-CV are predictors of cardiovascular outcomes with additive effects on risk in HF, but with an unknown effect size. Beyond HR reduction, ivabradine increases HR-CV. Low visit-to-visit variation of HR and SBP might signal risk of cardiovascular outcomes in systolic HF. Clinical Trial Registration: URL: http://www.isrctn.com/. Unique identifier: ISRCTN70429960

La musique instrumentale : des ‹ sons › ou du ‹ sens › ? Un bref parcours à travers l’esthétique rationaliste, romantique et symboliste

From the 18th to the 20th century, the problem of meaning is raised in music. Can music, devoid of words, only ‹ run after them › or unite itself with them? Momigny first attempted to prove that music, too, has a grammar and, like poetry, a logic, and composers of the Viennese classic era such as Haydn serve to demonstrate his claim. Wagner, as theorist, reversed the problem: Music proceeds from poetry, but the latter could accomplish what is impossible for the former. It was able to reactivate the alliance of idea and sensation, lost in language, and surpassing all logic, shed light on the mystery of the world. Debussy, for his part, following in Mallarmé’s footsteps, would like for his grammar to be more temporaland inconclusive

A Virtual Crowdsourcing Community for Open Collaboration in Science Processes

Although science has become an increasingly collaborative endeavor over the last hundred years, only little attention has been devoted to supporting scientific on-line communities. Our work focuses on scientific collaborations that revolve around complex science questions that require significant coordination to synthesize multi-disciplinary findings, enticing contributors to remain engaged for extended periods of time, and continuous growth to accommodate new contributors as needed as the work evolves over time. This paper presents a virtual crowdsourcing community for open collaboration in science processes to address these challenges. Our solution is based on the Semantic MediaWiki and extends it with new features for scientific collaboration. We present preliminary results from the usage of the interface in a pilot research project

Facilitating Conflict Resolution of Models for Automated Enterprise Architecture Documentation

Enterprise Architecture (EA) management relies on solid and up-to-date information about the current state of an EA. In current practices the manual collection of information is prevailing resulting in an error-prone, time-consuming, and expensive task. Recent research efforts seek to automate this task by integrating existing information sources in the organization to optimize the EA documentation process. While automation of EA documentation enables many advantages, the transformation of the collected information to an EA model remains an unresolved challenge since it cannot be automated completely. In particular, conflicts resulting from partial transformations require involvement of EA Stakeholders possibly not having a technical background. In this paper we propose an approach for the conflict resolution facilitating our long-term goal of automated EA documentation. We illustrate our approach using a productive Enterprise Service Bus from a leading organization of the fashion industry and evaluate our approach with expert interviews

Detection of non-classical space-time correlations with a novel type of single-photon camera

During the last decades, multi-pixel detectors have been developed capable of registering single photons. The newly developed Hybrid Photon Detector camera has a remarkable property that it has not only spatial but also temporal resolution. In this work, we use this device for the detection of non-classical light from spontaneous parametric down-conversion and use two-photon correlations for the absolute calibration of its quantum efficiency

From Research to Diagnostic Application of Raman Spectroscopy in Neurosciences: Past and Perspectives

In recent years, Raman spectroscopy has been more and more frequently applied to address research questions in neuroscience. As a non-destructive technique based on inelastic scattering of photons, it can be used for a wide spectrum of applications including neurooncological tumor diagnostics or analysis of misfolded protein aggregates involved in neurodegenerative diseases. Progress in the technical development of this method allows for an increasingly detailed analysis of biological samples and may therefore open new fields of applications. The goal of our review is to provide an introduction into Raman scattering, its practical usage and also commonly associated pitfalls. Furthermore, intraoperative assessment of tumor recurrence using Raman based histology images as well as the search for non-invasive ways of diagnosis in neurodegenerative diseases are discussed. Some of the applications mentioned here may serve as a basis and possibly set the course for a future use of the technique in clinical practice. Covering a broad range of content, this overview can serve not only as a quick and accessible reference tool but also provide more in-depth information on a specific subtopic of interest