Vale the Humanitarian Principles: New Principles for a New Environment

For more than 150 years, the international community’s assistance to those affected by various humanitarian events has been guided by four clear and succinct principles: humanity, impartiality, neutrality and independence. These principles have guided not only the ways in which the international community has responded to natural and human-induced disasters — they have also shaped the humanitarian system more generally. The geneses of these four humanitarian principles lie within Henry Dunant’s account of the violent Battle of Solferino in 1859. This account led to the establishment of the Red Cross and the first Geneva Convention, which together gave rise to the humanitarian principles. These humanitarian principles were conceived to guide the work of the International Committee of Red Cross, but they have since gained near universal adherence within the humanitarian sector, and have been utilised to justify both action and inaction by those responding to humanitarian crises. Whilst important and necessary at the time of their inception, the maturing of the humanitarian sector, along with the increasing complexity and intensity of humanitarian events, requires a reconsideration of their relevancy and usefulness. This paper argues that these four principles are no longer fit-for-purpose to guide and shape the international community’s humanitarian actions. We argue instead that four new principles would better direct humanitarian action in the current environment: equity, solidarity, compassion and diversity. We discuss the deepening complexity of modern humanitarian emergencies and resulting declining suitability of each of the four original principles, before considering the four new suggested principles

Optimizing Dynamic Logic Realizations For Partial Reconfiguration Of Field Programmable Gate Arrays

Many digital logic applications can take advantage of the reconfiguration capability of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to dynamically patch design flaws, recover from faults, or time-multiplex between functions. Partial reconfiguration is the process by which a user modifies one or more modules residing on the FPGA device independently of the others. Partial Reconfiguration reduces the granularity of reconfiguration to be a set of columns or rectangular region of the device. Decreasing the granularity of reconfiguration results in reduced configuration filesizes and, thus, reduced configuration times. When compared to one bitstream of a non-partial reconfiguration implementation, smaller modules resulting in smaller bitstream filesizes allow an FPGA to implement many more hardware configurations with greater speed under similar storage requirements. To realize the benefits of partial reconfiguration in a wider range of applications, this thesis begins with a survey of FPGA fault-handling methods, which are compared using performance-based metrics. Performance analysis of the Genetic Algorithm (GA) Offline Recovery method is investigated and candidate solutions provided by the GA are partitioned by age to improve its efficiency. Parameters of this aging technique are optimized to increase the occurrence rate of complete repairs. Continuing the discussion of partial reconfiguration, the thesis develops a case-study application that implements one partial reconfiguration module to demonstrate the functionality and benefits of time multiplexing and reveal the improved efficiencies of the latest large-capacity FPGA architectures. The number of active partial reconfiguration modules implemented on a single FPGA device is increased from one to eight to implement a dynamic video-processing architecture for Discrete Cosine Transform and Motion Estimation functions to demonstrate a 55-fold reduction in bitstream storage requirements thus improving partial reconfiguration capability

Detecting anthropogenic cloud perturbations with deep learning

One of the most pressing questions in climate science is that of the effect of anthropogenic aerosol on the Earth's energy balance. Aerosols provide the `seeds' on which cloud droplets form, and changes in the amount of aerosol available to a cloud can change its brightness and other physical properties such as optical thickness and spatial extent. Clouds play a critical role in moderating global temperatures and small perturbations can lead to significant amounts of cooling or warming. Uncertainty in this effect is so large it is not currently known if it is negligible, or provides a large enough cooling to largely negate present-day warming by CO2. This work uses deep convolutional neural networks to look for two particular perturbations in clouds due to anthropogenic aerosol and assess their properties and prevalence, providing valuable insights into their climatic effects.Comment: Awarded Best Paper and Spotlight Oral at Climate Change: How Can AI Help? (Workshop) at International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), Long Beach, California, 201

Tobac 1.2: Towards a flexible framework for tracking and analysis of clouds in diverse datasets

We introduce tobac (Tracking and Object-Based Analysis of Clouds), a newly developed framework for tracking and analysing individual clouds in different types of datasets, such as cloud-resolving model simulations and geostationary satellite retrievals. The software has been designed to be used flexibly with any two-or three-dimensional timevarying input. The application of high-level data formats, such as Iris cubes or xarray arrays, for input and output allows for convenient use of metadata in the tracking analysis and visualisation. Comprehensive analysis routines are provided to derive properties like cloud lifetimes or statistics of cloud properties along with tools to visualise the results in a convenient way. The application of tobac is presented in two examples. We first track and analyse scattered deep convective cells based on maximum vertical velocity and the threedimensional condensate mixing ratio field in cloud-resolving model simulations. We also investigate the performance of the tracking algorithm for different choices of time resolution of the model output. In the second application, we show how the framework can be used to effectively combine information from two different types of datasets by simultaneously tracking convective clouds in model simulations and in geostationary satellite images based on outgoing longwave radiation. The tobac framework provides a flexible new way to include the evolution of the characteristics of individual clouds in a range of important analyses like model intercomparison studies or model assessment based on observational data. © 2019 Author(s)

The impact of polio eradication on routine immunization and primary health care: A mixed-methods study

Background: After 2 decades of focused efforts to eradicate polio, the impact of eradication activities on health systems continues to be controversial. This study evaluated the impact of polio eradication activities on routine immunization (RI) and primary healthcare (PHC).Methods: Quantitative analysis assessed the effects of polio eradication campaigns on RI and maternal healthcare coverage. A systematic qualitative analysis in 7 countries in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa assessed impacts of polio eradication activities on key health system functions, using data from interviews, participant observation, and document review.Results: Our quantitative analysis did not find compelling evidence of widespread and significant effects of polio eradication campaigns, either positive or negative, on measures of RI and maternal healthcare. Our qualitative analysis revealed context-specific positive impacts of polio eradication activities in many of our case studies, particularly disease surveillance and cold chain strengthening. These impacts were dependent on the initiative of policy makers. Negative impacts, including service interruption and public dissatisfaction, were observed primarily in districts with many campaigns per year.Conclusions: Polio eradication activities can provide support for RI and PHC, but many opportunities to do so remain missed. Increased commitment to scaling up best practices could lead to significant positive impacts

The impact of polio eradication on routine immunization and primary health care: a mixed-methods study.

BACKGROUND: After 2 decades of focused efforts to eradicate polio, the impact of eradication activities on health systems continues to be controversial. This study evaluated the impact of polio eradication activities on routine immunization (RI) and primary healthcare (PHC). METHODS: Quantitative analysis assessed the effects of polio eradication campaigns on RI and maternal healthcare coverage. A systematic qualitative analysis in 7 countries in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa assessed impacts of polio eradication activities on key health system functions, using data from interviews, participant observation, and document review. RESULTS: Our quantitative analysis did not find compelling evidence of widespread and significant effects of polio eradication campaigns, either positive or negative, on measures of RI and maternal healthcare. Our qualitative analysis revealed context-specific positive impacts of polio eradication activities in many of our case studies, particularly disease surveillance and cold chain strengthening. These impacts were dependent on the initiative of policy makers. Negative impacts, including service interruption and public dissatisfaction, were observed primarily in districts with many campaigns per year. CONCLUSIONS: Polio eradication activities can provide support for RI and PHC, but many opportunities to do so remain missed. Increased commitment to scaling up best practices could lead to significant positive impacts

Creating a Conversation: Insights from the Development of a Decision Aid

The authors share lessons learned from their development ofStatin Choice, a decision aid for patients with diabetes who are considering using statins to reduce their cardiovascular risk

Increased water vapour lifetime due to global warming

Water vapour in the atmosphere is the source of a major climate feedback mechanism and potential increases in the availability of water vapour could have important consequences for mean and extreme precipitation. Future precipitation changes further depend on how the hydrological cycle responds to drivers of climate change, such as greenhouse gases and aerosols. Currently, neither the total anthropogenic influence on the hydrological cycle, nor those from individual drivers, are constrained sufficiently to make solid projections. We investigate how integrated water vapour (IWV) responds to different drivers of climate change. Results from 11 global climate models have been used, based on simulations where CO2, methane, solar irradiance, black carbon (BC), and sulphate have been perturbed separately. While the global-mean IWV is usually assumed to increase by ~7% per degree K surface temperature change, we find that the feedback response of IWV differs somewhat between drivers. Fast responses, which include the initial radiative effect and rapid adjustments to an external forcing, amplify these differences. The resulting net changes in IWV range from 6.4±0.9%/K for sulphate to 9.8±2%/K for BC. We further calculate the relationship between global changes in IWV and precipitation, which can be characterized by quantifying changes in atmospheric water vapour lifetime. Global climate models simulate a substantial increase in the lifetime, from 8.2±0.5 to 9.9±0.7 days between 1986-2005 and 2081-2100 under a high emission scenario, and we discuss to what extent the water vapour lifetime provides additional information compared to analysis of IWV and precipitation separately. We conclude that water vapour lifetime changes are an important indicator of changes in precipitation patterns and that BC is particularly efficient in prolonging the distance between evaporation and precipitation

Opportunistic experiments to constrain aerosol effective radiative forcing

Aerosol–cloud interactions (ACIs) are considered to be the most uncertain driver of present-day radiative forcing due to human activities. The nonlinearity of cloud-state changes to aerosol perturbations make it challenging to attribute causality in observed relationships of aerosol radiative forcing. Using correlations to infer causality can be challenging when meteorological variability also drives both aerosol and cloud changes independently. Natural and anthropogenic aerosol perturbations from well-defined sources provide “opportunistic experiments” (also known as natural experiments) to investigate ACI in cases where causality may be more confidently inferred. These perturbations cover a wide range of locations and spatiotemporal scales, including point sources such as volcanic eruptions or industrial sources, plumes from biomass burning or forest fires, and tracks from individual ships or shipping corridors. We review the different experimental conditions and conduct a synthesis of the available satellite datasets and field campaigns to place these opportunistic experiments on a common footing, facilitating new insights and a clearer understanding of key uncertainties in aerosol radiative forcing. Cloud albedo perturbations are strongly sensitive to background meteorological conditions. Strong liquid water path increases due to aerosol perturbations are largely ruled out by averaging across experiments. Opportunistic experiments have significantly improved process-level understanding of ACI, but it remains unclear how reliably the relationships found can be scaled to the global level, thus demonstrating a need for deeper investigation in order to improve assessments of aerosol radiative forcing and climate change