Sea-level rise in Hawaii: Implications for future shoreline locations and Hawaii coastal management

Management of coastal development in Hawaii is based on the location of the certified shoreline, which is representative of the upper limit of marine inundation within the last several years. Though the certified shoreline location is significantly more variable than long-term erosion indicators, its migration will still follow the coastline's general trend. The long-term migration of Hawaii’s coasts will be significantly controlled by rising sea level. However, land use decisions adjacent to the shoreline and the shape and nature of the nearshore environment are also important controls to coastal migration. Though each of the islands has experienced local sea-level rise over the course of the last century, there are still locations across the islands of Kauai, Oahu, and Maui, which show long- term accretion or anomalously high erosion rates relative to their regions. As a result, engineering rules of thumb such as the Brunn rule do not always predict coastal migration and beach profile equilibrium in Hawaii. With coastlines facing all points of the compass rose, anthropogenic alteration of the coasts, complex coastal environments such as coral reefs, and the limited capacity to predict coastal change, Hawaii will require a more robust suite of proactive coastal management policies to weather future changes to its coastline. Continuing to use the current certified shoreline, adopting more stringent coastal setback rules similar to Kauai County, adding realistic sea-level rise components for all types of coastal planning, and developing regional beach management plans are some of the recommended adaptation strategies for Hawaii. (PDF contains 4 pages

Has Patriarchy been Stealing the Feminists' Clothes? Conflict?related Sexual Violence and UN Security Council Resolutions

The UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 2106, in June 2013, and the declaration on preventing sexual violence in conflict adopted by G8 in London, in April 2013, signal a possible paradigm shift in how the international community can do ‘gender’, particularly in the arena of conflict?related sexual violence. Whilst UNSCR 1325 and its successors succeeded in drawing greater attention and funding to the particular needs of some women, they failed in comprehensively responding to the phenomenon of conflict?related sexual violence. This is largely due to a systematic reluctance to confront the reality of conflict?related sexual violence against men and boys, coupled with an active complicity in silencing that reality in what effectively reverted to a patriarchal discourse dressed up in feminist clothing. A new and unashamedly gender?inclusive resolution is required if gender?based violence (GBV) interventions are to be released from the stifling grip of a patriarchal mode of ‘doing gender’

A Controllable Model of Grounded Response Generation

Current end-to-end neural conversation models inherently lack the flexibility to impose semantic control in the response generation process, often resulting in uninteresting responses. Attempts to boost informativeness alone come at the expense of factual accuracy, as attested by pretrained language models' propensity to "hallucinate" facts. While this may be mitigated by access to background knowledge, there is scant guarantee of relevance and informativeness in generated responses. We propose a framework that we call controllable grounded response generation (CGRG), in which lexical control phrases are either provided by a user or automatically extracted by a control phrase predictor from dialogue context and grounding knowledge. Quantitative and qualitative results show that, using this framework, a transformer based model with a novel inductive attention mechanism, trained on a conversation-like Reddit dataset, outperforms strong generation baselines.Comment: AAAI 202