Later wet seasons with more intense rainfall over Africa under future climate change

Changes in the seasonality of precipitation over Africa have high potential for detrimental socio-economic impacts due to high societal dependence upon seasonal rainfall. Here, for the first time we conduct a continental scale analysis of changes in wet season characteristics under the RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 climate projection scenarios across an ensemble of CMIP5 models using an objective methodology to determine the onset and cessation of the wet season. A delay in the wet season over West Africa and the Sahel of over 5-10 days on average, and later onset of the wet season over Southern Africa is identified, and associated with increasing strength of the Saharan Heat Low in late boreal summer, and a northward shift in the position of the tropical rain belt over August-December. Over the Horn of Africa rainfall during the `short rains' season is projected to increase by over 100mm on average by the end of the 21st century under an RCP 8.5 scenario. Average rainfall per rainy day is projected to increase, while the number of rainy days in the wet season declines in regions of stable or declining rainfall (West and Southern Africa) and remains constant in Central Africa, where rainfall is projected to increase. Adaptation strategies should account for shorter wet seasons, increasing intensity and decreasing rainfall frequency, which will have implications for crop yields and surface water supplies

Affordable Housing Need in Scotland, Final Report - September 2015

First paragraph: This report presents the findings from research conducted in 2015 which sought to estimate the need for affordable housing across Scotland as a whole. The research was commissioned by Shelter Scotland, the Chartered Institute of Housing Scotland and the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations (SFHA). The study updates a previous, similar exercise conducted almost a decade ago for the Scottish Government (Bramley et al., 2006)

Gold Standard Online Debates Summaries and First Experiments Towards Automatic Summarization of Online Debate Data

Usage of online textual media is steadily increasing. Daily, more and more news stories, blog posts and scientific articles are added to the online volumes. These are all freely accessible and have been employed extensively in multiple research areas, e.g. automatic text summarization, information retrieval, information extraction, etc. Meanwhile, online debate forums have recently become popular, but have remained largely unexplored. For this reason, there are no sufficient resources of annotated debate data available for conducting research in this genre. In this paper, we collected and annotated debate data for an automatic summarization task. Similar to extractive gold standard summary generation our data contains sentences worthy to include into a summary. Five human annotators performed this task. Inter-annotator agreement, based on semantic similarity, is 36% for Cohen's kappa and 48% for Krippendorff's alpha. Moreover, we also implement an extractive summarization system for online debates and discuss prominent features for the task of summarizing online debate data automatically.Comment: accepted and presented at the CICLING 2017 - 18th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistic