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Big brands impact small islands:Sources of plastic pollution in a remote and protected archipelago
Get PDFRemote islands are disproportionately affected by plastic pollution, often originating from elsewhere, so it is important to understand its origins, to stop debris entering the ocean at their source. We investigated the origins of beached plastic drink bottles in the Chagos Archipelago, a large remote Marine Protected Area (MPA) in the Indian Ocean. We recorded the brands, countries of manufacture, types of drink, and ages of plastic bottles and their lids. The prevalent type of drink was water, with items mostly manufactured in Indonesia, China, and the Maldives. The main brands were Danone and the Coca-Cola Company. We deduced that 10 % of the items originated from ships passing the archipelago, including all the items manufactured in China. The identification of the brands creating plastic pollution in remote MPAs with high biodiversity supports extended producer responsibility, one of the proposed policy development areas of the Global Plastics Treaty
Beyond Quantity of Experience:Exploring the Role of Semantic Consistency in Chinese Character Knowledge
Get PDFCounter-Radicalisation in UK Higher Education:A Vernacular Analysis of ‘Vulnerability' and the Prevent Duty
Get PDFThe UK Government defines vulnerability to radicalisation as, ‘the process by which a person comes to support terrorism and extremist ideologies associated with terrorist groups’. Given this relationship between radicalisation and terrorism, in 2015 the UK Government passed legislation to enhance the national capacity to pre-emptively identify vulnerable people by co opting public sector workers. This responsibility (‘the Prevent duty’) has mandated the monitoring of citizen’s behaviours based on a relationship between vulnerability, radicalisation, and terrorism that is far from concrete. Despite this, the duty is presented as a clear and actionable framework designed to support frontline workers identify vulnerability and report cases of concern. It is within this context that our paper adopts a vernacular approach to present findings from focus groups and interviews with university students and staff about their comprehension, experiences, and evaluations of vulnerability and the duty. We approach these insights as valuable (but oft neglected) instances of ‘everyday’ security knowledge and argue that they are particularly valuable in the context of a duty that co opts those within Higher Education as counter-radicalisation practitioners and subjects. Our paper argues that conceptual, operational, and normative disconnects between Government policy and vernacular insights ‘on the ground’ mean that the duty assumes an uncertain position within UKHE to the detriment to of its stated objectives
Preservation of plant-wax biomarkers in deserts:implications for Quaternary environment and human evolutionary studies
Get PDFGlobal Sensitivity and Domain-Selective Testing for Functional-Valued Responses:An Application to Climate Economy Models
Get PDFComplex computational models are increasingly used by business and governments for making decisions, such as how and where to invest to transition to a low carbon world. Complexity arises with great evidence in the outputs generated by large scale models, and calls for the use of advanced Sensitivity Analysis techniques. To our knowledge, there are no methods able to perform sensitivity analysis for outputs that are more complex than scalar ones and to deal with model uncertainty using a sound statistical framework. The aim of this work is to address these two shortcomings by combining sensitivity and functional data analysis. We express output variables as smooth functions, employing a Functional Data Analysis (FDA) framework. We extend global sensitivity techniques to function-valued responses and perform significance testing over sensitivity indices. We apply the proposed methods to computer models used in climate economics. While confirming the qualitative intuitions of previous works, we are able to test the significance of input assumptions and of their interactions. Moreover, the proposed method allows to identify the time dynamics of sensitivity indices
An investigation into the physical factors that control slow mass movements
Get PDFThe behavior of slow mass movements like soil creep is well known to be governed by soil composition, slope, and cycles in temperature and rainfall. However, their magnitude and importance vary dramatically in often unpredictable ways, with important consequences for creep rate and infrastructure damage prediction. Here, we present long-term (2015–2022) creep measurements for four regions of the UK characterized by intense mass movement activity but different bedrock lithologies. We also obtained co-located temperature and precipitation time series over this period, as well as local measurements of slope and soil thickness and composition. Our goal was to deconvolve the relative importance of each observable on creep behavior. Our results imply that parent lithology governs first-order creep rates indirectly via hillslope repose angles and soil thickness and composition. Rates of ground movement on peat and sandstone soils are dictated by annual fluctuations in precipitation and temperature, respectively. By employing a simple error-minimizing regression routine, we demonstrate how creep rates can be predicted in these settings as a function of climatological observables. Over thinner limestone and thicker clay soils, however, our model fails: in these settings, we suggest that creep behavior is instead dominated by variations in regolith thickness, and slope and clay mineral content, respectively
Prediction of Long-Term Poor Clinical Outcomes in Cerebral Venous Thrombosis Using Neural Networks Model:The BEAST Study
Get PDFIntroductionRisk prediction models are commonly performed with logistic regression analysis but are limited by skewed datasets. We utilised neural networks (NNs) model to identify independent predictors of poor outcomes in cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT) due to the limitations of logistic regression (LR) analysis with complex datasets.MethodsWe evaluated 1309 adult CVT patients from the prospective BEAST (Biorepository to Establish the Aetiology of Sinovenous Thrombosis) study. The area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) curve confirmed the goodness-of-fit of prediction models. The normalised importance (NI) of the NNs determines the significance of independent predictors.ResultsThe stepwise logistic regression model found thrombolysis (OR 32.1; 95% CI 3.6–287.0; P=0.002), craniotomy (OR 6.9; 95% CI 1.3–36.8; P=0.02), and cerebral haemorrhage (OR 4.5; 95% CI 1.3–15.4; P=0.01) as predictors of poor clinical outcome with the AUROC of 0.71. Conversely, the NNs model identified major independent predictors of long-term poor clinical outcomes as cerebral haemorrhage (NI 100%) and thrombolysis (NI 98%), as well as trivial predictors of age (NI 2.8%) and altered mental status (NI 3.5%). The accuracy of the NNs model was 95.1% and 94.1% for self-learned randomly selected training and testing samples with an AUROC of 0.82. Positive and negative predictive values for poor outcomes were 13.2% and 97.1% for the LR model, compared with the NNs model of 18.8% and 98.7%, respectively.ConclusionCerebral haemorrhage and thrombolysis was a strong independent predictor, whereas age merely impacts the long-term poor clinical outcome in adult CVT. Integrating unorthodox neural networks risk prediction model can improve decision-making as it outperforms conventional logistic regression with complex datasets
Unravelling controls on multi-source-to-sink systems:A stratigraphic forward model of the early–middle Cenozoic of the SW Barents Sea
Get PDFSource-to-sink dynamics are subjected to complex interactions between erosion, sediment transfer and deposition, particularly in an evolving tectonic and climatic setting. Here we use stratigraphic forward modelling (SFM) to predict the basin-fill architecture of a multi-source-to-sink system based on a state-of-the-art numerical approach. The modelling processes consider key source-to-sink parameters such as water discharge, sediment load and grain size to simulate various sedimentary processes and transport mechanisms reflecting the dynamic interplay between erosion in the catchment area, subsidence, deposition and filling of the basin. The Cenozoic succession along the SW Barents Shelf margin provides a key area to examine controls on source-to-sink systems along a transform margin that developed during the opening of the North Atlantic when Greenland and Eurasian plates were separated (ca. 55 Ma onwards). Moreover, the gradual cooling which culminated in major glaciations in the northern hemisphere during the Quaternary (ca. 2.7 Ma), has affected the spatio-temporal evolution of the sediment routing along the western Barents Shelf margin. This study aims to characterize the relative importance of different source areas within the source-to-sink framework through SFM. In the early Eocene, the SW Barents Shelf experienced a relatively equal sediment delivery from three principal source areas: (i) Greenland to the north, (ii) the Stappen High to the east, representing a local source terrain, and (iii) a major southern source (Fennoscandia). In the middle Eocene, our best-fit modelling scenario suggests that the northern and the local eastern sources dominated over the southern source, collectively supplying large amounts of sand into the basin as evidenced by the submarine fans in Sørvestsnaget Basin. In the Oligocene (ca. 33 Ma) and Miocene (ca. 23 Ma), significant amounts of sediments were sourced from the east due to shelf-wide uplift. Finally, this study highlights the dynamic nature and controls of sediment transfer in multi-source-to-sink systems and demonstrates the potential of SFM to unravel tectonic and climatic signals in the stratigraphic record
The History of the EU Budget
Get PDFThe budget of the European Union has four pillars: its expenditure, its financing, its link to funds outside the budget and its audit. This paper looks at the origins of the budget, its development through multiannual planning and annual budgeting. It does so amid the European Parliament’s changing powers over the budget and the evolution of its financing and of the audit process. Since the very first European Community in 1952, there has been a tension over budgeting among the European institutions and the Member States and a close link between reforms to expenditure and those to the financing. During the last decade, the development of a galaxy of new funds and instruments, both separate from and related to the budget, have added to the complexity of the European Union’s financial arrangements
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