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Towards carbon neutrality and China's 14th Five-Year Plan: Clean energy transition, sustainable urban development, and investment priorities
No full textChina's 14th Five-Year Plan, for the period 2021–25, presents a real opportunity for China to link its long-term climate goals with its short-to medium-term social and economic development plans. China's recent commitment to achieving carbon neutrality by 2060 has set a clear direction for its economy, but requires ratcheting up ambition on its near-term climate policy. Against this background, this paper discusses major action areas for China's 14th Five-Year Plan after COVID-19, especially focusing on three aspects: the energy transition, a new type of sustainable urban development, and investment priorities. China's role in the world is now of a magnitude that makes its actions in the immediate future critical to how the world goes forward. This decade, 2021–2030, is of fundamental importance to human history. If society locks in dirty and high-carbon capital, it raises profound risks of irreversible damage to the world's climate. It is crucial for China to peak its emissions in the 14th Five-Year Plan (by 2025), making the transition earlier and cheaper, enhancing its international competitiveness in growing new markets and setting a strong example for the world. The benefits for China and the world as a whole could be immense
The promise and challenges of new actors and new technologies in international justice
No full textThis article addresses the role of new technologies in the international justice and accountability landscape, drawing from research we conducted into new United Nations (UN) accountability mechanisms that have the explicit mandate to collect, collate, analyse and preserve evidence of international crimes according to criminal justice standards. The article is divided in four parts. First, we contextualize our research by discussing some of our findings and situating them against what we define as a ‘third wave’ of institutional developments in international justice, prompted by an ‘accountability-turn’ affecting civil society groups and UN mandates. Secondly, we discuss — using real-world examples — both the opportunities and challenges arising from the use of digital and new documentation technologies in the field. Thirdly, the article pays particular attention to the role of UN mandates affected by the ‘accountability-turn’; our research reveals such UN mandates now often sit at the heart of the ‘life cycle’ of information and evidence collected for justice and accountability purposes. In this section of the article, we also briefly discuss issues relating to third party control of information, in particular by social media companies. Finally, we discuss the need (and welcome initiative) to develop better international guidance and best practices for actors across the board in order to maximize the effective use of new technologies and digital evidence in international justice and accountability processes
The effect of congenital and acquired bilateral anophthalmia on brain structure
No full textThe aim of this study was to compare the pattern of changes in brain structure resulting from congenital and acquired bilateral anophthalmia. Brain structure was investigated using 3T magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in Oxford (congenital) or Manchester (acquired). T1-weighted structural and diffusion-weighted scans were acquired from people with anophthalmia and sighted control participants. Differences in grey matter between the groups were quantified using voxel-based morphometry and differences in white matter microstructure using tract-based spatial statistics. Quantification of optic nerve volume and cortical thickness in visual regions was also performed in all groups. The optic nerve was reduced in volume in both anophthalmic populations, but to a greater extent in the congenital group and anophthalmia acquired at an early age. A similar pattern was found for the white matter microstructure throughout the occipitotemporal regions of the brain, suggesting a greater reduction of integrity with increasing duration of anophthalmia. In contrast, grey matter volume changes differed between the two groups, with the acquired anophthalmia group showing a decrease in the calcarine sulcus, corresponding to the area that would have been peripheral primary visual cortex. In contrast, the acquired anophthalmia group showed a decrease in grey matter volume in the calcarine sulcus corresponding to the area that would have been peripheral primary visual cortex. There are both qualitative and quantitative differences in structural brain changes in congenital and acquired anophthalmia, indicating differential effects of development and degeneration
On the diffusive-mean field limit for weakly interacting diffusions exhibiting phase transitions
No full textThe objective of this article is to analyse the statistical behaviour of a large number of weakly interacting diffusion processes evolving under the influence of a periodic interaction potential. We focus our attention on the combined mean field and diffusive (homogenisation) limits. In particular, we show that these two limits do not commute if the mean field system constrained to the torus undergoes a phase transition, that is to say, if it admits more than one steady state. A typical example of such a system on the torus is given by the noisy Kuramoto model of mean field plane rotators. As a by-product of our main results, we also analyse the energetic consequences of the central limit theorem for fluctuations around the mean field limit and derive optimal rates of convergence in relative entropy of the Gibbs measure to the (unique) limit of the mean field energy below the critical temperature
Organizational design: Culture and incentives
No full textWhy do some organizations perform so much better than others, and often persistently so? While the economics literature traditionally emphasizes the importance of incentives, other social sciences focus on the role of organizational culture. Yet very little is known about how an organization's incentive structure and its culture jointly shapes its performance. This paper therefore develops a formal model of how an organization's incentives and culture interact. The model offers a unified explanation for a variety of empirical phenomena, including why an organization's culture can be difficult to change and why there can be persistent performance differences across companies even when they have access to the same technology and resources
DECIDE-AI: new reporting guidelines to bridge the development-to-implementation gap in clinical artificial intelligence
No full textAs an increasing number of clinical decision-support systems driven by artificial intelligence progress from development to implementation, better guidance on the reporting of human factors and early-stage clinical evaluation is needed
Combinatorics in the exterior algebra and the Bollobás Two Families Theorem
No full textWe investigate the combinatorial structure of subspaces of the exterior algebra of a finite-dimensional real vector space, working in parallel with the extremal combinatorics of hypergraphs. Using initial monomials, projections of the underlying vector space onto subspaces, and the interior product, we find analogs of local and global LYM inequalities, the Erdős–Ko–Rado theorem, and the Ahlswede–Khachatrian bound for -intersecting hypergraphs. Using these tools, we prove a new extension of the Two Families Theorem of Bollobás, giving a weighted bound for subspace configurations satisfying a skew cross-intersection condition. We also verify a recent conjecture of Gerbner, Keszegh, Methuku, Abhishek, Nagy, Patkós, Tompkins and Xiao on pairs of set systems satisfying both an intersection and a cross-intersection condition
1-form symmetries of 4d N=2 class S theories
No full textWe determine the 1-form symmetry group for any 4d = 2 class S theory constructed by compactifying a 6d =(2,0) SCFT on a Riemann surface with arbitrary regular untwisted and twisted punctures. The 6d theory has a group of mutually non-local dimension-2 surface operators, modulo screening. Compactifying these surface operators leads to a group of mutually non-local line operators in 4d, modulo screening and flavor charges. Complete specification of a 4d theory arising from such a compactification requires a choice of a maximal subgroup of mutually local line operators, and the 1-form symmetry group of the chosen 4d theory is identified as the Pontryagin dual of this maximal subgroup. We also comment on how to generalize our results to compactifications involving irregular punctures. Finally, to complement the analysis from 6d, we derive the 1-form symmetry from a Type IIB realization of class S theories
Wasserstein stability estimates for covariance-preconditioned Fokker–Planck equations
No full textWe study the convergence to equilibrium of the mean field PDE associated with the derivative-free methodologies for solving inverse problems that are presented by Garbuno-Inigo et al (2020 SIAM J. Appl. Dyn. Syst. 19 412–41), Herty and Visconti (2018 arXiv:1811.09387). We show stability estimates in the Euclidean Wasserstein distance for the mean field PDE by using optimal transport arguments. As a consequence, this recovers the convergence towards equilibrium estimates by Garbuno-Inigo et al (2020 SIAM J. Appl. Dyn. Syst. 19 412–41) in the case of a linear forward model