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After Elmau: input to the policy debate on climate clubs
Get PDFThis input paper is a follow-up to conversations held on an informal basis with relevant stakeholders in August 2022. The discussions focused on different potential regulatory approaches to the establishment of plurilateral climate club arrangements. The paper assesses the advantages and the limitations of different regulatory models. It lays particular emphasis on questions surrounding environmental effectiveness and WTO law compatibility, examining different potentially applicable criteria for the establishment of economic or environmental equivalence between club Members and focusing on different remedies which may be imposed against products originating from non-Members. This includes an analysis of arrangements based on carbon pricing mechanisms and ‘explicit’ carbon prices, environmental equivalence and tariffs, and hybrid models; most importantly, the fourth section examines top-down and bottom-up approaches based on the establishment of environmental equivalence between club Members, product standards, and bans. Top-down installation-based approaches or bottom-up models based on average sectoral carbon intensity reduction commitments provide the most promising way forward in the context of climate club negotiations. The former model would be more effective in environmental terms and more likely to be WTO law compatible. The latter would be more feasible in political and administrative terms
Atomism, mechanism, and chymistry in the natural philosophy of Walter Warner
No full textIn the first two decades of the seventeenth century, atomism was not a widely held doctrine amongst English natural philosophers. Amongst natural philosophers with interests in alchemy or chymistry, proponents of atomism were even rarer. One such proponent – together with his colleague and friend Thomas Harriot (1560–1621) – was Walter Warner (ca. 1557–1643), one of several mathematically – and philosophically – inclined clients of Henry Percy, ninth earl of Northumberland (1564–1632). Although Warner never published any of his atomistic writings, his manuscripts show a natural philosopher who was seeking mechanical and atomistic explanations for chymical – and even physiological – processes well before the later and more widely-known corpuscularian hypotheses of Robert Boyle (1627–1691). This chapter analyses Warner's atomistic explanations of physical phenomena such as fire and the physiological processes involved in cognition and his use of chymical analogies.
Book synopsis: The Renaissance witnessed an upsurge in explanations of natural events in terms of invisibly small particles – atoms, corpuscles, minima, monads and particles. The reasons for this development are as varied as are the entities that were proposed. This volume covers the period from the earliest commentaries on Lucretius’ De rerum natura to the sources of Newton’s alchemical texts. Contributors examine key developments in Renaissance physiology, meteorology, metaphysics, theology, chymistry and historiography, all of which came to assign a greater explanatory weight to minute entities. These contributions show that there was no simple ‘revival of atomism’, but that the Renaissance confronts us with a diverse and conceptually messy process. Contributors are: Stephen Clucas, Christoph Lüthy, Craig Martin, Elisabeth Moreau, William R. Newman, Elena Nicoli, Sandra Plastina, Kuni Sakamoto, Jole Shackelford, and Leen Spruit
Attitudes to adolescent pregnancy among families in the Dominican Republic and El Salvador: insights from a longitudinal study
Get PDFOver the past few decades growing attention has focused on the perceived challenge of adolescent pregnancy and the need for girls to make ‘smart choices’. This has generated considerable debate particularly because of the failure of many programmes and interventions to consider the structural constraints faced by young women in accessing sexual and reproductive health and rights. Yet limited attention has been given to the views and experiences of girls’ parents and caregivers, many of whom were often adolescent parents themselves. We use data from the Real Choices, Real Lives longitudinal study conducted by Plan International to consider how the experiences of girls’ families shape their attitudes to teenage pregnancy in the Dominican Republic and El Salvador. Many families believe girls need to practise abstinence and avoid men and boys but given the lack of provision for SRHR faced by young women this response is not unexpected
Medical Experts Ask for a Rethink on Evusheld
No full textThe UK government has decided not to buy the COVID preventative injection Evusheld for immunocompromised people in the UK. The decision has come as a surprise and a huge disappointment to many doctors, charities, and campaign groups who signed an expert consensus statement on August 1 for the Government to make the drug available. The prophylactic monoclonal antibody treatment was seen as a lifeline for the thousands of immunocompromised people still shielding from COVID-19.
With comment from Martin Paul Eve
Bricks, trusses and superstructures: strategies for skeletal reinforcement in batted fishes (rays and skates)
Get PDFCrushing and eating hard prey (durophagy) is mechanically demanding. The cartilage jaws of durophagous stingrays are known to be reinforced relative to non-durophagous relatives, with a thickened external cortex of mineralized blocks (tesserae), reinforcing struts inside the jaw (trabeculae), and pavement-like dentition. These strategies for skeletal strengthening against durophagy, however, are largely understood only from myliobatiform stingrays, although a hard prey diet has evolved multiple times in batoid fishes (rays, skates, guitarfishes). We perform a quantitative analysis of micro-CT data, describing jaw strengthening mechanisms in Rhina ancylostoma (Bowmouth Guitarfish) and Rhynchobatus australiae (White-spotted Wedgefish), durophagous members of the Rhinopristiformes, the sister taxon to Myliobatiformes. Both species possess trabeculae, more numerous and densely packed in Rhina, albeit simpler structurally than those in stingrays like Aetobatus and Rhinoptera. Rhina and Rhynchobatus exhibit impressively thickened jaw cortices, often involving >10 tesseral layers, most pronounced in regions where dentition is thickest, particularly in Rhynchobatus. Age series of both species illustrate that tesserae increase in size during growth, with enlarged and irregular tesserae associated with the jaws’ oral surface in larger (older) individuals of both species, perhaps a feature of ageing. Unlike the flattened teeth of durophagous myliobatiform stingrays, both rhinopristiform species have oddly undulating dentitions, comprised of pebble-like teeth interlocked to form compound “meta-teeth” (large spheroidal structures involving multiple teeth). This is particularly striking in Rhina, where the upper/lower occlusal surfaces are mirrored undulations, fitting together like rounded woodworking finger-joints. Trabeculae were previously thought to have arisen twice independently in Batoidea; our results show they are more widespread among batoid groups than previously appreciated, albeit apparently absent in the phylogenetically basal Rajiformes. Comparisons with several other durophagous and non-durophagous species illustrate that batoid skeletal reinforcement architectures are modular: trabeculae can be variously oriented and are dominant in some species (e.g. Rhina, Aetobatus), whereas cortical thickening is more significant in others (e.g. Rhynchobatus), or both reinforcing features can be lacking (e.g. Raja, Urobatis). We discuss interactions and implications of character states, framing a classification scheme for exploring cartilage structure evolution in the cartilaginous fishes
Restricted lithospheric extrusion in the SE Tibetan Plateau: evidence from anisotropic Rayleigh-wave tomography
Get PDFConstraining variations of lithospheric structure and deformation across southeastern Tibet and the surrounding region are crucial for understanding the lateral growth of the plateau. Using data from two dense seismic arrays in the SE Tibetan Plateau, we obtained fine-scale Rayleigh-wave phase velocity maps by Eikonal tomography, and further inverted for 3-D shear wave velocity and azimuthal anisotropy of the crust and upper mantle. High velocities and weak lithospheric anisotropy are revealed under Dianzhong Block (DZB), where is covered by the relics of the Emeishan Large Igneous Province, while strong anisotropy is imaged around. We propose that the DZB strengthened by the paleo igneous activity plays an essential role in the evolution along the southeastern plateau margin. On the one hand, the DZB obstructs the migration of plateau material to the southeast. On the other hand, strong deformation is localized along the DZB margins, while the stress due to the plate expansion is transferred further to the Xiaojiang fault, which induced significant deformation within the Yangtze Craton. Furthermore, the lithosphere of DZB deflects the mantle flow driven by the eastward Indian subduction under the northern Indochina block
Eliciting ambiguous beliefs using constructed ambiguous acts: Alpha-Maxmin
Get PDFWe elicit subjective ambiguous beliefs of an agent with ambiguity-sensitive preferences; in particular, as represented by the alpha-maxmin model. An important problem with the model is that it cannot be identified using observations from typical choice problems, as the preference parameter alpha confounds observation of beliefs. Our main conceptual contribution is to show that the model can in fact be fully identified by using constructed ambiguous acts to elicit alpha
An entropic safety catch controls Hepatitis C virus entry and antibody resistance
Get PDFE1 and E2 (E1E2), the fusion proteins of Hepatitis C Virus (HCV), are unlike that of any other virus yet described, and the detailed molecular mechanisms of HCV entry/fusion remain unknown. Hypervariable region-1 (HVR-1) of E2 is a putative intrinsically disordered protein tail. Here, we demonstrate that HVR-1 has an autoinhibitory function that suppresses the activity of E1E2 on free virions; this is dependent on its conformational entropy. Thus, HVR-1 is akin to a safety catch that prevents premature triggering of E1E2 activity. Crucially, this mechanism is turned off by host receptor interactions at the cell surface to allow entry. Mutations that reduce conformational entropy in HVR-1, or genetic deletion of HVR-1, turn off the safety catch to generate hyper-reactive HCV that exhibits enhanced virus entry but is thermally unstable and acutely sensitive to neutralising antibodies. Therefore, the HVR-1 safety catch controls the efficiency of virus entry and maintains resistance to neutralising antibodies. This discovery provides an explanation for the ability of HCV to persist in the face of continual immune assault and represents a novel regulatory mechanism that is likely to be found in other viral fusion machinery
Accountability, analysis and avoidance: how PMO data impacts on Westminster
No full textParliamentary Monitoring Organisations [PMOs] seek to make legislators more accountable and reduce the potential moral hazards of delegation. This study of the UK finds that PMOs do reduce such hazards and make for greater ‘informatory’ accountability from MPs and Peers. The primary effect is on the House of Commons, and on individual MPs, where information seeking is most frequently local. The exact impact is variable, and depends on whether a Member is in government or opposition, how long they have served and, more subtly, whether they are male or female. The impact of PMOs is uneven, and can provoke resistance and gaming or fuel political conflict
Analysing Parallel Complexity of Term Rewriting
Get PDFWe revisit parallel-innermost term rewriting as a model of parallel computation on inductive data structures and provide a corresponding notion of runtime complexity parametric in the size of the start term. We propose automatic techniques to derive both upper and lower bounds on parallel complexity of rewriting that enable a direct reuse of existing techniques for sequential complexity. The applicability and the precision of the method are demonstrated by the relatively light effort in extending the program analysis tool AProVE and by experiments on numerous benchmarks from the literature
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