Search results for "GOALS"

2017

Summary Background The UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are grounded in the global ambition of "leaving no one behind". Understanding today's gains and gaps for the health-related SDGs is essential for decision makers as they aim to improve the health of populations. As part of the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2016 (GBD 2016), we measured 37 of the 50 health-related SDG indicators over the period 1990–2016 for 188 countries, and then on the basis of these past trends, we projected indicators to 2030. Methods We used standardised GBD 2016 methods to measure 37 health-related indicators from 1990 to 2016, an increase of four indicators since GBD 2015. W…

Toxicity of binary mixtures of Cu, Cr and As to the earthworm Eisenia andrei

2020

AbstractChromated copper arsenate (CCA) mixtures were used in the past for wood preservation, leading to large scale soil contamination. This study aimed at contributing to the risk assessment of CCA-contaminated soils by assessing the toxicity of binary mixtures of copper, chromium and arsenic to the earthworm Eisenia andrei in OECD artificial soil. Mixture effects were related to reference models of Concentration Addition (CA) and Independent Action (IA) using the MIXTOX model, with effects being related to total and available (H2O and 0.01 M CaCl2 extractable) concentrations in the soil. Since only in mixtures with arsenic dose-related mortality occurred (LC50 92.5 mg/kg dry soil), it wa…

SISALv2: a comprehensive speleothem isotope database with multiple age–depth models

2020

Characterizing the temporal uncertainty in palaeoclimate records is crucial for analysing past climate change, correlating climate events between records, assessing climate periodicities, identifying potential triggers and evaluating climate model simulations. The first global compilation of speleothem isotope records by the SISAL (Speleothem Isotope Synthesis and Analysis) working group showed that age model uncertainties are not systematically reported in the published literature, and these are only available for a limited number of records (ca. 15 %, n = 107/691). To improve the usefulness of the SISAL database, we have (i) improved the database’s spatio-temporal coverage and (ii) create…

The Dialectics of Free Energy Minimization

2019

Karl Friston’s free energy minimization has been received with great enthusiasm. With good reason: it not only makes the bold claim to a unifying theory of the brain, but it is presented as an a priori principle applicable to living systems in general. In this article, we set out to show how the breadth of scope of Friston’s framework converges with the dialectics of Georg Hegel. Through an appeal to the work of Catherine Malabou, we aim to demonstrate how Friston not only reinvigorates Hegelian dialectics from the perspective of neuroscience, but that the implicit alignment with Hegel necessitates a reading of free energy minimization from the perspective of Hegel’s speculative philosophy.…

The Psychology of Thinking in Creating AI

2021

The broad-scale emergence of AI in industry calls forth basic questions in terms of the knowledge bases and approaches relevant for its design. Engineering design has been mainly developed for electromechanical artifacts. In practice, this has meant that the scientific knowledge required for creating technical artifacts such as engines, cars, ships, cranes, telephones, radios, TVs, and simple data processing units has been natural science. However, one cannot find intelligent processes by means of physics and chemistry. Natural scientific phenomena follow their deterministic laws, but intelligence is based on selection and decision processes. The conceptual landscape of natural science is o…

A framework to identify primitives that represent usability within Model-Driven Development methods

2014

Context: Nowadays, there are sound methods and tools which implement the Model-Driven Development approach (MDD) satisfactorily. However, MDD approaches focus on representing and generating code that represents functionality, behaviour and persistence, putting the interaction, and more specifically the usability, in a second place. If we aim to include usability features in a system developed with a MDD tool, we need to extend manually the generated code. Objective: This paper tackles how to include functional usability features (usability recommendations strongly related to system functionality) in MDD through conceptual primitives. Method: The approach consists of studying usability guide…

Genome-Wide Association Study of Diabetic Kidney Disease Highlights Biology Involved in Glomerular Basement Membrane Collagen

2019

BACKGROUND: Although diabetic kidney disease demonstrates both familial clustering and single nucleotide polymorphism heritability, the specific genetic factors influencing risk remain largely unknown.METHODS: To identify genetic variants predisposing to diabetic kidney disease, we performed genome-wide association study (GWAS) analyses. Through collaboration with the Diabetes Nephropathy Collaborative Research Initiative, we assembled a large collection of type 1 diabetes cohorts with harmonized diabetic kidney disease phenotypes. We used a spectrum of ten diabetic kidney disease definitions based on albuminuria and renal function.RESULTS: Our GWAS meta-analysis included association result…

The economic impact of water taxes: a computable general equilibrium analysis with an international data set

2008

Water is scarce in many countries. One instrument for improving the allocation of a scarce resource is (efficient) pricing or taxation. However, water is implicitly traded on international markets, particularly through food and textiles, so that the impacts of water taxes cannot be studied in isolation, but require an analysis of international trade implications. We include water as a production factor in a multi-region, multi-sector computable general equilibrium model (GTAP), to assess a series of water tax policies. We find that water taxes reduce water use and lead to shifts in production, consumption and international trade patterns. Countries that do not levy water taxes are nonethele…

The Economic Impact of Restricted Water Supply: a Computable General Equilibrium Analysis

2007

Water problems are typically studied at the level of the river catchment. About 70% of all water is used for agriculture, and agricultural products are traded internationally. A full understanding of water use is impossible without understanding the international market for food and related products, such as textiles. The water embedded in commodities is called virtual water. Based on a general equilibrium model, we offer a method for investigating the role of water resources and water scarcity in the context of international trade. We run five alternative scenarios, analyzing the effects of water scarcity due to reduced availability of groundwater. This can be a consequence of physical con…

A general equilibrium analysis of climate change impacts on tourism

2006

This paper studies the economic implications of climate-change-induced variations in tourism demand, using a world CGE model. The model is first re-calibrated at some future years, obtaining hypothetical benchmark equilibria, which are subsequently perturbed by shocks, simulating the effects of climate change. We portray the impact of climate change on tourism by means of two sets of shocks, occurring simultaneously. The first set of shocks translate predicted variations in tourist flows into changes of consumption preferences for domestically produced goods. The second set reallocate income across world regions, simulating the effect of higher or lower tourists' expenditure. Our analysis h…