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    Regional income and wave energy deployment in Ireland
    (Oxford : Wiley-Blackwell, 2020) Farrell, Niall; O'Donoghue, Cathal; Morrissey, Karyn
    Alongside environmental benefits, renewable energy deployment is often evaluated on grounds of regional development. Focusing on wave energy deployment in Ireland, this paper quantifies employment-related welfare change net of associated subsidy costs. Although the added employment reduces inter-regional inequality, certain subsidies increase total income inequality by a greater extent. Total inequality increases by 0.25% in the preferred scenario. This pattern of incidence persists under an optimistic scenario where all manufacturing activity is carried out locally. This finding highlights that policies of regional development should consider the spatial distribution of associated subsidy costs.
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    European H2020 Project WORTECS Wireless Mixed Reality Prototyping
    (Oulu : Academy Publisher, 2020) Bouchet, Olivier; O'Brien, Dominic; Singh, Ravinder; Faulkner, Grahame; Ghoraishi, Mir; Garcia-Marquez, Jorge; Vercasson, Guillaume; Brzozowski, Marcin; Sark, Vladica
    This paper presents European collaborative project WORTECS objectives and reports on the development of several radio and optical wireless prototypes and a demonstrator targeting mixed reality (MR) application. The aim is to achieve a net throughput of up to Tbps in an indoor heterogeneous network for the MR use case, which seems to be a high throughput "killer application" beyond 5G. A special routing device is associated with the demonstrator to select the most suitable wireless access technology. Post introduction to the project, an overview of the demonstrator is presented with details of the current progress of the prototypes.
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    Stewardship of global collective behavior
    (Washington, DC : National Acad. of Sciences, 2021) Bak-Coleman, Joseph B.; Alfano, Mark; Barfuss, Wolfram; Bergstrom, Carl T.; Centeno, Miguel A.; Couzin, Iain D.; Donges, Jonathan F.; Galesic, Mirta; Gersick, Andrew S.; Jacquet, Jennifer; Kao, Albert B.; Moran, Rachel E.; Romanczuk, Pawel; Rubenstein, Daniel I.; Tombak, Kaia J.; Van Bavel, Jay J.; Weber, Elke U.
    Collective behavior provides a framework for understanding how the actions and properties of groups emerge from the way individuals generate and share information. In humans, information flows were initially shaped by natural selection yet are increasingly structured by emerging communication technologies. Our larger, more complex social networks now transfer high-fidelity information over vast distances at low cost. The digital age and the rise of social media have accelerated changes to our social systems, with poorly understood functional consequences. This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global crises. We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems.
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    Social tipping dynamics for stabilizing Earth's climate by 2050
    (2020) Otto, Ilona M.; Donges, Jonathan F.; Cremades, Roger; Bhowmik, Avit; Hewitt, Richard J.; Lucht, Wolfgang; Rockström, Johan; Allerberger, Franziska; McCaffrey, Mark; Doe, Sylvanus S.P.; Lenferna, Alex; Morán, Nerea; van Vuuren, Detlef P.; Schellnhuber, Hans Joachim
    Safely achieving the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement requires a worldwide transformation to carbon-neutral societies within the next 30 y. Accelerated technological progress and policy implementations are required to deliver emissions reductions at rates sufficiently fast to avoid crossing dangerous tipping points in the Earth's climate system. Here, we discuss and evaluate the potential of social tipping interventions (STIs) that can activate contagious processes of rapidly spreading technologies, behaviors, social norms, and structural reorganization within their functional domains that we refer to as social tipping elements (STEs). STEs are subdomains of the planetary socioeconomic system where the required disruptive change may take place and lead to a sufficiently fast reduction in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The results are based on online expert elicitation, a subsequent expert workshop, and a literature review. The STIs that could trigger the tipping of STE subsystems include 1) removing fossil-fuel subsidies and incentivizing decentralized energy generation (STE1, energy production and storage systems), 2) building carbon-neutral cities (STE2, human settlements), 3) divesting from assets linked to fossil fuels (STE3, financial markets), 4) revealing the moral implications of fossil fuels (STE4, norms and value systems), 5) strengthening climate education and engagement (STE5, education system), and 6) disclosing information on greenhouse gas emissions (STE6, information feedbacks). Our research reveals important areas of focus for larger-scale empirical and modeling efforts to better understand the potentials of harnessing social tipping dynamics for climate change mitigation.
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    Communicating sentiment and outlook reverses inaction against collective risks
    (Washington, DC : National Acad. of Sciences, 2020) Wang, Zhen; Jusup, Marko; Guo, Hao; Shi, Lei; Geček, Sunčana; Anand, Madhur; Perc, Matjaž; Bauch, Chris T.; Kurths, Jürgen; Boccaletti, Stefano; Schellnhuber, Hans Joachim
    Collective risks permeate society, triggering social dilemmas in which working toward a common goal is impeded by selfish interests. One such dilemma is mitigating runaway climate change. To study the social aspects of climate-change mitigation, we organized an experimental game and asked volunteer groups of three different sizes to invest toward a common mitigation goal. If investments reached a preset target, volunteers would avoid all consequences and convert their remaining capital into monetary payouts. In the opposite case, however, volunteers would lose all their capital with 50% probability. The dilemma was, therefore, whether to invest one's own capital or wait for others to step in. We find that communicating sentiment and outlook helps to resolve the dilemma by a fundamental shift in investment patterns. Groups in which communication is allowed invest persistently and hardly ever give up, even when their current investment deficits are substantial. The improved investment patterns are robust to group size, although larger groups are harder to coordinate, as evidenced by their overall lower success frequencies. A clustering algorithm reveals three behavioral types and shows that communication reduces the abundance of the free-riding type. Climate-change mitigation, however, is achieved mainly by cooperator and altruist types stepping up and increasing contributions as the failure looms. Meanwhile, contributions from free riders remain flat throughout the game. This reveals that the mechanisms behind avoiding collective risks depend on an interaction between behavioral type, communication, and timing.
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    Design and Evaluation of Radiation-Hardened Standard Cell Flip-Flops
    (New York, NY : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2021) Schrape, Oliver; Andjelkovic, Marko; Breitenreiter, Anselm; Zeidler, Steffen; Balashov, Alexey; Krstic, Milos
    Use of a standard non-rad-hard digital cell library in the rad-hard design can be a cost-effective solution for space applications. In this paper we demonstrate how a standard non-rad-hard flip-flop, as one of the most vulnerable digital cells, can be converted into a rad-hard flip-flop without modifying its internal structure. We present five variants of a Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) flip-flop: baseline TMR flip-flop, latch-based TMR flip-flop, True-Single Phase Clock (TSPC) TMR flip-flop, scannable TMR flip-flop and self-correcting TMR flip-flop. For all variants, the multi-bit upsets have been addressed by applying special placement constraints, while the Single Event Transient (SET) mitigation was achieved through the usage of customized SET filters and selection of optimal inverter sizes for the clock and reset trees. The proposed flip-flop variants feature differing performance, thus enabling to choose the optimal solution for every sensitive node in the circuit, according to the predefined design constraints. Several flip-flop designs have been validated on IHP’s 130nm BiCMOS process, by irradiation of custom-designed shift registers. It has been shown that the proposed TMR flip-flops are robust to soft errors with a threshold Linear Energy Transfer (LET) from ( 32.4 (MeV⋅cm2/mg) ) to ( 62.5 (MeV⋅cm2/mg) ), depending on the variant.
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    Reply to Smith et al.: Social tipping dynamics in a world constrained by conflicting interests
    (Washington, DC : National Acad. of Sciences, 2020) Otto, Ilona M.; Donges, Jonathan F.; Lucht, Wolfgang; Schellnhuber, Hans Joachim
    [No abstract available]
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    Marine wild-capture fisheries after nuclear war
    (2020) Scherrer, Kim J.N.; Harrison, Cheryl S.; Heneghan, Ryan F.; Galbraith, Eric; Bardeen, Charles G.; Coupe, Joshua; Jägermeyr, Jonas; Lovenduski, Nicole S.; Luna, August; Robock, Alan; Stevens, Jessica; Stevenson, Samantha; Toon, Owen B.; Xia, Lili
    Nuclear war, beyond its devastating direct impacts, is expected to cause global climatic perturbations through injections of soot into the upper atmosphere. Reduced temperature and sunlight could drive unprecedented reductions in agricultural production, endangering global food security. However, the effects of nuclear war on marine wild-capture fisheries, which significantly contribute to the global animal protein and micronutrient supply, remain unexplored. We simulate the climatic effects of six war scenarios on fish biomass and catch globally, using a state-of-the-art Earth system model and global process-based fisheries model. We also simulate how either rapidly increased fish demand (driven by food shortages) or decreased ability to fish (due to infrastructure disruptions), would affect global catches, and test the benefits of strong prewar fisheries management. We find a decade-long negative climatic impact that intensifies with soot emissions, with global biomass and catch falling by up to 18 ± 3% and 29 ± 7% after a US-Russia war under business-as-usual fishing-similar in magnitude to the end-of-century declines under unmitigated global warming. When war occurs in an overfished state, increasing demand increases short-term (1 to 2 y) catch by at most ∼30% followed by precipitous declines of up to ∼70%, thus offsetting only a minor fraction of agricultural losses. However, effective prewar management that rebuilds fish biomass could ensure a short-term catch buffer large enough to replace ∼43 ± 35% of today's global animal protein production. This buffering function in the event of a global food emergency adds to the many previously known economic and ecological benefits of effective and precautionary fisheries management.
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    A regional nuclear conflict would compromise global food security
    (Washington, DC : National Acad. of Sciences, 2020) Jägermeyr, Jonas; Robock, Alan; Elliott, Joshua; Müller, Christoph; Xia, Lili; Khabarov, Nikolay; Folberth, Christian; Schmid, Erwin; Liu, Wenfeng; Zabel, Florian; Rabin, Sam S.; Puma, Michael J.; Heslin, Alison; Franke, James; Foster, Ian; Asseng, Senthold; Bardeen, Charles G.; Toon, Owen B.; Rosenzweig, Cynthia
    A limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan could ignite fires large enough to emit more than 5 Tg of soot into the stratosphere. Climate model simulations have shown severe resulting climate perturbations with declines in global mean temperature by 1.8 °C and precipitation by 8%, for at least 5 y. Here we evaluate impacts for the global food system. Six harmonized state-of-the-art crop models show that global caloric production from maize, wheat, rice, and soybean falls by 13 (±1)%, 11 (±8)%, 3 (±5)%, and 17 (±2)% over 5 y. Total single-year losses of 12 (±4)% quadruple the largest observed historical anomaly and exceed impacts caused by historic droughts and volcanic eruptions. Colder temperatures drive losses more than changes in precipitation and solar radiation, leading to strongest impacts in temperate regions poleward of 30°N, including the United States, Europe, and China for 10 to 15 y. Integrated food trade network analyses show that domestic reserves and global trade can largely buffer the production anomaly in the first year. Persistent multiyear losses, however, would constrain domestic food availability and propagate to the Global South, especially to food-insecure countries. By year 5, maize and wheat availability would decrease by 13% globally and by more than 20% in 71 countries with a cumulative population of 1.3 billion people. In view of increasing instability in South Asia, this study shows that a regional conflict using <1% of the worldwide nuclear arsenal could have adverse consequences for global food security unmatched in modern history.
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    Emergent inequality and business cycles in a simple behavioral macroeconomic model
    (Washington, DC : National Acad. of Sciences, 2021) Asano, Yuki M.; Kolb, Jakob J.; Heitzig, Jobst; Farmer, J. Doyne
    Standard macroeconomic models assume that households are rational in the sense that they are perfect utility maximizers and explain economic dynamics in terms of shocks that drive the economy away from the steady state. Here we build on a standard macroeconomic model in which a single rational representative household makes a savings decision of how much to consume or invest. In our model, households are myopic boundedly rational heterogeneous agents embedded in a social network. From time to time each household updates its savings rate by copying the savings rate of its neighbor with the highest consumption. If the updating time is short, the economy is stuck in a poverty trap, but for longer updating times economic output approaches its optimal value, and we observe a critical transition to an economy with irregular endogenous oscillations in economic output, resembling a business cycle. In this regime households divide into two groups: poor households with low savings rates and rich households with high savings rates. Thus, inequality and economic dynamics both occur spontaneously as a consequence of imperfect household decision-making. Adding a few “rational” agents with a fixed savings rate equal to the long-term optimum allows us to match business cycle timescales. Our work here supports an alternative program of research that substitutes utility maximization for behaviorally grounded decision-making.