Natural Hazards, Climate Change, and Adaptation: Persistent Questions and Answers

Climate Change and Adaptation

Adaptation and Climate Change

This paper deals with the often ignored issue of adaptation to human-induced climate change. Adaptation is not only inevitable but essential to fashioning the least-social-cost strategy to addressing climate change. The urgency for limiting climate change is inversely proportional to society's adaptability. Some limitation strategies are incompatible with adaptation goals (e.g., reducing CO2 ra...

Structural answers and persistent questions about how nicotinic receptors work.

The electron diffraction structure of nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) from Torpedo marmorata and the X-ray crystallographic structure of acetylcholine binding protein (AChBP) are providing new answers to persistent questions about how nAChRs function as biophysical machines and as participants in cellular and systems physiology. New high-resolution information about nAChR structures mi...

Mining Extreme Values: Climate and Natural Hazards

The analysis and modeling of extreme values have traditionally relied on extreme value theory (EVT), which in turn has tended to focus on limiting or asymptotic cases and assumptions of independence. However, disciplines from climate science and digital mapping to infrastructure security and transportation, have been generating massive volumes of data with multidimensional and multivariable dep...

Natural Language Processing: many questions, no answers

Computational Linguistics, as a subfield of Linguistics, or Natural Language Processing (NLP), as a subfield of Artificial Intelligence (two research areas that nowadays can be safely considered as merged) concentrate on the “study of computer systems for understanding and generating natural language” [10], in order to develop “a computational theory of language, using the notions of algorithms...