Climate change and associated sea level rise (SLR) are already impacting low-lying coastal areas, including islands, throughout the world. Many of these areas are inhabited, many will need to be abandoned in coming decades as SLR continues. We examine the evolution (1850-2013) of the last inhabited offshore island in Virginia waters of Chesapeake Bay USA, the Tangier Islands. Three SLR scenario...

OBJECTIVE To analyze and summarize the characteristics of the death cases of the abandoned babies in Shanghai, and to explore the main points and features in forensic investigation. METHODS Twenty-seven death cases of the abandoned babies were selected from 2007 to 2011 in the Institute of Forensic Science of Shanghai Public Security Bureau. The cases were retrospectively analyzed in the resp...

The presence of ground subsidence near abandoned coal mine areas can be hazardous to people and property because of its tendency to happen without warning. The prognostication has recently become a serious social problem in Korea, since almost all underground coal mines have been abandoned, and few remain since 1989. However, the effort of scientifically assessment of susceptible ground subside...

The aim of this work was to evaluate New York State's regulatory program for plugging inactive oil and gas wells. Analysis of reports from the Division of Mineral Resources, Department of Environmental Conservation, reveals that three-fourths of the state's abandoned oil and gas wells were never plugged. Inadequate enforcement efforts have resulted in steady increases of unplugged oil and gas w...

During the last century, the socio-economic conditions of European mountain areas have completely changed, particularly in locations far from industrial areas. As a consequence of the migration of workers towards densely inhabited valleys and close-to-mountains lowland areas offering better income opportunities, the population of many small mountain villages has been declining and ageing. The t...

We present the software architecture of a robotic system for mapping abandoned mines. The software is capable of acquiring consistent 2D maps of large mines with many cycles, represented as Markov random fields. 3D C-space maps are acquired from local 3D range scans, which are used to identify navigable paths using A* search. Our system has been deployed in three abandoned mines, two of which i...

Abstract: In the teletraffic engineering of all the telecommunication networks, parameters characterizing the terminal traffic are used. One of the most important of them is the probability of finding the called (B-terminal) busy. This parameter is studied in some of the first and last papers in Teletraffic Theory. We propose a solution in this topic in the case of (virtual) channel systems, su...