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Losses from catastrophic floods are driving intense efforts to increase preparedness and improve response to disastrous flood events by providing early warnings. Yet accurate flood forecasting remains a challenge due to uncertainty in modeling, calibrating, and validating a useful early warning system. This paper presents the Requisitely Simple (ReqSim) flood forecasting system that includes key variables and processes of basin hydrology and atmospheric forcing in a data-driven modeling framework. The simplicity of the modeling structure and data requirements of the system allows for customization and implementation in any medium to large rain-fed river basin globally, provided there are water level or discharge measurements at the forecast locations. The proposed system's efficacy is demonstrated in this paper through providing useful forecasts for various river basins around the world. This include 3–10-day forecasts for the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers in South Asia, 2–3-day forecast for the Amur and Yangtze rivers in East Asia, 5–10-day forecasts for the Niger, Congo and Zambezi rivers in West and Central Africa, 6–8-day forecasts for the Danube River in Europe, 2–5-day forecasts for the Parana River in South America, and 2–7-day forecasts for the Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, and Arkansas rivers in the USA. The study also quantifies the effect of basin size, topography, hydrometeorology, and river flow controls on forecast accuracy and lead times. Results indicate that ReqSim's forecasts perform better in river systems with moderate slopes, high flow persistence, and less flow controls. The simple structure, minimal data requirements, ease of operation, and useful operational accuracy make ReqSim an attractive option for effective real-time flood forecasting in medium and large river basins worldwide.

 

Do lower court judges influence the content of Supreme Court opinions in the United Kingdom? Leveraging original data, we analyze opinion language adoption practices of the UK Supreme Court. We advance a theory where the justices’ choices to adopt language from lower court opinions are influenced by Supreme Court-level attributes and Court of Appeal case characteristics. We uncover compelling evidence that UK Supreme Court justices incorporate language extensively from the written opinions of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales. Our findings have significant implications for opinion formulation, doctrinal development, and higher and lower court interactions within comparative courts.

 

Biochemical signaling pathways in living cells are often highly organized into spatially segregated volumes, membranes, scaffolds, subcellular compartments, and organelles comprising small numbers of interacting molecules. At this level of granularity stochastic behavior dominates, well-mixed continuum approximations based on concentrations break down and a particle-based approach is more accurate and more efficient. We describe and validate a new version of the open-source MCell simulation program (MCell4), which supports generalized 3D Monte Carlo modeling of diffusion and chemical reaction of discrete molecules and macromolecular complexes in solution, on surfaces representing membranes, and combinations thereof. The main improvements in MCell4 compared to the previous versions, MCell3 and MCell3-R, include a Python interface and native BioNetGen reaction language (BNGL) support. MCell4’s Python interface opens up completely new possibilities for interfacing with external simulators to allow creation of sophisticated event-driven multiscale/multiphysics simulations. The native BNGL support, implemented through a new open-source library libBNG (also introduced in this paper), provides the capability to run a given BNGL model spatially resolved in MCell4 and, with appropriate simplifying assumptions, also in the BioNetGen simulation environment, greatly accelerating and simplifying model validation and comparison.

 

In this study, we use the EPIC-I I (exposure, persuasion, identification, commitment, and implementation) framework as a lens for viewing instructor perceptions of including diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) activities in engineering and computer science undergraduate courses. The results provided evidence of three findings: (a) evidence existed of faculty participation at all levels of EPIC-I, (b) in moving through the EPIC-I framework, the evidence became scanter, and (c) although both groups were small, approximately equal numbers of participants were openly negative as were actively implementing additional DEI supporting activities in their classes. Implications and future work are discussed. 

Ant behavior relies on a collection of natural products, from following trail pheromones during foraging to warding off potential predators. How nervous systems sense these compounds to initiate a behavioral response remains unclear. Here, we used Caenorhabditis elegans chemotaxis assays to investigate how ant compounds are detected by heterospecific nervous systems. We found that C. elegans avoid extracts of the pavement ant (Tetramorium immigrans) and either osm-9 or tax-4 ion channels are required for this response. These experiments were conducted in an undergraduate laboratory course, demonstrating that new insights into interspecies interactions can be generated through genuine research experiences in a classroom setting. 

How do judges decide issues of equality? While prior scholarship demonstrates that judicial attributes such as partisan identification, gender, race, age, and career backgrounds help elucidate judicial decision-making, considerably less attention has been devoted to how judicial empathy may influence or condition judicial decision-making. Such scholarly attention is especially lacking in the study of courts outside of the United States. To bridge this critical gap, we examine how judicial empathy affects decision-making behavior by analyzing data from the Supreme Court of Canada from 1982 to 2015. We find compelling evidence that trailblazer women’s unique personal experiences exert a strong influence on judicial behavior within the Canadian Supreme Court. In fact, our findings demonstrate that the effects of judicial empathy extend across a broader array of discrimination cases in Canada compared to previous findings on the American courts. We find that trailblazer women have a greater propensity to vote in favor of discrimination claimants compared to their male peers. Normatively, these effects manifest as judicial empathy in discrimination cases where trailblazers themselves likely faced upward mobility challenges. 

We study sequential bargaining between a proposer and a veto player. Both have single‐peaked preferences, but the proposer is uncertain about the veto player's ideal point. The proposer cannot commit to future proposals. When players are patient, there can be equilibria with Coasian dynamics: the veto player's private information can largely nullify proposer's bargaining power. Our main result, however, is that under some conditions there also are equilibria in which the proposer obtains the high payoff that he would with commitment power. The driving force is that the veto player's single‐peaked preferences give the proposer an option to “leapfrog,” that is, to secure agreement from only low‐surplus types early on to credibly extract surplus from high types later. Methodologically, we exploit the connection between sequential bargaining and static mechanism design.