The Ocean Enclosure Movement: Inventory and Prospect

This Article examines the ocean enclosure movement and its future viability in light of the signing of the Convention. The author presents an overview of the development of the maritime jurisdictional regime and then examines the impacts of current jurisdictional claims on ocean use. The author continues to examine the potential trends in the ocean enclosure movement against the backdrop of the Convention

The Impact of the 200-Mile Economic Zone on the Law of the Sea

Students of marine affairs can easily trace the evolving process of offshore claims: the expansion of territorial sea breadths in the case of many States to four, six, twelve or even greater mileages; the claims to specialized extra-territorial zones, as for example, customs, fishing, pollution control, and neutrality; the closing off of bays, gulfs, and inter-island waters as part of the national territory; and the extension of national rights over continental shelf reprocession, and terms such as straight baselines, historic bays, and archipelagic waters have become recognized (if sometimes ill-defined) parts of the law of the sea lexicon. Now yet another concept has emerged, the 200-mile zone. Like the straight baseline and the continental shelf regimes, it began through unilateral action; like them, it gradually gained acceptance among various States, and it appears now destined to become part of the new regime of the world ocean. But its impact on the traditional freedoms of the seas will be far more pronounced than were those of its predecessors; indeed, one can safely hypothesize only some of the short-term impacts of the new jurisdiction; what the long-range implications will be is still very much in doubt

The Role of the Geographically - Disadvantaged States in the Law of the Sea

One of the more ambiguous terms to have surfaced in recent law of the sea negotiations is in reference to certain States as being geographically-disadvantaged. Few criteria have been spelled out for inclusion in such groups, and the only serious suggestions for distinguishing among degrees of disadvantage have been those which tend to put land-locked States in a special category of misfortune. For many years, the plight of the land-locked countries has attracted international attention: witness the 1921 Barcelona Convention, the provisions on their behalf in the 1958 Geneva High Seas convention, and the 1965 UNCTAD Convention on Transit Trade of Land-locked States. Their problems are by no means resolved, and the Informal Single Negotiating Text, which emerged from the 1975 Geneva Session of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, makes a number of provisions on their behalf. But in addition to the land-locked States, there are an indefinite number of coastal countries which, for various reasons, claim or may be expected to claim, special rights in the new regime of the oceans on the grounds of geographic disadvantage. It is with the parameters of such a group that this paper is concerned

Positivity preserving solutions of partial integro-differential equations

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Chemical Engineering, 2009."May 15th, 2009."Includes bibliographical references (leaves 246-249).Differential equations are one of the primary tools for modeling phenomena in chemical engineering. While solution methods for many of these types of problems are well-established, there is growing class of problems that lack standard solution methods: partial integro-differential equations. The primary challenges in solving these problems are due to several factors, such as large range of variables, non-local phenomena, multi-dimensionality, and physical constraints. All of these issues ultimately determine the accuracy and solution time for a given problem. Typical solution techniques are designed to handle every system using the same methods. And often the physical constraints of the problem are not addressed until after the solution is completed if at all. In the worst case this can lead to some problems being over-simplified and results that provide little physical insight. The general concept of exploiting solution domain knowledge can address these issues. Positivity and mass-conservation of certain quantities are two conditions that are difficult to achieve in standard numerical solution methods. However, careful design of the discretizations can achieve these properties with a negligible performance penalty. Another important consideration is the stability domain. The eigenvalues of the discretized problem put restrictions on the size of the time step. For "stiff' systems implicit methods are generally used but the necessary matrix inversions are costly, especially for equations with integral components. By better characterizing the system it is possible to use more efficient explicit methods.(cont.) This work improves upon and combines several methods to develop more efficient methods. There are a vast number of systems that be solved using the methods developed in this work. The examples considered include population balances, neural models, radiative heat transfer models, among others. For the capstone portion, financial option pricing models using "jump-diffusion" motion are considered. Overall, gains in accuracy and efficiency were demonstrated across many conditions.by Alexander M. Lewis.Ph.D

SIG-DB: leveraging homomorphic encryption to Securely Interrogate privately held Genomic DataBases

Genomic data are becoming increasingly valuable as we develop methods to utilize the information at scale and gain a greater understanding of how genetic information relates to biological function. Advances in synthetic biology and the decreased cost of sequencing are increasing the amount of privately held genomic data. As the quantity and value of private genomic data grows, so does the incentive to acquire and protect such data, which creates a need to store and process these data securely. We present an algorithm for the Secure Interrogation of Genomic DataBases (SIG-DB). The SIG-DB algorithm enables databases of genomic sequences to be searched with an encrypted query sequence without revealing the query sequence to the Database Owner or any of the database sequences to the Querier. SIG-DB is the first application of its kind to take advantage of locality-sensitive hashing and homomorphic encryption to allow generalized sequence-to-sequence comparisons of genomic data.Comment: 38 pages, 3 figures, 4 tables, 1 supplemental table, 7 supplemental figure