Peranan ASEAN dalam kesalinghubungan pengangkutan rel di Asia: evolusi, faktor dan prospek

Pengkritik biasanya menggambarkan ‘ASEAN Way’ sebagai proses yang lembap dalam mempromosi integrasi serantau. Kritikan tersebut telah membawa kepada persoalan berhubung dengan peranan ASEAN dalam prospek kesalinghubungan fizikal serantau. Setakat ini memang terdapat kekurangan kajian ekonomi politik berkenaan dengan peranan ASEAN dalam perkembangan kesalinghubungan rel serantau di Asia. Oleh itu, kajian ini bertujuan memenuhi lompang penyelidikan tersebut. Artikel ini bermula dengan penyingkapan sejarah asal-usul perkembangan jaringan keretapi merentasi Asia sejak zaman imperialisme bagi mengkaji evolusi dan pelbagai faktor yang mempengaruhi perkembangan kesalinghubungan pengangkutan rel di rantau tersebut. Berdasarkan data sekunder berkenaan perkembangan rangkaian keretapi di Asia, analisis menunjukkan bahawa faktor ekonomi merupakan pendorong utama bagi setiap fasa perkembangan jaringan rel di rantau tersebut. Faktor tersebut bertambah penting berikutan dengan peningkatan penglibatan Asia dalam rangkaian pengeluaran global serta peningkatan perdagangan intra-ASEAN dan perdagangan dengan rantau lain sejak 1990-an. Hasil kajian mendapati bahawa kesalinghubungan pengangkutan rel di Asia berkembang mengikut konteks ekonomi politik rantau tersebut tanpa mengikut acuan institusi Kesatuan Eropah. Pelaksanaan polisi adalah terikat dengan perundangan Kesatuan Eropah. Pendekatan ASEAN yang berasaskan persefahaman dan autonomi nasional memberi fleksibiliti kepada negara-negara anggota ASEAN dalam pelaksanaan kesalinghubungan. Namun demikian, potensi ekonomi yang tinggi telah meningkatkan kehendak politik dan komitmen pemimpin-pemimpin ASEAN bagi memastikan kelancaran pelaksanaan jaringan rel Trans-Asian walaupun terdapat beberapa halangan dan masalah daripada segi politik dan geografi/teknikal. Justeru, prospek perkembangan jaringan TAR adalah cerah dengan gabungan peranan ASEAN, initiatif China dan Jepun melalui Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity, Belt and Road Initiative dan Partnership for Quality Infrastructure, di samping bantuan teknikal dan kewangan daripada organisasi antarabangsa lain

Whither financial regionalism among ASEAN+3

Having experienced a major crisis in 1997-98, several regional cooperative arrangements in finance were designed by ASEAN+3 to mobilize collective responses to cope with major financial crises. While the current global financial crisis poses a serious challenge to the adequacy of existing regional mechanisms and institutions for crisis prevention and management, it provides a good opportunity for ASEAN+3 countries to press for more legitimacy of the global financial arrangements. In the absence of an effective global solution, the West now place their hope in the key member states of the ASEAN+3 collective action to mitigate the severity of the impending global recession. Can ASEAN+3 rise to the expectation? In view of the magnitude of the crisis as well as weaknesses of the existing regional financial cooperation, it remains to be seen what impact the current global financial turmoil would have on financial regionalism between ASEAN and the ‘plus three’ countries - China, Japan and South Korea. Whether an effective global solution is emerging is the central issue and one which will determine the future direction of East Asian financial regionalism. This further raises the question of whether financial regionalism is still relevant. An attempt is made in this article to address these issues

To Which World Regions Does the Valence-Dominance Model of Social Perception Apply?

Over the past 10 years, Oosterhof and Todorov’s valence–dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgements of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear whether these findings apply to other regions. We addressed this question by replicating Oosterhof and Todorov’s methodology across 11 world regions, 41 countries and 11,570 participants. When we used Oosterhof and Todorov’s original analysis strategy, the valence–dominance model generalized across regions. When we used an alternative methodology to allow for correlated dimensions, we observed much less generalization. Collectively, these results suggest that, while the valence–dominance model generalizes very well across regions when dimensions are forced to be orthogonal, regional differences are revealed when we use different extraction methods and correlate and rotate the dimension reduction solution

Synthetic biology for the directed evolution of protein biocatalysts:navigating sequence space intelligently

The amino acid sequence of a protein affects both its structure and its function. Thus, the ability to modify the sequence, and hence the structure and activity, of individual proteins in a systematic way, opens up many opportunities, both scientifically and (as we focus on here) for exploitation in biocatalysis. Modern methods of synthetic biology, whereby increasingly large sequences of DNA can be synthesised de novo, allow an unprecedented ability to engineer proteins with novel functions. However, the number of possible proteins is far too large to test individually, so we need means for navigating the ‘search space’ of possible protein sequences efficiently and reliably in order to find desirable activities and other properties. Enzymologists distinguish binding (K (d)) and catalytic (k (cat)) steps. In a similar way, judicious strategies have blended design (for binding, specificity and active site modelling) with the more empirical methods of classical directed evolution (DE) for improving k (cat) (where natural evolution rarely seeks the highest values), especially with regard to residues distant from the active site and where the functional linkages underpinning enzyme dynamics are both unknown and hard to predict. Epistasis (where the ‘best’ amino acid at one site depends on that or those at others) is a notable feature of directed evolution. The aim of this review is to highlight some of the approaches that are being developed to allow us to use directed evolution to improve enzyme properties, often dramatically. We note that directed evolution differs in a number of ways from natural evolution, including in particular the available mechanisms and the likely selection pressures. Thus, we stress the opportunities afforded by techniques that enable one to map sequence to (structure and) activity in silico, as an effective means of modelling and exploring protein landscapes. Because known landscapes may be assessed and reasoned about as a whole, simultaneously, this offers opportunities for protein improvement not readily available to natural evolution on rapid timescales. Intelligent landscape navigation, informed by sequence-activity relationships and coupled to the emerging methods of synthetic biology, offers scope for the development of novel biocatalysts that are both highly active and robust