Ocean Development and Management in the Arctic: Issues in American and Canadian Relations

The need for Canadian-American cooperative ocean management in the Arctic stems from four factors. Transboundary ocean currents have the potential to carry marine pollutants from one country to the other. Many living resources, such as bowhead and beluga whales, do not recognize political boundaries. Native communities depend culturally and economically on coastal resources. Technological collaboration in such areas as satellite communications and navigational aids is necessary to avoid costly duplications. Three documents - the World Conservation Strategy, the Report of the U.N. Conference on the Human Environment, and the Law of the Sea Convention - bid the United States and Canada to join hands in managing resources in a more systematic manner. At least four jurisdictional issues concerning arctic waters are capable of rocking future U.S.-Canadian relations: the Alaska/Yukon offshore boundary, the legal status of the waters of the Canadian arctic archipelago and the Northwest Passage, the legal principles governing the exclusive economic zones in the Beaufort, Chukchi, and Bering seas, and the legal regime applicable to arctic waters and the seabed beyond 200 nautical miles. Although cooperative ocean management may be hindered by national complexities, such as lack of clear arctic policies, fragmented decision-making processes, and tensions between government managers and local communities, the two countries should address eight threshold questions concerning future institutional linkages: Are present formal and informal arrangements adequate for arctic ocean management? What type or types of agreement - demonstrative, administrative, distributive or resolutive - should be used to formalize cooperation? What level of cooperation - bilateral, trilateral, arctic-wide or global - is required and politically feasible? Should the two countries create new management institutions or should they harmonize existing legislation and administration? Should one "super commission" be created with a say over all arctic marine issues or should a number of commissions be created for coordinating individual ocean uses? Should joint institutions have advisory or actual decision-making powers? What role should native groups play in regionalized arctic marine management? What type of dispute-settlement mechanism(s) should be established?Key words: Canada-U.S. relations, ocean development and management, international law of the seaMots clés: relations Canada-E.U., développement et gestion de l'océan, droit international de la me

Learning and Serving: Pro Bono Legal Services by Law Students

All lawyers\u27 codes of professional ethics in the United States expect members of the bar to perform legal services for low-income persons. In practice, as we all know, many lawyers perform a great deal of such service while others do little or none. By much the same token, the accreditation rules of the American Bar Association urge all law schools to provide students with opportunities to do pro bono legal work; by much the same token, some schools in the United States have extensive programs for their students but many do not. In 1998, the Association of American Law Schools created a Commission on Pro Bono and Public Service Opportunities to help law schools improve their pro bono programs. The Commission began its work by reviewing available research and by surveying all law schools to learn the current extent of pro bono services by law students. The Commission learned that nearly all law schools offer clinical programs through which students can eam credit for providing legal services to low-income clients, but that schools were much more varying in the extent to which they gave students the opportunity to provide voluntary services without credit

Learning and Serving: Pro Bono Legal Services by Law Students

All lawyers\u27 codes of professional ethics in the United States expect members of the bar to perform legal services for low-income persons. In practice, as we all know, many lawyers perform a great deal of such service while others do little or none. By much the same token, the accreditation rules of the American Bar Association urge all law schools to provide students with opportunities to do pro bono legal work; by much the same token, some schools in the United States have extensive programs for their students but many do not. In 1998, the Association of American Law Schools created a Commission on Pro Bono and Public Service Opportunities to help law schools improve their pro bono programs. The Commission began its work by reviewing available research and by surveying all law schools to learn the current extent of pro bono services by law students. The Commission learned that nearly all law schools offer clinical programs through which students can eam credit for providing legal services to low-income clients, but that schools were much more varying in the extent to which they gave students the opportunity to provide voluntary services without credit

Knowledge and Awareness Among Patients with Chronic Kidney Disease Stage 3

Knowledge is a prerequisite for changing behavior, and is useful for improving outcomes and reducing mortality rates in patients diagnosed with chronic kidney disease (CKD). The purpose of this article is to describe baseline CKD knowledge and awareness obtained as part of a larger study testing the feasibility of a self-management intervention. Thirty patients were recruited who had CKD Stage 3 with coexisting diabetes and hypertension. Fifty-four percent of the sample were unaware of their CKD diagnosis. Participants had a moderate amount of CKD knowledge. This study suggests the need to increase knowledge in patients with CKD Stage 3 to aid in slowing disease progression

Degradation of optical components in a space environment

Phillips Laboratory's Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF) optical experiment is designed to determine the adverse effects of the natural space environment on laser optical component and coating materials. The experiment consists of 10 sample sets, each containing six different material samples. The materials were chosen because of their common use in laser optical components. Sample characterization is divided into three phases. Phase 1 testing is limited to visual and optical performance evaluation. Phase 2 tests investigate the fundamental causes of the performance degradation quantified in Phase 1. During Phase 3, selected samples will be cleaned and some Phase 1 measurements repeated to determine if acceptable optical performance can be restored, and laser damage testing will be performed on a small number of samples. Performance deteriorations will be correlated to exposure duration, sample location on the LDEF, atomic oxygen levels, and other space environment conditions. Preliminary results obtained on the optical samples are discussed

Neuron numbers increase in the human amygdala from birth to adulthood, but not in autism.

Remarkably little is known about the postnatal cellular development of the human amygdala. It plays a central role in mediating emotional behavior and has an unusually protracted development well into adulthood, increasing in size by 40% from youth to adulthood. Variation from this typical neurodevelopmental trajectory could have profound implications on normal emotional development. We report the results of a stereological analysis of the number of neurons in amygdala nuclei of 52 human brains ranging from 2 to 48 years of age [24 neurotypical and 28 autism spectrum disorder (ASD)]. In neurotypical development, the number of mature neurons in the basal and accessory basal nuclei increases from childhood to adulthood, coinciding with a decrease of immature neurons within the paralaminar nucleus. Individuals with ASD, in contrast, show an initial excess of amygdala neurons during childhood, followed by a reduction in adulthood across nuclei. We propose that there is a long-term contribution of mature neurons from the paralaminar nucleus to other nuclei of the neurotypical human amygdala and that this growth trajectory may be altered in ASD, potentially underlying the volumetric changes detected in ASD and other neurodevelopmental or neuropsychiatric disorders

Canadian Shoppers in Northwest Washington State

The purpose of this project was to record the proportion of Canadian vehicles in prominent retail destination parking lots along the I-5 corridor in northwest Washington State. These destinations were located in Blaine, Lynden, Ferndale, Bellingham, Burlington and Marysville. Data collection was executed by dividing the locations into northern and southern zones, with each zone visited by a two-person team following a prescribed route. The teams collected data within specific mapped sections of parking lots by counting the number of cars with Canadian and U.S. license plates with the use of tally counter devices. Additionally, an I-5 overpass is located within each zone in order to look at southbound I-5 traffic at locations both north and south of Bellingham at an identical time of day. Generally, the intent is to visit every site on each of three consecutive days, Thursday through Saturday. On each field day, data collection starts prior to mid-day and is scheduled to finish by late afternoon. The information collected is then compiled in an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis

Bond of Epoxy-Coated Reinforcement: Splices

The effects of epoxy coating and transverse reinforcement on the splice strength of reinforcing bars in concrete are described. A total of 65 beam and slab splice specimens containing No. 6 and No. 8 bars were tested. The average coating thickness ranged from 6 to 11 mils (0.15 to 0.28 mm). Three deformation patterns were used. All but one group of specimens contained Class B ACI/Class C AASHTO splices. The results of the current study are analyzed, along with the results of 48 specimens from earlier studies, and used to develop improved development length modification factors for use with epoxy-coated bars. Epoxy coatings are found to reduce splice strength significantly; however, the extent of the reduction is less than that used to select the development length modification factors in the 1989 ACI Building Code and 1989 AASHTO Bridge Specifications. The percentage decrease in splice strength caused by epoxy coating is independent of the degree of confining reinforcement, which provides approximately the same percentage increase in the strength of splices for both coated and uncoated bars. A maximum development length modification factor of 1.35 is applicable for design with epoxy-coated reinforcement. An alternate factor of 1.20 is applicable for epoxy-coated bars with a defined minimum amount of transverse reinforcement if the positive effects of that transverse reinforcement are not already taken into account in the design provisions. Thus, the 1.20 factor is not applicable to the ACI Building Code, but is applicable to the AASHTO Bridge Specifications. This is the second in a series of papers describing research at the University of Kansas on epoxy-coated reinforcement. The research is aimed at gaining a better understanding of the bond of epoxy-coated reinforcement to concrete and developing design procedures that accurately reflect the changes in bond strength caused by epoxy coating

Fostering parent–child dialog through automated discussion suggestions

The development of early literacy skills has been critically linked to a child’s later academic success. In particular, repeated studies have shown that reading aloud to children and providing opportunities for them to discuss the stories that they hear is of utmost importance to later academic success. CloudPrimer is a tablet-based interactive reading primer that aims to foster early literacy skills by supporting parents in shared reading with their children through user-targeted discussion topic suggestions. The tablet application records discussions between parents and children as they read a story and, in combination with a common sense knowledge base, leverages this information to produce suggestions. Because of the unique challenges presented by our application, the suggestion generation method relies on a novel topic modeling method that is based on semantic graph topology. We conducted a user study in which we compared how delivering suggestions generated by our approach compares to expert-crafted suggestions. Our results show that our system can successfully improve engagement and parent–child reading practices in the absence of a literacy expert’s tutoring.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Award Number 1117584