Growing an island: Okinotori

The UN Law of Sea defines an island as “a naturally formed area of land, surrounded by water, which is above water at high tide.” However, according to the same international law, not every kind of island engenders the same legal effects: “rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own shall have no exclusive economic zone.” In the Pacific Ocean, some 1750 kilometers south of Tokyo, the governor of Tokyo raised the Japanese flag, and placed an address plaque “1 Okinotori Island, Ogasawara Village, Tokyo” on a rock, or actually two rocks. The first one is roughly the size of a small room, the second one that of a twin bed. The smallest pokes some 7 centimeters out of the ocean, the bigger one arrives at double this altitude. In order to continue claiming territorial rights and assert exclusive economic control and fishing rights in a two hundred nautical mile zone around the rocks — i.e. in a part of the ocean larger than the surface of Japan’s mainland — these rocks need to be protected against the effects of global warming and typhoons. What is more: they need to naturally grow, in order to change status from mere rock into “a naturally formed area of land”. According to the New York Times the Japanese government has already spent over 600 million dollars to keep the barren islets above water. It encased the tiny protrusions in 25 meter thick concrete, at a cost of 280 million dollars, then made slits across the concrete, so it would comply with the UN law that an island be surrounded by water. Since then, Japanese scientists are developing genetically modified species of coral with the aim to grow the rocks into a small but internationally recognized archipelago: the Okinotori Islands

Rediscovering architecture : paestum in eighteenth-century architectural experience and theory, by Sigrid de Jong

Book review of: Sigrid de Jong, Rediscovering Architecture: Paestum in Eighteenth-Century Architectural Experience and Theory. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015, 352 pp., 100 color and 185 b/w illus. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978030019575

Oral History Interview with Arnoud De Meyer: Conceptualising SMU

This is an abridged version of the original interview. Please contact the Library at [email protected] for access to the full version of the transcript and/or audio recording.</p

War on scale : models for the First World War battlefront

This essay traces the evolution and use of military scale models during the First World War. The application of such models by all belligerents is characterized by an enormous diversity in scale, context, construction method and purpose. Between the two extremes of a full scale replica of the Paris agglomeration and the tiny boxed miniature of a POW prison cell, a whole range of military models can be distinguished. On one hand, the model production can be considered part of a long tradition of military terrain modeling, as is evident in the examples of relief maps and training models. On the other hand, the rapidly changing technological and tactical developments during the Great War –such as strategic aerial bombing, camouflage and submarine warfare—require the creation of new types of scale models. During the last stages of the war, the encapsulation of the model as research object in a laboratory, looked at through optical devices and studied through model photography, demonstrates how this technological progress paves the way for a scientific approach towards warfare. The evolution of the models thus illustrates how war was waged on a variety of scales and that its theatre was far from limited to the battlefield itself

Salicylic acid produced by the rhizobacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa 7NSK2 induces resistance to leaf infection by Botrytis cinerea on bean

Selected strains of nonpathogenic rhizobacteria can induce a systemic resistance in plants that is effective against various pathogens. In an assay with bean plants, we investigated which determinants of the rhizobacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa 7NSK2 are important for induction of resistance to Botrytis cinerea. By varying the iron nutritional state of the bacterium at inoculation, it was demonstrated that induced resistance by P. aeruginosa 7NSK2 was iron-regulated. As P. aeruginosa 7NSK2 produces three siderophores under iron limitation, pyoverdin, pyochelin, and salicylic acid, we investigated the involvement of these iron-regulated metabolites in induced resistance by using mutants deficient in one or more siderophores. Results demonstrated that salicylic acid production was essential for induction of resistance to B. cinerea by Fl aeruginosa 7NSK2 in bean and did not exclude a role for pyochelin. A role for pyoverdin, however, could not be demonstrated. Transcriptional activity of salicylic acid and pyochelin biosynthetic genes was detected during P. aeruginosa 7NSK2 colonization of bean. Moreover, the iron nutritional state at inoculation influenced the transcriptional activity of salicylic acid and pyochelin biosynthetic genes in the same way as it influenced induction of systemic resistance to B. cinerea

Do not forget the strategic architecture of your manufacturing network while offshoring

Offshoring manufacturing to low labor cost countries has become trendy. Nearly everyday one sees an announcement in the business press of companies moving to China or India. Whilst production cost is an important consideration in choosing a location for the factory, we argue that one should not become victim of a herd effect and that other parameters e.g. quality, flexibility, transportation and energy costs, etc. need to be taken into consideration in the determination of the optimal manufacturing network. Relocating a factory is changing the strategic architecture of the company's manufacturing network and requires a long term view and a good model to design the architecture of the manufacturing network. Based on empirical survey research and a set of case studies we provide such a model to think about the roles of factories in the strategic manufacturing network of the firm. But we go beyond a classification and a descriptive model and we provide a set of six managerial issues that require senior management's attention in determining the optimal manufacturing network and its dynamic evolution. We argue for example that senior management needs to build a balanced portfolio of different types of factories, has to have a performance measurement system adapted to the type of factory, as well as the appropriate leadership for each of the different types of factories and needs to actively manage the dynamics and the flows of innovation in the factory network. Key words: international manufacturing, network management, outsourcin