Assessing National Human Rights Performance: A Theoretical Framework

Comparative quantitative assessment of human rights is hampered by the length of the list of internationally recognized rights. Not only is the list so long that it is hard to imagine gathering adequate data without an army of researchers (the International Human Rights Covenants contain more than thirty substantive articles, encompassing at least twice as many separate rights), but the results of such a comprehensive effort would almost certainly be overwhelming and bewildering in their complexity. In this article we try to narrow the list of rights concerning which it is necessary to gather data by establishing a theoretical framework for assessing a state’s human rights performance. We identify a relatively small set of ten essential rights that separately are intrinsically essential and together provide good proxies for almost all other rights. An assessment of national performance on these ten rights, we argue, will approximate a comprehensive assessment of a country’s overall human rights record

Potential uses for bracken (Pteridium aquilinum (L.) Kuhn) in organic agrculture

Bracken is a weed species due to its toxic nature and adverse effects on agriculture and ecology. This poster reviews research into historical uses for fronds and litter harvested as part of organically approved control methods. The use of bracken as an over winter mulch reduced losses of nitrogen and potassium from bare soil and maintained soil temperatures. Bracken litter was found to be a viable biofuel, with a calorific value comparable to wood and low ash and alkali metal contents. The contents of frond ash were investigated, with high concentrations of potassium found giving them a value as organic fertiliser. The addition of frond ash to soil significantly increased clover growth and number of nodules. The addition of frond ash to soil significantly increased the yield of saleable main crop potatoes. These finding have shown that bracken has a value especially within organic agriculture

Human Dignity, Human Rights, and Political Regimes

It is often argued that internationally recognized human rights are common to all cultural traditions and adaptable to a great variety of social structures and political regimes. Such arguments confuse human rights with human dignity. All societies possess conceptions of human dignity, but the conception of human dignity underlying international human rights standards requires a particular type of “liberal” regime. This conclusion is reached through a comparison of the social structures of ideal type liberal, minimal, traditional, communist, corporatist and developmental regimes and their impact on autonomy, equality, privacy, social conflict, and the definition of societal membership

Liberalism, Human Rights, and Human Dignity

Do international standards regarding human rights require the existence of a liberal regime? This was the thrust of Rhoda Howard and Jack Donnelly’s essay in the September 1986 issue of this Review. Neil Mitchell takes vigorous issue with this contention, arguing first and foremost that Howard and Donnelly have not defined liberalism satisfactorily. Howard and Donnelly present a spirited rejoinder

Predicting the distributions of under-recorded Odonata using species distribution models

1. Absences in distributional data may result either from the true absence of a species or from a false absence due to lack of recording effort. I use general linear models (GLMs) and species distribution models (SDMs) to investigate this problem in North American Odonata and present a potential solution. 2. I use multi-model selection methods based on Akaike's information criterion to evaluate the ability of water-energy variables, human population density, and recording effort to explain patterns of odonate diversity in the USA and Canada using GLMs. Water-energy variables explain a large proportion of the variance in odonate diversity, but the residuals of these models are significantly related to recorder effort. 3. I then create SDMs for 176species that are found solely in the USA and Canada using model averaging of eight different methods. These give predictions of hypothetical true distributions of each of the 176species based on climate variables, which I compare with observed distributions to identify areas where potential under-recording may occur. 4. Under-recording appears to be highest in northern Canada, Alaska, and Quebec, as well as the interior of the USA. The proportion of predicted species that have been observed is related to recorder effort and population density. Maps for individual species have been made available online () to facilitate recording in the future. 5. This analysis has illustrated a problem with current odonate recording in the form of unbalanced recorder effort. However, the SDM approach also provides the solution, targeting recorder effort in such a way as to maximise returns from limited resources

A business perspective on a China - US bilateral investment treaty

The recent Perspective “A China - US bilateral investment treaty: A template for a multilateral framework for investment” by Karl P. Sauvant and Huiping Chen raises very important issues. I welcome the focus on the US-China investment negotiations and believe Sauvant and Chen are asking many key questions. But their analysis and their recommendations end up, I believe, seriously off-track. I will offer an alternative perspective, one shaped both by my previous life as an international economic policy-maker/negotiator at the State Department and the US Trade Representative’s office and my current role at the United States Council for International Business (USCIB), representing global companies on investment policy issues, including investment treaties

A table of elliptic curves over the cubic field of discriminant -23

Let F be the cubic field of discriminant -23 and O its ring of integers. Let Gamma be the arithmetic group GL_2 (O), and for any ideal n subset O let Gamma_0 (n) be the congruence subgroup of level n. In a previous paper, two of us (PG and DY) computed the cohomology of various Gamma_0 (n), along with the action of the Hecke operators. The goal of that paper was to test the modularity of elliptic curves over F. In the present paper, we complement and extend this prior work in two ways. First, we tabulate more elliptic curves than were found in our prior work by using various heuristics ("old and new" cohomology classes, dimensions of Eisenstein subspaces) to predict the existence of elliptic curves of various conductors, and then by using more sophisticated search techniques (for instance, torsion subgroups, twisting, and the Cremona-Lingham algorithm) to find them. We then compute further invariants of these curves, such as their rank and representatives of all isogeny classes. Our enumeration includes conjecturally the first elliptic curves of ranks 1 and 2 over this field, which occur at levels of norm 719 and 9173 respectively

Avoided intersections of nodal lines

We consider real eigen-functions of the Schr\"odinger operator in 2-d. The nodal lines of separable systems form a regular grid, and the number of nodal crossings equals the number of nodal domains. In contrast, for wave functions of non integrable systems nodal intersections are rare, and for random waves, the expected number of intersections in any finite area vanishes. However, nodal lines display characteristic avoided crossings which we study in the present work. We define a measure for the avoidance range and compute its distribution for the random waves ensemble. We show that the avoidance range distribution of wave functions of chaotic systems follow the expected random wave distributions, whereas for wave functions of classically integrable but quantum non-separable wave functions, the distribution is quite different. Thus, the study of the avoidance distribution provides more support to the conjecture that nodal structures of chaotic systems are reproduced by the predictions of the random waves ensemble.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

Current approaches for modulation of the nanoscale interface in the regulation of cell behavior

Regulation of cell behavior in response to nanoscale features has been the focus of much research in recent years and the successful generation of nanoscale features capable of mimicking the natural nanoscale interface has been of great interest in the field of biomaterials research. In this review, we discuss relevant nanofabrication techniques and how they are combined with bioengineering applications to mimic the natural extracellular matrix (ECM) and create valuable nanoscale interfaces