Crash and Burn

My eyes open slowly as the paralyzing drugs begin to lose their hold over my body. I wake up alone and at first, I look around in fear; not knowing where I am. I begin to remember the terrifying events of the morning that led me to this place, this hospital recovery room at midnight. It had started as any other horse show day. ~excerpt from pros

Ten-T policy and the Fehmarnbelt tunnel: Impact on regional development between Øresund and Hamburg

This article addresses the question of the regional impact of the Ten-T strategy in the Fehmarnbelt region (a region stretching from Malmö to Hamburg), a topic which seems overlooked in the actual discussions on green corridors at the UE level. It presents academic discussions on the matter and sets them in perspective with the current plans for developing a transport corridor across the region and the perception regional transport planning practitioners have on the matter. This article discusses the capacities of those actors to deal with questions regarding the exploitation of Ten-T infrastructure for the benefit of their region. The regional level can also be relevant for integration of sustainable transport solution to the local economic system at a level that national authorities do not have the resources to address. Finally, this article discusses how a regional anchoring allows for the adaptation of such a general EU policy to the local context so that targeted solutions are also adequate for the regions

Trans-European transport network and crossborder governance

This article looks at the implementation of trans-European transport corridors in the EU and the influence it has on governance within EU member-states. It considers the implementation of such a scheme in the context of cross-border cooperation and discusses the system of governance necessary for coordinating knowledge, efforts and solutions across several national systems. In order to understand this governance setting, one needs to understand the specific quality of transnational governance in the EU, which is neither purely international nor federally integrated. The transport corridor between Malmö and Hamburg is taken as a case for discussion. Cross-border governance is analyzed within a multi-level policy network approach including actors from supranational, national and subnational levels, in order to determine the existence of a policy network across the borders. The main finding is a depiction of the actual state of integration of the crossborder networks related to a green corridor strategy and its implications for the region

Defining Ordinary Prudential Doctrines After Booker: Why the Limited Remand Is the Least of Many Evils

This Note examines the limited-remand approach in comparison with the approaches taken by the different circuits. Part I discusses the history of the Sentencing Guidelines and the cases, up to and including Booker, that completely changed the way the Sentencing Guidelines were used. Part II sets forth the history of the traditional plain error standard of review and the contemporary Plain Error Problem. Part III examines the limited-remand approach and compares it with the approach taken in other circuits. Part IV argues that the limited-remand approach is the best of a list of bad possible choices but that the Ninth Circuit should have imposed a higher burden of roof on defendants before they could obtain a limited remand. Finally, Part V concludes that although it alters the traditional plain-error standard of review, the limited-remand approach is the most consistent with the intent of the majority that authored the remedial portion of the Booker opinion but would be improved with a higher burden on defendants

Defining Ordinary Prudential Doctrines After Booker: Why the Limited Remand Is the Least of Many Evils

This Note examines the limited-remand approach in comparison with the approaches taken by the different circuits. Part I discusses the history of the Sentencing Guidelines and the cases, up to and including Booker, that completely changed the way the Sentencing Guidelines were used. Part II sets forth the history of the traditional plain error standard of review and the contemporary Plain Error Problem. Part III examines the limited-remand approach and compares it with the approach taken in other circuits. Part IV argues that the limited-remand approach is the best of a list of bad possible choices but that the Ninth Circuit should have imposed a higher burden of roof on defendants before they could obtain a limited remand. Finally, Part V concludes that although it alters the traditional plain-error standard of review, the limited-remand approach is the most consistent with the intent of the majority that authored the remedial portion of the Booker opinion but would be improved with a higher burden on defendants

‘As dead as a dodo’: Extinction narratives and multispecies justice in the museum

This article unites recent writing in extinction studies with work in political ecology, justice theory and museum studies to explore qualitative, cultural approaches to extinction. I examine the role of storytelling and the power of narratives in addressing nonhuman extinction. Analysing the case study of a permanent gallery on extinction, evolution and biodiversity loss – the Survival Gallery of the National Museum of Scotland – I utilise a more-than-textual approach to narrative analysis. This paper explores the diverse ways in which the gallery relates stories of ‘natural’ extinction to the contemporary anthropogenic ‘Sixth Mass Extinction’. The Survival Gallery narrates a remarkably complex compilation of extinction stories, but the gallery’s narrative avoids areas of conflict or controversy, obscures justice concerns and ultimately presents a problematic depiction of a universalised humanity. Using this analysis of museum extinction storytelling, the paper contributes to emerging conceptualisations of multispecies justice frameworks. The article explores the possibilities and challenges of museum storytelling in grappling with complicated pasts and envisioning potential futures of survival, coexistence and flourishing. The paper concludes by considering how a multispecies justice approach to narrating extinction (and other entangled ecological-social phenomena) might flourish within and beyond museums.</jats:p

Trans-European transport network and cross- border governance

This article looks at the implementation of trans-European transport corridors in the EU and the influence it has on governance within EU member-states. It considers the implementation of such a scheme in the context of cross-border cooperation and discusses the system of governance necessary for coordinating knowledge, efforts and solutions across several national systems. In order to understand this governance setting, one needs to understand the specific quality of transnational governance in the EU, which is neither purely international nor federally integrated. The transport corridor between Malmö and Hamburg is taken as a case for discussion. Cross-border governance is analyzed within a multi-level policy network approach including actors from supranational, national and subnational levels, in order to determine the existence of a policy network across the borders. The main finding is a depiction of the actual state of integration of the cross- border networks related to a green corridor strategy and its implications for the region

Multiple sequence alignment correction using constraints

Trabalho apresentado no âmbito do European Master in Computational Logics, como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Computational LogicsOne of the most important fields in bioinformatics has been the study of protein sequence alignments. The study of homologous proteins, related by evolution, shows the conservation of many amino acids because of their functional and structural importance. One particular relationship between the amino acid sites in the same sequence or between different sequences, is protein-coevolution, interest in which has increased as a consequence of mathematical and computational methods used to understand the spatial, functional and evolutionary dependencies between amino acid sites. The principle of coevolution means that some amino acids are related through evolution because mutations in one site can create evolutionary pressures to select compensatory mutations in other sites that are functionally or structurally related. With the actual methods to detect coevolution, specifically mutual information techniques from the information theory field, we show in this work that much of the information between coevolved sites is lost because of mistakes in the multiple sequence alignment of variable regions. Moreover, we show that using these statistical methods to detect coevolved sites in multiple sequence alignments results in a high rate of false positives. Due to the amount of errors in the detection of coevolved site from multiple sequence alignments, we propose in this work a method to improve the detection efficacy of coevolved sites and we implement an algorithm to fix such sites correcting the misalignment produced in those specific locations. The detection part of our work is based on the mutual information between sites that are guessed as having coevolved, due to their high statistical correlation score. With this information we search for possible misalignments on those regions due to the incorrect matching of amino acids during the alignment. The re-alignment part is based on constraint programming techniques, to avoid the combinatorial complexity when one amino acid can be aligned with many others and to avoid inconsistencies in the alignments. In this work, we present a framework to impose constraints over the sequences, and we show how it is possible to compute alignments based on different criteria just by setting constraint between the amino acids. This framework can be applied not only for improving the alignment and detection of coevolved regions, but also to any desired constraints that may be used to express functional or structural relations among the amino acids in multiple sequences. We show also that after we fix these misalignments, using constraints based techniques, the correlation between coevolved sites increases and, in general, the new alignment is closer to the correct alignment than the MSA alignment. Finally, we show possible future research lines with the objective of overcoming some drawbacks detected during this work