The International Political Ecology of Industrial Shrimp Aquaculture and Industrial Plantation Forestry in Southeast Asia

This paper compares the trajectories over the last two decades of two export-oriented ‘boom crops’ in Southeast Asia: indsturial shrimp aquaculture and industrial plantation forestry. It focuses on differences in the establishment, operation and politics of these sectors to explain why they have experienced very different kinds of ‘booms.

Environmental Change, Protest, and Havens of Environmental Degradation: Evidence from Asia

As has been made clear by the other contributions to this debate, much of one’s analysis of the question of “pollution havens” depends upon how one frames the question. While I do not wish to repeat the arguments that have been made by the preceeding authors, I would like to suggest that it is useful to characterize the literature in economics on pollution havens in terms of its choices among two independent variables and three dependent variables. In seeking to identify which environmental factors might influence the global economy, scholars have generally focused on either expenditures on pollution abatement or on the relative “dirtiness” of different industries (generally measured in terms of toxic emissions). In order to determine the effects of these causal factors, most authors have examined intercountry differences in industrial structure, trade flows, and foreign direct investment (FDI). It is thus posible to place much of the literature within a 2x3 grid based on the choices made within this menu of independent and dependent variables. Lucas, Wheeler, and Hettige, for instance, have studied the effect of toxic emissions on industrial structure, while Tobey has investigated the effects of environmental compliance costs on patterns of trade.1 It is important to recognize, however, that the questions posed within this grid do not exhaust the research questions that are relevant to the study of pollution havens. A broader framing of the question underlying the debate might go as follows: to what extent do the environmental transformations associated with particular sectors influence their international siting patterns? Posing the question in this way would move the debate away from the questions of intentionality and regulatory costs addressed in this issue by David Wheeler (while still, of course, encompassing them) and towards the consequences, anticipated and otherwise, of environmental degradation. This article attempts to address new aspects of this broader question by departing from the existing literature in two ways. First, I address the consequences for international siting patterns of another aspect of environmental transformations: environmentally-oriented protest. While protest often results in tightened regulatory conditions, it also affects firms by creating non-regulatory difficulties in the actual siting and construction of plants and by generating uncertainty about future regulation. The connections between environmentally-oriented protest and the actual environmental problems caused by different sectors are not, of course, air-tight; it is possible that protesters are in fact mistaken about the environmental degradation that they perceive industry to be causing. In this article, I will not address this question, other than to note that a similar association of protest with environmental damage is made in much of the pollution havens literature in economics.2 Second, while most studies of pollution havens have taken aggregate statistics to be the relevant data in the determination of what drives siting decisions, I take a more phenomenological approach by examining the actual statements of firm representatives. The cases I examine provide examples of firms indicating that headaches over environmental protest are a primary factor in motivating their FDI. I attempt to advance this more political and phenomenological study through an analysis of two cases int he political economy of Japan’s relations with Southeast Asia. The first case takes up the possibility that Japan’s FDI to Southeast Asia during the 1970s was motivated in part by the dsire (on the part of both firms and the Japanese state) to escape from anti-pollution protest in Japan. The second asks whether the siting of overseas industrial tree plantations (particularly plantations of the species Eucalyptus camaldeulensis) supplying the Japanese market for wood chips and paper pulp has been influenced by the environmental problems whose plantations cause. The cases present useful contrasts for the study of pollution export, varying as they do in time (the 1970s for manufacturing FDI, the 1980s and 1990s for plantation forestry), sector (manufacturing vs. forestry), and the location of protest (Japan vs. Southeast Asia). However, they are similar in that each case has seen protest against environmental problems and clear statements by firms that the desire to escape that protest was influencing their siting decisions. While the first case seems to be a fairly straightforward example of firms searching for pollution havens, the second requires more interpretation and indeed presents a somewhat counterintuitive result

Driving departmental change through evaluation: Some outcomes and problems

This paper identifies the ways in which a three‐year technology‐based learning and teaching project has addressed the issue of catalysing departmental change. In order to promote change at this level, it is necessary to relate the accepted learning and teaching parameters of specific disciplines to meaningful evaluation data of student and staff perceptions, in an attempt to broaden the understanding of academic staff. Thus, a number of factors become important to the process of change including: supportive role models within departments; forging feasible departmental implementation plans; utilizing support staff with a technical and pedagogical awareness; and fully involving students in curriculum development and design. Inhibitors to change also need to be noted, for instance: time‐management; resource and training allocation; and a lack of managerial support. However, the creation of a supportive structure which highlights good practice is fundamental in gaining uptake of materials and in changing perceptions. An acceptance of staff development needs in the light of the objectives of both the student and the curriculum is required This holistic approach provides a suitable environment for the symbiosis between learning and teaching to develop

Chiral effective field theory beyond the power-counting regime

Novel techniques are presented, which identify the chiral power-counting regime (PCR), and realize the existence of an intrinsic energy scale embedded in lattice QCD results that extend outside the PCR. The nucleon mass is considered as a benchmark for illustrating this new approach. Using finite-range regularization, an optimal regularization scale can be extracted from lattice simulation results by analyzing the renormalization of the low energy coefficients. The optimal scale allows a description of lattice simulation results that extend beyond the PCR by quantifying and thus handling any scheme-dependence. Preliminary results for the nucleon magnetic moment are also examined, and a consistent optimal regularization scale is obtained. This indicates the existence of an intrinsic scale corresponding to the finite size of the source of the pion cloud.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, conferenc

The ceramics. In: Caldwell, David H and Stell, Geoffrey P, Achanduin Castle, Lismore, Argyll: an account of the excavations by Dennis Turner, 1970–5'. Scottish Archaeology Internet Report 73

Excavations were undertaken at Achanduin Castle, Lismore, Argyll (NGR: NM 8043 3927), over six seasons from 1970 to 1975 under the direction of the late Dennis John Turner (1932–2013), henceforward referred to as DJT. Partly funded by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and with tools and equipment loaned by RCAHMS (now Historic Environment Scotland), the work was carried out in support of the RCAHMS’s programme of survey in the Lorn district of Argyll. Its purpose was to examine an apparently little-altered but much-ruined example of a castle of enclosure ascribable to a small but identifiably distinct group of rectangular, or near rectangular, courtyard castles. DJT concluded that it was built c 1295–1310 by the MacDougalls, and only later passed to the bishops of Argyll. The authors add their own observations on the excavations in a separate section. They note tenuous evidence for a pre-castle phase. The bulk of the report focuses on the erection and occupation of the castle, followed by abandonment, post-medieval occupation, collapse/demolition and recent times

Subtyping somatic tinnitus: a cross-sectional UK cohort study of demographic, clinical and audiological characteristics

Somatic tinnitus is the ability to modulate the psychoacoustic features of tinnitus by somatic manoeuvres. The condition is still not fully understood and further identification of this subtype is essential, particularly for the purpose of establishing protocols for both its diagnosis and treatment. This study aimed to investigate the characteristics of somatic tinnitus within a large UK cohort using a largely unselected sample. We believe this to be relatively unique in comparison to current literature on the topic. This was investigated by using a total of 608 participant assessments from a set of recognised tinnitus and audiology measures. Results from a set of chi-square tests of association found that amongst the individuals with somatic tinnitus, a higher proportion had pulsatile tinnitus (different from heartbeat), were under the age of 40, reported variation in the loudness of their tinnitus and reported temporomandibular joint (TMJ) disorder. The same pattern of results was confirmed using a multivariate analysis of the data based on logistic regression. These findings have strong implications towards the profiling of somatic tinnitus as a distinct subtype of general tinnitus

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web