The Impact of the 200-Mile Economic Zone on the Law of the Sea

Students of marine affairs can easily trace the evolving process of offshore claims: the expansion of territorial sea breadths in the case of many States to four, six, twelve or even greater mileages; the claims to specialized extra-territorial zones, as for example, customs, fishing, pollution control, and neutrality; the closing off of bays, gulfs, and inter-island waters as part of the national territory; and the extension of national rights over continental shelf reprocession, and terms such as straight baselines, historic bays, and archipelagic waters have become recognized (if sometimes ill-defined) parts of the law of the sea lexicon. Now yet another concept has emerged, the 200-mile zone. Like the straight baseline and the continental shelf regimes, it began through unilateral action; like them, it gradually gained acceptance among various States, and it appears now destined to become part of the new regime of the world ocean. But its impact on the traditional freedoms of the seas will be far more pronounced than were those of its predecessors; indeed, one can safely hypothesize only some of the short-term impacts of the new jurisdiction; what the long-range implications will be is still very much in doubt

The Role of the Geographically - Disadvantaged States in the Law of the Sea

One of the more ambiguous terms to have surfaced in recent law of the sea negotiations is in reference to certain States as being geographically-disadvantaged. Few criteria have been spelled out for inclusion in such groups, and the only serious suggestions for distinguishing among degrees of disadvantage have been those which tend to put land-locked States in a special category of misfortune. For many years, the plight of the land-locked countries has attracted international attention: witness the 1921 Barcelona Convention, the provisions on their behalf in the 1958 Geneva High Seas convention, and the 1965 UNCTAD Convention on Transit Trade of Land-locked States. Their problems are by no means resolved, and the Informal Single Negotiating Text, which emerged from the 1975 Geneva Session of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, makes a number of provisions on their behalf. But in addition to the land-locked States, there are an indefinite number of coastal countries which, for various reasons, claim or may be expected to claim, special rights in the new regime of the oceans on the grounds of geographic disadvantage. It is with the parameters of such a group that this paper is concerned

Benchmarking image codecs by assessment of coded test images: the development of test images and new objective quality metrics, Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2006, nr 1

Objective quality measures are required for benchmarking codec performance. Our aim was to develop a simple, accurate method capable of rapidly measuring the degree of blockiness, edge-blur and ringing due to image compression. Two test images were designed to emphasise these artefacts. The efficacy of the new metrics is demonstrated using a JPEG codec at a range of compression levels

Identification of genes expressed by immune cells of the colon that are regulated by colorectal cancer-associated variants.

A locus on human chromosome 11q23 tagged by marker rs3802842 was associated with colorectal cancer (CRC) in a genome-wide association study; this finding has been replicated in case-control studies worldwide. In order to identify biologic factors at this locus that are related to the etiopathology of CRC, we used microarray-based target selection methods, coupled to next-generation sequencing, to study 103 kb at the 11q23 locus. We genotyped 369 putative variants from 1,030 patients with CRC (cases) and 1,061 individuals without CRC (controls) from the Ontario Familial Colorectal Cancer Registry. Two previously uncharacterized genes, COLCA1 and COLCA2, were found to be co-regulated genes that are transcribed from opposite strands. Expression levels of COLCA1 and COLCA2 transcripts correlate with rs3802842 genotypes. In colon tissues, COLCA1 co-localizes with crystalloid granules of eosinophils and granular organelles of mast cells, neutrophils, macrophages, dendritic cells and differentiated myeloid-derived cell lines. COLCA2 is present in the cytoplasm of normal epithelial, immune and other cell lineages, as well as tumor cells. Tissue microarray analysis demonstrates the association of rs3802842 with lymphocyte density in the lamina propria (p = 0.014) and levels of COLCA1 in the lamina propria (p = 0.00016) and COLCA2 (tumor cells, p = 0.0041 and lamina propria, p = 6 × 10(-5)). In conclusion, genetic, expression and immunohistochemical data implicate COLCA1 and COLCA2 in the pathogenesis of colon cancer. Histologic analyses indicate the involvement of immune pathways

Smoking and Selected DNA Repair Gene Polymorphisms in Controls: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

When the case-only study design is used to estimate statistical interaction between genetic (G) and environmental (E) exposures, G and E must be independent in the underlying population, or the case-only estimate of interaction (COR) will be biased. Few studies have examined the occurrence of G-E association in published control group data

Cost-effectiveness of stent-retriever thrombectomy in combination with IV t-PA compared with IV t-PA alone for acute ischemic stroke in the UK.

Objective: To evaluate the cost-effectiveness of neurothrombectomy with a stent retriever (Solitaire**Solitaire Revascularization Device is a registered trademark of Medtronic (Irvine, CA). View all notes Revascularization Device) in treating acute ischemic stroke patients from the UK healthcare provider perspective. Methods: A Markov model was developed to simulate health outcomes and costs of two therapies over a lifetime time horizon: stent-retriever thrombectomy in combination with intravenous tissue-type plasminogen activator (IV t-PA), and IV t-PA alone. The model incorporated an acute phase (0–90 days) and a rest of life phase (90+ days). Health states were defined by the modified Rankin Scale score. During the rest of life phase, patients remained in the same health state until a recurrent stroke or death. Clinical effectiveness and safety data were taken from the SWIFT PRIME study. Resource use and health state utilities were informed by published data. Results: Combined stent-retriever thrombectomy and IV t-PA led to improved quality-of-life and increased life expectancy compared to IV t-PA alone. The higher treatment costs associated with the use of stent-retriever thrombectomy were offset by long-term cost savings due to improved patient health status, leading to overall cost savings of £33 190 per patient and a net benefit of £79 402. Deterministic and probabilistic sensitivity analyses demonstrated that the results were robust to a wide range of parameter inputs. Limitations: The acute and long-term costs resource use data were taken from a study based on a patient population that was older and may have had additional comorbidities than the SWIFT PRIME population, resulting in costs that may not be representative of the cohort within this model. In addition, the estimates may not reflect stroke care today as no current evidence is available; however, the cost estimates were deemed reasonable by clinical opinion. Conclusions: Combined stent-retriever neurothrombectomy and IV t-PA is a cost-effective treatment for acute ischemic stroke compared with IV t-PA alone