Building Bridges Across Jurisdictional and Disciplinary Boundries: The Need for New Environmental Law Research Methods

In the past forty years the global population has doubled and global CO2 emissions have increased by 70%. Human induced change to ecosystems is more rapid and extensive than any comparable period in history. Current biodiversity loss exceeds that of the historical past by several orders of magnitude and shows no indication of slowing. Anthropogenic changes to ecosystems have contributed to improvements to human well-being and economic development. This has been achieved at growing costs in the form of the degradation of many ecosystem services. Population growth and economic development have intensified competition over natural resources worldwide. Rapid increases in globalization since the first Rio Conference in 1992 has exceeded the ability of global governance systems to respond to the resulting sustainability challenges. The need for integrated interdisciplinary approaches to address these challenges is widely accepted. There are however a lack of methods to address such approaches. In this context, traditional doctrinal approaches to legal scholarship are clearly inadequate. There is growing recognition that the design of effective legal instruments requires research methods that go beyond traditional approaches and include social and institutional considerations. This recognition has led to socio-legal approaches to legal research and the use of empirical research methods. The design of environmental law instruments faces challenges in addition to those found in other areas of law. These challenges include the meaningful incorporation of ecological knowledge into decision-making and addressing issues that span jurisdictional boundaries from the global to the local. In this presentation, I discuss the methods used in a research project aimed at developing strategies for the effective management of transboundary natural resources. I use this research to explore the particular methodological challenges that face environmental law research and provide directions for the further development of environmental law scholarship. The research used an iterative process which combined desk-based legal-doctrinal research, case-studies and comparative legal research. Two transboundary projects were used as case studies. The first case-study was located in the Pamir-Alai Mountains of Central Asia and involved the adjacent former Soviet nations of Tajikistan and the Kyrgyz Republic. The second case study was based in the highlands of Borneo and included the island’s three countries: Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia. A comparative study of the legal and institutional requirements for transboundary biodiversity conservation and transboundary water management was conducted to identify core principles for the governance of transboundary resources. This research highlights the transferability of legal methods for the management of natural resources. It also highlights that the creation of effective environmental law instruments requires additional methods to incorporate essential science-policy linkages

The use of scenarios in legal education to develop future thinking and sustainability competencies

Achieving sustainability requires a populace equipped to deal with complex, interacting and ever-changing realities as well as uncertain futures. There is however a significant lack of focus on developing sustainability competencies within legal and governance education. Legal education plays a key role in shaping sustainable futures. Long-term sustainability relies on lawyers, judges and policy-makers being able to make optimal decisions in the present when faced with significant uncertainty about the future. This paper discusses how the combination of problem-based learning (PBL) and scenario-based pedagogical approaches can provide an authentic contextualised learning environment to empower law students to deal with the challenges of global change. The paper highlights the potential of the approach to equip students with the skills to work through plausible future challenges; to consider a range of options; and to manage interacting environmental, social and economic issues in an adaptive fashion. The paper describes how the approach was applied in the context of the Water Law Master’s (LLM) course at the University of Dundee. The paper concludes with recommendations of how scenario-based approaches could be used in other contexts and further highlights the importance of such approaches in developing sustainability competencies through the legal curriculum.Michelle Lim and Andrew Alla

Why Instagram? The Role of Telepresence and Transportation in Visual Content Marketing

This experimental study focuses on the effects of a type of image on story construction and how consumers are transported to a branded photo narrative, which is expected to engender attitudinal change and relational outcomes. In addition, this study aimed to discover the mediating role of telepresence, the extent to which a consumer feels present in the mediated environment, on the relationship between a brand\u27s photo-type and the level of consumers\u27 transportation. This experimental study found that respondents who were exposed to the story-focused stimuli reported greater levels of transportation compared to respondents exposed to the product-focused stimuli and that telepresence mediates the relationship between photo-type (story vs. product-focused) and transportation. Lastly, findings indicate that transportation predicts consumers\u27 positive change in attitude towards the brand and self-brand connection. Theoretical and managerial implications will be presented based on findings of this study

Modeling the dynamics of bivalent histone modifications

Epigenetic modifications to histones may promote either activation or repression of the transcription of nearby genes. Recent experimental studies show that the promoters of many lineage-control genes in stem cells have "bivalent domains" in which the nucleosomes contain both active (H3K4me3) and repressive (H3K27me3) marks. It is generally agreed that bivalent domains play an important role in stem cell differentiation, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Here we formulate a mathematical model to investigate the dynamic properties of histone modification patterns. We then illustrate that our modeling framework can be used to capture key features of experimentally observed combinatorial chromatin states.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figure

The Role of Visual Abstracts in the Dissemination of Medical Research

Medical research within the UK has continued to grow, most notably during the COVID-19 pandemic over the last two years, which highlights the importance of disseminating relevant research findings. For all researchers involved in clinical trials and scientific research, the end goal of success is not completed following the publication of the research findings, but ultimately true impact and significance is achieved when such research has a role in developing clinical practice. Each year between 2.5 - 3 million scientific papers are published and the number continues to rise, therefore it is becoming increasingly difficult to ensure that published research has such a targeted impact as it must first get noticed. Increasing time commitments result in difficulties for clinicians keeping up-to-date with the current literature and in order to address this, journals and researchers have developed approaches to share peer-reviewed research with the wider research community in an effective and efficient manner. One such approach has been the introduction of the visual abstract which comprises of an infographic style format, coupled with a shortened, limited word summary of the research abstract detailing the key question, methodology, findings and take home message of the research study. The visual abstract has characteristics which enable it to be shared on social media platforms and in turn increase the interest and impact within the research community. Visual abstracts are being increasingly introduced within medical journals and organisations to help disseminate valuable research findings. This review focuses on visual abstracts, what they are, their history, structure and role within research dissemination and medical education

Diversification: A Sharia Effect? Some Evidence from Malaysia

AbstractThis study compares the effect of diversification between the Sharia and non-Sharia stocks listed on Bursa Malaysia during the period January 2002 to April 2014. The standard deviations of stock portfolios were calculated for the entire and two market phase defined bull and bear periods. Independent samples T-test indicated that there is significant difference in standard deviation between Sharia and non-Sharia portfolios for the bear and first bull period with no significant difference in the entire and second bull period. It can be concluded that portfolio diversification applies in both Sharia and non-Sharia compliant stocks of the Malaysian stock market. In addition, Sharia compliant stocks required a smaller number of stocks in a portfolio to reduce specific amount of risk