An Incident in the South China Sea

This article assesses characterization issues under the law of the sea, through the medium of an International Law Studies “maritime situation.” The article begins with a hypothetical scenario concerning an incident between a NATO warship and PRC vessels near Subi Reef and Thitu Island in the South China Sea. The analysis then turns to how we might assess characterization issues under the law of the sea as they apply to this incident. The lenses of analysis employed are: (1) Where, in law of the sea terms, did the incident happen? (2) Who, employing a law of the sea characterization scheme, but referencing relevant responsibility regimes, were the perpetrator vessels? (3) Where does responsibility for the conduct of these vessels lay? (4) How do these “where” and “who” factors interact in assessing the incident in terms of the law of the sea

How Do You Mass What You Cannot See? Using Paper Clips to Help Students Learn How Electron Mass Was First Measured

Many students wrongly presume that scientific knowledge is mysteriously discovered and often believe the development of this knowledge is beyond their ability to comprehend. The activity presented here – appropriate for high-school chemistry and physics students – challenges these misconceptions. Students are engaged in thinking and creativity similar to how the first scientists accurately measured the mass and charge of an electron. Through this process, students develop a deep understanding of how the mass and charge of an individual electron was determined. This activity addresses National Science Education Standards A, B, E, and G and Iowa teaching Standards 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6

Session D1: Towards Effective, Bi-Directional Selective Fish Passage

Abstract: Barriers interfere with aquatic connectivity by preventing or limiting migratory fishes from spawning and other life history processes, and there is increasing pressure to restore connectivity. However, conflicting management objectives exist in many jurisdictions where barriers to fish movement inhibit the restoration of native fishes but protect native fish communities above barriers from undesirable invasive species. In the Laurentian Great Lakes, barriers are an important management tool in the control of invasive Sea Lampreys. Sea Lampreys remain highly destructive in the Great Lakes, and are a constant threat to a 7 billion dollar fishery. Developing selective, effective bi-directional fish passage to remove Sea Lampreys while allowing the passage of native fishes has become an issue of great importance for Great Lakes fisheries managers. To date, efforts have included a variety of approaches including velocity barriers, seasonal barriers, trap-and-sort fishways, and eel ladders. The integration of emerging technologies, such as push-pull and electrical and pheromone guidance and advances in engineering, such as eel-style ladder traps are providing hope that better selective, effective bi-directional fish passage solutions are possible. The Great Lakes Fishery Commission is developing a research theme specific to selective bi-directional fish passage in the hopes of resolving the conflict between aquatic fragmentation and invasive species control

Navigating the Looking Glass:Severing the Lawyer's Head in <i>Arkham Asylum</i>

Reading Arkham Asylum jurisprudentially, we encounter a story of the meeting of reason and unreason in the context of justice – of conscious law and its unconscious threat. Batman’s exploration of the Asylum is symbolic of the legal unconscious, and reflects the processes of repression that can be seen in dominant legal knowledge. A threat to this dominant knowledge can be seen in Two-Face’s reliance on his coin to ‘judge’ his victims. Moreover, Arkham Asylum configures the threat of law’s unconscious as the lawyer’s severed head inside the house of law. Ultimately, Batman’s journey through Arkham Asylum reminds law of the aesthetic and irrational contexts that it strives to deny and from which it seeks to defend itself – and that cultural legal studies explores. It recalls the unreason outside law’s logic, the chaos outside its order, the madness outside its sanity. The lesson of Batman’s encounters in the Asylum is that we should remember the ‘madness’ outside the legal order, and thus recognise that law is always already more than its conscious ‘sanity’ can contain

COVID-19 modelling by time-varying transmission rate associated with mobility trend of driving via Apple Maps

Compartment-based infectious disease models that consider the transmission rate (or contact rate) as a constant during the course of an epidemic can be limiting regarding effective capture of the dynamics of infectious disease. This study proposed a novel approach based on a dynamic time-varying transmission rate with a control rate governing the speed of disease spread, which may be associated with the information related to infectious disease intervention. Integration of multiple sources of data with disease modelling has the potential to improve modelling performance. Taking the global mobility trend of vehicle driving available via Apple Maps as an example, this study explored different ways of processing the mobility trend data and investigated their relationship with the control rate. The proposed method was evaluated based on COVID-19 data from six European countries. The results suggest that the proposed model with dynamic transmission rate improved the performance of model fitting and forecasting during the early stage of the pandemic. Positive correlation has been found between the average daily change of mobility trend and control rate. The results encourage further development for incorporation of multiple resources into infectious disease modelling in the future.European Commissio