People -- Marine Mammal Interactions

Our relationships with marine mammals are complex. We have used them as resources, and in some places this remains the case; viewed them as competitors and culled them (again ongoing in some localities); been so captivated and intrigued by them that we have taken them into captivity for our entertainment; and developed a lucrative eco-tourism activity focused on them in many nations. When we first envisaged this special topic, we had two overarching aims: Firstly, we hoped to generate critical evaluation of some of our relationships with these animals. Secondly, we hoped to attract knowledgeable commentators and experts who might not traditionally publish in the peer-reviewed literature. We were also asking ourselves a question about what responsibility mankind might have to marine mammals, on our rapidly changing planet? The answer to the question; can, or should, humans have responsibility for the lives of marine mammals when they are affected by our activities? - is, in our opinion, ‘yes’ – and the logical progression from this question is to direct research and effort to understand and optimise the actions, reactions and responses that mankind may be able to take. We hope that the papers in this special issue bring some illumination to a small selection of topics under this much wider topic area, and prove to be informative and stimulating.https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/anibsci/1000/thumbnail.jp

A review of seal killing practice in Europe:Implications for animal welfare

Seals are killed in a number of European countries and regions for commercial, management and recreational reasons. This is the first review to make a comparison across different nations, and it reveals that a variety of methods are employed, including the use of firearms, clubs, netting and harpoons. There is disparity in terms of which firearms and ammunition may be used and what, if any, training is required in killing methods. Seal killing presents serious animal welfare challenges and this may be exacerbated in some cases by the absence of close seasons, the practice of shooting from moving platforms or when conditions are suboptimal, and the use of nets. The introduction of internationally agreed standards could help ensure that welfare is paramount in seal management, legislation and practice. If lethal control measures are to continue, then good practice should include the annual training and assessment of hunters, the implementation and enforcement of relevant legislation, increased effort to improve the efficiency of killing (including the assessment of this through the expert and independent examination of carcasses), and minimising conflict by locating fish farms away from core seal habitat

Women Witnesses to the Risen Lord

Under Jewish law, the witnessing of Jesus as resurrected must occur by the third-day after death. Later witnessing can be corroborative, but the third-day witnessing is crucial. In Matthew and John, the sole percipient witnesses on the third-day are women, plural in Matthew, a single woman in John. This seems to cast doubt on Jesus’ resurrection because in Greek, Roman, and Jewish culture, women were ineligible as witnesses or were considered vastly inferior as witnesses to men. Celsus inveighed, “Who saw this? A hysterical female!” Communicating to outsiders, having women witness casts aspersions on Jesus’ resurrection making Christianity appear unthreatening to the imperial order. However, for Jews aware of the celebrated exception in the Pharisaic/rabbinic oral law/tradition that accepted women’s testimony in the circumstances found in the gospels, having specifically women witness makes their testimony more credible than had the witnesses been men or any combination of men and women. Women witnessing the risen Lord fits within the interstices of the Law, so that, not just human testimony, but the Law lends its imprimatur endorsing Jesus

STRAND: A Model for Longshore Sediment Transport in the Swash Zone

In this paper we report on the development and performance of an engineering model, STRAND which has the aim of predicting longshore movement of coarse sediment above the still water line of steep beaches. The model assumes that this transport is driven by swash run-up at the edge of an unsaturated inner surfzone and uses Nielsen's (1992) formulation for sediment transport rate. The hydrodynamic sub-model is shown to agree well with field measurements of swash run-up and swash period. We argue that consideration of interactions between subsequent swash events implies that a monotonic relationship between transport rate and incident wave period is inappropriate. Bulk longshore transport rates are shown to compare reasonably with previous estimates from field studies in the UK and accounts for up to 50% of the net longshore flux. Agreement of this simplified model with one of the best available laboratory data sets, Kamphuis (1991a,b), is very good indeed. However, new laboratory and field data are required before stronger conclusions can be drawn

The International Whaling Commission—Beyond Whaling

Since its establishment in 1946 as the international body intended to manage whaling, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) has expanded its areas of interest to ensure the wider conservation of whales. Several key conservation topics have been taken forward under its auspices including climate change, chemical and noise pollution, marine debris and whale watching. Work on each of these topics at the IWC has grown substantially since the 1990s and remains ongoing. Important developments were the establishment of the Standing Working Group on Environmental Concerns in 1996 and the IWC’s Conservation Committee in 2003. Trying to address this diverse set of issues is obviously a challenge, but will be necessary if the long term conservation of cetaceans is to be achieved. Through research, workshops, resolutions and collaboration with other organizations, the IWC has advanced both the understanding of the various issues and the means to manage them with increasing effectiveness. The IWC is likely to remain on the forefront of continuing efforts to address these, and other, conservation concerns and ensure the continued viability of cetacean populations around the globe

Symplectic geometry and circuit quantization

Circuit quantization is an extraordinarily successful theory that describes the behavior of quantum circuits with high precision. The most widely used approach of circuit quantization relies on introducing a classical Lagrangian whose degrees of freedom are either magnetic fluxes or electric charges in the circuit. By combining nonlinear circuit elements (such as Josephson junctions or quantum phase slips), it is possible to build circuits where a standard Lagrangian description (and thus the standard quantization method) does not exist. Inspired by the mathematics of symplectic geometry and graph theory, we address this challenge, and present a Hamiltonian formulation of non-dissipative electrodynamic circuits. The resulting procedure for circuit quantization is independent of whether circuit elements are linear or nonlinear, or if the circuit is driven by external biases. We explain how to re-derive known results from our formalism, and provide an efficient algorithm for quantizing circuits, including those that cannot be quantized using existing methods.Comment: 30 pages, 8 figure

Policy Based QoS support using BGP Routing

Abstract -Routing protocols are important to exchange routing information between neighboring routers. Such information is Key words: BGP, QoS, Autonomous System (AS) Introduction Current Internet architecture is based on the Best Effort (BE) model, where packets can be dropped indiscriminately in the event of congestion. Such architecture attempts to deliver all traffic as soon as possible within the limits of its abilities, but without any guarantee about throughput, delay, packet loss, etc. Though such a model works well for certain traditional applications such as FTP, E-mail and less QoS constrained applications, it can be intolerable for newly emerged real-time, multimedia applications such as Internet Telephony (VoIP), Video-Conferencing and Video on-Demand, as well as future services. Hence, with massive deployment of Internet based applications in recent years and the need to manage them efficiently, current Internet structure needs a major shift from the BE model to a service oriented model with support for desired QoS. Current research in this direction is focused towards providing better than BE service over the Internet through a new architecture. Also the new architecture should be both scalable and guarantee end-to-end QoS for different services/applications while supporting different levels of performance. Current Internet architecture lacks standardization while deployed across various domains, hence affecting end-to-end QoS significantly. In this paper our effort is to find a scalable and uniform solution mainly addressing routing and its effect on end to end QoS. In this regard, we consider current inter-domain routing based on BGP as the central component and develop an algorithm allowing QoS domains to be easily identified and enable policy based routing to support QoS for various applications. One of the main objectives in setting up an end-to-end path for any service over the Internet is providing support for its service requirements to achieve necessary QoS, and such tasks are difficult to achieve through current Internet architecture. In this regard, our algorithm is designed to address such heterogeneous service parameter requirements for different services between ASs, and tries to find a viable solution by integrating network policies with routing and traffic engineering objectives. We mainly focus on Inter-domain traffic engineering issues in resolving the policy requirements of different services. In doing so, we have identified and addressed two core problems in the Internet today in relation to QoS