Taming Troubled Waters: Joint Development of Oil and Mineral Resources in Overlapping Claim Areas

This Article examines the issues surrounding the joint development of resources in overlapping claim areas. The author reviews the precedents for joint development of offshore areas and seeks to define the elements that frequently appear in these precedents, namely the extent of the area, the contract type, the financial arrangements, the process of selection of concessionaires or operators, the length of the agreement, and the nature and functions of the joint management body. The author also examines the joint development efforts of various countries which share common claimed resources. The author argues that the success of joint development agreements depends on the given knowledge of actual deposits, good political relations, practical mindedness, and cooperative private companies

A Marine Security Regime for Northeast Asia

The Article describes a regional security mechanism in Northeast Asia. This mechanism should originally focus on maritime security. The rationale includes the region’s geography, competing maritime and island claims, the resultant maritime military buildup and changing priorities, increasing frequency of dangerous incidents, and the existence of a foundation for conflict avoidance and resource sharing. The Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea could serve as a model for a similar Declaration for Northeast Asian Seas that may ultimately include guidelines for activities in others’ Exclusive Economic Zones

Religious vs Secular volunteering motivations: A study on European elders

The reality of volunteering is highly complex. This concept is difficult to define and typify because of the great variety of interpretations, motivations, socio-demographic variables and cultural aspects that shape the volunteer profile. This work aims to analyze the differential and inter-related impact of socio-demographic and contextual variables, and cultural values on elder volunteer profile in Europe. We thus conduct an empirical study involving the use of a logistic regression model that shows, in probabilistic terms, traits that characterize senior and retired volunteers. Further, we study which variables motivate senior volunteers to a determined type of volunteering. Results from the European Value Study help to explain variable influence on volunteering and confirm that cultural values impact among elder people, both, election to volunteering activities and decisions regarding which kind of activity volunteers are drawn to. By analyzing two types of volunteering (religious and secular) that are supposed to be motivated by different forces, we conclude that certain values encourage religious volunteering while others stimulate secular volunteering

The Evolution of Agrarian Landscapes in the Tropical Andes

Changes in land-use practices have been a central element of human adaptation to Holocene climate change. Many practices that result in the short-term stabilization of socio-natural systems, however, have longer-term, unanticipated consequences that present cascading challenges for human subsistence strategies and opportunities for subsequent adaptations. Investigating complex sequences of interaction between climate change and human land-use in the past—rather than short-term causes and effects—is therefore essential for understanding processes of adaptation and change, but this approach has been stymied by a lack of suitably-scaled paleoecological data. Through a highresolution paleoecological analysis, we provide a 7000-year history of changing climate and land management around Lake Acopia in the Andes of southern Peru. We identify evidence of the onset of pastoralism, maize cultivation, and possibly cultivation of quinoa and potatoes to form a complex agrarian landscape by c. 4300 years ago. Cumulative interactive climate-cultivation effects resulting in erosion ended abruptly c. 2300 years ago. After this time, reduced sedimentation rates are attributed to the construction and use of agricultural terraces within the catchment of the lake. These results provide new insights into the role of humans in the manufacture of Andean landscapes and the incremental, adaptive processes through which land-use practices take shape

BUMPER v1.0: a Bayesian user-friendly model for palaeo-environmental reconstruction

We describe the Bayesian user-friendly model for palaeo-environmental reconstruction (BUMPER), a Bayesian transfer function for inferring past climate and other environmental variables from microfossil assemblages. BUMPER is fully self-calibrating, straightforward to apply, and computationally fast, requiring ~2 s to build a 100-taxon model from a 100-site training set on a standard personal computer. We apply the model’s probabilistic framework to generate thousands of artificial training sets under ideal assumptions.We then use these to demonstrate the sensitivity of reconstructions to the characteristics of the training set, considering assemblage richness, taxon tolerances, and the number of training sites. We find that a useful guideline for the size of a training set is to provide, on average, at least 10 samples of each taxon. We demonstrate general applicability to real data, considering three different organism types (chironomids, diatoms, pollen) and different reconstructed variables. An identically configured model is used in each application, the only change being the input files that provide the training-set environment and taxon-count data. The performance of BUMPER is shown to be comparable with weighted average partial least squares (WAPLS) in each case. Additional artificial datasets are constructed with similar characteristics to the real data, and these are used to explore the reasons for the differing performances of the different training sets

Non-Invasive Cytology Brush PCR Diagnostic Testing in Mucosal Leishmaniasis: Superior Performance to Conventional Biopsy with Histopathology

Traditional methods of diagnosing mucosal leishmaniasis (ML), such as biopsy with histopathology, are insensitive and require collection of an invasive diagnostic specimen. species identification was performed by PCR-based assays of positive specimens. (n = 3).Use of commercial grade cytology brush PCR for diagnosis of ML is sensitive, rapid, well tolerated, and carries none of the risks of invasive diagnostic procedures such as biopsy. Further optimization is required for adequate species identification. Further evaluation of this method in field and other settings is warranted