Rivers in Contention: Is There a Water War in South Asia’s Future?

Rivalry over river water resources has been a constant theme in the international politics of the South Asian region ever since the British Raj ended in 1947. Indeed, hardly had independence been gained when the competing claims of India and Pakistan to the waters of the Indus river basin helped bring on the first war between them over Kashmir (1947-1949). Nearly a decade of arduous World Bank-facilitated negotiations resulted finally in the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), a landmark agreement that succeeded in resolving the question of Indus waters ownership by getting Indian and Pakistani consent to the permanent division of the six rivers of the Indus system. That formula, perhaps suitable enough for then, strikes some as an ill fit for now. After all, much has changed in the sixty-odd years that have passed since independence. The South Asian region has experienced more than a tripling of its population; and it has also undergone the massive social and economic changes that go along with industrialization and urbanization. Inevitably, these things have brought it under vastly increased pressures on water availability for agricultural and other uses. Acute fresh water scarcity now ranks among the most pressing domestic problems faced by Pakistan, and it is scarcely less pressing for large parts of India and Bangladesh as well. Exacerbated by equally acute power shortages in these countries (a development attracting attention to the region’s vast hydroelectric potential), their water resource-related disputes are already among the most nettlesome issues on their bilateral agendas. This is no less true of India-Bangladesh relations, which are bedeviled by the failure of their governments to seal water sharing agreements on any but one of the 54 rivers India and Bangladesh share in common, than it is of India-Pakistan relations. True, the near-term likelihood of war erupting in the region as a direct consequence of these disputes is slight; but that the region’s water rivalries are already fraying tempers, deepening distrust, and, in myriad ways, acting as conflict multipliers cannot be denied. Added to this, of course, is that neighboring China’s own extreme fresh water scarcity and its much-magnified interest in tapping into Tibet’s rich water resources hover threateningly over South Asian water supplies. Tibet’s water resources include the Brahmaputra river, already of unquestionably crucial importance to Bangladesh and India. With China now beginning to weigh in on the scales of South Asia’s water security, the potential for serious confrontation over water resources is heightened still further. Increased basin-wide cooperation over these resources is one possible—and, indeed, highly desirable—outcome of these developments. One highly undesirable—but perhaps no less possible—outcome, of course, is water war

A Component-oriented Framework for Autonomous Agents

The design of a complex system warrants a compositional methodology, i.e., composing simple components to obtain a larger system that exhibits their collective behavior in a meaningful way. We propose an automaton-based paradigm for compositional design of such systems where an action is accompanied by one or more preferences. At run-time, these preferences provide a natural fallback mechanism for the component, while at design-time they can be used to reason about the behavior of the component in an uncertain physical world. Using structures that tell us how to compose preferences and actions, we can compose formal representations of individual components or agents to obtain a representation of the composed system. We extend Linear Temporal Logic with two unary connectives that reflect the compositional structure of the actions, and show how it can be used to diagnose undesired behavior by tracing the falsification of a specification back to one or more culpable components

Characterisation and prognostic value of tertiary lymphoid structures in oral squamous cell carcinoma

BACKGROUND: Oral squamous cell carcinomas are often heavily infiltrated by immune cells. The organization of B-cells, follicular dendritic cells, T-cells and high-endothelial venules into structures termed tertiary lymphoid structures have been detected in various types of cancer, where their presence is found to predict favourable outcome. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the incidence of tertiary lymphoid structures in oral squamous cell carcinomas, and if present, analyse whether they were associated with clinical outcome. METHODS: Tumour samples from 80 patients with oral squamous cell carcinoma were immunohistochemically stained for B-cells, follicular dendritic cells, T-cells, germinal centre B-cells and high-endothelial venules. Some samples were sectioned at multiple levels to assess whether the presence of tertiary lymphoid structures varied within the tumour. RESULTS: Tumour-associated tertiary lymphoid structures were detected in 21 % of the tumours and were associated with lower disease-specific death. The presence of tertiary lymphoid structures varied within different levels of a tissue block. CONCLUSIONS: Tertiary lymphoid structure formation was found to be a positive prognostic factor for patients with oral squamous cell carcinoma. Increased knowledge about tertiary lymphoid structure formation in oral squamous cell carcinoma might help to develop and guide immune-modulatory cancer treatments

Presence of tumour high-endothelial venules is an independent positive prognostic factor and stratifies patients with advanced-stage oral squamous cell carcinoma

Accepted manuscript version. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13277-015-4036-4Background: Staging of oral squamous cell carcinoma is based on the TNM system, which has been deemed insufficient for prognostic purposes. Hence, better prognostic tools are needed to reflect the biological diversity of these cancers. Previously, high numbers of specialized blood vessels called high-endothelial venules have been reported to be associated with prolonged survival in patients with breast cancer. In this study, we analysed the prognostic value and morphological characteristics of tumour-associated high-endothelial venules in oral cancer. Methods: The presence of tumour-associated high-endothelial venules was evaluated by immunohistochemistry in 75 patients with oral squamous cell carcinoma and analysed with correlation to clinicopathological parameters, patients’ survival, and vessel morphology. Ten of the samples were analysed at multiple levels to evaluate intratumoural heterogeneity. Results: The presence of tumour-associated high-endothelial venules was found to be associated with lower disease-specific death in multivariate regression analyses (P=0.002). High-endothelial venules were present in all (n=53) T1-T2 tumours, but only in two-thirds (n=14) of the T3-T4 tumours. The morphology of high-endothelial venules was heterogeneous and correlated with lymphocyte density. High-endothelial venules were found to be distributed homogeneously within the tumours. Conclusion: We found the presence of tumour-associated high-endothelial venules to be an easy-to-use, robust, and independent positive prognostic factor for patients with oral cancer. Absence of these vessels in advancedstage tumours might identify patients with more aggressive disease. Evaluating the presence of tumour-associated high-endothelial venules might help to tailor the treatment of oral cancer patients to their individual need

An Institutional Framework for Heterogeneous Formal Development in UML

We present a framework for formal software development with UML. In contrast to previous approaches that equip UML with a formal semantics, we follow an institution based heterogeneous approach. This can express suitable formal semantics of the different UML diagram types directly, without the need to map everything to one specific formalism (let it be first-order logic or graph grammars). We show how different aspects of the formal development process can be coherently formalised, ranging from requirements over design and Hoare-style conditions on code to the implementation itself. The framework can be used to verify consistency of different UML diagrams both horizontally (e.g., consistency among various requirements) as well as vertically (e.g., correctness of design or implementation w.r.t. the requirements)

Salmonid species diversity predicts salmon consumption by terrestrial wildlife

1. Resource waves—spatial variation in resource phenology that extends feeding opportunities for mobile consumers—can affect the behaviour and productivity of recipient populations. Interspecific diversity among Pacific salmon species (Oncorhynchus spp.) creates staggered spawning events across space and time, thereby prolonging availability to terrestrial wildlife. 2. We sought to understand how such variation might influence consumption by terrestrial predators compared with resource abundance and intra- and interspecific competition. 3. Using stable isotope analysis, we investigated how the proportion of salmon in the annual diet of male black bears (Ursus americanus; n = 405) varies with species diversity and density of spawning salmon biomass, while also accounting for competition with sympatric black and grizzly bears (U. arctos horribilis), in coastal British Columbia, Canada. 4. We found that the proportion of salmon in the annual diet of black bears was ≈40% higher in the absence of grizzly bears, but detected little effect of relative black bear density and salmon biomass density. Rather, salmon diversity had the largest positive effect on consumption. On average, increasing diversity from one salmon species to ~four (with equal biomass contributions) approximately triples the proportion of salmon in diet. 5. Given the importance of salmon to bear life histories, this work provides early empirical support for how resource waves may increase the productivity of consumers at population and landscape scales. Accordingly, terrestrial wildlife management might consider maintaining not only salmon abundance but also diversit

The arithmetic-geometric scaling spectrum for continued fractions

To compare continued fraction digits with the denominators of the corresponding approximants we introduce the arithmetic-geometric scaling. We will completely determine its multifractal spectrum by means of a number theoretical free energy function and show that the Hausdorff dimension of sets consisting of irrationals with the same scaling exponent coincides with the Legendre transform of this free energy function. Furthermore, we identify the asymptotic of the local behaviour of the spectrum at the right boundary point and discuss a connection to the set of irrationals with continued fraction digits exceeding a given number which tends to infinity.Comment: 22 pages, 1 figur

A comparison of the seasonal movements of tiger sharks and green turtles provides insight into their predator-prey relationship

During the reproductive season, sea turtles use a restricted area in the vicinity of their nesting beaches, making them vulnerable to predation. At Raine Island (Australia), the highest density green turtle Chelonia mydas rookery in the world, tiger sharks Galeocerdo cuvier have been observed to feed on green turtles, and it has been suggested that they may specialise on such air-breathing prey. However there is little information with which to examine this hypothesis. We compared the spatial and temporal components of movement behaviour of these two potentially interacting species in order to provide insight into the predator-prey relationship. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that tiger shark movements are more concentrated at Raine Island during the green turtle nesting season than outside the turtle nesting season when turtles are not concentrated at Raine Island. Turtles showed area-restricted search behaviour around Raine Island for ~3–4 months during the nesting period (November–February). This was followed by direct movement (transit) to putative foraging grounds mostly in the Torres Straight where they switched to area-restricted search mode again, and remained resident for the remainder of the deployment (53–304 days). In contrast, tiger sharks displayed high spatial and temporal variation in movement behaviour which was not closely linked to the movement behaviour of green turtles or recognised turtle foraging grounds. On average, tiger sharks were concentrated around Raine Island throughout the year. While information on diet is required to determine whether tiger sharks are turtle specialists our results support the hypothesis that they target this predictable and plentiful prey during turtle nesting season, but they might not focus on this less predictable food source outside the nesting season