Suchergebnisse

This study concerns oil pollution and sea-going tanker movements in the wake of the US Oil Pollution Act of 1990. The purpose is to look at the passage and enactments of the OPA, many of whose provisions are only just entering into force now, and consider their effect on ship and cargo owners and movement of oil in US waters and mainland ports (the study only briefly considers offshore unloading and lightering). The study then considers and compares maritime legislation over the same period within the EC (now EU). It concludes with a brief survey - in the context of growing global environmentalism and the impetus of the OPA - of anti-pollution initiatives being pursued in the rest of the world.

The Gulf crisis has thrown into sharp relief matters of key concern to national, regional and global security. It has refocused political attention and jerked nations out of an earlier complacency regarding such varied but key issues as the Palestinian question, energy security and the development process. It occurs in a new global context of changed East-West relations, and historic developments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. With political will, it could be the catalyst for accelerated action on another issue of global concern: the environment.

When scientists from two or more disciplines work together on related problems, they often face what we call 'science friction'. As science becomes more data-driven, collaborative, and interdisciplinary, demand increases for interoperability among data, tools, and services. Metadata – usually viewed simply as 'data about data', describing objects such as books, journal articles, or datasets – serve key roles in interoperability. Yet we find that metadata may be a source of friction between scientific collaborators, impeding data sharing. We propose an alternative view of metadata, focusing on its role in an ephemeral process of scientific communication, rather than as an enduring outcome or product. We report examples of highly useful, yet ad hoc, incomplete, loosely structured, and mutable, descriptions of data found in our ethnographic studies of several large projects in the environmental sciences. Based on this evidence, we argue that while metadata products can be powerful resources, usually they must be supplemented with metadata processes. Metadata-as-process suggests the very large role of the ad hoc, the incomplete, and the unfinished in everyday scientific work.

The issues which provided Iraq with the pretext for its invasion of Kuwait were oil pricing policies and oil revenues. Of course, Iraq had broader political and regional objectives, but its most immediate and pressing concern was to loosen the economic and financial noose that was threatening strangulation. Low oil prices, technical limitations on current oil output and financial constraints on the investments required to reclaim or expand productive capacity were causing intractable problems for the government and severe hardship for the population. President Saddam Hussain was finding himself pushed further and further into a corner and tried to get out of it by invading Kuwait. This behaviour was utterly unacceptable and rightly condemned by the international community. But for the purposes of this analysis it is relevant to recall that oil was an integral part of the story.