Customary Process Research Articles

Treatment of Geographical Indications (GIs) in the European Union (EU) TRIPS-Plus Initiatives: Implications for Bangladesh

Geographical Indications (GIs) are an important aspect of intellectual property rights. Over the years both developed and developing countries have been trying to promote GI standards worldwide to seek protection of their locally produced products. It is a source identifier and protection of the integrity, specialty, and commercial value of products whose uniqueness is identified with their geographic origin and customary process of manufacture. The European Union has been at the forefront of promoting GI standards worldwide through its negotiation process with other nation states under the TRIPS-plus initiatives. The TRIPS-plus initiatives originated from the discontent with WTO multilateral forum sometime sluggishly responding to the member countries’ demands. Worldwide GIs protection has been demanded by most of the WTO nations. However such demands were not met. Therefore EU opted for TRIPS-plus initiatives to promote the protection of GIs. From this background, the article explores the genesis and nature of treatment of GIs under the EU led TRIPS-plus initiatives for promoting global notions of GIs and their impacts on the socio-economic sectors of developing countries like Bangladesh. The central research question of this paper is how the treatment of GIs in EU led TRIPS-plus initiatives changes the global landscape of GIs protection. Do TRIPS-plus FTAs provisions on GIs help developing countries? The paper also looks at how Bangladesh can benefit from enacting GIs protection law.

Not ‘mere window dressing’: children's rights and adoption in Samoa

Since Samoa's independence in 1962, customary law has been formally recognised by the State legal system. However, there are tensions between customary law and State law, which are particularly evident in family matters, where the influence of custom and culture is strong. One area where tensions are increasingly acute is adoption. In Samoa, most adoptions, or ‘vae tama’ as the closest customary equivalent is called, take place within the extended family according to customary law and practice. Overseas adoptions, which, unlike the customary process, take children away from their cultural roots, are a particular cause for concern. In 2005, the death of a child awaiting adoption by overseas adopters focused attention on the formal adoption regime in Samoa and provided an impetus for amendment of adoption law. However, whilst this introduced some level of protection for children, it did not result in reconciliation of the underlying tensions between customary and State laws. This article considers the tensions between the different legal systems in the context of vae tama and adoption, and puts forward some suggestions for reform. It considers the extent to which each system protects the rights of the child and the child's best interests.

Management of a Small Biomass Gasification Power Plant in a Sub-district Administrative Organization (SAO)

There are several agricultural residues in the country that can be used for biomass energy. At present, biomass is being used in small electricity generation. It is an effective way to eliminate agricultural waste and simultaneously reduce fossil fuel consumption. Currently, there are many incentives from the government for small and very small electricity producers. For example, these electricity producers are allowed to sell the power to the grid under long-term contracts, the government provides an “adder” on top of the normal tariff, assists in finding soft loans and investment subsidies, etc. With the aforementioned benefits, a prototype of a small biomass gasification power plant of 200 kW capacity was installed at SAO Banna, Prachinburi province of Thailand. The plant uses local agricultural residues, such as corn cob, cassava, eucalyptus bark, and chip wood as fuel. The total cost of electricity generated is estimated at 1.97 Baht/kWh. The electricity is then sold to the electricity authority of Thailand (EGAT) at 3.44 Baht/kWh (in 2010). Thus, the power plant makes a profit of 1.48 Baht for every kWh. If the plant is operated at 80% of its full capacity, the total electricity of 1,401,600 kWh will be generated per year. The annual profit of selling the electricity amounted to 2,070,451 Baht. Impressively, at this profit, the payback period is approximately 5.8 years. Moreover, the small biomass gasification power plant does not only eliminate agricultural waste effectively in the surrounding area, but also reduces the customary process of the disposal by burning. The emission to the atmosphere is thus reduced. In addition, the plant creates jobs and income for local people.

The Minamata Convention on Mercury: A First Step toward Protecting Future Generations

In July 1956, in a fishing village near the city of Minamata on Japan’s Shiranui Sea, a baby girl named Shinobu Sakamoto was born. Her parents soon realized something was wrong. At 3 months old, when healthy babies can hold up their heads, Sakamoto could not. She grew slowly and began crawling unusually late. At age 3 years, she drooled excessively and still couldn’t walk. Her parents sent her to live at a local hospital, where she spent four years in therapy to learn to walk, use her hands, and perform other basic functions. Early on, several physicians agreed on a diagnosis of cerebral palsy.

What x rays can tell us about the interfacial profile of water near hydrophobic surfaces

The free surface of water and the interface between water and a hydrophobic surface both have positive interface energies. The water density near a free surface drops below the bulk density, and thus it is expected that water near a hydrophobic surface will also show a density depletion. However, efforts by multiple groups to detect and characterize the predicted gap at water-hydrophobic interfaces have produced contradictory results. We have studied the interface between water and fluoroalkylsilane self-assembled monolayers using specular x-ray reflectivity and analyzed the parameter-space landscapes of the merit functions being minimized by data fitting. This analysis yields a better understanding of confidence intervals than the customary process of reporting a unique best fit. We conclude that there are unambiguous gaps at water-hydrophobic interfaces when the hydrophobic monolayer is more densely packed.

Sexual Offences in Vanuatu under the Light of Custom and Law: “An Avenue for Restorative Justice”

This paper will focus on the Republic of Vanuatu’s society and customs relevant to this topic. I will consider the laws made by the legislature to deal with sexual offences in Vanuatu and how they are being implemented or enforced. I will also discuss the different provisions under the law whereby accused persons have an option to actually compensate the victim of the offence and how it is being used in Vanuatu in relation to sexual offences. This paper will also look at how Vanuatu’s culture influences the prosecution or the sentencing of sexual offences or dealing with such crimes in the first place. This will reveal whether Vanuatu’s customary approaches to sexual offences actually support the state’s laws to punish such offenders and if a more fair and just process is needed where the voices of the offender as well as the victim are heard. Custom usually does not allow the victim to speak, and the victim’s parents and the elders of the community decide how the offender should be dealt with. Neither the formal court process nor the customary reconciliation process seem to take into account the wishes and interests of the victim and the offender. The flaws within the legal system and customary laws in addressing victims’ and offenders’ issues will be examined and an alternative process of restorative justice will be discussed.

Rebuilt phleboclysis process and its clinical practice

Objective To explore the clinical effect of application of rebuilt phleboclysis process. Methods We rebuilt the customary process of phleboclysis by improving the check-point, the way of holding needle handle, the venipuncture angle and the technique of removing the needle, and we tried to explain what we were doing to the patient in the process. Then we put the rebuilt process into clinical practice and compared the satisfaction rate and error rate of phleboclysis followed the two processes. Results The rebuilt process improved the the satisfaction rate and lower the error rate significantly (P < 0. 05 ). Conclusions The rebuilt process lead to more canonical and more safe phleboclysis. It can avoid the slips, make the patient more cooperative and satisfying to our treatments. Key words: Phleboclysis; Process rebuilT; Clinical practice

Reconciling Cadastral Records in a Dual Land Registration System in Ghana

Soon after gaining independence, the Ghana government adopted a deed registration system for recording land ownership. A legislative instrument supported this decision. The deficiencies of the deed registration system resulted in innumerable cases of land ownership disputes. Juxtaposed with the official registration system is the customary land tenure system, which authorized custodians of the stool lands to allocate parcels through the customary process. Because the customary system did not mandate documentary evidence of the transaction, the allocation process created situations where the same parcel of land was allocated to multiple owners. The weaknesses in the two systems engendered lucrative, illegal and unrecorded land market activities. With increasing population and associated competing interests in available land, it became imperative for the government to review the existing legislation for recording and maintaining records of land parcel ownership. A new legislation was promulgated, based on a land title registration system. While efforts are being made to improve the customary land allocation process, the new legislation seeks to remove the deficiencies in the deed registration system. The introduction of the title registration system has resulted in a duality of the record keeping process. Efforts are currently under way to remove the inconsistencies in the deed records and to reconcile them with those that have been obtained through the title registration system. This paper reviews the cadastral surveying activities and the processes for recording land titles in Ghana in view of existing laws. Experiences in developing procedures for reconciling the records from the two systems are also discussed. Keywords: Cadastral survey, land records, land tenure, registration, survey regulation Journal of Science and Technology Vol. 28 (1) 2008 pp. 128-135

Slaves and the Creation of Legal Rights in Cuba: Coartación and Papel

On August 16, 1855, Dona Carlota Dascar, a resident of Santiago de Cuba, initiated a lawsuit against the city’s public advocate (sindico procurador) to prevent the forcible sale of her slave Maria. Dascar had tried to sell Maria, whom she described as a healthy criolla without vices, for 700 pesos. The slave, however, “presented” herself before the sindico Miguel Rodriguez — the municipal official charged with the representation of slave interests — to request that he initiate the customary process of assessing her value in order to fix the price at which she would become coartada: the price that she would have to pay, in installments, to purchase her freedom. He invited Dascar to appoint

Integrating Homework Assignments Based on Culture: Working with Chinese Patients

Cognitive therapy as espoused by A. T. Beck (A. T. Beck, Rush, Shaw, & Emery, 1979) is increasingly used as a therapeutic modality and applied to a variety of cultural groups throughout the world. However, the majority of the literature on empirical and clinical practice has been focused on the use of cognitive therapy for Western cultures. In this article, we discuss Chinese patients’ adherence to therapy homework assignments in terms of Chinese cultural values and practices, their customary problem-solving process, and other traditional beliefs. Through the use of a case study, we illustrate how some of these culturally specific beliefs can influence the process of integrating homework assignments into the course of therapy. This resource on supervising practitioners’ treatment of Chinese patients with cognitive behavior therapy is offered as a contribution to the emerging literature on CBT for non-Western cultures.

Enhanced Optimization Algorithms for the Development of Microsystems

Due to the ongoing growth of microsystems' complexity, there is an urgent need for automatic optimization. In order to include it seamlessly in the customary design process, the algorithms have to be fast and robust. Calculations of the quality function call for at least one FEM-, netlist based or behavioral simulation. Thus the optimization process is a very time consuming task. This paper presents a methodology for enhancing the convergence characteristics of heuristic search methodologies. The concept is to combine direct optimization strategies with interpolation methods in such a way that a mathematical model of the quality function is successively constructed in parallel to an optimization run. Once this model has is meaningful enough, its evaluation can substitute time consuming simulation runs.

Fast sinogram computation and the sinogram-based alignment of images.

A direct Fourier method (DFM) to compute sinograms is described. Since the DFM is much faster than the customary rotation and projection process, novel uses of sinograms can be devised. As an example and an exercise on the properties of sinograms, a fast sinogram-based method to align large sets of images is described. The method is based on shift-invariant functions to detect rotations, and on tomographic reconstructions of cross-correlation functions to detect relative shifts. It has been implemented in a novel library, SIGNAL, used to align images of macromolecular assemblies observed in the electron microscope. A comparative analysis of the complexity of sinogram- and imagebased methods, as well as quite a few tests with EM images, show that SIGNAL runs faster, the accuracy being the same.

The Role of State Consent in the Customary Process

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Wigner function and normal ordering

The Wigner function is calculated for a relativistic system of interacting scalar particles and anti-particles in thermal equilibrium. It is pointed out that the prerequisite for obtaining the correct result is normal ordering, as opposed to the customary process of symmetrization of the field operators, whether combined with a vacuum subtraction or not.

Comment: Government Reorganization for Economic Development

Abstract Editor's note: This is the first in a series of comments to be published from time-to-time. Although the pieces in this series are of a less formal nature than regular articles, they are sent through the customary review process before acceptance.

A modified method for labeling erythrocytes with 99mTc (author's transl)

A modified method for labeling erythrocytes with 99mTc-sodium pertechnetate for spleenic scintigraphy is described. In vitro investigations have shown that by omitting the customary process of washing and by simultaneous alteration of the erythrocytes during the tin incubation period, the duration of erythrocyte labeling can be considerably reduced. A yield of 96 of 98% can be achieved. The effect of the tin on the erythrocytes is further investigated. The effect of the incubation period and temperature, of the plasma in the erythrocyte suspension, of stirring and agitation, of the dispersion liquid and tin concentration were studied. The method proves satisfactory in 56 controlled spleenic scintigrams.

Man and Law in Urban Africa: A Role for Customary Courts in the Urbanization Process

The purpose of this paper is to examine these two propositions in the light of what is known about the processes and problems of urbanization in Africa. To this end, I shall draw upon the now extensive body of sociological and social anthropological literature that has grown up over the last two decades concerning urbanization, urbanism and migration in various African states.' I shall also draw upon the findings of those who have examined the customary legal process in homogeneous tribal (rural) areas and suggest how these findingswhich often appear to be of only academic value to those concerned with developing legal systems-may help in understanding and solving the plight of the urban African. My primary frame of reference will be English-speaking West Africa.

On the Quick Drawing Process of Lines from Standard Series for the Basic Design of Merchant Ships. (2 nd report)

In this paper, the author proposes a new quick drawing process of the lines of under water form for the basic design of merchant ships having block coefficient ranging between 0.65 and 0.80.With systematic hand works, this process needs less labour than the customary process. The key points of this process are as follows : -(1) Drawing the sectional area curve from standard series of sectional area curves with C⊗ and 1cb corrections.(2) Picking up the offset points on the standard size from the offset curves.3) Drawing the body plan of actual size from standard size by means of the similar translation method.The item (1) was already described in the first report, and the item; 2) and the item (3) are reported in this second report.