Pacific State Research Articles

Essential Principles of Contract and Sales Law in the Northern Pacific: Federated States of Micronesia, the Republics of Palau and the Marshall Islands, and United States Territories and Political Entities

This text includes the general contract and sales law that applies in the geographic region identified as the Northern Pacific, including the Republics of Palau and the Marshall Islands, Hawaii, Guam, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa and in the Federated States of Micronesia. It then compares and contrast this regional substantive law to international standards governing contract and sales law.It is unique in that it is the only text compiling in one source the current statutes and case law for contract and sales for Northern Pacific region through 2009. Although the focus of the text will be on those independent nations in the Northern Pacific that are developing their own unique substantive law identity, the text will also include a comparison to contract and sales law that is prevalent in the United States and applicable in its Northern Pacific State of Hawaii, and in its Pacific territories of Guam, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.The book will emphasize any divergence and highlight regional anomalies in the substantive law of contract and sales. It will also examine the inter-relationship between customary and traditional law and the law of contract and sales. This anthropological approach will highlight how regional customary and traditional law have interacted with Anglo-American concepts of contract and sales law to produce a unique amalgam of contract and sales law in this Northern Pacific region.

Using polymer adhesive compositions in design of slider bearings

A description is given of polymer composite self-lubricating EFLONG and EFLAST materials developed at Pacific State University and designed for operation in slider-bearing designs. The results of comparative studies of strength are presented for adhesive compositions of sleeves made from these composite materials with metallic holders.

Cold tongue/Warm pool and ENSO dynamics in the Pliocene

Abstract. It has been suggested that a "permanent" El Niño climate state has existed in the warm Pliocene. One of the main pieces of evidence of such conditions is the small east-west sea surface temperature (SST) difference that is found in proxy temperature records of the equatorial Pacific. Using a coupled version of the Zebiak-Cane model of intermediate complexity for the tropical Pacific, we study the sensitivity of the time-mean Pacific background state and El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) variability to Pliocene climate changes. The parameters varied in this sensitivity study include changes in the trade wind strength due to a reduced equator-to-pole temperature gradient, higher global mean temperatures and an open Panama gateway. All these changes lead to a westward shift of the position of the cold tongue along the equator by up to 2000 km. This result is consistent with data from the PRISM3D Pliocene SST reconstruction. Our model further suggests that ENSO variability is present in the Pliocene climate with only slight changes as compared to today. A background climate that would resemble a "permanent" El Niño with weak to no east-west temperature difference along the equator is only found for very weak trade winds which seem unrealistic for the Pliocene climate.

The EU as an Agent for Democracy: Images of the EU in the Pacific Media ‘Mirror’

The Pacific is a major recipient of EU assistance under the Cotonou Agreement and target for EU development actions (including the reinforcement of democracy and human rights). Positioning its inquiry within the diffusion theory, this study focuses on one of the Union’s ‘normative’ profiles communicated externally, namely the EU’s international performance as a promoter of democracy, rule of law and human rights. This paper considers a particular case study, namely the EU’s metaphorical imagery in media discourses in Fiji, a South Pacific state experiencing an ongoing democratic crisis. These external media framings of the EU are then compared with the auto-images the Union has about itself when interacting with the Pacific. The conclusions indicated a mismatch in external and internal EU imagery potentially ripe with miscommunication and counterproductive for EU–Pacific relations in general (and EU–Fiji relations in particular).

Takita Kenji, The Pacific State America from a Historical Perspective

Takita Kenji, The Pacific State America from a Historical Perspective

Elections in the Republic of Palau

This article reviews national elections in the Pacific island state of Palau. The article provides an overview of elections since 1988, concentrating on the vote for president and vice president, but also drawing attention to developments with respect to the national congress as well as various issues involving direct input from the electorate as a whole. Island politics are intense and intimate, with candidates relying on family and clan relations for support and advice. In 2008 the dominant figure from 2000 and 2004, Tommy E. Remengesau, Jr., was out of the presidential picture because of a constitutionally specified term limit, leaving the executive offices open to two talented teams: Elias Chin and Alan Seid, and Johnson Toribiong and Kerai Mariur. The article focuses on the 2008 election, at which the electorate also chose 21 new members (including two women) to the national congress and took further important constitutional decisions following the convening of Palau’s 2nd constitutional convention in 2005.

Characteristics and Needs of People With Intellectual Disability Who Have Higher IQs

Characteristics and Needs of People With Intellectual Disability Who Have Higher IQs

Antipodean Statebuilding: The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands and Australian Intervention in the South Pacific

This essay analyses Australian-led statebuilding efforts in Solomon Islands, through the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI). RAMSI has often been offered as a successful example of statebuilding worthy of international consideration. Here, some of the limitations of the RAMSI mission and its progress in rebuilding the ‘failed’ South Pacific state will be carefully assessed. Despite significant short-term statebuilding successes in restoring security and stabilizing the economy, RAMSI faces long-term challenges centred on the complex politics of political community-building. As an example of ‘best practice’ statebuilding, RAMSI highlights the complexities involved with the two-level game of international intervention: the (conflicting) challenge of reconciling the need to respect sovereign sensitivities with the need to undertake robust political engagement.

Enforced consociationalism and deeply divided societies: some reflections on recent developments in Fiji

Consociationalism is seen as a useful tool in dealing with intractable ethnic, religious, linguistic and other tensions in deeply divided societies and is often preferred over federalism, partition, secession, assimilation or other forms of conflict management in such societies. This article examines the validity of many of the assumptions which underlie the concept of consociationalism by looking at the experience of its use in the Pacific island state of Fiji, which has had a long record of strife between the country’s two main ethnic groups, the indigenous Fijians and the Indo-Fijians. It argues that the consociational model – particularly one which is highly prescriptive and involves strong mandatory power-sharing – has certain structural shortcomings which make it unsuitable for adoption in societies (like Fiji) where the ethnic or other cleavages run deep. In such cases, says the author, the society concerned would do well to explore other options such as a looser form of power-sharing, proportional representation, or outright majoritarian rule but with strong minority protections. The article also examines the limitations of judicial intervention in the enforcement of consociational agreements.

Nauru: The first failed Pacific State?

In recent years supposedly ‘failed states’ have been recognized in the Pacific. Nauru, once rich, has acquired most of the characteristics of a failed state, in large part because of the consequences of an extreme ‘resource curse’ scenario, where other economic sectors fail. Mining of phosphate is now almost over. Wasteful expenditure, especially on a national airline and the panoply of a ‘welfare state’, and inadequate health services and education systems created budget deficits but not the skills required to develop an alternative economy to mining. The collapse of a corrupt offshore banking and passport system emphasized this failure. Political systems have been too inexperienced, short-term and divided to stabilize the political economy. Regional external intervention has occurred and may lead to extensive emigration from Nauru and to a new political status.

Emerging Pedagogies of Linguistic and Cultural Continuity in Papua New Guinea

This paper explores issues of linguistic and cultural continuity in vernacular education in the south pacific state of Papua New Guinea (PNG). It draws from an ongoing ethnographic study of the introduction of vernacular teaching in elementary and lower primary schooling where English has recently been replaced as the medium of instruction making way for PNG's more than 850 languages to potentially be languages of early school instruction. In this paper, PNG's multilingual setting is presented in terms of a linguistic ecology of which vernacular schooling is emerging as an integral part. The circumstances discussed have been selected to highlight the way the introduction of vernacular and the use of vernacular genres and storytelling practices has prompted the emergence of indigenous or culturally continuous pedagogies not previously apparent. They derive from visits to rural schools in two provinces, classroom observations and discussions with elementary school teachers, and video recording and discussions of micro-teaching sessions in storytelling with final year primary teacher trainees during 2003. The situated meanings of stori performance, gesture, circulation and place are discussed as key features of local communicative genres. The paper has relevance for educators working in multilingual, vernacular and language transition settings where, it is argued, pedagogy can be informed by a greater awareness, understanding and uptake of local language genres.

A comparison study of tropical Pacific Ocean state estimation: Low-resolution assimilation vs. high-resolution simulation

A comparison study is performed to contrast the improvements in the tropical Pacific oceanic state of a low-resolution model respectively via data assimilation and by an increase in horizontal resolution. A low resolution model (LR) (1°lat by 2°lon) and a high-resolution model (HR) (0.5°lat by 0.5°lon) are employed for the comparison. The authors perform 20-yr numerical experiments and analyze the annual mean fields of temperature and salinity. The results indicate that the low-resolution model with data assimilation behaves better than the high-resolution model in the estimation of ocean large-scale features. From 1990 to 2000, the average of HR’s RMSE (root-mean-square error) relative to independent Tropical Atmosphere Ocean project (TAO) mooring data at randomly selected points is 0.97°C compared to a RMSE of 0.56°C for LR with temperature assimilation. Moreover, the LR with data assimilation is more frugal in computation. Although there is room to improve the high-resolution model, the low-resolution model with data assimilation may be an advisable choice in achieving a more realistic large-scale state of the ocean at the limited level of information provided by the current observational system.

Environmental impact assessment in the Fijian state sector

For over 20 years, the South Pacific state of Fiji has required developers to conduct more than 70 environmental impact assessments (EIA), without specifying the environmental quality or impacts it considers (in)appropriate. It has ignored aspects of EIA to which agencies funding development have paid little attention—assessing alternatives, monitoring outcomes and enforcing consent conditions. This infers the Fijian state is not serious about using EIA to control environmental quality. Factors other than technical shortcomings are shaping the way the state constrains EIA practice. Unless these factors change, the comprehensive EIA system proposed in Sustainable Development legislation will not prevent environmental degradation.

Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women's Movement, 1880-1911

'In 1880, the California woman safeguarded the Republic by maintaining a morally sound home. Scarcely forty years later, women in the Pacific state won full-fledged citizenship and voting rights of their own. Becoming Citizens shows how this enormous transformation came about. Gayle Gullett demonstrates how women's search for a larger public life in the late nineteenth century led to a flourishing women's movement in California. Women's radical demand for citizenship, however, was rejected by state voters along with the presidential reform candidate, William Jennings Bryan, in the tumultuous election year of 1896'.'Gullett shows how women rebuilt the movement in the early years of the twentieth century and forged a critical alliance between activist women and the men involved in the urban Good Government movement. This alliance formed the basis of progressivism, with male Progressives helping to legitimize women's new public work by supporting their civic campaigns, appointing women to public office, and placing a suffrage referendum before the male electorate in 1911. Placing local developments in a national context, Becoming Citizens illuminates the links between these two major social movements: the western women's suffrage movement and progressivism'.

The Law Relating to Satellite Navigation and Air Traffic Management Systems - A View from the South Pacific

This article is an updated and revised version of a paper originally presented to a Communication, Navigation, Surveillance/ Air Traffic Management Forum of Pacific state, airline and air traffic service provider organisation representatives meeting in Sydney, Australia on 16 April 1998. The Forum was organised under the auspices of the Australian Branch of the Royal Aeronautical Society.

Perception of Boredom: Students' Resistance to a Secondary Physical Education Curriculum

From the perspective that perceived boredom is a type of emotional resistance to learning, this investigation examined students' perceptions of boredom derived from learning in physical education in secondary schools. A group of physically active university students (N = 35) who completed their entire secondary education in a U.S. Pacific state constructed their perceived boredom in physical education on a Q scale. Data, consisting of students' ranking scores and oral reflections on the content perceived as boring, were analyzed using Q analysis and inductive analysis. Four response patterns were revealed. Four types of conflict between the students' learning expectations and the learning realities accounted for the perceived boredom. The findings suggest that feeling bored is a form of resistance resulted when students are the party with little power or control in the learning process.

U.S. Geological Survey National Assessment of Oil and Gas Resources: Pacific Region Onshore and State Offshore

U.S. Geological Survey National Assessment of Oil and Gas Resources: Pacific Region Onshore and State Offshore

Constitutional change in Tuvalu

With constitutional change playing an important role in the evolving political status of the small Pacific island state of Tuvalu, island leaden seeking to protect its indigenous culture and values adopted a new constitution in 1986, eight years after independence. The document's commitment to the Tuvaluan way of life challenges aspects of the democratic ethos, as its phrasing* resonate more closely with Tuvalu's values and nationalism than with Western concepts of individual entitlement. Although divisions persist within the Pacific over the role of custom and tradition in political and legal affairs, developments in Tuvalu suggest one approach for states grappling with comparable political and cultural concerns.

Space-time analysis of the structural pattern of continents

The Earth's stress field is composed of 4 sub-fields that are induced by A standard global stress field results from a combination of these four sub-stress-fields. From the existence of six otherwise inexplicable geodynamic phenomena, it has to be concluded that the standard global stress field of the present can only be an instantaneous (still) photograph of a field that constantly migrates eastwards relative to the Earth's continents. This disclosure can be explained with an extended plate tectonic model, in which the Earth's surface is subdivided by the circum-Pacific ring of subduction zones, into a Pacific area and a continental or Pangaea area with intra-Pangaea oceans (Atlantic, Indian Ocean, etc.). The Pangaea area in turn is subdivided into a North Pangaea area and a South Pangaea area. Due to the off-centre rotation of the spinning Earth around the gravitational centre of the Earth-Moon (-Sun) system (tidal forces), the lower mantle, the Pacific basin, area or state (Pacific crust = lower mantle?), the remaining states that together with the Pacific state compose the Wilson Cycle of ocean opening and closing (Rift/Red Sea state, Atlantic state, Pacific state, Collision/Himalayas state), the ocean sequence of which is permanently arranged from E to W through 360° around the globe, and the standard global stress field as an expression of the Wilson Cycle, are constantly displaced eastwards relative to the upper mantle, the continents or the North and South Pangaea areas with Intra-Pangaea oceans, completing one full turn around the globe in 200 to 250 my (principle of hypocycloid gearing). The continents migrate westwards around the globe and around the Pacific basin in the N and S hemispheres, through sequences of plate tectonic settings of the Oceanic or Wilson Cycle that possess distinct regional stress fields as parts of the standars global stress field, or else the continents are subjected to eastward migrating sequences of settings with distinct regional stress fields as parts of the Wilson Cycle/standard global stress field. By rotations and N-S migrations of the individual continents dissected in all directions by groups of parallel structural planes (fracture systems) through the standard global stress field, the orientation of which is aligned with the spinning Earth's axis and equator and that constantly migrates eastwards relative to the continents, the amount and nature of stress (compression, tension, shearing) a given fracture system is subjected to is constantly altered and the tectonic activity may gradually be transferred from the system under consideration to another fracture system, with slightly different strike directions. Every 400 to 500 my or each Pangaea Cycle (two complete W-E/E-W displacements around the globe between the continents/Pangaea areas with Intra-Pangaea Oceans/upper mantle on the one side and the lower mantle/Pacific basin/ sequence of ocean states and local stress fields of the Wilson Cycle and the standard global stress field on the other) the inhomogeneous standard global stress field is reversed in the N-S direction. Any model proposing the long-time existence of extended lineaments or fracture systems that do not end at the margin of the respective continent or at an orogen/suture zone/former continental margin, in the event of being older than the respective orogenesis, but which cross the surrounding ocean or the younger orogen and continue in the neighbouring continents or former independent continents or even encompass the whole globe, and which puts foreward simultaneous tectonic activity along the whole length of such lineament or fracture system and proposes their longevity or permanent existence, contradicts the physical laws that are the foundation of plate tectonics and mobilism.

Life Expectancy and Mental Retardation: A Longitudinal Study in a State Residential Facility

The authors of this compact monograph have impeccable credentials; they are authorities in residential care of people with developmental disabilities. The state residential facility mentioned in this work is the Lanterman Developmental Center (formerly Pacific State Hospital) in California. Many professionals who are expected to know the longterm prospects of severely handicapped people will value this small paperback book. This group would include primary care physicians; medical specialists, such as neurologists, orthopedists, and psychiatrists; physical therapists and occupational therapists; educators; and social workers. This monograph not only provides information about high-risk factors in patient care but also informs professionals who must testify in various legal forums in regard to life expectancy. In some legal proceedings the handicapped person seeks financial awards that may hinge on someone's estimates of the life expectancy of the impaired person. The size of the award may be based partially on the years that the person