Business Planning for Climate Change: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Planning for Changes in Water,Temperature, Sea Level,Natural Resources,Health Effects,and Extreme Events

The ability to predict the timing and magnitude of future climate and temperature changes at a regional level has become increasingly important for corporate decision making and enterprise risk management. In the short term, companies could face decisions about acquisitions of water-dependent companies and natural resources or might be planning facilities or operations in communities vulnerable to erosion and flooding, changes in water supplies, and increasing health-care costs. In the intermediate term, companies need to assess these vulnerabilities to determine appropriate insurance coverage, plan for new infrastructure, implement preventative health-care programs, or protect natural resources. A technical approach needs to involve predictive tools that can provide bounding estimates at regional scales. The implications of those changes need to be translated to consequences that can affect specific businesses. Corporations must be cognizant of the uncertainties in this forecasting process and for that reason it is essential to link the likelihood of outcomes with the magnitudes of consequences. This article outlines an approach that is gaining traction as a way to address this complex matter.     

The influence of public programs on inter-firm R&D collaboration strategies: project-level evidence from EU FP5 and FP6

Inter-firms R&D collaborations are often seen as an effective mean to access new resources, to innovate and/or to enter new markets in a turbulent environment characterized by fierce competition. However, all R&D partnerships do not have the same strategic importance. We analyze the strategic features of two types of partnerships that are seldom compared in the academic literature on R&D alliances: EU-sponsored inter-firms collaborations on the one hand, and non-sponsored, spontaneous inter-firm collaborations on the other. We compare their incentives and coordination mechanisms, and derive theoretical propositions that we test empirically. Our econometric analysis uses original data on (sponsored and non-sponsored) projects conducted by participants in the 5th and 6th European R&D Framework Programs. Our empirical findings support our main propositions. EU-funded collaborations are more exploratory and more focused on peripheral competences than spontaneous R&D collaborations. They are also less flexible, due to rigid monitoring rules which are nevertheless crucial to the projects?? success. However, there is no major difference between the different types of EU-sponsored collaborations, which pleads for a simplification of these policy instruments.     

From Dignified Burial to ‘Terrorist Mausoleum’: Exhumations,Moral Panic and Mourning Policies in Peru

In this article, we examine mourning policies with respect to exhumations of mass graves from the Peruvian armed conflict. By reflecting on a case in which the exhumed dead, and their relatives, do not conform to the model of legitimate victims, we explore the limits of reparation policies and their effect on reconciliation. We investigate how the ‘terrorist mausoleum’ led to a significant episode of ‘moral panic’. We then analyse the normative perspective on mourning, as implemented in the public sphere, and how mourning, citizenship and nation are related when burying unwelcome dead associated with the figure of the ‘terrorist’.     

Redefining American Security Interests in Europe

Despite sometimes promiscuous claims by President Trump's critics, controversy about America's commitment under Article 5 dates back seven decades. If largely quiescent through the Soviet Union's collapse, it was because the core Article 5 commitment thankfully went untested. Controversy reemerged with NATO enlargement eastward. In a strange inversion, what c.1949 was a prime objection to its commitment to use force—what Senator Forrest Donnell called the illusory discretion of the “such action as it deems necessary” condition added by George Kennan and other proponents to rescue the Washington Treaty in the Senate—is now embraced, ahistorically, by Article 5 hawks: that the commitment is mechanical, not discretionary. It is substantially a unilateral American one, too. Chronic European underspending and anemic public support across the continent challenge whether most NATO countries could—or would—rally to an ally's defense.     

Utility of the Frontonasal Suture for Estimating Age at Death in Human Skeletal Remains*

Abstract: This project evaluated the utility of the frontonasal suture for estimating age at death. Utilizing human remains of known age at death with varying degrees of fusion, curated at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, data were collected from the ectocranial surface of 522 crania; 68 of these were sagittally sectioned, allowing collection of internal data and observation of suture closure through the bone. Degree of ectocranial suture closure does not significantly predict age, even when sex and ancestry are accounted for. Suture closure progression data were converted into a Hershkovitz ratio (sum of the measurement of open portion divided by the total suture length), and regression models demonstrate that the effect of age accounts for only 13% of variation in suture closure.