Aworkshop was held August 26–28, 2015, by the Earth- Life Science Institute (ELSI) Origins Network (EON, see Appendix I) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. This meeting gathered a diverse group of around 40 scholars researching the origins of life (OoL) from various perspectives with the intent to find common ground, identify key questions and investigations for progress, and guide EON by suggesting a roadmap of activities. Specific challenges that the attendees were encouraged to address included the following: What key (...) questions, ideas, and investigations should the OoL research community address in the near and long term? How can this community better organize itself and prioritize its efforts? What roles can particular subfields play, and what can ELSI and EON do to facilitate research progress? (See also Appendix II.) The present document is a product of that workshop; a white paper that serves as a record of the discussion that took place and a guide and stimulus to the solution of the most urgent and important issues in the study of the OoL. This paper is not intended to be comprehensive or a balanced representation of the opinions of the entire OoL research community. It is intended to present a number of important position statements that contain many aspirational goals and suggestions as to how progress can be made in understanding the OoL. The key role played in the field by current societies and recurring meetings over the past many decades is fully acknowledged, including the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life (ISSOL) and its official journal Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres, as well as the International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL). (shrink)

The article advocates the importance of studying conceptual meaning and change in modern mass media and highlights the significance of conceptual intermediality. The article first analyzes anger in Hindi cinema as an audiovisual key concept within the framework of an Indian national ideology. It explores how anger and the Indian angry young man became popularized, politicized, and stereotyped by popular films and print media in India in the 1970s and 1980s. The article goes on to advocate for extending conceptual history (...) beyond language on theoretical grounds and identifies two major obstacles in political iconography: the methodological subordination of visuals to language in the negotiation of meaning, and the distinction of emotion and reason by assigning them functionally to different sign systems. (shrink)

The climate regime, comprising the Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992 and the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, contains elements of prescription for and leadership of developed countries and differentiation in favor of developing countries. The nature and extent of differentiation in favor of developing countries in the climate regime, however, has remained contentious through the years. While there is a shared understanding among states that they have common but differentiated responsibilities in addressing climate change, there is little agreement on (...) the formulae for differentiating between states in doing so. This Article argues that the outcomes of international climate negotiations in recent years, in particular the Copenhagen Accord of 2009 and the Cancun Agreements of 2010, offer a distinctive vision of differential treatment. Through these instruments, the international community appears to be moving from differentiation in favor of developing countries towards differentiation or flexibility for all countries, as well as towards increasing parallelism between developed and developing countries. The Durban Platform of 2011, which launches a new process to negotiate a post-2020 agreement, confirms this trend, setting the scene for the erosion of differential treatment in the future/post-2020 climate regime. This Article explores the nature of differentiation, as it is evolving, in the emerging climate regime, in particular as it relates to mitigation obligations, and the impact this is likely to have on the design, ambition, reach and rigor of the emerging climate regime. (shrink)

Children have difficulty comprehending novel verbs in the double object dative as compared to the prepositional dative. We explored this pattern with 3 and 4 year olds. In Experiment 1, we replicated the documented difficulty with the double object frame, even though we provided more contextual support. In Experiment 2, we tested a novel hypothesis that children would comprehend novel verbs in, and generalize them to, the double object frame if they were first familiarized to the verbs in the prepositional (...) frame. They did, suggesting that part of their difficulty with the double object frame is due to uncertainty about a new verb's semantic/syntactic properties, information that the easy-to-comprehend prepositional frame provides. The benefits of training were short-lived, however; children again struggled after a 2-h delay. The results are discussed in the context of mechanisms underlying verb acquisition. (shrink)

Diffraction imaging is recognized as a new approach to image small-scale fractures in shale and carbonate reservoirs. By identifying the areas with increased natural fracture density, reservoir engineers can design an optimal well placement program that targets the sweet spots, and minimizes the total number of wells used for a prospective area. High-resolution imaging of the small-scale fractures in shale reservoirs such as Eagle Ford, Bakken, Utica, and Woodbine in the US, and Horn River, Montney, and Utica in Canada improves (...) the prospect characterization and predrill assessment of the geologic conditions, improves the production and recovery efficiency, reduces field development cost, and decreases the environmental impact of developing the field by using fewer wells to optimally produce the reservoir. We evaluated several field data examples using a method of obtaining images of diffractors using specularity filtering that could be performed in depth and time migration. Provided that a good migration velocity was available, we used the deviation of ray scattering from Snell’s law to attenuate reflection energy in the migrated image. The resulting diffraction images reveal much of the structural detail that was previously obscured by reflection energy. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to examine the determinants for early discontinuation among IUCD users in a rural district of northern India. Multivariate analysis indicated several significant predictors of early discontinuation of IUCD use. The risk of discontinuation increased more than two times in the presence of factors such as more than usual amount of menstrual flow before insertion and intermenstrual bleeding after insertion. Similarly, residence or alternatively those coming from villages without health centres were nearly two times more (...) likely to discontinue. Menstrual disturbance increased the risk nearly three-fold. If only those women who report normal menstrual cycles had IUCDs inserted, it is very likely that the high discontinuation rate due to menstrual disturbance could be reduced. Knowledge about the IUCD and its effectiveness decreased the risk of early discontinuation but was not a statistically significant factor in multivariate analysis. Validation of the developed model was done by using the bootstrapping method and the model was found to be 18% noisy. These findings may help family planning providers in counselling and practice. (shrink)