The Saint Pierre and Miquelon dispute: Towards a further redefinition of French fishing rights in the Northwest Atlantic
Abstract The Canada-France dispute concerning the extent of maritime jurisdiction around the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon is distinct from other maritime boundary disputes. The French claim creates a large enclave within Canada's 200 nautical mile zone, raises questions about the extent of maritime jurisdiction which dependent islands can claim, and involves historic fishing rights governed by treaty. After reviewing the redefinition and relocation of these rights, attention is turned to what has happened since 1977. It is argued that the effect of the boundary settlement to be decided by an international tribunal will be critical to both Canadian and French fisheries. Whatever the tribunal's decision, it will be another step in the redefinition of the French fishing rights in the Northwest Atlantic but it will not be the last. It is likely to be followed by a renegotiation of the 1972 fisheries agreement which continues to govern French fishing rights in the Canadian exclusive fishing zone.
A Study on Reliable Shoreline Extraction Method by Way of Determination of Optimum Vertex Interval
For efficient quantification and management of shorelines, the vertex interval is of utmost importance and should therefore be reasonably determined. In the present study, a method to determine the optimum vertex interval for use in reliable shoreline calculation is proposed. As the first step of the procedure, grids designed on the premise of a grid-based algorithm were superimposed on the shoreline area. Consequently, the shoreline in each grid unit was simplified. In order to calculate the shoreline length a sum of the shorelines extracted by simplification was drawn out. The optimal vertex interval needed to perform reliable shoreline calculation can be derived by comparing shoreline extraction results of different grid sizes with a reference dataset. The result provides an optimal vertex interval for calculating the length of the shoreline while meeting a certain level of accuracy.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.