Straits Talk

Straits, Passages and Chokepoints

The transportation of petroleum represents one of the most strategically important circulations of resources in the global economy. Its role cannot be overstated. Yet, petroleum has become a “strategically invisible” commodity as its flow has been continuous with limited, but eye-opening, disruptions such as the First Energy Crisis is 1973. Petroleum supplies are virtually taken for granted. Si...

Venezuelan science in dire straits.

Comment on “Control profiles ofcomplex networks” Colin Campbell, Katriona Shea, Réka Albert ■ Ruths and Ruths (Reports, 21 March2014, p. 1373) find that existing syntheticrandom network models fail to generatecontrol profiles that match those found inreal network models. Here, we show that astraightforward extension to the Barabási-Albert model allows the control pro...

Brownian Motion in Dire Straits

The passage of Brownian motion through a bottleneck in a bounded domain is a rare event, and as the bottleneck radius shrinks to zero the mean time for such passage increases indefinitely. Its calculation reveals the effect of geometry and smoothness on the flux through the bottleneck. We find new behavior of the narrow escape time through bottlenecks in planar and spatial domains and on a surf...

The Regime of Straits and National Security

Modeling and Dynamics of Archipelago Straits

The general focus of this work is to explore, better understand, model and predict the interactive dynamics and variability of sub-mesoscale and mesoscale features and processes in the Philippine Straits region and their impacts on local ecosystems through i. physical-biogeochemical-acoustical data assimilation of novel multidisciplinary observations, ii. adaptive, multi-scale physical and biog...