794 In their article published in this issue, Steven J Hoffman & John-Arne Røttingen note that an international agreement on the important issue of research and development (R&D) could take any number of forms.1 Following discussions at the 2012 World Health Assembly (WHA), the authors describe a variety of administrative, financial, decision-making, oversight and compliance mechanisms, their p...

Professor Lawrence Gostin is the Linda D. and Timothy J. O’Neill Professor of Global Health Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he directs the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. Professor Gostin is the Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on Public Health Law and Human Rights. He serves on the Director-General’s Advisory Committee on R...

We study the interaction of a seismic wave-field with a spherical acoustic gas-or fluid-filled cavity. The intention of this study is to identify characteristic features in the interaction that may help detecting cavities in the subsurface. This is important for many applications, as in particular the detection of underground nuclear explosions which are to be prohibited by the Comprehensive-Te...

The automated processing of multiple seismic signals to detect and localize seismic events is a central tool in both geophysics and nuclear treaty verification. This paper reports on a project begun in 2009 to reformulate this problem in a Bayesian framework. A Bayesian seismic monitoring system, NET-VISA, has been built comprising a spatial event prior and generative models of event transmissi...

The automated processing of multiple seismic signals to detect and localize seismic events is a central tool in both geophysics and nuclear treaty verification. This paper reports on a project, begun in 2009, to reformulate this problem in a Bayesian framework. A Bayesian seismic monitoring system, NET-VISA, has been built comprising a spatial event prior and generative models of event transmis...

Dr. Charles W. Nakhleh is a technical staff member in the Safeguards Systems Group at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. His research interests include the applications of environmental monitoring to international safeguards, safeguarding of advanced nuclear fuel cycles, and policy and technology issues related to the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty and the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nu...

The waters of rhe sub-Antarctic Southern Ocean are legally distinctive from those which fall within the Antarctic Treaty area extending to 60e S, not only because the Treaty does not apply in those waters but also because sovereignty over sub-Antarctic islands is largely uncontested. As a result, many of the countries claiming sub-Antarctic possessions are able to assert the full range of marit...

Despite large numbers of empirical studies are conducted on examiner patent citations, few have scrutinized the cognitive limitations of officials at patent offices in searching for prior art to add citations during patent prosecution. This research takes advantage of the longitudinal gap between International Search Reports (ISRs) required by the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) and subsequent ...