Debt and Dependence: Foreign Interference in Haiti and the Importance of Non-State Actor Accountability

Colonialist policies and lending practices by foreign states and non-state actors have led to serious and wide-spread violations of Haitian individuals’ fundamental human rights. In particular, a series of loan conditions imposed by international financial institutions and their members states left Haiti vulnerable to increased food insecurity and a severely diminished social sector. This paper proposes that the imposition of such loan conditions constitutes a violation of foreign actors’ obligations under international law respecting economic, social, cultural, and political rights, as well as their extra-territorial obligations (ETOs) to take joint and separate action to promote and respect human rights beyond their borders. As such, this paper outlines the emerging recognition of ETOs around the globe and the urgent need to reform and strengthen accountability mechanisms and oversight measures, without which foreign actors have not had to account for the harms caused by their policies and practices

Observations and numerical simulations of large-eddy circulation in the ocean surface mixed layer

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2014. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 41 (2014): 7584–7590, doi:10.1002/2014GL061637.Two near-surface dye releases were mapped on scales of minutes to hours temporally, meters to order 1 km horizontally, and 1–20 m vertically using a scanning, depth-resolving airborne lidar. In both cases, dye evolved into a series of rolls with their major axes approximately aligned with the wind and/or near-surface current. In both cases, roll spacing was also of order 5–10 times the mixed layer depth, considerably larger than the 1–2 aspect ratio expected for Langmuir cells. Numerical large-eddy simulations under similar forcing showed similar features, even without Stokes drift forcing. In one case, inertial shear driven by light winds induced large aspect ratio large-eddy circulation. In the second, a preexisting lateral mixed layer density gradient provided the dominant forcing. In both cases, the growth of the large-eddy structures and the strength of the resulting dispersion were highly dependent on the type of forcing.Support for the 2004 field experiment was provided by the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Technology Innovation Fund and Coastal Ocean Institute grant 27001545, both through Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and by Office of Naval Research grant N00014-01-1-0984. Support for the 2011 field experiments was provided by ONR grants N00014-09-1-0194, N00014-09-1-0175, N00014-11-WX-21010, N00014-12-WX-21031, and N00014-09-1-0460 and NSF grants OCE-0751734 and OCE-0751653. Simulations were supported under grant N00014-09-1-0268.2015-05-0

Restitution for Haiti, Reparations for All: Haiti’s Place in the Global Reparations Movement

Haiti’s claim for restitution of the debt coerced by France in exchange for Haiti’s 1804 independence has unique legal advantages that can open the door to broader reparations for the descendants of all people harmed by slavery. But in order to assert the claim, Haiti first needs help reclaiming its democracy from a corrupt, repressive regime propped up by the powerful countries that prospered through slavery and overthrew the Haitian President who dared to assert his country’s legal claim. This article explores Haiti’s Independence Debt, and the fight for restitution of it, in the context of two centuries of continued struggle between Haitians asserting their independence and countries enriched by slavery trying to limit the power of Haiti’s example

UBVRI Light Curves of 44 Type Ia Supernovae

We present UBVRI photometry of 44 type-Ia supernovae (SN Ia) observed from 1997 to 2001 as part of a continuing monitoring campaign at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The data set comprises 2190 observations and is the largest homogeneously observed and reduced sample of SN Ia to date, nearly doubling the number of well-observed, nearby SN Ia with published multicolor CCD light curves. The large sample of U-band photometry is a unique addition, with important connections to SN Ia observed at high redshift. The decline rate of SN Ia U-band light curves correlates well with the decline rate in other bands, as does the U-B color at maximum light. However, the U-band peak magnitudes show an increased dispersion relative to other bands even after accounting for extinction and decline rate, amounting to an additional ~40% intrinsic scatter compared to B-band.Comment: 84 authors, 71 pages, 51 tables, 10 figures. Accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal. Version with high-res figures and electronic data at http://astron.berkeley.edu/~saurabh/cfa2snIa

The LatMix summer campaign : submesoscale stirring in the upper ocean

Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2015. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 96 (2015): 1257–1279, doi:10.1175/BAMS-D-14-00015.1.Lateral stirring is a basic oceanographic phenomenon affecting the distribution of physical, chemical, and biological fields. Eddy stirring at scales on the order of 100 km (the mesoscale) is fairly well understood and explicitly represented in modern eddy-resolving numerical models of global ocean circulation. The same cannot be said for smaller-scale stirring processes. Here, the authors describe a major oceanographic field experiment aimed at observing and understanding the processes responsible for stirring at scales of 0.1–10 km. Stirring processes of varying intensity were studied in the Sargasso Sea eddy field approximately 250 km southeast of Cape Hatteras. Lateral variability of water-mass properties, the distribution of microscale turbulence, and the evolution of several patches of inert dye were studied with an array of shipboard, autonomous, and airborne instruments. Observations were made at two sites, characterized by weak and moderate background mesoscale straining, to contrast different regimes of lateral stirring. Analyses to date suggest that, in both cases, the lateral dispersion of natural and deliberately released tracers was O(1) m2 s–1 as found elsewhere, which is faster than might be expected from traditional shear dispersion by persistent mesoscale flow and linear internal waves. These findings point to the possible importance of kilometer-scale stirring by submesoscale eddies and nonlinear internal-wave processes or the need to modify the traditional shear-dispersion paradigm to include higher-order effects. A unique aspect of the Scalable Lateral Mixing and Coherent Turbulence (LatMix) field experiment is the combination of direct measurements of dye dispersion with the concurrent multiscale hydrographic and turbulence observations, enabling evaluation of the underlying mechanisms responsible for the observed dispersion at a new level.The bulk of this work was funded under the Scalable Lateral Mixing and Coherent Turbulence Departmental Research Initiative and the Physical Oceanography Program. The dye experiments were supported jointly by the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation Physical Oceanography Program (Grants OCE-0751653 and OCE-0751734).2016-02-0