Over the past three years, Burma has begun a transition to democracy, triggering massive changes in a country led from the 1960s to 2011 by a repressive military government. The country is plagued with many serious problems from corruption and cronyism to grinding poverty to a lack of all kinds of infrastructure. One of the biggest problems in Burma today combines these three issues: land grabs. Burma has few legal protections for property rights and the wealthy military cronies act with impunity to achieve their financial goals and increase their business holdings. While by far not the only instances of land grabs in the country, this thesis looks at the Letpadaung copper mine and Myitsone dam and the surrounding events as case studies to analyze the tension between Burmese law and rights and economic development. This thesis uses three sources of law to analyze Burmese land rights and human rights: the Constitution, other domestic law, and international law. Many human rights groups are focused on the violence at the Letpadaung mine and suspension of the Myitsone dam as reflections on the new Burmese government's commitment, or lack thereof, to legal rights or human rights. The thesis looks at Burmese land grabs and Chinese involvement through a legal analysis and case studies. Burma's relationship with China is more complicated than many think, and Burma has many neighbors it should look to when improving land and property rights, economic development, and human rights to determine best practices.

After a 5-year study of transportation planning in the San Francisco Bay Area, we have concluded that the contentiousness we observed in the process was due in great part to differences in participants’ styles of planning and not solely to disagreements over desired outcomes. Each style involved different assumptions about information, public participation, and what a good plan is like, as well as about the process of planning. Practitioners of each tended to believe deeply in their approach and to regard with suspicion, if not hostility, those practicing different styles. We identified four coexisting styles, which we label technical/bureaucratic, political influence, social movement, and collaborative. Each style tended to be associated with different types of outcomes, though this was not explicit in discussion. The political planners divided resources among players, whereas the collaborative and the social movement planners were associated with strategies designed to benefit the region as a whole.

We propose to establish, maintain, and augment the sensors for UCLA's oceanographic mooring near the edge of the continental shelf in Santa Monica Bay; extensively sample the water quality within the surrounding region, and interpret the measurements in combination with satellite sensing and three-dimensional, fine-scale numerical simulations of the local region. This will be done in coordination with other proposed measurements in the Southern California Bight that collectively are establishing a long-term, multi-purpose observing system for the regional environment. The research issues to be addressed with the measurements include water quality and pollution, ecosystem productivity, biogeochemical cycling, zooplankton and forage species distributions, mesoscale circulation patterns, and climate variability.