Nangkha Nangdrik in the land of the thunder dragon

- The Kingdom of Bhutan is a country on the move - In July 2008, Bhutan transitioned from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy - The Constitution and a number of pieces of national legislation make specific reference to alternative dispute resolution. - An alternative dispute resolution Bill will come before the Bhutanese parliament in early 2012.

Nangkha Nangdrik in the land of the Thunder Dragon : psychology, religion and the potential of mediation in the Kingdom of Bhutan

This article will consider the role that Alternative Dispute Resolution (‘Dham Kha Chen Ki Khendum’ or ‘Nangkha Nangdrik’) currently plays in resolving legal conflict in Bhutan. With a Constitution that has committed to the pursuit of Gross National Happiness, non-adversarial dispute resolution processes that promote continuing relationships and goodwill assume greater importance. One difficulty for Bhutan is that alternative dispute resolution procedures such as mediation (Dhum Drik) are being referred to in enactments of the Bhutanese National Council and National Assembly (bicameral parliament), without a shared understanding as to the characteristics and functionality of these procedures. This article will focus particularly on the current practice of mediation in Bhutan and investigate whether particular models of mediation are more suited to the Bhutanese context, given the particularities of Bhutanese culture, the search for gross national happiness, psychological understandings of happiness and the omnipresent influence of Mahayana Buddhism.

Shanghai: city of other people’s dreams

Shanghai as a place where other people's dreams inform the imaginary landscape. How does this relate to the new possibilities available to the current citizens of the city?

Relationship of lightning ground flashes to rainfall and wet bulb temperature

The close relationship between rain and lightning is well known. However, there are numerous documented observations of heavy rain accompanied by little or no lightning activity (Williams et al, 1992; Jayaratne, 1993). Kuleshov et al (2002) studied thunderstorm distribution and frequency in Australia and concluded that thunderstorm frequency (as expressed by number of thunder-days) in Australia does not, in general, appear to vary in any consistent way with rainfall. However, thunder-days describe occurrence of thunderstorms as heard by an observer, and therefore could be only proxy data to evaluate actual lightning activity (i.e. number of total or cloud-to-ground flashes). Field experiments have demonstrated a strong increase in lightning activity with convective available potential energy (CAPE). It has also been shown that CAPE increases linearly with potential wet bulb temperature, Tw (Williams et al, 1992). In this study, we examine the relationship between lightning ground flash incidence and the two parameters – surface rainfall and surface wet bulb maximum temperature for selected localities around Australia...