Elections, mass media and short-termism in foreign policy making: the case of Afghan war

After nearly eight years of conflict in Afghanistan it appears that the campaign is at its final stretch, with US and British troop withdrawals on the cards. However Nima Khorrami Assl writes that our short-termist strategies in Afghanistan expose inherent problems with the democratic process in producing effective foreign policy and that this is further complicated by an influential mass media

Jacobian of meromorphic curves

The contact structure of two meromorphic curves gives a factorization of their jacobian.Comment: 41 pages, amstex, to be published in the Proceedings of the Indian Academy of Science

N=2⋆\mathcal{N}=2^\star from Topological Amplitudes in String Theory

In this paper, we explicitly construct string theory backgrounds that realise the so-called $\mathcal N=2^\star$ gauge theory. We prove the consistency of our models by calculating their partition function and obtaining the correct gauge theory spectrum. We further provide arguments in favour of the universality of our construction which covers a wide class of models all of which engineer the same gauge theory. We reproduce the corresponding Nekrasov partition function once the $\Omega$-deformation is included and the appropriate field theory limit taken. This is achieved by calculating the topological amplitudes $F_g$ in the string models. In addition to heterotic and type II constructions, we also realise the mass deformation in type I theory, thus leading to a natural way of uplifting the result to the instanton sector.Comment: 27 page