Book review: the cosmopolitan military: armed forces and human security in the 21st century by Jonathan Gilmore

What role should national militaries play in a globalised and interdependent world? In The Cosmopolitan Military: Armed Forces and Human Security in the 21st Century, Jonathan Gilmore examines how cosmopolitan norms have influenced the ways in which armed forces perform civilian protection and ensure human security. Sajjad Ahmed finds this a thorough, encyclopaedic account of the evolution of conflict resolution through cosmopolitan military engagement in the post-Cold War era, which will be of use to scholars of peace and security studies, conflict management and international politics

Dynamic Modulation Yields One-Way Beam Splitting

This article demonstrates the realization of an extraordinary beam splitter based on nonreciprocal and synchronized photonic transitions in obliquely illuminated space-time-modulated (STM) slabs which impart the coherent temporal frequency and spatial frequency shifts. As a consequence of such unusual photonic transitions, a one-way beam splitting and amplification is exhibited by the STM slab. Beam splitting is a vital operation for various optical and photonic systems, ranging from quantum computation to fluorescence spectroscopy and microscopy. Despite the beam splitting is conceptually a simple operation, the performance characteristics of beam splitters significantly influence the repeatability and accuracy of the entire optical system. As of today, there has been no approach exhibiting a nonreciprocal beam splitting accompanied with transmission gain and an arbitrary splitting angle. Here, we show that oblique illumination of a periodic and semi-coherent dynamically-modulated slab results in coherent photonic transitions between the incident light beam and its counterpart space-time harmonic (STH). Such photonic transitions introduce a unidirectional synchronization and momentum exchange between two STHs with same temporal frequencies, but opposite spatial frequencies. Such a beam splitting technique offers high isolation, transmission gain and zero beam tilting, and is expected to drastically decrease the resource and isolation requirements in optical and photonic systems. In addition to the analytical solution, we provide a closed-form solution for the electromagnetic fields in STM structures, and accordingly, investigate the properties of the wave isolation and amplification in subluminal, superluminal and luminal ST modulations

A study of food aid leakage in Bangladesh

The estimated average leakage in the Vulnerable Group Development (VGD) programme due to short ration and undercoverage is 8 percent of the total wheat allotment. These losses are low by international and Bangladesh standards, and are due, in part, to monitoring and evaluation throughout the system and women's empowerment at the union level to hold programme managers accountable." from Text

Single Pion production from Nuclei

We have studied charged current one pion production induced by $\nu_\mu(\bar\nu_\mu)$ from some nuclei. The calculations have been done for the incoherent pion production processes from these nuclear targets in the $\Delta$ dominance model and take into account the effect of Pauli blocking, Fermi motion and renormalization of $\Delta$ properties in the nuclear medium. The effect of final state interactions of pions has also been taken into account. The numerical results have been compared with the recent results from the MiniBooNE experiment for the charged current 1$\pi$ production, and also with some of the older experiments in Freon and Freon-Propane from CERN.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, 5th International Workshop on Neutrino-Nucleus Interactions in the few GeV region(NuInt07), Batavia, Illinois, 30May-3June, 200

Quantitatively evaluating the effect of social barriers: a case-control study of family members' opposition and women's intention to use contraception in Pakistan.

BACKGROUND: Uptake of family planning services in Pakistan has remained slow over the past decade despite a rapid increase in availability and awareness, indicating that social barriers may be preventing uptake. Social barriers such as opposition by family members have largely been studied qualitatively; there is a lack of quantitative evidence about the effect of different family members' opposition on women's intention to use contraceptives. The objective of this study was to quantitatively evaluate the effect of family members' opposition to family planning on intention to use contraception amongst poor women in Pakistan who have physical access to family planning services. METHODS: An unmatched case control study (nested within a larger cohort study) was conducted in two public hospitals in Karachi, Pakistan. Univariable and multivariable logistic regression analyses were conducted to compare risk factors between women that were not intending to use any contraceptive methods in the future (cases) and women that were planning to use contraceptive methods (controls). RESULTS: 248 cases and 496 controls were included in the study. Negative contraceptive intent was associated with no knowledge of contraception (AOR = 3.79 [2.43-5.90]; p < 0.001), husband's opposition (AOR = 21.87 [13.21-36.21]; p < 0.001) and mother-in-law's opposition (AOR = 4.06 [1.77-9.30]; p < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: This study is the first to quantitatively assess the effect of opposition by different family members on women's contraceptive intent in Pakistan. Our results indicate that of all family members, husband's opposition has the strongest effect on women's intention to use contraception, even when the women have knowledge of and physical access to family planning services

The Drama of Dictatorship : Martial Law and the Communist Parties of the Philippines, by Joseph Scalice, Cornell University Press, 2023. 400 pages. ISBN: 9781501770470

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