Defining a US defence diplomacy for Brazil at the beginning of the century

At the beginning of the 1990s, the US military was apparently considered to be a significant threat by the Brazilian Armed Forces. Other military establishments in the Hemisphere likewise expressed a lack of confidence, and even a sense of fear, regarding the North Americans. After an ‘opening’ in military relations between Brazil and the United States, directed by General Barry McAfree, commander-in-chief of the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) in the mid 1990s, Brazilian military sentiment regarding the US marginally improved. Nevertheless, by the end of the 1990s and the beginning of this Century, the Brazilian Armed Forces again felt threatened by the unilateralism of the US military. This work examines the the concept of ‘defense diplomacy’ and the process by which the Clinton Administration initiated an experiment in conjunction with the National Defense University (Fort Leslie McNair, Washington, DC), at the request of the Deputy Assitant Secretary of Defense for Western Hemisphere Affairs, that established between 1999 and 2001 a broader understanding of possible US defense diplomacy for the subsequent seven years. I was an invited participant in this experiment, along with more than two dozen North American and Latin American academics, including Brazilians, the aim of which was to complete a proposal under contract with the Defense Department. Although it was ended soon after the Bush Administration began, this experiment, and the broader concept of ‘defense diplomacy,’ may well have represented an important option for future hemispheric military relations

Calculating Risk, Denying Uncertainty: Seismicity and Hydropower Development in Nepal

If Ulrich Beck’s definition of ‘risk society’ describes societies increasingly structured by preoccupations with future environmental threats and related insecurities created by modernization, then Nepal’s hydropower community would appear to be quite the opposite, propelled into environmental denial by twin demands for domestic electricity and revenue earned through hydroelectric export. Our research reveals that prior to the April 2015 earthquake in Nepal, the hydropower community was engaging in what Eviatar Zerubavel calls ‘socially organized denial,’ largely ignoring the uncertainties associated with seismic activity. Earthquakes and tremors were viewed as unavoidable realities that should not impede hydropower development. This denial, we argue, was shaped not only by local political realities and demand for electricity, but also by a larger desire to capitalize on available funds from international finance, which are highly contingent upon Nepal presenting itself as a ‘safe’ zone for investment. Our study focuses on the elites of Nepal’s hydro community: the developers, investors, water experts, and government officials who occupy the ‘upstream’ positions at which scientific knowledge is produced and adjudicated. On one hand, the denial or omission of earthquake potential that we witnessed seems to identify the ineluctable challenges that Nepal faces in attempting to integrate its economy into global markets; on the other hand, it indicates the desire of the private sector to reap profits from hydropower in spite of obvious geophysical dangers. These dangers, we argue, are a bankable risk for these elites. However, for the people directly affected by new hydropower infrastructures, these are risks and uncertainties threatening already vulnerable livelihoods

Training and Union wages

This paper investigates whether unions, through imposing wage floors that lead to wage compression, increase on-the-job training. Our analysis focuses on Germany. Based on a model of unions and firm-financed training, we derive empirical implications regarding apprenticeship training intensity, layoffs, wage cuts, and wage compression in unionized and nonunionized firms. We test these implications using firm panel data matched with administrative employee data. We find support for the hypothesis that union recognition, via imposing minimum wages and wage compression, increases training in apprenticeship programs

A resource-advantage perspective on pricing: shifting the focus from ends to means-end in pricing research?

This paper contributes to a long-lasting debate between practitioners who argue that academia is unable to understand what pricing is all about and academics who criticize practitioner pricing approaches for lacking rigor or rationality. The paper conceptualizes a resource-advantage (R-A) perspective on pricing by drawing on the R-A theory of competition. After a review of R-A theory, the paper integrates the price discretion concept and pricing as a spanning competence by introducing a separation between resources that create and resources that extract value, thereby expanding R-A theory to pricing. The perspective aims to shed light on how the process of competition helps organizations to learn/benefit from pricing capabilities. The research shifts the focus of pricing research from an equilibrium-based static view to a dynamic, disequilibrium-provoking pricing competence. In this way, it draws attention to what is perhaps most relevant to pricing in practice: the actual means necessary to determine price

Magma Snolf at Rest

This piece is my attempt exercise agency in naming my identity: I am a Snolf

Deformation Control in Rest-to-Rest Motion of Mechanisms with Flexible Links

This paper develops and validates experimentally a feedback strategy for the reduction of the link deformations in rest-to-rest motion of mechanisms with flexible links, named Delayed Reference Control (DRC). The technique takes advantage of the inertial coupling between rigid-bodymotion and elasticmotion to control the undesired link deformations by shifting in time the position reference through an action reference parameter. The action reference parameter is computed on the fly based on the sensed strains by solving analytically an optimization problem. An outer control loop is closed to compute the references for the position controllers of each actuator, which can be thought of as the inner control loop. The resulting multiloop architecture of the DRC is a relevant advantage over several traditional feedback controllers: DRC can be implemented by just adding an outer control loop to standard position controllers. A validation of the proposed control strategy is provided by applying the DRC to the real-time control of a four-bar linkage