The Interagency Process in Support & Stability Operations: Integrating and Aligning the Roles and Missions of Military and Civilian Agencies in Conflict and Post-Conflict Environments

This study addressed the support, stability, and reconstruction missions and tasks for the U.S. government in counterinsurgency warfare and suggests that interagency processes between civilian and military elements are in need of reform as a prerequisite for improving U.S. performance in complex counterinsurgencies. The project examined, assessed, and defined the nature of these problems in the context of historical case studies, policymaking, and current operations, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, suggesting several ways to improve agency and interagency structures, as well as the education and training of core interagency civilian and military professionals. The findings were presented at a conference on the topic, hosted by the Bush School and the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army

Supreme Court Opinion Authorship Attribution on a Case-by-Case Basis

This thesis analyzes the authorship of Supreme Court opinions and the theory that Justices on that Court might be delegating portions, if not the majority, of opinion authorship to their clerks. I test the theories that as Justices age they are more likely to delegate, and that delegation has increased across all justices over the past several decades of the Court’s history. I employ a content analysis method known as stylometry to assign authorship attributions on a case by case basis and use those attributions to inform larger trends regarding authorship. I ultimately find that there is little evidence to support the age or time-period theories but that there is significant variation across Justices in attribution, indicating that clerks are likely playing a large and measurable role in opinion drafting

Semantic Annotation for Retrieval of Visual Resources

Beeldmateriaal speelt een steeds grotere rol in onze cultuur, maar ook in de wetenschap en in het onderwijs. Zoeken in grote collecties beeldmateriaal blijft echter een moeizaam proces. Het kost een eindgebruiker veel tijd en moeite om juist dat ene beeld te vinden. Daarom zijn er efficiënte zoekmethoden nodig om de groeiende collecties doorzoekbaar te maken en te houden. Laura Hollink onderzoekt de problemen bij het zoeken naar beeldmateriaal en de mogelijke oplossingen daarvoor, in drie uiteenlopende collecties: schilderijen, foto’s van organische cellen en nieuwsuitzendingen.Schreiber, A.T. [Promotor]Wielinga, B.J. [Promotor]Worring, M. [Copromotor

Great Powers, Small Wars

A sophisticated appraisal of the problem of asymmetric conflict in the post–World War II period.In a sophisticated combination of quantitative research and two in-depth case studies, Larisa Deriglazova surveys armed conflicts post World War II in which one power is much stronger than the other. She then focuses on the experiences of British decolonization after World War II and the United States in the 2003 Iraq war. Great Powers, Small Wars employs several large databases to identify basic characteristics and variables of wars between enemies of disproportionate power. Case studies examine the economics, domestic politics, and international factors that ultimately shaped military events more than military capacity and strategy

Collecting and analyzing typical actions for visual scene types

Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 115-119).Recent work in human and machine vision has increasingly focused on the problem of scene recognition. Scene types are largely defined by the actions one might typically do there: an office is a place someone would typically "work". I introduce the SUN Action database (short for "Scene UNderstanding - Action"): the first effort to collect and analyze free-response data from human subjects about the typical actions associated with different scene types. Responses were gathered on Mechanical Turk for twenty images per catgory, each depicting a characteristic view of one of 397 different scene types. The distribution of phrases is shown to be heavy-tailed and Zipf-like, whereas the distribution of semantic roots is not Zipf-like. Categories strongly associated with particular tasks or actions are shown to have lower overall diversity of responses. A hierarchical clustering analysis reveals a heterogeneous clustering structure, with some categories readily grouping together, and other categories remaining apart even at coarse clustering levels. Finally, two simple classifiers are introduced for predicting scene types from associated actions: a nearest centroid classifier, and an empirical maximum likelihood classifier. Both classifiers demonstrate greater than 50% classification performance in a 397-way classification task.by Catherine Anne White Olsson.M. Eng

Jews in East Norse Literature

This book explores the portrayal of Jews and Judaism in medieval Danish and Swedish literary and visual culture. Drawing on over 100 manuscripts and incunabula as well as runic inscriptions and religious art, the author describes the various, often contradictory, images ranging from antisemitism and anti-Judaism to the elevation of Jews as morally exemplary figures. It includes new editions of 54 East Norse texts with English translations