Britain and the pacification of the Lebanon 1841-1845

With the expulsion of the Egyptians from Syria in 1840, and the signing of the Straits Convention in July 1841, there comes a period of relative quiescence in the Eastern Question. The restored province provided a constitutional problem which took five years to solve. Prior to the Ibrahimian occupation, Lebanon had been governed by a local family and was virtually independent of the Porte, but the Shehab prince, the Amir Bashir, had traitorously supported the rule of the Egyptians. After the Egyptians had been driven out, Turkey resolved to improve her hold on the Syrian pashaliks and in particular, on the autonomous province of Lebanon. The Amir Bashir was deposed. By nature of the promises made to the sects of Lebanon during the 1840 fighting, that their loyalty to the sultan would be rewarded by an improved administration and the recognition of their traditional liberties, the Turks committed themselves to a greater extent than they would have wished, but since the powers who ejected Muhammad Ali had allowed their military commanders to be the bearers of the Turkish promises, they took it on themselves to see these promises honoured, and Turkey found it difficult to evade her obligations. The promises included the right of the Lebanon to select its own prince, and to have its own administration. England assumed a pre-eminent influence in local affairs by virtue of her leading part in the military operations of 1840, and Palmerston was not inclined to surrender it to France, who by nature of her centuries-old religious link with the biggest sect in the Lebanon - the Maronites - had customarily wielded the greatest, and indeed the only, European influence in Syria. France, readmitted to the concert of powers, set about the recovery of the influence she had forfeited by a too exclusive advocacy of Muhammad Ali. Palmerston reorganised his consular service, appointed a 'purely political' consul-general, and might even have set up a counterbalance to the Franco-Maronite liaison by establishing relations with the most warlike of the sects, the Druses. But in August 1841 the Whigs fell from office. Russia acted with Britain in an effort to preserve the Anglo-French rift, Metternich tried to balance, and Aberdeen attempted to bring the western powers together again in a second entente. But in Syria, as in their Mediterranean and colonial policies, Britain and France were on divergent courses. Canning, who replaced Ponsonby at the Porte, was largely responsible for the successful implementation of the promises Turkey made to the Lebanon, and the consular corps in Lebanon supervised their operation. The restoration of the Shehab family in the person of a septuagenarian nephew of Amir Bashir was not a success and in 1842 he too was deposed by the Turks. The European representatives fought for the legitimist principle but the Shehabs had no competent scion to offer. The Turks tried to take this opportunity to establish direct rule, but again Europe intervened. The separatism of the sects, and in particular of the Druses, rendered a unified administration impossible, and two civil wars proved the point. Europe was obliged to forsake schemes of a united Lebanon under a Christian prince and to set up separate Maronite and Druse administrations in 1843, and the system endured until the twentieth century. Austria and France had been party to the efforts to secure a single regime for the Lebanon but when this proved impracticable they would not coerce the Turks to establish a dual system which would reduce Catholic influence. They accused Britain of complicity in the civil wars, and hindered Canning's efforts to effect the dual system of administration. After two more years of wearying negotiation he brought the system into working order, largely with Russian assistance. French archives on Syria are closed, but the P.R.O. material is very full and there are copious Blue Books; the Aberdeen papers, contemporary memoirs and private papers throw light on a period which history has labelled, paradoxically, as the entente cordiale. <p

Restoration of eucalypt grassy woodland: effects of experimental interventions on ground-layer vegetation

We report on the effects of broad-scale restoration treatments on the ground layer of eucalypt grassy woodland in south-eastern Australia. The experiment was conducted in two conservation reserves from which livestock grazing had previously been removed. Changes in biomass, species diversity, ground-cover attributes and life-form were analysed over a 4-year period in relation to the following experimental interventions: (1) reduced kangaroo density, (2) addition of coarse woody debris and (3) fire (a single burn). Reducing kangaroo density doubled total biomass in one reserve, but no effects on exotic biomass, species counts or ground cover attributes were observed. Coarse woody debris also promoted biomass, particularly exotic annual forbs, as well as plant diversity in one of the reserves. The single burn reduced biomass, but changed little else. Overall, we found the main driver of change to be the favourable growth seasons that had followed a period of drought. This resulted in biomass increasing by 67%, (mostly owing to the growth of perennial native grasses), whereas overall native species counts increased by 18%, and exotic species declined by 20% over the 4-year observation period. Strategic management of grazing pressure, use of fire where biomass has accumulated and placement of coarse woody debris in areas of persistent erosion will contribute to improvements in soil and vegetation condition, and gains in biodiversity, in the future.Funding and in-kind logistic support for this project was provided by the ACT Government as part of an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant (LP0561817; LP110100126). Drafts of the manuscript were read by Saul Cunningham and Ben Macdonald

Seeing more than the graph: evaluation of multivariate graph visualization methods.

Many real-world networks are multivariate, i.e., they have attributes associated with nodes and/or edges. Examples include social networks whose nodes represent people and edges represent relationships. There is usually information about each person (such as name, age, and gender) and the relationship (such type, duration, and strength). Besides common graph analysis tasks (such as identifying the most influential or structurally important nodes), there are more complex analyses for multivariate networks. One of these is the multivariate graph clustering, i.e., identifying clusters formed by nodes that have similar attributes and are close to each other in terms of graph distance. For instance, in social network analysis, it is interesting to sociologists whether or not people with similar characteristics (node attributes) are also connected to each other. Currently there are very few visualization methods available for such analysis. Graph and multivariate visualization have been well studied separately in the literature. Herman et al. summarized the recent work on graph visualization [3], and Wong and Bergeron covered the development in multivariate visualization [4]. However, there is relatively less work available on multivariate network visualization. Two types of approaches are commonly used. The first one is the mapping approach, which maps attributes to visual elements of a node or edge. A simple example is to map one attribute to node size and another to node color [2]. A more advanced mapping approach uses glyphs to represent node or edge attributes. One such example is to use the length and width of a rectangle node glyph to represent two node attributes [1]. The second one is the 2.5D approach: it uses the third dimension to present the multivariate information, while the graph is shown on a 2D plane. Examples include the recently proposed "GraphScape" [5], which adopts a landscape metaphor: each attribute is represented by a two-and-a-half- dimensional surface, whose height indicates its value. Each approach has its strength and weakness. The mapping approach is effective of showing numerical value using visual element such as size, but it can be difficult to compare the value of attributes represented by different elements such as size and color. The problem is alleviated by a carefully designed glyph, but visual complexity increases quickly as the number of attributes that a glyph needs to represent grows. The 2.5D approach is good at showing the distribution of attribute values over the network, but the attribute surface could introduce occlusion and affect the visibility of underlying network. In this paper, we present a study evaluating the effectiveness of these two approaches for different analysis tasks. We compare the performance of mapping and 2.5D approach in a controlled lab environment. We included both simple tasks (such as identifying nodes with the largest attribute value) and complex tasks (such as multivariate graph clustering). The performance is measured both in terms of accuracy and completion time. The results indicate that statistically mapping approach performs better for the simple tasks, while the 2.5D approach is favored in the complex task. The outcomes from this study provide some guidelines for the design of effective multivariate graph visualization for different analysis tasks

An investigation of wing buffeting response at subsonic and transonic speeds: Phase 1: F-111A flight data analysis. Volume 1: Summary of technical approach, results and conclusions

The structural response to aerodynamic buffet during moderate to high-g maneuvers at subsonic and transonic speeds was investigated. The investigation is reported in three volumes. This volume presents a summary of the investigation with a complete description of the technical approach, description of the aircraft, its instrumentation, the data reduction procedures, results and conclusion

An investigation of wing buffeting response at subsonic and transonic speeds. Phase 1: F-111A flight data analysis. Volume 2: Plotted power spectra

Volume 2 of this three volume report is presented. This volume presents plotted variations of power spectral density data with frequency for each structural response item for each data sampled and analyzed during the course of the investigation. Some of the information contained in Volume 1 are repeated to allow the reader to identify the specific conditions appropriate to each plot presented and to interpret the data

Do managed clinical networks improve quality of diabetes care? : Evidence from a retrospective mixed methods evaluation

Peer reviewedPostprin

Evidence for olfactory learning in procellariiform seabird chicks

Burrow nesting procellariiform seabirds use olfactory cues for both foraging and nest recognition. As chicks, burrow nesters develop in the dark, but are exposed to both prey-related and individual-specific scents through contact with their parents. This exposure suggests that chicks may have the opportunity to learn odors while still in the nest. In this study, we examined whether exposure to odorants during development might influence olfactory search behavior expressed later in life. To test this idea, we exposed eggs of thin-billed prions Pachyptila belcheri to a rosy-scented novel odor (phenyl ethyl alcohol, PEA) or a control (water) just before hatching; chicks were then tested with these odors in a simple wind tunnel. Prior to fledgling, subjects who had received pre-exposure to PEA displayed head sweeps nearly twice as frequently as control birds did when presented with PEA. This study demonstrates that under natural rearing conditions, procellariiforms learn odor characteristics of their rearing environment in the nest