1,978 research outputs found
Covert action failure and fiasco construction: William Hague’s 2011 Libyan venture
In 2011 William Hague, then British Foreign Secretary, authorized a Special Forces team to enter Libya and attempt to contact rebels opposed to Muammar Gaddafi in the unfolding civil war. However, its members were detained by the rebels, questioned and ejected from the country. This article puts the literature on public policy failures into dialogue with that on covert action as a tool of foreign policy. It asks: why did this not develop into a fully-fledged policy fiasco when journalists and politicians alike judged it to have been a major error of judgement on Hague’s part? Using narrative analysis of the contemporary reporting of this incident, we argue that the government – possessing the advantage of information asymmetry accruing from operational secrecy – was ultimately able to win the battle of narratives in a frame contestation process. The study of information asymmetry can enhance the recently revivified research into foreign policy failures
A secondary ionization mass spectrometry calibration of Cibicidoides pachyderma Mg/Ca with temperature
Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2008. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems 9 (2008): Q04009, doi:10.1029/2007GC001620.An evaluation of C. pachyderma Mg/Ca using a new suite of warm water multicores from the Florida Straits shows that the slope of Mg/Ca with temperature is shallower than previously thought. Using secondary ionization mass spectrometry, we have documented that the distribution of magnesium within the polished walls of foraminiferal tests is Gaussian, suggesting that the Mg/Ca in these samples is not affected by the addition of a secondary high-magnesium calcite in the walls. The Mg/Ca within a typical C. pachyderma test varies by about ±20% (1σ/μ · 100), and the variability increases slightly in tests with higher Mg/Ca. The regression of C. pachyderma Mg/Ca with temperature has a slope of 0.13 ± 0.05 mmol mol−1 per °C, indistinguishable from the slope observed in inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry measurements from a different subset of the same multicores, but about one half the slope of previously published calibrations. The largest differences between the calibrations comes at the warm water end of the regression, where previously published C. pachyderma Mg/Ca values from Little Bahama Bank are at least 3 mmol mol−1 higher than observed in these new cores. The reasons for this difference are not fully known but are most likely related to diagenesis at Little Bahama Bank.This
research was supported by several grants from the National
Science Foundation: OCE0096469 to W.B.C. for cruise support
to collect the Florida Straits cores; ATM0502428 and
OCE0550271 to W. B. C. for support to obtain the Mg/Ca data
on the ion probe; and OCE0425522 and OCE0550150 to T. M.
for the core top calibration study using ICP-MS
Associations of maternal BMI and gestational weight gain with neonatal adiposity in the Healthy Start study
Background: Maternal obesity and weight gain during pregnancy are risk factors for child obesity. Associations may be attributable to causal effects of the intrauterine environment or genetic and postnatal environmental factors
The F-BAR domain of SRGP-1 facilitates cell–cell adhesion during C. elegans morphogenesis
SRGP-1 activity leads to outward bending and projections of membranes at cell–cell junctions, promoting robust adhesion between cells during embryonic closure events
BeadArray Expression Analysis Using Bioconductor
Illumina whole-genome expression BeadArrays are a popular choice in gene profiling studies. Aside from the vendor-provided software tools for analyzing BeadArray expression data (GenomeStudio/BeadStudio), there exists a comprehensive set of open-source analysis tools in the Bioconductor project, many of which have been tailored to exploit the unique properties of this platform. In this article, we explore a number of these software packages and demonstrate how to perform a complete analysis of BeadArray data in various formats. The key steps of importing data, performing quality assessments, preprocessing, and annotation in the common setting of assessing differential expression in designed experiments will be covered
Measurement of the quasi-elastic axial vector mass in neutrino-oxygen interactions
The weak nucleon axial-vector form factor for quasi-elastic interactions is
determined using neutrino interaction data from the K2K Scintillating Fiber
detector in the neutrino beam at KEK. More than 12,000 events are analyzed, of
which half are charged-current quasi-elastic interactions nu-mu n to mu- p
occurring primarily in oxygen nuclei. We use a relativistic Fermi gas model for
oxygen and assume the form factor is approximately a dipole with one parameter,
the axial vector mass M_A, and fit to the shape of the distribution of the
square of the momentum transfer from the nucleon to the nucleus. Our best fit
result for M_A = 1.20 \pm 0.12 GeV. Furthermore, this analysis includes updated
vector form factors from recent electron scattering experiments and a
discussion of the effects of the nucleon momentum on the shape of the fitted
distributions.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, 6 table
A Study of Time-Dependent CP-Violating Asymmetries and Flavor Oscillations in Neutral B Decays at the Upsilon(4S)
We present a measurement of time-dependent CP-violating asymmetries in
neutral B meson decays collected with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II
asymmetric-energy B Factory at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. The data
sample consists of 29.7 recorded at the
resonance and 3.9 off-resonance. One of the neutral B mesons,
which are produced in pairs at the , is fully reconstructed in
the CP decay modes , , , () and , or in flavor-eigenstate
modes involving and (). The flavor of the other neutral B meson is tagged at the time of
its decay, mainly with the charge of identified leptons and kaons. The proper
time elapsed between the decays is determined by measuring the distance between
the decay vertices. A maximum-likelihood fit to this flavor eigenstate sample
finds . The value of the asymmetry amplitude is determined from
a simultaneous maximum-likelihood fit to the time-difference distribution of
the flavor-eigenstate sample and about 642 tagged decays in the
CP-eigenstate modes. We find , demonstrating that CP violation exists in the neutral B meson
system. (abridged)Comment: 58 pages, 35 figures, submitted to Physical Review
From Classical Genetics to Quantitative Genetics to Systems Biology: Modeling Epistasis
Gene expression data has been used in lieu of phenotype in both classical and quantitative genetic settings. These two disciplines have separate approaches to measuring and interpreting epistasis, which is the interaction between alleles at different loci. We propose a framework for estimating and interpreting epistasis from a classical experiment that combines the strengths of each approach. A regression analysis step accommodates the quantitative nature of expression measurements by estimating the effect of gene deletions plus any interaction. Effects are selected by significance such that a reduced model describes each expression trait. We show how the resulting models correspond to specific hierarchical relationships between two regulator genes and a target gene. These relationships are the basic units of genetic pathways and genomic system diagrams. Our approach can be extended to analyze data from a variety of experiments, multiple loci, and multiple environments
Measurement of the Branching Fraction for B- --> D0 K*-
We present a measurement of the branching fraction for the decay B- --> D0
K*- using a sample of approximately 86 million BBbar pairs collected by the
BaBar detector from e+e- collisions near the Y(4S) resonance. The D0 is
detected through its decays to K- pi+, K- pi+ pi0 and K- pi+ pi- pi+, and the
K*- through its decay to K0S pi-. We measure the branching fraction to be
B.F.(B- --> D0 K*-)= (6.3 +/- 0.7(stat.) +/- 0.5(syst.)) x 10^{-4}.Comment: 7 pages, 1 postscript figure, submitted to Phys. Rev. D (Rapid
Communications
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