Power, Prospects, and Priorities

Some educated guesses are necessary to guide de­ fense planning. Without them, procurement, doctrine, and military organization become arbitrary, the result of inertia rather than strategy. This article offers a few arguments to challenge inertia: • The benign security environment of the 1990s abets domestic political confusion about which potential types of conflict should govern military planning

Research priorities in land use and land-cover change for the Earth system and integrated assessment modelling

Copyright © 2010 Royal Meteorological Society and Crown Copyright.This special issue has highlighted recent and innovative methods and results that integrate observations and modelling analyses of regional to global aspect of biophysical and biogeochemical interactions of land-cover change with the climate system. Both the Earth System and the Integrated Assessment modeling communities recognize the importance of an accurate representation of land use and land-cover change to understand and quantify the interactions and feedbacks with the climate and socio-economic systems, respectively. To date, cooperation between these communities has been limited. Based on common interests, this work discusses research priorities in representing land use and land-cover change for improved collaboration across modelling, observing and measurement communities. Major research topics in land use and land-cover change are those that help us better understand (1) the interaction of land use and land cover with the climate system (e.g. carbon cycle feedbacks), (2) the provision of goods and ecosystem services by terrestrial (natural and anthropogenic) land-cover types (e.g. food production), (3) land use and management decisions and (4) opportunities and limitations for managing climate change (for both mitigation and adaptation strategies)

Markers of assimilation of problematic experiences in dementia within the LivDem project

© 2015, © The Author(s) 2015. This study aimed to determine whether the Markers of Assimilation of Problematic Experiences in Dementia scale (MAPED) can be used to identify whether the way in which participants talk about dementia changed during the group. All eight sessions of a LivDem group, which were attended by participants were recorded and transcribed. An initial analysis identified 160 extracts, which were then rated using the MAPED system. Inter-rater reliability was 61% and following a resolution meeting, 35 extracts were discarded, leaving 125 extracts with an agreed marker code. All of the participants were identified as producing a speech marker relating to dementia, and these varied between 0 (warding off) to 6 (problem solution). Examples of these markers are provided. The proportion of emergence markers (indicating the initial stages of assimilation) compared to later markers changed significantly between the first four sessions and the final sessions. This difference was still significant even when the markers produced by the most verbal participant, Graham, were excluded. The use of process measures within psychotherapy complements more conventional outcome measures and has both theoretical and clinical implications