Effects of UN Peacekeeping Missions

Of everything the United Nations does, probably one its most scrutinized programs is its peacekeeping missions across the globe. Even though humanity is experiencing an unprecedented level of peace, deadly civil wars still occur across the world, especially in developing nations. The UN has become involved in many of these conflicts, sending peacekeeping forces to the country in crisis. UN peace efforts are very important because they have the potential to save thousands of lives and preventing the further damages of war. It is for this reason that it is vital to examine the UN peacekeeping missions and evaluate the outcomes these have produced. My research into this question will briefly look at the process of peacekeeping and its results based on reports after peacekeeping missions leave the nation in question. The overall question I seek to answer is “Do UN peacekeeping forces leave a civil war-stricken country in a better or worse condition since they have arrived?”. Essentially I seek to asses the UN’s effectiveness in peacekeeping overall. In order to find an answer to this question, I will examine various scholarly debates and papers all evaluating the UN’s performance in various conflicts. These papers range in backgrounds and hypotheses but they break down these conflicts into various tests in order to identify the outcomes and come to a general conclusion. Each of these studies also highlights specific conflicts as examples in support of their argument, thus providing the research with more credibility, while still showing the vast complication of peacekeeping. UN peacekeeping forces, in the majority of cases, fail to bring about stable peace in civil wars. I believe this because, from what I have seen, there seems to be a lot of civil wars that keep occurring or fail to stop, for example, Syria. While Syria has caught quite the attention and action of the UN, its war has no end in sight. Conflicts in various African nations such as Somalia fail to end as well, thus bringing me to what I hypothesize

Optimal funding and investment strategies in defined contribution pension plans under Epstein-Zin utility

A defined contribution pension plan allows consumption to be redistributed from the plan member’s working life to retirement in a manner that is consistent with the member’s personal preferences. The plan’s optimal funding and investment strategies therefore depend on the desired pattern of consumption over the lifetime of the member. We investigate these strategies under the assumption that the member has an Epstein-Zin utility function, which allows a separation between risk aversion and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution, and we also take into account the member’s human capital. We show that a stochastic lifestyling approach, with an initial high weight in equity-type investments and a gradual switch into bond-type investments as the retirement date approaches is an optimal investment strategy. In addition, the optimal contribution rate each year is not constant over the life of the plan but reflects trade-offs between the desire for current consumption, bequest and retirement savings motives at different stages in the life cycle, changes in human capital over the life cycle, and attitude to risk

Quantifying Loss Aversion: Evidence from a UK Population Survey

We estimate loss aversion using on an online survey of a representative sample of over 4,000 UK residents. The average aversion to a loss of £500 relative to a gain of the same amount is 2.41, but loss aversion varies significantly with characteristics such as gender, age, education, financial knowledge, social class, employment status, management responsibility, income, savings and home ownership. Other influencing factors include marital status, number of children, ease of savings, rainy day fund, personality type, emotional state, newspaper and political party. However, once we condition on all the profiling characteristics of the respondents, some factors, in particular gender, cease to be significant, suggesting that gender differences in risk and loss attitudes might be due to other factors, such as income differences

The FU Orionis binary system RNO 1B/1C

Observations of CS (7→6) emission reveal a ≥3M_⊙ core, 1.8×10^4 AU in size, surrounding the FU Orionis binary system RNO 1B/1C. Fractional chemical abundances, calculated from LVG and LTE codes, are mostly similar to those in the cold core TMC 1. However, values for Si0/H_2 and CH_(3)0H/H_2 are enhanced, possibly by sputtering reactions or grain-grain collisions in tile outflow associated with the young stars. Aperture syntllesis maps of tile 2.6 and 3.1 mm continuum emission at ~5" and ~9" resolution, respectively, reveal that RNO 1C is surrounded by a flattened, dusty envelope, ~5000 AU in size, with mass ≥1.1 M_⊙. High spatial resolution (~3") interferometer observations of CS (2→1) emission may trace the dense walls of ail outflow cavity comprised of two concentric arcs with dynamical ages of 4×10^3 and 1×10^4 yr. The velocity structure of lower density gas imaged in the CO (1→0) transition is consistent with the arcs being formed by two energetic FU Orionis outbursts. Each event may have imparted more than 4 M_⊙km s^(-1) to the outflow, implying outburst mass loss rates of ~10^(-4) M_⊙ yr^(-1). It appears that RNO 1C is probably the driving source for the outflow and tllat, while pre-main sequence stars are in tile FU Orionis stage, outbursts may dominate both outflow morphology and energetics

Development and fabrication of sealed silver-zinc cells, phase 1

A facility was designed, constructed and equipped for the production of prismatic alkaline rechargeable battery cells using inorganic (ceramic) separators. This unique facility is environmentally controlled and contains separate areas for electrode fabrication, separator processing, cell assembly, cell finishing and testing. An initial production run of 125 sealed silver zinc cells, using inorganic separators, was made in the facility in order to provide samples for baseline performance tests. Ten of these cells were given performance characterization and life cycle tests

Evaluation of an urban NMHC emission inventory by measurements and impact on CTM results

This paper presents an evaluation of the consistency of an urban state-of-the-art hydrocarbon (HC) emission inventory. The evaluation was conducted through the comparison of this inventory with hourly HC measurements during two summer months in the centre of Marseille, on the Mediterranean French coast. Factors of under or overestimation could be calculated for each compound on the basis of a systematic HC to HC ratio analysis. These results, associated with a deep analysis of the speciation profiles, show that most of the common and highly concentrated hydrocarbons (such as butanes) are too much predominant in the emission speciation, while the heavy and less common species (branched alkanes, substituted aromatics) are under-represented in the inventory. The urban diffuse sources appear here as one critical point of the inventories. The disagreements were shown to have a strong incidence on the representation of the air mass reactivity. In a last step, the identified uncertainties in emissions were implemented in an air-quality model for sensitivity studies. It was shown that the observed biases in the inventory could affect the regional ozone production, with a probable impact on ozone peaks of 2-10 ppbv over the area. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd

Methane emissions from the 2015 Aliso Canyon blowout in Los Angeles, CA.

Single-point failures of natural gas infrastructure can hamper methane emission control strategies designed to mitigate climate change. The 23 October 2015 blowout of a well connected to the Aliso Canyon underground storage facility in California resulted in a massive release of natural gas. Analysis of methane and ethane data from dozens of plume transects, collected during 13 research-aircraft flights between 7 November 2015 and 13 February 2016, shows atmospheric leak rates of up to 60 metric tons of methane and 4.5 metric tons of ethane per hour. At its peak, this blowout effectively doubled the methane emission rate of the entire Los Angeles basin and, in total, released 97,100 metric tons of methane to the atmosphere

Grouping Individual Investment Preferences in Retirement Savings: A Cluster Analysis of a USS Members Risk Attitude Survey

Cluster analysis is used to identify homogeneous groups of members of USS in terms of risk attitudes. There are two distinct clusters of members in their 40s and 50s. One had previously ‘engaged’ with USS by making additional voluntary contributions. It typically had higher pay, longer tenure, less interest in ethical investing, lower risk capacity, a higher percentage of males, and a higher percentage of academics than members of the ‘disengaged’ cluster. Conditioning only on the attitude to risk responses, there are 18 clusters, with similar but not identical membership, depending on which clustering method is used. The differences in risk aversion across the 18 clusters could be explained largely by differences in the percentage of females and the percentage of couples. Risk aversion increases as the percentage of females in the cluster increases, while it reduces as the percentage of couples increases because of greater risk sharing within the household. Characteristics that other studies have found important determinants of risk attitudes, such as age, income and (pension) wealth, do not turn out to be as significant for USS members. Further, despite being on average more highly educated than the general population, USS members are marginally more risk averse than the general population, controlling for salary, although the difference is not significant

Systematics of the odd-even effect in the resonance ionization of Os and Ti

Measurements of the odd-even effect in the mass spectrometric analysis of Ti and Os isotopes by resonance ionization mass spectrometry have been performed for ΔJ = + 1, 0 and -1 transitions. Under saturating conditions of the ionization and for ΔJ = + 1 transitions odd-even effects are reduced below the 0.5% level. Depending on the polarization state of the laser large odd isotope enrichments are observed for ΔJ = 0 and -1 transitions which can be reduced below the 0.5% level by depolarization of the laser field