L’otan et George W. Bush : Perspectives du Congrès américain sur la transformation de l’alliance

La plupart des recherches actuelles sur l’Organisation du traité de l’Atlantique nord (otan) mettent en évidence que cette alliance traverse de graves difficultés, est dans l’ensemble inappropriée, ou bien est vouée à l’effondrement. Presque toutes portent sur les différends à propos de l’Irak des deux côtés de l’Atlantique, sur les grandes différences de capacité militaire entre les États-Unis et ses alliés, ou sur les effets (négativement perçus) d’un élargissement de l’alliance. Dans la littérature récente, aucune recherche n’examine le rôle du Congrès américain sur l’évolution de l’organisation. Cet article fait l’examen du regard que porte le Congrès sur l’otan à propos des quatre questions de l’élargissement de l’alliance, du rôle de l’otan en Afghanistan, de l’assistance qu’elle apporte aux pays de l’Union africaine au Soudan, et de son rôle en Irak après l’opération Liberté de l’Irak. Il conclut que le Congrès s’est peu soucié de voir à la transformation de l’otan et s’est désintéressé de manière surprenante de sa mission en Afghanistan. Bien qu’il y ait eu des exemples d’entrepreneurship de la part du Congrès, celui-ci s’est montré principalement loyal envers le président des États-Unis.Much of the current research on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (nato) points to an alliance that is deeply troubled, largely irrelevant, or is bound to collapse. Nearly all of this research focuses on the transatlantic differences over Iraq, the wide differences in military capabilities between the United States and its allies, or the perceived negative impact of alliance expansion. Within recent literature, no research examines Congress’s role in shaping the alliance’s evolution. This paper examines Congress’s views toward nato across four issue areas; alliance expansion, nato’s role in Afghanistan, nato’s assistance to the African Union in Sudan, and nato’s role in Iraq after Operation Iraqi Freedom. This paper finds that Congress devoted little attention to shaping nato’s transformation, and was surprisingly disengaged on nato’s mission in Afghanistan. While examples of congressional entrepreneurship were evident, Congress was mostly deferential to the president

An Economic Analysis of Texas Shrimp Season Closures

Management of the Texas penaeid shrimp fishery is aimed at increasing revenue from brown shrimp, Penaeus aztecus, landings and decreasing the level of discards. Since 1960 Texas has closed its territorial sea for 45-60 days during peak migration of brown shrimp to the Gulf of Mexico. In 1981 the closure was extended to 200 miles to include the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone. Simulation modeling is used in this paper to estimate the changes in landings, revenue, costs, and economic rent attributable to the Texas closure. Four additional analyses were conducted to estimate the effects of closing the Gulf 1- to 4-fathom zone for 45 and 60 days, with and without effort redirected to inshore waters. Distributional impacts are analyzed in terms of costs, revenues, and rents, by vessel class, shrimp species, vessel owner, and crew

High frequency EPR on dilute solutions of the single molecule magnet Ni4_4

Dilute frozen solutions of the single molecule magnet Ni$_4$ (S=4) have been studied using high frequency D-band (130 GHz) EPR. Despite the random orientation of the molecules, well defined EPR absorption peaks are observed, due to the strong variation of the splittings between the different spin-states on magnetic field. Temperature dependent studies above 4 K and comparison with simulations enable identification of the spin transitions and determination of the Hamiltonian parameters. The latter are found to be close to those of Ni$_4$ single crystals. No echo was detected from Ni$_4$ in pulsed experiments, which sets an upper bound of about 50 ns on the spin coherence time.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Journal of Applied Physics (52nd MMM conference proceedings

One year and one war later: still no vote from Congress onmilitary action

It has now been more than a year since the US began military action against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Since the war began, President Obama has repeatedly requested that Congress give the authority for the action, but Congress has made little progress in that direction. Ryan C. Hendrickson places most of the blame for Congressional inaction on the Speaker of the House, John Boehner. He argues that Boehner’s lack of desire for a vote is expanding the president’s war powers – powers that, constitutionally, Congress should be exercising much more oversight of

Measurement of Magnetization Dynamics in Single-Molecule Magnets Induced by Pulsed Millimeter-Wave Radiation

We describe an experiment aimed at measuring the spin dynamics of the Fe8 single-molecule magnet in the presence of pulsed microwave radiation. In earlier work, heating was observed after a 0.2-ms pulse of intense radiation, indicating that the spin system and the lattice were out of thermal equilibrium at millisecond time scale [Bal et al., Europhys. Lett. 71, 110 (2005)]. In the current work, an inductive pick-up loop is used to probe the photon-induced magnetization dynamics between only two levels of the spin system at much shorter time scales (from ns to us). The relaxation time for the magnetization, induced by a pulse of radiation, is found to be on the order of 10 us.Comment: 3 RevTeX pages, including 3 eps figures. The paper will appear in the Journal of Applied Physics as MMM'05 conference proceeding

Partitioning Complex Networks via Size-constrained Clustering

The most commonly used method to tackle the graph partitioning problem in practice is the multilevel approach. During a coarsening phase, a multilevel graph partitioning algorithm reduces the graph size by iteratively contracting nodes and edges until the graph is small enough to be partitioned by some other algorithm. A partition of the input graph is then constructed by successively transferring the solution to the next finer graph and applying a local search algorithm to improve the current solution. In this paper, we describe a novel approach to partition graphs effectively especially if the networks have a highly irregular structure. More precisely, our algorithm provides graph coarsening by iteratively contracting size-constrained clusterings that are computed using a label propagation algorithm. The same algorithm that provides the size-constrained clusterings can also be used during uncoarsening as a fast and simple local search algorithm. Depending on the algorithm's configuration, we are able to compute partitions of very high quality outperforming all competitors, or partitions that are comparable to the best competitor in terms of quality, hMetis, while being nearly an order of magnitude faster on average. The fastest configuration partitions the largest graph available to us with 3.3 billion edges using a single machine in about ten minutes while cutting less than half of the edges than the fastest competitor, kMetis

Origin of the fast magnetization tunneling in the single-molecule magnet [Ni(hmp)(tBuEtOH)Cl]4

We present high-frequency angle-dependent EPR data for crystals of [NixZn1-x(hmp)(t-BuEtOH)Cl]4 (x = 1 and 0.02). The x = 1 complex behaves as a single-molecule magnet at low temperatures, displaying hysteresis and exceptionally fast magnetization tunneling. We show that this behavior is related to a 4th-order transverse crystal-field interaction, which produces a significant tunnel-splitting (~10 MHz) of the ground state of this S = 4 system. The magnitude of the 4th-order anisotropy, and the dominant axial term (D), can be related to the single-ion interactions (Di and Ei) at the individual NiII sites, as determined for the x = 0.02 crystals.Comment: 11 pages including 2 figure