Civil-Military Relations in a Civilized State: Panama

This article traces and analyzes civil-military relations in Panama. After a brief overview of the role of the National Guard in the country politics, the article concentrates on political developments since the 1989 U.S. invasion to overthrow the Noriega regime and the subsequent elimination of the Panamanian military. The study seeks to shed light on political life in an armyless and politically and socially fractionalized country occupying a sensitive strategic location. The concluding part of the study speculates on the possibility that terrorism, domestic security concerns, and regional considerations may prompt Washington and Panamanian leaders to reverse the decision to abolish the country\u27s military institution

Residual Minimizing Model Interpolation for Parameterized Nonlinear Dynamical Systems

We present a method for approximating the solution of a parameterized, nonlinear dynamical system using an affine combination of solutions computed at other points in the input parameter space. The coefficients of the affine combination are computed with a nonlinear least squares procedure that minimizes the residual of the governing equations. The approximation properties of this residual minimizing scheme are comparable to existing reduced basis and POD-Galerkin model reduction methods, but its implementation requires only independent evaluations of the nonlinear forcing function. It is particularly appropriate when one wishes to approximate the states at a few points in time without time marching from the initial conditions. We prove some interesting characteristics of the scheme including an interpolatory property, and we present heuristics for mitigating the effects of the ill-conditioning and reducing the overall cost of the method. We apply the method to representative numerical examples from kinetics - a three state system with one parameter controlling the stiffness - and conductive heat transfer - a nonlinear parabolic PDE with a random field model for the thermal conductivity.Comment: 28 pages, 8 figures, 2 table

Revisiting the anomalous rf field penetration into a warm plasma

Radio frequency waves do not penetrate into a plasma and are damped within it. The electric field of the wave and plasma current are concentrated near the plasma boundary in a skin layer. Electrons can transport the plasma current away from the skin layer due to their thermal motion. As a result, the width of the skin layer increases when electron temperature effects are taken into account. This phenomenon is called anomalous skin effect. The anomalous penetration of the rf electric field occurs not only for transversely propagating to the plasma boundary wave (inductively coupled plasmas) but also for the wave propagating along the plasma boundary (capacitively coupled plasmas). Such anomalous penetration of the rf field modifies the structure of the capacitive sheath. Recent advances in the nonlinear, nonlocal theory of the capacitive sheath are reported. It is shown that separating the electric field profile into exponential and non-exponential parts yields an efficient qualitative and quantitative description of the anomalous skin effect in both inductively and capacitively coupled plasma.Comment: 44 pages, invited paper at "Nonlocal, Collisionless Phenomena in Plasma" worksho

Advances in the therapy of cancer pain: from novel experimental models to evidence-based treatments

Cancer related pain may be due to the malignant disease itself, or subsequent to treatments, such as surgery, chemotherapy or radiation therapy. The pathophysiology of pain due to cancer may be complex and include a variety of nociceptive, inflammatory, and neuropathic mechanisms. Despite modern advances in pharmacotherapy, cancer pain remains overall under-treated in a world-wide scale, and a main reason is lack of understanding of its pertinent pathophysiology and basic pharmacology. Recently, pertinent animal models have facilitated understanding of the pathobiology and have advanced the pharmacology of cancer pain, with significant translational applicability to clinical practice. Furthermore, quantitative and qualitative systematic reviews, integrating the best available evidence, indicate the validity of treatments that fit into an expanded view of the WHO-analgesic ladder. Appropriate current treatments include a valid therapeutic role of non-opioid and opioid analgesics, adjuvants -such as gabapentin, biphosphonates, palliative radiation therapy and radiopharmaceutical compounds, and interventional pain therapy (including neuraxial drug infusion and verterbroplasty for spine metastases) in selected patients. Overall, experimental animal models simulating cancer pain have been useful in providing pertinent information on the pathophysiology of cancer pain, and provide a testing ground for established and novel therapies, which are validated by clinical evidence. This is clinically significant, considering the epidemiological dimensions and the problematic nature of cancer pain

Ellogon: A New Text Engineering Platform

This paper presents Ellogon, a multi-lingual, cross-platform, general-purpose text engineering environment. Ellogon was designed in order to aid both researchers in natural language processing, as well as companies that produce language engineering systems for the end-user. Ellogon provides a powerful TIPSTER-based infrastructure for managing, storing and exchanging textual data, embedding and managing text processing components as well as visualising textual data and their associated linguistic information. Among its key features are full Unicode support, an extensive multi-lingual graphical user interface, its modular architecture and the reduced hardware requirements.Comment: 7 pages, 9 figures. Will be presented to the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation - LREC 200

TORTS-LIBEL AND SLANDER-ABSOLUTE PRIVILEGE TO PRESS RELEASES OF EXECUTIVE OFFICIALS

Defendant, Attorney General for the state of Pennsylvania, wrote a letter to a District Attorney demanding the dismissal of the plaintiff, an Assistant District Attorney, because of the plaintiff\u27s alleged communistic activities and associations, information of which had been brought to the attention of the defendant by the State Police. Before delivery of the letter to the District Attorney, the defendant released it to the newspapers. Plaintiff brought a libel action alleging the statements to be false and maliciously made. The defendant demurred and the court sustained. On appeal, held, affirmed. Although the defendant himself has no power to dismiss or to compel the dismissal of the plaintiff, the letter supplying information about the plaintiff was written within the scope of his powers, and it is in the public interest that he keep the public advised of his official acts; therefore, release of the letter to the press is absolutely privileged. Matson v. Margiotti, 371 Pa. 188, 88 A. (2d) 892 (1952)

Bosonic molecules in rotating traps

We present a variational many-body wave function for repelling bosons in rotating traps, focusing on rotational frequencies that do not lead to restriction to the lowest Landau level. This wave function incorporates correlations beyond the Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) mean field approximation, and it describes rotating boson molecules (RBMs) made of localized bosons that form polygonal-ring-like crystalline patterns in their intrinsic frame of reference. The RBMs exhibit characteristic periodic dependencies of the ground-state angular momenta on the number of bosons in the polygonal rings. For small numbers of neutral bosons, the RBM ground-state energies are found to be always lower than those of the corresponding GP solutions, in particular in the regime of GP vortex formation.Comment: To appear in Phys. Rev. Lett. LATEX, 5 pages with 5 figures. For related papers, see http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~ph274cy