Integrated Project Teams: The MoD's New Hot Potato?

Since the announcement of Smart Procurement, much has been written on the potential benefits that IPTs will hopefully bring. It is supposed that they will improve the interface with industry, create a better understanding of requirements and establish an environment where industry is motivated to perform and so reduce cost, risk and time into service while improving product quality. The formation of a team should provide continuity, consistency, flexibility and ~ increased performance due to the integration of a wide-range of functional activities and decision-making, as well as increased motivation. These may well be gallant objectives, but how achievable are they? What obstacles does the MoD face in the implementation of the IPTs? Have they grasped a 'hot potato'

Waterfowl Harvest and Hunter Use at Carlyle Lake During the 1973 Season

Division of Wildlife Resources Migratory Bird Section, Periodic Report No. 7Report issued on: April 15, 197

Is sea-basing a viable method of providing logistic support to the UK amphibious force?

Maritime power has traditionally been a central part of the UK’s defence planning and is well suited to supporting a wide range of military operations. The littoral area has always created problems for naval planners as most landings historically have had to endure a tactical separation of the naval and land components, and hence an artificial seam between the Navy and the Marines. With the end of the Cold War, amphibious operations are going to be more difficult to conduct than in the past, and amphibious forces are going to have to adopt manoeuvre warfare capabilities in order to successfully complete their missions. It is very likely that amphibious forces will have to conduct operations against a numerically superior enemy, who is on his own terrain, and be surrounded by a neutral, if not hostile populace. As such, the concept of Operational Manoeuvre From The Sea (OMFTS) whereby the sea is used as a manoeuvre space, and command and control is fast enough to cope with large amounts of information, but at the same time allow subordinates maximum flexibility to use their initiative, is increasingly attractive. It will be important not only for the combat elements to be able to use this new concept, but the Combat Service Support (CSS) elements as well

Implications for the U.S. of Anglo-French Defense Cooperation

The paper analyzes, from a predominantly UK perspective, the implications for the U.S. of the November 2, 2010, Anglo-French Defence Cooperation Treaty. The current pressures on British and French defence budgets were the primary driving force behind this cooperative effort. London and Paris have made steps toward improving joint efforts in a number of areas, with defence acquisition and industrial cooperation being prominent. In the UK, there appears to be strong political support at the highest levels, which has permeated to lower levels in the bureaucracy, while the UK defence industry appears to be cautiously optimistic about future business opportunities. The impact of enhanced Anglo-French cooperation on the U.S. would appear to be largely favourable for Washington. Rather than providing a basis for weakened UK attention to the U.S., as some fear, the efforts by London and Paris will potentially generate greater national military capability from scarce resources and could serve as a vehicle for broader European efforts to enhance their defence capabilities. While multinational European military development projects are viewed with scepticism in the UK, the Anglo-French arrangement could strengthen the prospects for bilateral projects in which other European states may elect to participate

New Records of Michigan Cicadidae (Homoptera), With Notes on the Use of Songs to Monitor Range Changes

We present records of Diceroprocta vitripennis, Tibicen chloromera, and Tibicen pruinosa (new state record) in Michigan. Monitoring geographic range changes and population size differences by song suggests several population situations for cicadas: (1) sizable populations in most areas of apparently good habitat; (2) widely separated single individuals or small populations on the edges of populated regions, representing range extensions that may be of limited duration; (3) one or a few individuals present only once, probably transferred in soil on roots, and ultimately unsuccessful. Species- specific calling songs allow sensitive measurement of species\u27 range changes

A Computational Cognitive Model of Syntactic Priming

The psycholinguistic literature has identified two syntactic adaptation effects in language production: rapidly decaying short-term priming and long-lasting adaptation. To explain both effects, we present an ACT-R model of syntactic priming based on a wide-coverage, lexicalized syntactic theory that explains priming as facilitation of lexical access. In this model, two well-established ACT-R mechanisms, base-level learning and spreading activation, account for long-term adaptation and short-term priming, respectively. Our model simulates incremental language production and in a series of modeling studies we show that it accounts for (a) the inverse frequency interaction; (b) the absence of a decay in long-term priming; and (c) the cumulativity of long-term adaptation. The model also explains the lexical boost effect and the fact that it only applies to short-term priming. We also present corpus data that verifies a prediction of the model, i.e., that the lexical boost affects all lexical material, rather than just heads. Keywords: syntactic priming, adaptation, cognitive architectures, ACT-R, categorial grammar, incrementality

A global fit of top quark effective theory to data

In this paper we present a global fit of beyond the Standard Model (BSM) dimension six operators relevant to the top quark sector to currently available data. Experimental measurements include parton-level top-pair and single top production from the LHC and the Tevatron. Higher order QCD corrections are modelled using differential and global K-factors, and we use novel fast-fitting techniques developed in the context of Monte Carlo event generator tuning to perform the fit. This allows us to provide new, fully correlated and model-independent bounds on new physics effects in the top sector from the most current direct hadron-collider measurements in light of the involved theoretical and experimental systematics. As a by-product, our analysis constitutes a proof-of-principle that fast fitting of theory to data is possible in the top quark sector, and paves the way for a more detailed analysis including top quark decays, detector corrections and precision observables.Comment: Additional references and preprint code added. Minor error in generation of plots fixed, no conclusions affecte