Italy, British resolve and the 1935-1936 Italo-Ethiopian War

This article offers an explanation of varying perceptions of resolve - the willingness to incur costs in order to reach a contested good. The article argues that domestic actors who publicly and personally invest themselves in policy action are likely to view signals of high adversary resolve more critically than those who do not. Variance in signals is also important. Skeptical “vested” actors view even public signals as indicators of low resolve if the signals contain ambiguity. If “vested” actors dominate the challenger’s government, only clear and costly signals are likely to lead the challenger to perceive high defender resolve. I use this approach to explain Italian perceptions of British resolve on the eve of the 1935-36 Italo-Ethiopian War. While many Italian officials came to see British resolve as high, Benito Mussolini was motivated to see the ambiguity in British signals.Cet article propose une analyse de la perception variable de la résolution (l’attitude qui permet de prendre en compte des coûts pour obtenir un bien contesté). L’article soutient que les acteurs nationaux qui s’investissent personnellement et de façon publique dans l’action politique sont susceptibles de sous-interpréter les signaux provenant de compétiteurs engagés dans une épreuve de force. La variation de ces signaux constitue également un paramètre important. Des acteurs sceptiques ne prennent pas aux sérieux des messages, même publics, s’ils contiennent des ambiguïtés. Si des acteurs fortement motivés dominent le gouvernement du compétiteur, alors seulement des signaux clairs et forts (en termes de coûts) de la part du défenseur peuvent amener le compétiteur à percevoir le caractère résolu du défendeur. C’est ce schéma interprétatif que nous utilisons pour expliquer les perceptions italiennes de l’attitude résolue des Britanniques au seuil de la guerre italo-éthiopienne de 1935-1936. Alors que de nombreux officiels italiens percevaient la détermination des Britanniques, Benito Mussolini continuait à insister sur l’ambiguïté des signaux de leur part

A Study of Dark Matter and QCD-Charged Mediators in the Quasi-Degenerate Regime

We study a scenario in which the only light new particles are a Majorana fermion dark matter candidate and one or more QCD-charged scalars, which couple to light quarks. This scenario has several interesting phenomenological features if the new particles are nearly degenerate in mass. In particular, LHC searches for the light scalars have reduced sensitivity, since the visible and invisible products tend to be softer. Moreover, dark matter-scalar co-annihilation can allow even relatively heavy dark matter candidates to be consistent thermal relics. Finally, the dark matter nucleon scattering cross section is enhanced in the quasi-degenerate limit, allowing direct detection experiments to use both spin-independent and spin-dependent scattering to probe regions of parameter space beyond those probed by the LHC. Although this scenario has broad application, we phrase this study in terms of the MSSM, in the limit where the only light sparticles are a bino-like dark matter candidate and light-flavored squarks.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figures; as published in PRD with significant revision

The Limits of Radical Parties in Coalition Foreign Policy: Italy, Hijacking, and the Extremity Hypothesis

Scholars increasingly suggest that coalition governments produce more extreme foreign policies than single-party governments. Extremity is especially likely when governments include radical parties that take extreme positions on foreign policy issues and are \u201ccritical\u201d to the government\u2019s survival, as the radical parties push the centrist ones toward the extremes. A look at Italy\u2019s Second Republic provides an important counterpoint to the extremity hypothesis. In three high-profile cases of military operations\u2014Albania 1997, Kosovo 1999, and Afghanistan 2006\u201308\u2014Italy had a center-left government that depended on radical parties for its survival. In all cases, the radical parties opposed military operations but did not prevent the government from acting by forcing the government\u2019s fall. Our article seeks to explain the limits of leftist radical parties in Italy\u2019s Second Republic. We argue first that radical parties are reluctant to threaten or force government collapse as this can lead to an opposition coalition coming to office and voters\u2019 being blamed for the outcome. Second, we claim that foreign policy has been less important to radical parties than domestic issues. Finally, we argue that radical parties have appealed to their voters through theatrical politics and have affected the implementation of military operations

Using Machine Learning to Predict Sales Conditional on Bid Acceptance

A North American provider of vehicle parking solutions seeks to predict if a bid will be successful and, for those that are successful, what will be the cumulative sales revenue. Both traditional statistical methods and machine learning algorithms were employed. The machine learning techniques performed better than the statistical methods. There is no statistically significant difference between random forest and extreme gradient boosting for either the binary classification task or the regression task

In-Season Functional Shoulder Training for High School Baseball Pitchers

The overhead throwing motion is used in numerous sports including track, football, and baseball. Among these sports, the baseball pitch is unique in the demands placed upon the shoulder. The forces created in the shoulder can potentially lead to pathology affecting the athlete\u27s career. To enhance performance and decrease the risk of injury, it is important that the athlete participate in a year-round periodized program. Inappropriate or deficient training combined with the stress that the shoulder experiences during a season can lead to strains, impingement, tendon or labral tears, and instabilities

Session B3: Replacement Turbine Design for Improved Fish Passage at Ice Harbor

Abstract: In the summer of 2014, an extensive hydraulic development was completed for replacement fixed and adjustable blade turbines for the US Army Corps of Engineers’ (USACE) Ice Harbor Lock and Dam. During the hydraulic design phase, fish passage considerations made up the primary evaluation criteria, including minimum pressures, shear, flow quality, and blade strike. Expected fish passage characteristics for each set of proposed geometries were evaluated using both Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) calculations and physical model testing. Turbine performance characteristics, such as power and efficiency, were also considered as secondary evaluation criteria. For both machine types, several design and test loops were completed. At the end of each iteration, the design team, consisting of engineers and biologists from the USACE, Voith Hydro, and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), evaluated the results and identified aspects of the fish passage environment that could be improved. As the design process neared completion, final improvements to the overall fish passage environment involved making compromises between the individual design criteria. The current paper presents computational and model test results to illustrate the detailed design and evaluation process, including the trade-offs that were made leading up to the selection of the final prototype fixed blade turbine geometry. Comparison of the fish passage evaluations for the fixed blade solution with those of the existing Ice Harbor Kaplan geometry shows significant potential for fish passage improvement

The Skeleton of a Data Breach: The Ethical and Legal Concerns

After over thirty data breaches spanning the third and fourth quarter of 2012, Forbes magazine labeled the summer of 2012 as “The Summer of the Data Breach.” Four years later, businesses across multiple industries have suffered brand-image damage and paid millions of dollars in remedial expenses; we are living in the era of the mega breach. In 2014, companies such as Target, Home Depot, JP Morgan Chase, Anthem, Sony, UPS, Jimmy John’s, Kmart, Neiman Marcus, Community Health Systems, and the White House suffered data breaches. The Home Depot breach alone resulted in the loss of “56 million credit card accounts,” “53 million email addresses,” and an estimated 63 million dollars in damage. In addition to the economic fallout associated with data breaches, the 2015 Ashley Madison data breach highlighted the personal toll faced by consumers when their “private” information becomes “public.” That data breach exposed the identities of millions of would-be philanderers, shaming not only the subscribers to Ashley Madison’s service, but also innocent bystanders such as their family members. The frequency of data breaches has shown no signs of abating in 2016—in the first quarter, multiple hospitals fell victim to “ransomware,” a data breach that allows hackers to literally hold patient data hostage.7 Several hospitals had to pay hackers to regain access to their patients’ data. “Decentralized technology” creates a different set of problems than the simple misuse of a single individual’s “technological profile” and information. Today, unauthorized access to electronic information, a result of what Burnham in 1983 referred to as “transactional information,” includes “hackers breaking into systems or networks, third parties accessing personal information on lost laptops or other mobile devices, or organizations failing to dispose of personal information securely.” Data breaches exemplify the first type of unauthorized access and despite their frequent occurrence, they are little examined from an ethical standpoint. Though Google Scholar lists over 82,000 entries under “ethics of a data breach,” very few combine both terms in the title. One article that does so notes a “dearth of prior organizational-level privacy research, which has largely overlooked ethical issues or the personal harms often caused by privacy violations.” Even within the field of technology, “there has not been a huge literature on ethics within the mainstream of information systems journals.” Part of the problem is the novelty of data breach cases. They are so new and different that they appear to be technologically, morally, and legally unlike other problems. We suggest that analogies and analyses exist which can help resolve some of these moral and legal puzzles

Exploring Rural-Urban Differences in Polygenic Associations for Health among Older Adults in the United States

A complex combination of genes and environment influence health and, as a result, both genes and environment can play a role in shaping health disparities. We consider distinctions in these influences across rural and urban settings, expanding upon work that shows lower genetic associations in rural compared to urban places by studying an older age group and examining more than the typical outcomes of alcohol/substance abuse. Using a sample of 14,994 adults from the 1992 through 2016 waves of the Health andRetirement Study, our results suggest genetic associations for BMI and heart conditions are significantly lower in rural compared to urban settings. We do not find evidence in support of this association for depression and smoking. In sum, the results suggest the gene-environment interaction may play a role in the well-documented disparities across rural and urban places within the United States, further highlighting the importance of the social, economic, and built environments for individual health

Zipr: A High-Impact, Robust, Open-source, Multi-platform, Static Binary Rewriter

Zipr is a tool for static binary rewriting, first published in 2016. Zipr was engineered to support arbitrary program modification with an emphasis on low overhead, robustness, and flexibility to perform security enhancements and instrumentation. Originally targeted to Linux x86-32 binaries, Zipr now supports 32- and 64-bit binaries for X86, ARM, and MIPS architectures, as well as preliminary support for Windows programs. These features have helped Zipr make a dramatic impact on research. It was first used in the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge to take second place overall, with the best security score of any participant, Zipr has now been used in a variety of research areas by both the original authors as well as third parties. Zipr has also led to publications in artificial diversity, program instrumentation, program repair, fuzzing, autonomous vehicle security, research computing security, as well as directly contributing to two student dissertations. The open-source repository has accepted accepted patches from several external authors, demonstrating the impact of Zipr beyond the original authors.Comment: 5 page

Helix++: A platform for efficiently securing software

The open-source Helix++ project improves the security posture of computing platforms by applying cutting-edge cybersecurity techniques to diversify and harden software automatically. A distinguishing feature of Helix++ is that it does not require source code or build artifacts; it operates directly on software in binary form--even stripped executables and libraries. This feature is key as rebuilding applications from source is a time-consuming and often frustrating process. Diversification breaks the software monoculture and makes attacks harder to execute as information needed for a successful attack will have changed unpredictably. Diversification also forces attackers to customize an attack for each target instead of attackers crafting an exploit that works reliably on all similarly configured targets. Hardening directly targets key attack classes. The combination of diversity and hardening provides defense-in-depth, as well as a moving target defense, to secure the Nation's cyber infrastructure.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, white pape