ISAF, NATO and the Quest for Stability in Afghanistan

政治学 / Political Science and International RelationsNATO’s ISAF is entering a critical phase. The arrival of the Obama Administration and the crafting of the AFPAK strategy affords the NATO mission in Afghanistan four vital new departures: a balanced regional strategy that considers Afghanistan and Pakistan; a more coherent overall strategy, an audit of effect in Afghanistan; and an all-important new approach to political reconciliation. Hitherto ISAF has been Afghanistan-lite. The new effort will help to ease that in the short-term but will only bear fruit if the three strategic phases envisaged in planning (security by end 2011, Afghan capacity building by end 2014 and Afghan civil primacy by end 2017) are bound together by a strategic campaign plan worthy of the name, that includes Asian partners first and foremost and an enhanced role for the UN.GRIPS-GCOE State-Building Workshop: Afghanistan (March 4, 2009

Defensa europea “light”: Por qué la defensa europea tiene más de política que de defensa

La defensa europea debe entenderse también como una pieza más en la lucha de los principales socios de la UE por lograr una posición de liderazgo en la jerarquía de poder de la Unión. Uno de los principales motivos de la división que se ha producido en Europa en torno a la guerra de Iraq ha sido la necesidad de los principales países europeos de maximizar su influencia dentro de la nueva Europa. El debate ha puesto de manifiesto el surgimiento de España como una fuerza coherente con capacidad para impedir que un tri-rectorio de los tres “grandes” fije la dirección estratégica de la UE. Además, la ampliación de la UE debería asegurar que el acercamiento a EEUU siga siendo un requisito para una seguridad y defensa eficaz

European Defence-Lite: Why European Defence is Less about Defence and More About Politics

European defence should be understood, also, as a pawn in the game between the major EU partners to secure a leading place in the Union’s power hierarchy. One of the primary reasons for the split between Europeans over the war in Iraq was the major European players’ need to maximise their influence in the new Europe. The debate brought to the fore the fact that Spain has emerged as a coherent force that could prevent a tri-rectoire of the big three from determining the EU’s strategic direction. Furthermore, EU enlargement should ensure that closeness to the US remains a pre-requisite of effective security and defence

Decision trees in epidemiological research

Background: In many studies, it is of interest to identify population subgroups that are relatively homogeneous with respect to an outcome. The nature of these subgroups can provide insight into effect mechanisms and suggest targets for tailored interventions. However, identifying relevant subgroups can be challenging with standard statistical methods. Main text: We review the literature on decision trees, a family of techniques for partitioning the population, on the basis of covariates, into distinct subgroups who share similar values of an outcome variable. We compare two decision tree methods, the popular Classification and Regression tree (CART) technique and the newer Conditional Inference tree (CTree) technique, assessing their performance in a simulation study and using data from the Box Lunch Study, a randomized controlled trial of a portion size intervention. Both CART and CTree identify homogeneous population subgroups and offer improved prediction accuracy relative to regression-based approaches when subgroups are truly present in the data. An important distinction between CART and CTree is that the latter uses a formal statistical hypothesis testing framework in building decision trees, which simplifies the process of identifying and interpreting the final tree model. We also introduce a novel way to visualize the subgroups defined by decision trees. Our novel graphical visualization provides a more scientifically meaningful characterization of the subgroups identified by decision trees. Conclusions: Decision trees are a useful tool for identifying homogeneous subgroups defined by combinations of individual characteristics. While all decision tree techniques generate subgroups, we advocate the use of the newer CTree technique due to its simplicity and ease of interpretation

A Generative Praxis

Since 2016, the academic narrative emerging from the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities in Eatonville, Florida, has increasingly relied on a public scholarship model to bridge the gap between institutional practice and community knowledge. Inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s legacy as an interdisciplinary scholar, these activities have turned toward generative digital practices to document, share, and preserve the scholarly and community knowledge associated with this event. This change reflects Edward L. Ayers’s call for a more robust and inclusively engaged scholarship that speaks to the need to identify the deeply rooted cultural questions traditional narratives all too easily overlook. By allying with the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community, Inc. (PEC), we leverage digital humanities practices to better understand the experiences of heritage communities. In this way, we see our work as building on Kim Gallon’s call for a digital humanities that seeks to apprehend the constructed nature of race and the impact of racism on society.1 Our praxis has evolved into a three-pronged strategy of public scholarship, digital pedagogy, and open educational resource curation designed to engage the public and shape scholarly narratives in new ways. The project spotlights a commitment to combine and amplify pedagogy and digital methodologies in order to create unique and sustainable archival materials for future research

A Generative Praxis Curation, Creation, and Black Counterpublics

Since 2016, the academic narrative emerging from the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities in Eatonville, Florida, has increasingly relied on a public scholarship model to bridge the gap between institutional practice and community knowledge. Inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s legacy as an interdisciplinary scholar, these activities have turned toward generative digital practices to document, share, and preserve the scholarly and community knowledge associated with this event. This change reflects Edward L. Ayers’s call for a more robust and inclusively engaged scholarship that speaks to the need to identify the deeply rooted cultural questions traditional narratives all too easily overlook. By allying with the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community, Inc. (PEC), we leverage digital humanities practices to better understand the experiences of heritage communities. In this way, we see our work as building on Kim Gallon’s call for a digital humanities that seeks to apprehend the constructed nature of race and the impact of racism on society.1 Our praxis has evolved into a three-pronged strategy of public scholarship, digital pedagogy, and open educational resource curation designed to engage the public and shape scholarly narratives in new ways. The project spotlights a commitment to combine and amplify pedagogy and digital methodologies in order to create unique and sustainable archival materials for future research

Syngenetic sand veins and anti-syngenetic sand wedges, Tuktoyaktuk Coastlands, western Arctic Canada

Sand-sheet deposits of full-glacial age in the Tuktoyaktuk Coastlands, western Arctic Canada, contain syngenetic sand veins 1-21 cm wide and sometimes exceeding 9 m in height. Their tall and narrow, chimney-like morphology differs from that of known syngenetic ice wedges and indicates an unusually close balance between the rate of sand-sheet aggradation and the frequency of thermal-contraction cracking. The sand sheets also contain rejuvenated (syngenetic) sand wedges that have grown upward from an erosion surface. By contrast, sand sheets of postglacial age contain few or sometimes no intraformational sand veins and wedges, suggesting that the climatic conditions were unfavourable for thermal-contraction cracking. Beneath a postglacial sand sheet near Johnson Bay, sand wedges with unusually wide tops (3.9 m) extend down from a prominent erosion surface. The wedges grew vertically downward during deflation of the ground surface, and represent anti-syngenetic wedges. The distribution of sand veins and wedges within the sand sheets indicates that the existence of continuous permafrost during sand-sheet aggradation can be inferred confidently only during full-glacial conditions

Durrington Walls to West Amesbury by way of Stonehenge: a major transformation of the Holocene landscape

A new sequence of Holocene landscape change has been discovered through an investigation of sediment sequences, palaeosols, pollen and molluscan data discovered during the Stonehenge Riverside Project. The early post-glacial vegetational succession in the Avon valley at Durrington Walls was apparently slow and partial, with intermittent woodland modification and the opening-up of this landscape in the later Mesolithic and earlier Neolithic, though a strong element of pine lingered into the third millennium BC. There appears to have been a major hiatus around 2900 cal BC, coincident with the beginnings of demonstrable human activities at Durrington Walls, but slightly after activity started at Stonehenge. This was reflected in episodic increases in channel sedimentation and tree and shrub clearance, leading to a more open downland, with greater indications of anthropogenic activity, and an increasingly wet floodplain with sedges and alder along the river’s edge. Nonetheless, a localized woodland cover remained in the vicinity of DurringtonWalls throughout the third and second millennia BC, perhaps on the higher parts of the downs, while stable grassland, with rendzina soils, predominated on the downland slopes, and alder–hazel carr woodland and sedges continued to fringe the wet floodplain. This evidence is strongly indicative of a stable and managed landscape in Neolithic and Bronze Age times. It is not until c 800–500 cal BC that this landscape was completely cleared, except for the marshy-sedge fringe of the floodplain, and that colluvial sedimentation began in earnest associated with increased arable agriculture, a situation that continued through Roman and historic times