The strategic calculus of terrorism: Substitution and competition in the Israel—Palestine conflict

Previous work on the dynamics of conflicts where we see terrorism has tended to focus on whether we see shifts in attack mode following government countermeasures. We contend that many factors other than counterinsurgency can influence whether groups resort to terrorism, including competition between groups, as well as their relationship to public opinion and other political events. Hence, understanding terrorist tactics in prolonged conflicts with multiple actors requires us to consider a more general framework of innovation, imitation, competition and dependence between actors. We use disaggregated data on terrorist attacks, counterterrorism and public opinion in the Israel—Palestine conflict to jointly evaluate predictions derived from several conventional theories of strategic behaviour. We find that the strategic calculus of Palestinian groups is complex and cannot be treated as time invariant. Our results suggest that factors such as the degree of public support, inter-group competition, the anticipation of countermeasures and non-trivial non-violent payoffs have an observable effect on the strategic behaviour of the Palestinian groups, and that structural relationships are often far from constant over time. </jats:p

Model Order Reduction in Fluid Dynamics: Challenges and Perspectives

This chapter reviews techniques of model reduction of fluid dynamics systems. Fluid systems are known to be difficult to reduce efficiently due to several reasons. First of all, they exhibit strong nonlinearities — which are mainly related either to nonlinear convection terms and/or some geometric variability — that often cannot be treated by simple linearization. Additional difficulties arise when attempting model reduction of unsteady flows, especially when long-term transient behavior needs to be accurately predicted using reduced order models and more complex features, such as turbulence or multiphysics phenomena, have to be taken into consideration. We first discuss some general principles that apply to many parametric model order reduction problems, then we apply them on steady and unsteady viscous flows modelled by the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. We address questions of inf-sup stability, certification through error estimation, computational issues and — in the unsteady case — long-time stability of the reduced model. Moreover, we provide an extensive list of literature references

Changes to the phenotypic profile of Vibrio harveyi when infected with the Vibrio harveyi myovirus-like (VHML) bacteriophage

Aims: To determine if infection of Vibrio harveyi with the V. harveyi myovirus-like (VHML) bacteriophage causes a change to the phenotypic profile of this species. \ud \ud Methods and Results: Using 46 biochemical and metabolic tests, phenotypic profiles for noninfected V. harveyi and VHML infected V. harveyi were developed. Comparison of the infected and bacteriophage-infected strains of V. harveyi 645, 20 and 45 were found to have different test results ford-gluconate utilization, γ-glutamyl transpeptidase and sulfatase activity, respectively. Using probabilistic identification, VHML infected and noninfected strains were identified as V. harveyi and had similar Willcox probability scores though the modal likelihood scores were reduced for VHML infected strains. One VHML infected strain, 642b, was misidentified as V. campbellii by phenotyping but not by PCR. It would appear that the phenotype of V. harveyi strains infected with VHML, are sufficiently altered that they occur at the margins of the known range of strain variation for V. harveyi. \ud \ud Conclusion: Infection of V. harveyi with VHML causes the phenotypic profile of the bacterium to change. This change reduces the modal likelihood score resulting in a poorer level of assurance for an identification of V. harveyi, especially in the natural host, strain 642. The bacteriophage VHML integrates into different sites in different strains of V. harveyi. \ud \ud Significance and Impact of the Study: The identification of V. harveyi as the causative agent of mortality in aquatic organisms is predominantly achieved through phenotyping. Since bacteriophages alter virulence in V. harveyi, understanding the effect they have on phenotype is important

Language in society across the Baltic Republics: A comparative overview

There is to date no systematic comparative analysis of work on the significance of language at the levels of the individual and the state across the Baltic. This introductory article reviews recent publications and proposes further aspects of research to be conducted on the language situation in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. It also highlights the need to adopt a diachronic approach in language research.</p