Setting the record straight on the Malayan counterinsurgency strategy: interview with Karl Hack

You are a long time researcher and observer of the Malayan Emergency. What were the core key ingredients that broke the back of the communist insurgents in the Malayan Emergency? The primary cause for putting the campaign on a firmly winning path? The game changer that helped at the end of the day to regain the initiative

How Troublesome are Stereotypes in International Business?

Substantial concern has been raised in international business writing that national stereotypes bias perception of employees, customers, and others. That concern is certainly supported by findings in person perception research. But some constraints of that research, such as the provision of incomplete information and uninteresting stimuli may well have caused an overestimation of the impact of stereotypes in business situations. This research shows that the impact of stereotypes is likely less than previously thought. When current diagnostic information is available, that information is used, leading to unbiased assessments. Only when information is limited are stereotype-biased judgments generated. A second experiment further shows that people feel more confident in assessments based on current information than in those where information is limited. These relatively optimistic findings suggest methods that managers can use to overcome national stereotype bias in international business situations

Exploring hidden narratives: Conscript graffiti at the former military base of Kummersdorf

This article explores the cultural significance and interpretative potential of graffiti left by Soviet conscripts at Kummersdorf, a former military base in the German federal state of Brandenburg. The graffiti is framed as war art and its typology, distribution and content is studied in detail. In this way opportunities for further research are highlighted, as well as the potential for the graffiti to contribute to interpretative and conservation strategies. We demonstrate how the graffiti embodies multi-level interpretative narratives which can help to reveal hidden aspects of Soviet conscript life and cultural practices whilst alluding to global events and Soviet and Russian military policy. More generally, the article aims to promote the potential of graffiti and other forms of what is traditionally considered vandalism to contribute to the cultural significance and interpretation of heritage sites

On the Stress-Energy Tensor of Quantum Fields in Curved Spacetimes - Comparison of Different Regularization Schemes and Symmetry of the Hadamard/Seeley-DeWitt Coefficients

We review a few rigorous and partly unpublished results on the regularisation of the stress-energy in quantum field theory on curved spacetimes: 1) the symmetry of the Hadamard/Seeley-DeWitt coefficients in smooth Riemannian and Lorentzian spacetimes 2) the equivalence of the local $\zeta$-function and the Hadamard-point-splitting procedure in smooth static spacetimes 3) the equivalence of the DeWitt-Schwinger- and the Hadamard-point-splitting procedure in smooth Riemannian and Lorentzian spacetimes.Comment: 24 pages, accepted for publication in Journal of Physics A, special issue devoted to S. Dowker's 75th birthda

The Effects of Funding Costs and Risk on Banks' Lending Rates

After falling for over a decade, the major banks' net interest margins appear to have stabilised in a relatively narrow range in recent years. In the early part of the financial crisis, margins fell to the bottom of this range, reflecting an increase in debt funding costs. Margins have since recovered a little, to around the middle of the range, as a result of some repricing of lending rates relative to these costs. In addition to the increase in the cost of debt funding, there have been other drivers of the rise in lending rates relative to the cash rate. First, the banks have increased their equity funding, which is more costly than debt finance. Second, risk margins on loans have risen to account for higher expected losses.funding costs; lending rates; interest rates; risk pricing