Regime legitimacy and military resilience : lessons from World War II and Yugoslavia

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2008.Includes bibliographical references.This thesis argues that regime legitimacy creates military resilience. A regime is legitimate when its constituents believe-whether because of ideological solidarity, patriotism, nationalism, or good governance-that a government has the right to exercise authority in its regime. Military resilience, which contributes to military effectiveness, refers to the willingness of troops to stay committed in combat. In modern war, dispersion of forces creates the need for a very high degree of troop commitment, making resilience more important than in previous forms of warfare. Resilient units do not disintegrate through desertion, and furthermore commit themselves actively under fire. In arguing that legitimacy matters, this thesis revives a debate between two theories of military resilience. The first school, which comes out of the tradition of the mass army, holds that broad attributes like legitimacy, patriotism, and nationalism are crucial to resilience. In recent political science, a second school has been significantly more influential; these scholars argue that factors like small-unit cohesion and professionalism are the key explanatory variables for military resilience. Settling the debate between these competing methods of generating resilience is critical to effective army building. This thesis strongly supports a revival of the first school of thought, based on the evidence from two cases where legitimacy experienced a sudden shock. The first case examines the military resilience of foreign legions forced to fight for Nazi Germany in World War II.(cont.) It finds that those units were rarely resilient, even given otherwise similar conditions to German units, and what little resilience existed can be explained primarily through patriotism to soldiers' original homelands. The second case examines the Yugoslav People's Army during and after the disintegration of federated Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The evidence suggests that the army lacked resilience, experiencing mass desertion, when fighting for a disintegrated regime. It regained in resilience when it was reconstituted as a nationalist Serbian army in 1992.by Jacob Hale Russell.S.M

The Separation of Intelligence and Control: Retirement Savings and The Limits of Soft Paternalism

“Soft paternalism” is in vogue among academics and lawmakers, but too much is being asked of it. This Article studies soft paternalist techniques—including nudging and disclosure—which have been used in the employersponsored retirement system. Defined-contribution retirement plans represent an ideal test case for libertarian paternalism: there has been extensive experimentation, and nudge advocates have often held up such plans as successes. In particular, this Article focuses on investment allocation decisions in retirement portfolios, and suggests that we should be skeptical of the ability of soft paternalism to improve those decisions. When a domain is rife with conflicts of interest—as in the allocation context—soft-touch strategies fare poorly. Since our tax-incentivized retirement system has paternalistic roots, we should more readily consider direct regulation of investment options available to retirement accounts. The migration of American retirement savings from centralized, riskpooling structures (Social Security and pensions) toward individual retirement plans (401(k) plans and other tax-favored, individually managed accounts) had collateral consequences. In particular, the responsibility for making complicated financial choices was redistributed to the individual saver—who typically lacks the knowledge and sophistication to make such choices. The result has been that many savers make costly mistakes in investing their portfolios. In response, academics and policymakers, most formally through the Pension Protection Act of 2006, have turned to a variety of typical “soft” remedies, including nudges designed to improve investment decisions by allowing employers to automatically direct employee savings into certain default mutual funds. This Article argues that nudges have failed and will continue to fail in improving the allocation of retirement portfolios, because of problems that are common in many nudge programs. First, nudges rarely consider the ability of third parties to counter-nudge or to weaken nudge outcomes. Conflicts of interest are pervasive in the mutual fund and retirement industry, and those who accept the nudges are being pushed into a category of funds of dubious merit, and which appear to be worsening as institutions seek to exploit the default. Second, nudges are often loosely connected, or not connected at all, to the cognitive problems they seek to remedy. In the retirement allocation context, the nudge acts as a weak mandate for a substantive preference, rather than as a corrective for investors’ cognitive biases. Finally, nudging often asserts autonomy—taking an agent’s preferences seriously—as its central goal. But the claim that the retirement allocation nudges respect savers’ preferences is problematic as a descriptive matter, and illogical as a normative matter, in a domain that is already a government-sponsored, tax-advantaged, paternalistic means to encourage retirement savings

PTF10fqs: A Luminous Red Nova in the Spiral Galaxy Messier 99

The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) is systematically charting the optical transient and variable sky. A primary science driver of PTF is building a complete inventory of transients in the local Universe (distance less than 200 Mpc). Here, we report the discovery of PTF10fqs, a transient in the luminosity "gap" between novae and supernovae. Located on a spiral arm of Messier 99, PTF 10fqs has a peak luminosity of Mr = -12.3, red color (g-r = 1.0) and is slowly evolving (decayed by 1 mag in 68 days). It has a spectrum dominated by intermediate-width H (930 km/s) and narrow calcium emission lines. The explosion signature (the light curve and spectra) is overall similar to thatof M85OT2006-1, SN2008S, and NGC300OT. The origin of these events is shrouded in mystery and controversy (and in some cases, in dust). PTF10fqs shows some evidence of a broad feature (around 8600A) that may suggest very large velocities (10,000 km/s) in this explosion. Ongoing surveys can be expected to find a few such events per year. Sensitive spectroscopy, infrared monitoring and statistics (e.g. disk versus bulge) will eventually make it possible for astronomers to unravel the nature of these mysterious explosions.Comment: 12 pages, 12 figures, Replaced with published versio

2017 Research & Innovation Day Program

A one day showcase of applied research, social innovation, scholarship projects and activities.https://first.fanshawec.ca/cri_cripublications/1004/thumbnail.jp

A communal catalogue reveals Earth's multiscale microbial diversity

Our growing awareness of the microbial world's importance and diversity contrasts starkly with our limited understanding of its fundamental structure. Despite recent advances in DNA sequencing, a lack of standardized protocols and common analytical frameworks impedes comparisons among studies, hindering the development of global inferences about microbial life on Earth. Here we present a meta-analysis of microbial community samples collected by hundreds of researchers for the Earth Microbiome Project. Coordinated protocols and new analytical methods, particularly the use of exact sequences instead of clustered operational taxonomic units, enable bacterial and archaeal ribosomal RNA gene sequences to be followed across multiple studies and allow us to explore patterns of diversity at an unprecedented scale. The result is both a reference database giving global context to DNA sequence data and a framework for incorporating data from future studies, fostering increasingly complete characterization of Earth's microbial diversity.Peer reviewe

A communal catalogue reveals Earth’s multiscale microbial diversity

Our growing awareness of the microbial world’s importance and diversity contrasts starkly with our limited understanding of its fundamental structure. Despite recent advances in DNA sequencing, a lack of standardized protocols and common analytical frameworks impedes comparisons among studies, hindering the development of global inferences about microbial life on Earth. Here we present a meta-analysis of microbial community samples collected by hundreds of researchers for the Earth Microbiome Project. Coordinated protocols and new analytical methods, particularly the use of exact sequences instead of clustered operational taxonomic units, enable bacterial and archaeal ribosomal RNA gene sequences to be followed across multiple studies and allow us to explore patterns of diversity at an unprecedented scale. The result is both a reference database giving global context to DNA sequence data and a framework for incorporating data from future studies, fostering increasingly complete characterization of Earth’s microbial diversity

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Measurement of t(t)over-bar normalised multi-differential cross sections in pp collisions at root s=13 TeV, and simultaneous determination of the strong coupling strength, top quark pole mass, and parton distribution functions

Peer reviewe

An embedding technique to determine ττ backgrounds in proton-proton collision data

An embedding technique is presented to estimate standard model tau tau backgrounds from data with minimal simulation input. In the data, the muons are removed from reconstructed mu mu events and replaced with simulated tau leptons with the same kinematic properties. In this way, a set of hybrid events is obtained that does not rely on simulation except for the decay of the tau leptons. The challenges in describing the underlying event or the production of associated jets in the simulation are avoided. The technique described in this paper was developed for CMS. Its validation and the inherent uncertainties are also discussed. The demonstration of the performance of the technique is based on a sample of proton-proton collisions collected by CMS in 2017 at root s = 13 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 41.5 fb(-1).Peer reviewe

Measurement of the top quark forward-backward production asymmetry and the anomalous chromoelectric and chromomagnetic moments in pp collisions at √s = 13 TeV

Abstract The parton-level top quark (t) forward-backward asymmetry and the anomalous chromoelectric (d̂ t) and chromomagnetic (μ̂ t) moments have been measured using LHC pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, collected in the CMS detector in a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 fb−1. The linearized variable AFB(1) is used to approximate the asymmetry. Candidate t t ¯ events decaying to a muon or electron and jets in final states with low and high Lorentz boosts are selected and reconstructed using a fit of the kinematic distributions of the decay products to those expected for t t ¯ final states. The values found for the parameters are AFB(1)=0.048−0.087+0.095(stat)−0.029+0.020(syst),μ̂t=−0.024−0.009+0.013(stat)−0.011+0.016(syst), and a limit is placed on the magnitude of | d̂ t| < 0.03 at 95% confidence level. [Figure not available: see fulltext.