Public Opinion in the Eurasian De Facto States

Developing reliable social scientific knowledge about public opinion in de facto states is a challenging exercise. Since 2008 we cooperated with a variety of research partners to organize a series of social scientific surveys in all four de facto states in the post-Soviet region, organizing an initial round of surveys in 2010-2011 and a follow-up round in December 2014. In this contribution we summarize the responses by declared nationality to two questions asked in 2010-11 and then again in 2013-2014: preferred future status and trust in the president. We show the results for nationalities because these values tend to be most distinctive and indicate some of the key divides in the de facto states

Territorial Ambitions in Nagorno-Karabakh: Survey Results Before the 2020 War

Territory is central to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Borders and control of lands claimed by both Azerbaijan and the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic have shifted dramatically since the end of the Soviet Union. Following up on a 2011 survey, we again asked a representative sample of Karabakhis in February 2020 about their territorial aspirations and the possibility of surrendering some lands to Azerbaijan. The results are somewhat contradictory. While about half of the sample were willing to compromise on territory with Azerbaijan - in the expectation of a more permanent and peaceful settlement to the conflict - a firm majority (85%) rejected any return to the smaller lands of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) of Soviet times. This result is highly consistent with the 2011 data. Even more respondents than in 2011 aspired to extend Nagorno-Karabakh’s territory to encompass all historical Armenian lands, a patently unrealistic option. While Karabakhi attitudes remained hardened against territorial compromise, the 2020 war changed the facts on the ground and reduced the Republic's control to an area even smaller than the NKAO

Neural Likelihood Approximation for Integer Valued Time Series Data

Stochastic processes defined on integer valued state spaces are popular within the physical and biological sciences. These models are necessary for capturing the dynamics of small systems where the individual nature of the populations cannot be ignored and stochastic effects are important. The inference of the parameters of such models, from time series data, is difficult due to intractability of the likelihood; current methods, based on simulations of the underlying model, can be so computationally expensive as to be prohibitive. In this paper we construct a neural likelihood approximation for integer valued time series data using causal convolutions, which allows us to evaluate the likelihood of the whole time series in parallel. We demonstrate our method by performing inference on a number of ecological and epidemiological models, showing that we can accurately approximate the true posterior while achieving significant computational speed ups in situations where current methods struggle

The Wikileaks Afghanistan War Logs: A Boon or Bane for Academic Research?

Streaming video requires Flash Player, RealPlayer, or Windows Media Player to view.The findings of a spatial analysis of the 77,000 secret war logs released by Wikileaks in summer 2010 are reviewed in the context of a broader review of the dynamics of conflict in Afghanistan-Pakistan. The reaction to the published paper in Eurasian Geography and Economics, Vol. 51 no. 4, 2010, the advisability of analyzing the confidential data by academics, and the wider issues of people's right to know versus state security secrets are presented as an invitation for a discussion and debate.Ohio State University. Department of GeographyOhio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent Web page, streaming video, event photo

Vessels for miracles : a tangible expression of an unwillingness to disallow belief

"Through a review of the art of late antiquity and early Christianity, the study examines the nature of, and tension between, superstion and belief. It debates the implicit question 'is all religion superstition?' in an attempt to provide a sound basis for the presentation of reasons for my personal unwilingness to 'disallow belief' in the mysteries of the Faith, despite doubts on their content."Master of Arts (Visual Arts

The Determination of Atom-Molecule Interaction Potentials from Total Differential Cross Sections

A newly constructed crossed molecular beams apparatus has been used to measure total (elastic plus inelastic) differential cross sections for collisions between rare gas atoms and methane and chlorine molecules. The total differential cross sections were then used in an iterative trial and error potential fitting program to determine the interaction potentials between these species. In the rare gas-methane study (Chapter 2), the methane molecule has been approximated as being a spherical entity, and the standard equations and techniques have been applied to simulate the laboratory scattering distributions from an assumed isotropic potential. The isotropic potentials determined in this manner are compared with some recently proposed anisotropic potentials for these systems. In the rare gas-chlorine study (Chapter 3), anisotropic potentials have been determined using the infinite order sudden approximation and a Legendre parameter expansion of a central field potential. The resulting potentials compare rather favorably with what is known about these potential surfaces from photodissociation experiments.</p

Politicizing Memory: Evidence from Ukraine

Research shows that people’s perceptions of historical violence shape many present-day outcomes. Yet it is also plausible that people emphasize or downplay certain events of the past based on how these resonate with their beliefs and identities today. With a population of diverse orientations involving Russia and Europe, Ukraine in 2019 was an important case for exploring how people’s present geopolitical orientations shaped perceptions of victimization in World War II. Drawing on a survey experiment, we find evidence for “motivated reasoning” among Western-oriented respondents, who emphasized their family’s suffering in World War II when faced with information that attributed blame to the Soviet regime. We find no evidence for motivated reasoning among the Russian-oriented respondents

Addressing Issues of Cloud Resilience, Security and Performance through Simple Detection of Co-locating Sibling Virtual Machine Instances

Most current Infrastructure Clouds are built on shared tenancy architectures, with resources shared amongst large numbers of customers. However, multi tenancy can lead to performance issues (so-called “noisy neighbours”) and also brings potential for serious security breaches such as hypervisor breakouts. Consequently, there has been a focus in the literature on identifying co-locating instances that are being affected by noisy neighbours or suggesting that such instances are vulnerable to attack. However, there is limited evidence of any such attacks in the wild. More beneficially, knowing that there is co-location amongst your own Virtual Machine instances (siblings) can help to avoid being your own worst enemy: avoiding your instances acting as your own noisy neighbours, building resilience through ensuring hostbased redundancy, and/or reducing exposure to a single compromised host. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a test to detect co-locating sibling instances on Xen-based Clouds, as could help address such needs, and evaluate its efficacy on Amazon’s EC2

Effects of thrombin, PAR-1 activating peptide and a PAR-1 antagonist on umbilical artery resistance in vitro

BACKGROUND: The non-thrombotic effects of thrombin in cardiovascular tissues, as mediated via the protease activated receptors (PARs), and particularly PAR-1, have been the focus of much recent research. The aims of this study were to evaluate the effects of thrombin, a specific PAR-1 activating peptide (PAR1-AP), and a PAR-1 antagonist on human umbilical artery tone in vitro. METHODS: Human umbilical artery samples were obtained from 17 women at term. Arterial rings were suspended under physiologic conditions for isometric recording. The in vitro effects of thrombin (0.5 units/mL to 3 units/mL), PAR1-AP TFLLR-NH2 [10(-9) to 10(-6) M], and PAR-1 antagonist (N-trans cinnamoyl- p-fluoroPhe-p-guanidinoPhe-Leu-Arg-Orn-NH2) [10(-9) M to 10(-5) M] on umbilical artery tone were measured. RESULTS: Both thrombin and TFLLR-NH2 exerted a potent cumulative vasodilatory effect on human umbilical artery resistance (P < 0.001). The mean net maximal inhibition (MMI) for thrombin was 53.05% (n = 6; SEM = 1.43) at tissue bath concentration of 3 units/mL. The MMI with TFLLR-NH2 was 61.50 % (n = 6; SEM = 1.43) at bath concentration of 10(-6) M. In comparison to vehicle control, the PAR-1 antagonist did not show a significant relaxant or contractile effect (P > 0.05). CONCLUSION: These findings highlight a potential role for thrombin and PAR-1 receptors in vascular regulation of feto-placental blood flow in normal pregnancy, and in association with the vascular lesions associated with IUGR and pre-eclampsia