An analysis of well-being in retirement : The role of pensions, health, and 'voluntariness' of retirement

Copyright 2012 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.Peer reviewedPostprin

If War Is Everywhere, Then Must the Law Be Nowhere?

This response focuses on one of the most difficult questions posed by Rosa Brooks\u27s How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: How should the erosion of the war / peace dichotomy impact the justifications for the use of lethal force by the United States government and what, if any, role is there for law in this context? While Brooks is unambiguously critical of Bush administration legal policies that asserted expansive executive war powers, she is less certain about the Obama administration\u27s own reliance on the war paradigm to justify its targeted killing policies. While describing these policies as “undermining the international rule of law,” Brooks declines to take a firm stance on whether they are lawful or unlawful, and she rejects the views of critics who would “jam war back into its old box.” It is a credit to Brooks that she is willing to acknowledge such ambivalence, but her approach comes at a cost. It is difficult to maintain a critical stance on governmental policy while simultaneously undermining the very legal foundations that most plausibly support that stance. In this way, critique quickly turns into apology

Targeted Capture

This Article confronts one of the most difficult and contested questions in the debate about targeted killing that has raged in academic and policy circles over the last decade. Suppose that, in wartime, the target of a military strike may readily be neutralized through nonlethal means such as capture. Do the attacking forces have an obligation to pursue that nonlethal alternative? The Article defends the duty to employ less restrictive means (“LRM”) in wartime, and it advances several novel arguments in defense of that obligation. In contrast to those who look to external restraints--such as those imposed by international human rights law, U.S. constitutional law, or, indeed, the laws of war themselves--to check the operation of military necessity, I argue that the most plausible LRM obligation exists as a limitation embedded within the necessity principle itself. Indeed, the principle of military necessity supports not one, but two, related LRM restraints. The first restraint--virtually ignored yet highly relevant to contemporary debates--is a right reason requirement: it prohibits the killing of combatants for reasons unrelated to the pursuit of military advantage. Specifically, the necessity principle does not permit a preference for lethal force over capture when that preference is driven by considerations such as retributive justice, a desire to avoid due process obligations relating to capture and trial, raising morale, and diplomatic sensitivities. The second restraint--more familiar to the debate yet still deserving of further exploration--is objective in nature. It demands that lethal force benefit from a cognizable expectation of military advantage. The Article develops and defends these claims, engages both contrary and complementary viewpoints, and anticipates objections

Simulation of the spatio-temporal extent of groundwater flooding using statistical methods of hydrograph classification and lumped parameter models

This article presents the development of a relatively low cost and rapidly applicable methodology to simulate the spatio-temporal occurrence of groundwater flooding in chalk catchments. In winter 2000/2001 extreme rainfall resulted in anomalously high groundwater levels and groundwater flooding in many chalk catchments of northern Europe and the southern United Kingdom. Groundwater flooding was extensive and prolonged, occurring in areas where it had not been recently observed and, in places, lasting for 6 months. In many of these catchments, the prediction of groundwater flooding is hindered by the lack of an appropriate tool, such as a distributed groundwater model, or the inability of models to simulate extremes adequately. A set of groundwater hydrographs is simulated using a simple lumped parameter groundwater model. The number of models required is minimized through the classification and grouping of groundwater level time-series using principal component analysis and cluster analysis. One representative hydrograph is modelled then transposed to other observed hydrographs in the same group by the process of quantile mapping. Time-variant groundwater level surfaces, generated using the discrete set of modelled hydrographs and river elevation data, are overlain on a digital terrain model to predict the spatial extent of groundwater flooding. The methodology is applied to the Pang and Lambourn catchments in southern England for which monthly groundwater level time-series exist for 52 observation boreholes covering the period 1975–2004. The results are validated against observed groundwater flood extent data obtained from aerial surveys and field mapping. The method is shown to simulate the spatial and temporal occurrence of flooding during the 2000/2001 flood event accurately

Organic Farming Technologies and Practices Followed by the Farmers

The study mainly focused on organic farming technologies and practices followed by the farmers for coconut, millets, sugarcane and turmeric. The study was conducted in Coimbatore, Erode and Dharampuri districts of Tamil Nadu. A sample of 100 organic farmers was the respondents for the present study. The data were collected from each respondent through personal interview method with the help of interview schedule. The data were analyzed using percentage analysis. The results revealed that, majority of the respondents followed seed treatment with Azospirillum, beejamrutha and panchakavya, application of jeevamruthum and panchakavya through drip irrigation, application of farm yard manure and insitu ploughing of green manure crops, mulching with crop leaf residues and weeds, spraying of agni astram to repel pests, post harvest technology like oil extraction and jaggary preparation, storage techniques like using neem and pungam leaves. The result of the present study shows that, the farmers have the inclination for adoption of organic production practices. Hence it may be concluded from the study that, there is an imperative need to raise the level of adoption of these organic farming practices in order to reduce the quantum of environmental hazards by inorganic farming

Reasons for Resorting to Organic Farming and Advantages Perceived by the Organic Farmers

The study mainly focused on reasons for resorting to organic farming and advantages and benefits perceived by the organic farmers. The study was conducted in Coimbatore, Erode and Dharampuri districts of Tamil Nadu. A sample of 100 organic farmers were the respondents for the present study. The data were collected from each respondent through personal interview method with the help of interview schedule. The results revealed that, major reasons for resorting to organic farming were premium price ( 75.00%) conservation of environment (72.00%), production of high quality, toxic and pesticide free product (68.00%) and negative experiences face with inorganic farming(50.00%) and perceived benefits of organic farming were increased soil properties(100.00%), reduced cost on external inputs (82.00%), efficient use of local on- farm resources(77.00%) and water holding capacity of soil (75.00%).

Small-world networks, distributed hash tables and the e-resource discovery problem

Resource discovery is one of the most important underpinning problems behind producing a scalable, robust and efficient global infrastructure for e-Science. A number of approaches to the resource discovery and management problem have been made in various computational grid environments and prototypes over the last decade. Computational resources and services in modern grid and cloud environments can be modelled as an overlay network superposed on the physical network structure of the Internet and World Wide Web. We discuss some of the main approaches to resource discovery in the context of the general properties of such an overlay network. We present some performance data and predicted properties based on algorithmic approaches such as distributed hash table resource discovery and management. We describe a prototype system and use its model to explore some of the known key graph aspects of the global resource overlay network - including small-world and scale-free properties

Information can kill

Recent advances in understanding links between genes and the susceptibility to particular diseases have considerably increased the scope for predictive diagnosis. Methods. We analyse how the introduc- tion of predictive diagnosis affects patients�decisions to undergo medical screenings relying on a �rational choice�model. Findings. We show that predictive diagnosis can increase the number of fatalities from a deadly disease. Interpretation. Our result shows the necessity of careful further analysis and debate about the pros and cons of predictive diagnosis and the publication of medical research in general

Managing community membership information in a small-world grid

As the Grid matures the problem of resource discovery across communities, where resources now include computational services, is becoming more critical. The number of resources available on a world-wide grid is set to grow exponentially in much the same way as the number of static web pages on the WWW. We observe that the world-wide resource discovery problem can be modelled as a slowly evolving very-large sparse-matrix where individual matrix elements represent nodes’ knowledge of one another. Blocks in the matrix arise where nodes offer more than one service. Blocking effects also arise in the identification of sub-communities in the Grid. The linear algebra community has long been aware of suitable representations of large, sparse matrices. However, matrices the size of the world-wide grid potentially number in the billions, making dense solutions completely intractable. Distributed nodes will not necessarily have the storage capacity to store the addresses of any significant percentage of the available resources. We discuss ways of modelling this problem in the regime of a slowly changing service base including phenomena such as percolating networks and small-world network effects