Le gouvernement de Tony Blair et la crise afghane

Cet article est la traduction d'une allocution prononcée par Lord Morgan à l'occasion d'une conférence sur le New Labour, in, Valérie AUDA-ANDRE (ed.), Les années Blair, Toulon : Observatoire de la Société Britannique & BABEL, 2007, intitulée The Blair Government and the Afghan Terrorist Crisis Traduction de Valérie Auda-André, Jean-Philippe Fons, Gilles Leydier, Jean-Paul Révauger et Timothy WhittonInternational audienceLe 8 juin 2001, le gouvernement de Tony Blair aurait dû être au comble du bonheur ; il venait de remporter les élections pour la deuxième fois consécutive. Pour la première fois de son histoire vieille d'un siècle, le Parti travailliste avait gagné de façon exemplaire le droit d'exercer un deuxième mandat électoral. Sa majorité de 167 sièges était presque aussi écrasante que celle obtenue lors des élections de 1997. Pratiquement toutes les avancées réussies alors avaient été consolidées dans tout le pays. Le Parti conservateur était pratiquement en déroute et malgré tous les efforts déployés pendant la campagne électorale de 2001, il n'avait réussi à emporter qu'un total de 166 sièges, tout juste un de plus qu'en 1997. Le chef du Parti, William Hague, démissionna sur le champ

The Telecommunications Act of 1996: the policy\u27s impact on southeastern jurisdictions that had lawsuits overturn public hearing decisions

This study examines fourteen southeastern Telecommunication Act of 1996 lawsuits, which occurred between February 1996 and September 1998. In order for the lawsuit to be analyzed it had to involve a situation where a telecommunication company had been denied a permit to erect a new tower. The applicable cases analyzed situations where a local-level government had been denied a tower permit through an administrative decision, variance, special use permit hearing, conditional use permit hearing, or moratorium. Additional research was conducted on the seven local-level jurisdictions that had a Telecommunication Act of 1996 lawsuit overturn one of their decisions. The purpose of this research was to verify if tower ordinances or tower approval rates would change in a specific jurisdiction after a lawsuit had reversed a decision. This research should be extremely interesting to planners and telecommunication companies because it gives insight into what kinds of cases have been reversed and what kind of cases have been upheld

The Recruitment, Education, and Training of PLA Navy Personnel

Looking back at the parlous state of the People\u27s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) in the early 1980s, Liu Huaqing, its former commander, wrote, All areas [of the navy] required significant strengthening, but I believed the key was developing capable personnel. Indeed, during Admiral Liu\u27s tenure (1982-88), the PLAN embarked on a major effort to improve the quality of its officers and enlisted personnel an effort that continues to this day.https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cmsi-red-books/1011/thumbnail.jp

EM modelling of arbitrary shaped dispersive chiral dielectric objects using a 3D leapfrog scheme on unstructured meshes

The standard Yee FDTD algorithm is widely used in computational electromagnetics because of its simplicity and divergence free nature. A generalization of this classical scheme to 3D unstructured co-volume meshes is adopted, based on the use of a Delaunay primal mesh and its high quality Voronoi dual. This circumvents the problem of accuracy losses, which are normally associated with the use of a staircased representation of curved material interfaces in the standard Yee scheme. The procedure has been successfully employed for modelling problems involving both isotropic and anisotropic lossy materials. Here, we consider the novel extension of this approach to allow for the challenging modelling of chiral materials, where the material parameters are frequency dependent. To adequately model the dispersive behaviour, the Z-transform is employed, using second order Padé approximations to maintain the accuracy of the basic scheme. To validate the implementation, the numerical results produced are compared with available analytical solutions. The stability of the chiral algorithm is also studied

A 3D Unstructured Mesh FDTD Scheme for EM Modelling

The Yee finite difference time domain (FDTD) algorithm is widely used in computational electromagnetics because of its simplicity, low computational costs and divergence free nature. The standard method uses a pair of staggered orthogonal cartesian meshes. However, accuracy losses result when it is used for modelling electromagnetic interactions with objects of arbitrary shape, because of the staircased representation of curved interfaces. For the solution of such problems, we generalise the approach and adopt an unstructured mesh FDTD method. This co-volume method is based upon the use of a Delaunay primal mesh and its high quality Voronoi dual. Computational efficiency is improved by employing a hybrid primal mesh, consisting of tetrahedral elements in the vicinity of curved interfaces and hexahedral elements elsewhere. Difficulties associated with ensuring the necessary quality of the generated meshes will be discussed. The power of the proposed solution approach is demonstrated by considering a range of scattering and/or transmission problems involving perfect electric conductors and isotropic lossy, anisotropic lossy and isotropic frequency dependent chiral materials

Densely distributed and real-time scour hole monitoring using piezoelectric rod sensors

This study aims to validate a piezoelectric driven-rod scour monitoring system that can sense changes in scour depth along the entire rod at its instrumented location. The proposed sensor is a polymeric slender rod with a thin strip of polyvinylidene fluoride that runs through its midline. Extraction of the fundamental frequency allows the direct calculation of the exposed length (or scour depth) of the slender rod undergoing fluid flow excitation. First, laboratory validation in dry conditions is presented. Second, hydrodynamic testing of the sensor system in a soil-bed flume is discussed. Each rod was installed using a three-dimensional-printed footing designed for ease of installation and stabilization during testing. The sensors were installed in a layout designed to capture symmetric scour conditions around a scaled pier. In order to analyze the system out of steady-state conditions, water velocity was increased in stages during testing to induce different degrees of scour. As ambient water flow excited the portion of the exposed rods, the embedded piezoelectric element outputted a time-varying voltage signal. Different methods were then employed to extract the fundamental frequency of each rod, and the results were compared. Further testing was also performed to characterize the relationship between frequency outputs and flow velocity, which were previously thought to be independent. In general, the proposed driven-rod scour monitoring system successfully captured changing frequencies under varied flow conditions

Integration of domain and resource-based reasoning for real-time control in dynamic environments

A real-time software controller that successfully integrates domain-based and resource-based control reasoning to perform task execution in a dynamically changing environment is described. The design of the controller is based on the concept of partitioning the process to be controlled into a set of tasks, each of which achieves some process goal. It is assumed that, in general, there are multiple ways (tasks) to achieve a goal. The controller dynamically determines current goals and their current criticality, choosing and scheduling tasks to achieve those goals in the time available. It incorporates rule-based goal reasoning, a TMS-based criticality propagation mechanism, and a real-time scheduler. The controller has been used to build a knowledge-based situation assessment system that formed a major component of a real-time, distributed, cooperative problem solving system built under DARPA contract. It is also being employed in other applications now in progress