6,676 research outputs found
Russia and the IMF: pseudo lending for pseudo reforms
This paper argues that the IMF financial and good technical assistance to Russia in the 1990s has been less than generous. Not only the size of the assistance might have not been adequate but also the timing and actual disbursements of these funds were in sharp discord with pledges. More importantly, the IMF made a number of serious policy mistakes in both design and the implementation of the reforms, which significantly contributed to a delay in stabilisation of the economy and were thus costly in terms of the loss of welfare to the society
UN Peacekeeping Economies and Local Sex Industries: Connections and Implications
âPeacekeeping economiesâ have not been subject to much analysis of either their economic or socio-cultural and political impacts. This paper uses a gendered lens to explore some ramifications and lasting implications of peacekeeping economies, drawing on examples from four post-conflict countries with past or ongoing United Nations peacekeeping missions: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Liberia, and Haiti. The paper is particularly concerned with the interplay between the peacekeeping economy and the sex industry. It examines some of the characteristics and impacts of peacekeeping economies, arguing that these are highly gendered â but that the ânormalizationâ of peacekeeping economies allows these effects to be overlooked or obscured. It also contends that these gendered characteristics and impacts have (or are likely to have) broad and lasting consequences. Finally, the paper considers the initial impacts of UN efforts to tackle negative impacts of peacekeeping economies, particularly the zero-tolerance policy against sexual exploitation and the effort to âmainstreamâ gender and promote gender equality in and through peacekeeping. The paper suggests that the existence and potential longterm perpetuation of a highly gendered peacekeeping economy threatens to undermine the gender goals and objectives that are a component of most peace operations.Peacekeeping; Gender; Sex industry; Bosnia-Herzegovina; Kosovo; Liberia; Haiti
Symmetry Based Properties of the Transition Metal Dichalcogenide Nanotubes
The full geometrical symmetry groups (the line groups) of the monolayered,
2Hb and 3R polytypes of the inorganic MoS2 and WS2 micro- and nanotubes of
arbitrary chirality are found. This is used to find the coordinates of the
representative atoms sufficient to determine completely geometrical structure
of tubes. Then some physical properties which can be deduced from the symmetry
are discussed: electron band degeneracies, selection rules, general forms of
the second rank tensors and potentials, phonon spectra.Comment: 6 pages 1 figur
Out-Of-Focus Holography at the Green Bank Telescope
We describe phase-retrieval holography measurements of the 100-m diameter
Green Bank Telescope using astronomical sources and an astronomical receiver
operating at a wavelength of 7 mm. We use the technique with parameterization
of the aperture in terms of Zernike polynomials and employing a large defocus,
as described by Nikolic, Hills & Richer (2006). Individual measurements take
around 25 minutes and from the resulting beam maps (which have peak signal to
noise ratios of 200:1) we show that it is possible to produce low-resolution
maps of the wavefront errors with accuracy around a hundredth of a wavelength.
Using such measurements over a wide range of elevations, we have calculated a
model for the wavefront-errors due to the uncompensated gravitational
deformation of the telescope. This model produces a significant improvement at
low elevations, where these errors are expected to be the largest; after
applying the model, the aperture efficiency is largely independent of
elevation. We have also demonstrated that the technique can be used to measure
and largely correct for thermal deformations of the antenna, which often exceed
the uncompensated gravitational deformations during daytime observing.
We conclude that the aberrations induced by gravity and thermal effects are
large-scale and the technique used here is particularly suitable for measuring
such deformations in large millimetre wave radio telescopes.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures (accepted by Astronomy & Astrophysics
Noncommutativity relations in type IIB theory and their supersymmetry
In the present paper we investigate noncommutativity of and -brane
world-volumes embedded in space-time of type IIB superstring theory. Boundary
conditions, which preserve half of the initial supersymmetry, are treated as
canonical constraints. Solving the constraints we obtain original coordinates
in terms of the effective coordinates and momenta. Presence of momenta induces
noncommutativity of string endpoints. We show that noncommutativity relations
are connected by N=1 supersymmetry transformations and noncommutativity
parameters are components of N=1 supermultiplet
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