Civil War or Genocide? The United Nations Commission of Experts’ Misunderstanding of the Third Balkan War of the 1990s

When the country of Yugoslavia disintegrated into war, the United Nations created a research commission, the Yugoslav Commission of Experts, to document war crimes. This commission, led by Cherif M. Bassiouni, depicted the conflict as a perpetual problem with historical roots and also as having victims on both sides, which presented a legal-definitional paradox to the Security Council, requiring litigation of principles, categorization of conflicts, and discussion of further involvement - if applicable. This paper traces the essentialist understandings of the Commission of Experts and the International Human Rights Law Institute – two groups that otherwise had good intentions to bring about peace and justice in the former Yugoslavia, but presented contradictory evidence and descriptions of the conflict. This essentialist portrayal stalled the UN Security Council, stalling adequate aid for the first half of the 1990s

Hard limits on the postselectability of optical graph states

Coherent control of large entangled graph states enables a wide variety of quantum information processing tasks, including error-corrected quantum computation. The linear optical approach offers excellent control and coherence, but today most photon sources and entangling gates---required for the construction of large graph states---are probabilistic and rely on postselection. In this work, we provide proofs and heuristics to aid experimental design using postselection. We derive a fundamental limitation on the generation of photonic qubit states using postselected entangling gates: experiments which contain a cycle of postselected gates cannot be postselected. Further, we analyse experiments that use photons from postselected photon pair sources, and lower bound the number of classes of graph state entanglement that are accessible in the non-degenerate case---graph state entanglement classes that contain a tree are are always accessible. Numerical investigation up to 9-qubits shows that the proportion of graph states that are accessible using postselection diminishes rapidly. We provide tables showing which classes are accessible for a variety of up to nine qubit resource states and sources. We also use our methods to evaluate near-term multi-photon experiments, and provide our algorithms for doing so.Comment: Our manuscript comprises 4843 words, 6 figures, 1 table, 47 references, and a supplementary material of 1741 words, 2 figures, 1 table, and a Mathematica code listin

Call centre management: responsibilities and performance

PURPOSE - To investigate call centre management from the perspective of the managers, particularly what the key management responsibilities are in managing call centres and the key performance indicators (KPIs) used in managing call centres. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH - A survey of call centre managers, followed by in-depth interviews. FINDINGS - There is confusion over the strategic intent of call centres. Centres are primarily used by organisations as a means of reducing costs, with customer service delivery a secondary consideration. Call centre managers, however, declared customer service as their main management responsibility. PRACTICAL IMPLICATION - The metrics employed in the call centres resulted in managers concentrating on the call itself rather than the outcome of the call from the perspective of the customer or the organisation. Some quantitative measures were used as proxies for customer service, but the achievement of the relevant KPI became a goal in its own right. There appears to be an insatiable appetite for quantitative performance measures, despite their limitations, almost to the exclusion of all other performance measures. ORIGINALITY/VALUE - The implication of the results for call centre managers, and their managers, is that call centres could be better managed if a wider range of means and measures were used

Ignorance is bliss: General and robust cancellation of decoherence via no-knowledge quantum feedback

A "no-knowledge" measurement of an open quantum system yields no information about any system observable; it only returns noise input from the environment. Surprisingly, performing such a no-knowledge measurement can be advantageous. We prove that a system undergoing no-knowledge monitoring has reversible noise, which can be cancelled by directly feeding back the measurement signal. We show how no-knowledge feedback control can be used to cancel decoherence in an arbitrary quantum system coupled to a Markovian reservoir that is being monitored. Since no-knowledge feedback does not depend on the system state or Hamiltonian, such decoherence cancellation is guaranteed to be general, robust and can operate in conjunction with any other quantum control protocol. As an application, we show that no-knowledge feedback could be used to improve the performance of dissipative quantum computers subjected to local loss.Comment: 6 pages + 2 pages supplemental material, 3 figure

Gene loss and lineage specific restriction-modification systems associated with niche differentiation in the Campylobacter jejuni Sequence Type 403 clonal complex

Campylobacter jejuni is a highly diverse species of bacteria commonly associated with infectious intestinal disease of humans and zoonotic carriage in poultry, cattle, pigs, and other animals. The species contains a large number of distinct clonal complexes that vary from host generalist lineages commonly found in poultry, livestock, and human disease cases to host-adapted specialized lineages primarily associated with livestock or poultry. Here, we present novel data on the ST403 clonal complex of C. jejuni, a lineage that has not been reported in avian hosts. Our data show that the lineage exhibits a distinctive pattern of intralineage recombination that is accompanied by the presence of lineage-specific restriction-modification systems. Furthermore, we show that the ST403 complex has undergone gene decay at a number of loci. Our data provide a putative link between the lack of association with avian hosts of C. jejuni ST403 and both gene gain and gene loss through nonsense mutations in coding sequences of genes, resulting in pseudogene formation

High levels of congenital transmission of toxoplasma gondii in longitudinal and cross-sectional studies on sheep farms provides evidence of vertical transmission in ovine hosts

Recent research suggests that vertical transmission may play an important role in sustaining Toxoplasma gondii infection in some species. We report here that congenital transmission occurs at consistently high levels in pedigree Charollais and outbred sheep flocks sampled over a 3-year period. Overall rates of transmission per pregnancy determined by PCR based diagnosis, were consistent over time in a commercial sheep flock (69%) and in sympatric (60%) and allopatric (41%) populations of Charollais sheep. The result of this was that 53·7% of lambs were acquiring an infection prior to birth: 46·4% of live lambs and 90·0% of dead lambs (in agreement with the association made between T. gondii and abortion). No significant differences were observed between lamb sexes. Although we cannot distinguish between congenital transmission occurring due to primary infection at pregnancy or reactivation of chronic infection during pregnancy, our observations of consistently high levels of congenital transmission over successive lambings favour the latter

Significant familial differences in the frequency of abortion and Toxoplasma gondii infection within a flock of Charollais sheep

A study was carried out to investigate the frequencies of abortion and congenital Toxoplasma gondii infection within 27 families (765 individuals) of a pedigree Charollais sheep flock maintained on a working farm in Worcestershire, UK, since 1992. Pedigree lambing records were analysed to establish the frequency of abortion for each family. The frequency of congenital infection was determined for each family by PCR analysis of tissue samples taken from newborn lambs. Atotal of 155 lambs were tested for congenital T. gondii infection, which were all born during the study period 2000–2003. Significant differences in the frequency of abortion between sheep families within this flock were observed with frequencies ranging between 0% and 48% (P<0.01). Significantly different infection frequencies with T. gondii were also observed for different families and ranged between 0% and 100% (P<0.01). Although the actual cause of each abortion was not verified, a highly significant positive correlation was found to exist between the frequency of abortion and the frequency of T. gondii infection in the same families (P<0.01). The data presented here raise further questions regarding the significance of congenital transmission of T. gondii within sheep populations, the possible successive vertical transmission of T. gondii within families of sheep, and the potential role of inherited genetic susceptibility to abortion with respect to T. gondii infection. This work invites further study into the epidemiology of ovine toxoplasmosis and may have implications for sheep husbandry methods in the future. Key words: Toxoplasma gondii, ovine, toxoplasmosis, congenital, transmission, pedigree, sheep

Long-lived spin coherence in silicon with an electrical spin trap readout

Journal ArticlePulsed electrically detected magnetic resonance of phosphorous (31P) in bulk crystalline silicon at very high magnetic fields (B0 > 8:5 T) and low temperatures (T = 2:8 K) is presented. We find that the spin-dependent capture and reemission of highly polarized (>95%) conduction electrons by equally highly polarized 31P donor electrons introduces less decoherence than other mechanisms for spin-to-charge conversion. This allows the electrical detection of spin coherence times in excess of 100 μs, 50 times longer than the previous maximum for electrically detected spin readout experiments