Lessons From the French in Vietnam

Last year at a conference on The Military Lessons of the Vietnamese War, a discussion took place in which the relevant learning model for American counterinsurgency efforts in Vietnam was debated. 1 One person noted that his commanders at the Pentagon had warned him to be wary in Saigon of the orchestrator of the British success in Malaysia, Sir Robert Thompson, who was serving then in Vietnam as head of the British Advisory Mission. The gentleman was happy to observe to Sir Robert, who also attended the conference, that he had not heeded the warning-and had subsequently benefited from Sir Robert\u27s wise counsel

The PCI, NATO, and the United States

The North Atlantic Alliance came into being in 1949 to protect its members from an external Communist threat. Italy has always had a large and active Communist Party. However, recent events have raised the real possibility of the Italian Communist being taken into the Government. Professor Thompson discusses the effects of such an eventuality and he suggests possible courses of action

Characterisation of sensitivity and orientation tuning for visually responsive ensembles in the zebrafish tectum

Sensory coding relies on ensembles of co-active neurons, but these ensembles change from trial to trial of the same stimulus. This is due in part to wide variability in the responsiveness of neurons within these ensembles, with some neurons responding regularly to a stimulus while others respond inconsistently. The specific functional properties that cause neurons to respond more or less consistently have not been thoroughly explored. Here, we have examined neuronal ensembles in the zebrafish tectum responsive to repeated presentations of a visual stimulus, and have explored how these populations change when the orientation or brightness of the stimulus is altered. We found a continuum of response probabilities across the neurons in the visual ensembles, with the most responsive neurons focused toward the spatial centre of the ensemble. As the visual stimulus was made dimmer, these neurons remained active, suggesting higher overall responsiveness. However, these cells appeared to represent the most consistent end of a continuum, rather than a functionally distinct "core" of highly responsive neurons. Reliably responsive cells were broadly tuned to a range of stimulus orientations suggesting that, at least for this stimulus property, tight stimulus tuning was not responsible for their consistent responses

AN ANALYSIS OF THE PROFILES AND MOTIVATIONS OF HABITUAL COMMODITY SPECULATORS

The focus of this study is the habitual speculator in commodity futures markets. The speculator's activity broadens a market, creates essential liquidity, and performs an irreplaceable pricing function. Working knowledge of the profiles and motivations of habitual speculators is essential to both market theorist and policy makers. Responses to a 73 question survey were collected directly from retail commodity brokers with offices in Alabama. Each questionnaire recorded information on an individual commodity client who had traded for an extended period of time. The typical trader studied is a married, white male, age 52. He is affluent and well educated. He is a self-employed business owner who can recover from financial setbacks. He is a politically right wing conservative involved in the political process. He assumes a good deal of risk in most phases of his life. He is both an aggressive investor and an active gambler. This trader does not consider preservation of his commodity capital to be a very high trading priority. As a result, he rarely uses stop loss orders. He wins more frequently than he loses (over 51% of the time) but is an overall net loser in dollar terms. In spite of recurring trading losses, he has never made any substantial change in his basic trading style. To this trader, whether he won or lost on a particular trade is more important than the size of the win or loss. Thus he consistently cuts his profits short while letting his losses run. He also worries more about missing a move in the market by being on the sidelines than about losing by being on the wrong side of a market move; i.e., being in the action is more important than the financial consequences. Participating brokers confirmed that for the majority of the speculators studied, the primary motivation for continuous trading is the recreational utility derived largely from having a market position.Marketing,

Method for the Manufacturing of a Composite

Described herein are composites that are relatively lightweight, high strength and low thermal conductivity. Also described herein are methods for the manufacture and use thereof

Superconductivity in SrNi2As2 Single Crystals

The electrical resistivity \rho(T) and heat capacity C(T) on single crystals of SrNi2As2 and EuNi2As2 are reported. While there is no evidence for a structural transition in either compound, SrNi2As2 is found to be a bulk superconductor at T_c=0.62 K with a Sommerfeld coefficient of \gamma= 8.7 mJ/mol K^2 and a small upper critical field H_{c2} \sim 200 Oe. No superconductivity was found in EuNi2As2 above 0.4 K, but anomalies in \rho and C reveal that magnetic order associated with the Eu^{2+} magnetic moments occurs at T_m = 14 K.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

The development of rainfall retrievals from radar at Darwin

17 USC 105 interim-entered record; under review.The article of record as published may be found at https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-14-53-2021The U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement program Tropical Western Pacific site hosted a C-band polarization (CPOL) radar in Darwin, Australia. It provides 2 decades of tropical rainfall characteristics useful for validating global circulation models. Rainfall retrievals from radar assume characteristics about the droplet size distribution (DSD) that vary significantly. To minimize the uncertainty associated with DSD variability, new radar rainfall techniques use dual polarization and specific attenuation estimates. This study challenges the applicability of several specific attenuation and dual-polarization-based rainfall estimators in tropical settings using a 4-year archive of Darwin disdrometer datasets in conjunction with CPOL observations. This assessment is based on three metrics: statistical uncertainty estimates, principal component analysis (PCA), and comparisons of various retrievals from CPOL data. The PCA shows that the variability in R can be consistently attributed to reflectivity, but dependence on dualpolarization quantities was wavelength dependent for 1 10 mm h−1 . Rainfall estimates during these conditions primarily originate from deep convective clouds with median drop diameters greater than 1.5 mm. An uncertainty analysis and intercomparison with CPOL show that a Colorado State University blended technique for tropical oceans, with modified estimators developed from video disdrometer observations, is most appropriate for use in all cases, such as when 1 10 mm h−1 (deeper convective rain).Argonne National Laboratory’s work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research, under contract DE-AC02-06CH11357. This work has been supported by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research (OBER) of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) as part of the Climate Model Development and Validation activity. NOAA PSL contributes effort with funding from the Weather Program Office’s Precipitation Prediction Grand Challenge. The development of the Python ARM radar toolkit was funded by the ARM program part of the Office of Biological and Environmental Research (OBER) of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The work from Monash University and the Bureau of Meteorology was partly supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric Systems Research Program through the grant DE-SC0014063. BD contributions are supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric Systems Research Program through the grant DE-SC0017977