The Central Intelligence Agency’s armed Remotely Piloted Vehicle-supported counter-insurgency campaign in Pakistan – a mission undermined by unintended consequences?

This paper views America's 'drones-first' counter-insurgency effort in Pakistan through the lens of Merton's theory of the unintended consequences of purposive action. It also references Beck’s Risk Society thesis, America’s Revolution in Military Affairs doctrine, Toft’s theory of isomorphic learning, Langer’s theory of mindfulness, Highly Reliable Organisations theory and the social construction of technology (SCOT) argument. With reference to Merton’s theory, the CIA-directed armed Remotely Piloted Vehicle (RPV) campaign has manifest functions, latent functions and latent dysfunctions. Measured against numbers of suspected insurgents killed, the campaign can be judged a success. Measured against the level of collateral damage or the state of US-Pakistan relations, the campaign can be judged a failure. Values determine the choice of metrics. Because RPV operations eliminate risk to American service personnel, and because this is popular with both US citizens and politicians, collateral damage (the killing of civilians) is not considered a policy-changing dysfunction. However, the latent dysfunctions of America's drones-first policy may be so great as to undermine that policy's intended manifest function – to make a net contribution to the War on Terror. In Vietnam the latent dysfunctions of Westmoreland’s attritional war undermined America’s policy of containment. Vietnam holds a lesson for the Obama administration.Publisher PD

Cultural identity and academic achievement among Māori undergraduate university students

Cultural identity and academic achievement were investigated among a nonrandom sample of 72 undergraduate Māori university students studying at Massey University. Student problems were examined to identify the types of difficulties most prevalent among this population. The degree to which cultural identity moderates the relationship between student problems and academic achievement was then examined. Major findings were that (a) there is a consistent negative relationship between student problems and academic achievement; and (b) cultural identity moderates the effect of student problems on academic achievement, in that: a high degree of problems were associated with decreases in grade point average among respondents with low cultural identity; while among respondents with high cultural identity, high levels of student problems had little negative effect on grade point average. Despite the study having limitations, the findings have important implications for Māori students, deliverers of tertiary education, tertiary education providers, and those involved in the development and implementation of tertiary education policy

BEEBS: Open Benchmarks for Energy Measurements on Embedded Platforms

This paper presents and justifies an open benchmark suite named BEEBS, targeted at evaluating the energy consumption of embedded processors. We explore the possible sources of energy consumption, then select individual benchmarks from contemporary suites to cover these areas. Version one of BEEBS is presented here and contains 10 benchmarks that cover a wide range of typical embedded applications. The benchmark suite is portable across diverse architectures and is freely available. The benchmark suite is extensively evaluated, and the properties of its constituent programs are analysed. Using real hardware platforms we show case examples which illustrate the difference in power dissipation between three processor architectures and their related ISAs. We observe significant differences in the average instruction dissipation between the architectures of 4.4x, specifically 170uW/MHz (ARM Cortex-M0), 65uW/MHz (Adapteva Epiphany) and 88uW/MHz (XMOS XS1-L1)

The adaptation of cognitive behavioural therapy for adult Maori clients with depression: A pilot study

A semistructured cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) programme for depression was adapted for use with Maori adult clients with depression. Adaptations were developed in consultation with an advisory group consisting of Maori clinical psychologists and kaumatua with experience working in mental health services. The programme was piloted with 2 participants who were clients of a Maori mental health service. The programme builds on a more traditional CBT treatment programme by integrating concepts such as whakatauki, whanaungatanga, whanau involvement, and whakapapa into the therapeutic context. Despite limitations the results demonstrate considerable promise. Depressive symptoms increased substantially in both cases and both clients reflected positively on the adaptations incorporated into therapy

What risks in whose risk society?

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University.The thesis discusses the mediating role of socioeconomic factors in risk debates through an examination of the decontamination and demolition of Fulham Power Station in 1983-1984. The power station was built between the wars by and for the people of Fulham. Located on the Thames in the neighbourhood of Sands End, it generated electricity and provided employment until 1978, when it was sold to a property development company. During the decontamination, a quantity of asbestos was released into the environment. A protest group was formed to secure better standards of work at the site. The group never had more than a dozen active members. All the members were middle-class. At the time of the decontamination and demolition, Sands End was a poor neighbourhood. A majority of the local population faced many 'social' as well as environmental hazards. Amongst these were sub-standard housing, unemployment, under-employment, low wages, inadequate work and educational skills and crime. The thesis discusses whether the neighbourhood's socioeconomic problems had any bearing on the character and dynamics of the power station debate. It suggests that the social geography and economic status of Sands End had two major effects on the debate. Firstly, gentrification provided the neighbourhood with a (small) middle-class constituency receptive to issues of environmental risk, such as the long-term health implications of airborne asbestos dust. Secondly, the neighbourhood's pressing social and economic problems mitigated against a wider involvement in the campaign. Most residents were too preoccupied with meeting their social and economic needs to become actively involved. The thesis also suggests that the population's experience of Fulham Power Station as a source of 'convenient' electrical power, employment and civic pride may have made it difficult for those native to Sands End to accept the activists' construction of the power station as a source of danger.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC

Framing the MH17 disaster – more heat than light?

Despite the reductionist analyses produced by politicians and the Fourth Estate, the loss of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was a systems accident – a product of the interactions between the actants that compose the commercial aviation system network-space. As an antidote to reductionism’s ‘fundamental attribution error’, this paper presents a systems-thinking-informed analysis of the MH17 disaster. To this end it draws on Actor-Network Theory and the work of Reason, Toft, Dekker, Hollnagel and other systems-thinking advocates. Whether intentional or not, politicians’ reductionist analyses generated political capital. European Union and American finger-pointing distracted from aviation authorities’ and airlines’ ill-advised routing policies. Russian finger-pointing distracted from that country’s economic dysfunction and adventurism. The risk-management community must redouble its efforts to publicise the benefits of the systems-thinking approach to risk assessment and accident investigation

Strength-structure relationships in carbon fibers

The three-dimensional microstructure and macrostructure of various PAN-based carbon fibres has been characterized by bright- and dark-field transmission electron microscopy, and quantitative electron-diffraction analysis. A skin-core heterogeneity was observed for all fibres heat treated to 2500°C, irrespective of type and time of stabilization cycle, the skin being variable in longitudinal extent and width, but typically, 0.1 vm in thickness - much smaller than the sheath zone attributable to oxidation, which has been observed in optical microscopy. At 1000°C and 1500°C, only a few layer planes at the fibre surface can be considered as forming a skin structure, and it is proposed that progressive growth inwards of a well-oriented skin structure occurs at heat-treatment temperatures in excess of 1800°C. The nature of the fibre surface so formed would suggest that the number of edge sites suited to bonding with a resin matrix in untreated fibre is'inversely related to heat-treatment temperature. Examination of 'first-cut' sections suggests that the surfaces of the fibres are rippled, with, at 2500°C, the c-axes of skin crystallites being predominantly normal to the fibre surface; this is confirmed by scanning electron microscopy and examination of transverse sections. In cross section, the sheath and core zones, first observed in optical microscopy, have been shown to possess no preferred transverse c-axis orientation, it being proposed that structural differences between the zones lie in a crosslinking mechanism during oxidative stabilization. The origin of the intrinsic oriented structure of PAN-based carbon fibres has been traced, by quantitative electron-diffraction analysis, through heat treatment at 2500°C, 1500°C and 1000°C to the important pyrolysis range 400 - 600°C. At this temperature it is proposed that a uniform angular spread of stacking size exists within the azimuthal spread of the (0O&) reflection. Heat treatment, particularly at 2500°C, causes the preferential growth of those crystallites aligned closest to the fibre axis, while the röle of smaller crystallites oriented at high angles to the fibre axis is thought to be one of interlinking. Surface and internal flaws, involving large crystallite misorientations, have been observed in type I fibres, and using the Reynolds - Sharp theory for fibre failure, estimates of mechanical properties for such fibres have been made which are encouragingly close to the observed values. In the absence of internal voids and the surface skin characteristic of these fibres, an intrinsic strength of 7 GNm-2 and strain-to-failure of 2% is predicted. Enhanced crystallization effects have not been observed in fibres heat treated to 1000°C or 1500°C, and the fracture of these fibres at strains below 2% is thought to be due to the presence of gross internal and surface voids, flaws and irregularities

The Christian Denomination and Christian Doctrine

https://digitalcommons.acu.edu/crs_books/1569/thumbnail.jp

The design and development of an information technology application for community transport: a case study approach

The aim of the research has been to develop a single modular software package for all modes of Community Transport (CT) operations. In order to achieve this aim, the research has set out to examine CT operations, the scope for computerisation of those operations and existing software for them, to analyse the requirements of CT operators through a collaborative process, to develop a data model which supports their operations, and to implement a software package based on this model which provides both a data management system and operational functions. [Continues.