Effects of UN Peacekeeping Missions

Of everything the United Nations does, probably one its most scrutinized programs is its peacekeeping missions across the globe. Even though humanity is experiencing an unprecedented level of peace, deadly civil wars still occur across the world, especially in developing nations. The UN has become involved in many of these conflicts, sending peacekeeping forces to the country in crisis. UN peace efforts are very important because they have the potential to save thousands of lives and preventing the further damages of war. It is for this reason that it is vital to examine the UN peacekeeping missions and evaluate the outcomes these have produced. My research into this question will briefly look at the process of peacekeeping and its results based on reports after peacekeeping missions leave the nation in question. The overall question I seek to answer is “Do UN peacekeeping forces leave a civil war-stricken country in a better or worse condition since they have arrived?”. Essentially I seek to asses the UN’s effectiveness in peacekeeping overall. In order to find an answer to this question, I will examine various scholarly debates and papers all evaluating the UN’s performance in various conflicts. These papers range in backgrounds and hypotheses but they break down these conflicts into various tests in order to identify the outcomes and come to a general conclusion. Each of these studies also highlights specific conflicts as examples in support of their argument, thus providing the research with more credibility, while still showing the vast complication of peacekeeping. UN peacekeeping forces, in the majority of cases, fail to bring about stable peace in civil wars. I believe this because, from what I have seen, there seems to be a lot of civil wars that keep occurring or fail to stop, for example, Syria. While Syria has caught quite the attention and action of the UN, its war has no end in sight. Conflicts in various African nations such as Somalia fail to end as well, thus bringing me to what I hypothesize

Quantifying Loss Aversion: Evidence from a UK Population Survey

We estimate loss aversion using on an online survey of a representative sample of over 4,000 UK residents. The average aversion to a loss of £500 relative to a gain of the same amount is 2.41, but loss aversion varies significantly with characteristics such as gender, age, education, financial knowledge, social class, employment status, management responsibility, income, savings and home ownership. Other influencing factors include marital status, number of children, ease of savings, rainy day fund, personality type, emotional state, newspaper and political party. However, once we condition on all the profiling characteristics of the respondents, some factors, in particular gender, cease to be significant, suggesting that gender differences in risk and loss attitudes might be due to other factors, such as income differences

Optimal funding and investment strategies in defined contribution pension plans under Epstein-Zin utility

A defined contribution pension plan allows consumption to be redistributed from the plan member’s working life to retirement in a manner that is consistent with the member’s personal preferences. The plan’s optimal funding and investment strategies therefore depend on the desired pattern of consumption over the lifetime of the member. We investigate these strategies under the assumption that the member has an Epstein-Zin utility function, which allows a separation between risk aversion and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution, and we also take into account the member’s human capital. We show that a stochastic lifestyling approach, with an initial high weight in equity-type investments and a gradual switch into bond-type investments as the retirement date approaches is an optimal investment strategy. In addition, the optimal contribution rate each year is not constant over the life of the plan but reflects trade-offs between the desire for current consumption, bequest and retirement savings motives at different stages in the life cycle, changes in human capital over the life cycle, and attitude to risk

The circumstellar environment of the FU Orionis pre-outburst candidate V1331 Cygni

High resolution (~4") aperture synthesis maps of the CO (1→ 0), ^(13)CO (1→0), ^(13)CO (2→1), and asociated continuum emission from the FU Orions candidate V1331 Cygni reveal a massive, 0.5 ± 0.15 M_☉, circumstellar disk surrounded by a flattened gaseous envelope, 6000 x 4400 AU in size, mass >0.32 M_☉. These images and lower resolution measurements also trace a bipolar outflow and gaseous ring, 4.1 by 2.8 x 10^4 AU, mass greater than or equal to 0.07 M_☉, radially expanding at 22 ± 4 kms^(-1). We suggest this ring is a swept-up gaseous torus from an energetic mass ejection stage, possibly an FU Orionis outburst or outburts, ~4 x 10^3 yr ago that imparted >10^(45) ergs into the ambient cloud

The FU Orionis binary system RNO 1B/1C

Observations of CS (7→6) emission reveal a ≥3M_⊙ core, 1.8×10^4 AU in size, surrounding the FU Orionis binary system RNO 1B/1C. Fractional chemical abundances, calculated from LVG and LTE codes, are mostly similar to those in the cold core TMC 1. However, values for Si0/H_2 and CH_(3)0H/H_2 are enhanced, possibly by sputtering reactions or grain-grain collisions in tile outflow associated with the young stars. Aperture syntllesis maps of tile 2.6 and 3.1 mm continuum emission at ~5" and ~9" resolution, respectively, reveal that RNO 1C is surrounded by a flattened, dusty envelope, ~5000 AU in size, with mass ≥1.1 M_⊙. High spatial resolution (~3") interferometer observations of CS (2→1) emission may trace the dense walls of ail outflow cavity comprised of two concentric arcs with dynamical ages of 4×10^3 and 1×10^4 yr. The velocity structure of lower density gas imaged in the CO (1→0) transition is consistent with the arcs being formed by two energetic FU Orionis outbursts. Each event may have imparted more than 4 M_⊙km s^(-1) to the outflow, implying outburst mass loss rates of ~10^(-4) M_⊙ yr^(-1). It appears that RNO 1C is probably the driving source for the outflow and tllat, while pre-main sequence stars are in tile FU Orionis stage, outbursts may dominate both outflow morphology and energetics

Development and fabrication of sealed silver-zinc cells, phase 1

A facility was designed, constructed and equipped for the production of prismatic alkaline rechargeable battery cells using inorganic (ceramic) separators. This unique facility is environmentally controlled and contains separate areas for electrode fabrication, separator processing, cell assembly, cell finishing and testing. An initial production run of 125 sealed silver zinc cells, using inorganic separators, was made in the facility in order to provide samples for baseline performance tests. Ten of these cells were given performance characterization and life cycle tests

Evaluation of an urban NMHC emission inventory by measurements and impact on CTM results

This paper presents an evaluation of the consistency of an urban state-of-the-art hydrocarbon (HC) emission inventory. The evaluation was conducted through the comparison of this inventory with hourly HC measurements during two summer months in the centre of Marseille, on the Mediterranean French coast. Factors of under or overestimation could be calculated for each compound on the basis of a systematic HC to HC ratio analysis. These results, associated with a deep analysis of the speciation profiles, show that most of the common and highly concentrated hydrocarbons (such as butanes) are too much predominant in the emission speciation, while the heavy and less common species (branched alkanes, substituted aromatics) are under-represented in the inventory. The urban diffuse sources appear here as one critical point of the inventories. The disagreements were shown to have a strong incidence on the representation of the air mass reactivity. In a last step, the identified uncertainties in emissions were implemented in an air-quality model for sensitivity studies. It was shown that the observed biases in the inventory could affect the regional ozone production, with a probable impact on ozone peaks of 2-10 ppbv over the area. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd

Chemistry in circumstellar disks: CS toward HL Tauri

High-resolution millimeter-wave aperture synthesis images of the CS J = 2 → 1 and dust continuum emission toward the young star HL Tauri have been combined with single-dish spectra of the higher J CS transitions in order to probe the chemical and physical structure of circumstellar material in this source. We find that the extended molecular cloud surrounding HL Tau is similar to other Taurus dark cloud cores, having T_(kinetic) ≈ 10-20 K, n_(H2) ≈ 10^4-10^5 cm^(-3) , and x(CS) = N(CS)/N(H_2) ≈ (1-2) x 10^(-8). In contrast, the gas-phase CS abundance in the circumstellar disk is depleted by factors of at least 25-50, and perhaps considerably more. These results are consistent with substantial depletion onto grains, or a transition from kinetically controlled chemistry in the molecular cloud to thermodynamically controlled chemistry in the outer regions of the circumstellar disk. Dust continuum emission at 3.06 mm, although unresolved in a 3".0 beam, appears centered on the stellar position; combined with other millimeter-wave measurements its intensity indicates an emissivity index of β = 1.2 ± 0.3. This β may reflect grain growth via depletion and aggregation or compositional evolution, and suggests that the 3.06 mm dust opacity exceeds unity within 8-10 AU of HL Tauri. Even at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths, observational studies of other high dipole moment molecules in circumstellar disks may also be hampered by the combination of grain mantle depletion and dust opacity structure in sources viewed nearly edge-on

Effect of motion frequency spectrum on subjective comfort response

In order to model passenger reaction to present and future aircraft environments, it is necessary to obtain data in several ways. First, of course, is the gathering of environmental and passenger reaction data on commercial aircraft flights. In addition, detailed analyses of particular aspects of human reaction to the environment are best studied in a controllable experimental situation. Thus the use of simulators, both flight and ground based, is suggested. It is shown that there is a reasonably high probability that the low frequency end of the spectrum will not be necessary for simulation purposes. That is, the fidelity of any simulation which omits the very low frequency content will not yield results which differ significantly from the real environment. In addition, there does not appear to be significant differences between the responses obtained in the airborne simulator environment versus those obtained on commercial flights