Racing to War: Arms Competitions, Military Spending, and the Tendency of Nations to Engage in Armed Conflict

An essay exploring the relationship between arms acquisition, military spending, and the tendency of nations to engage in war

The Great War Then and Now: Reflections on America’s Declaration of War

This short essay explores the many impacts of the 1917 U.S. entry to World War I on the author\u27s hometown of Pennington, NJ, and the reaction of its residents at the time

A flexible approach to parametric inference in nonlinear time series models

Many structural break and regime-switching models have been used with macroeconomic and …nancial data. In this paper, we develop an extremely flexible parametric model which can accommodate virtually any of these speci…cations and does so in a simple way which allows for straightforward Bayesian inference. The basic idea underlying our model is that it adds two simple concepts to a standard state space framework. These ideas are ordering and distance. By ordering the data in various ways, we can accommodate a wide variety of nonlinear time series models, including those with regime-switching and structural breaks. By allowing the state equation variances to depend on the distance between observations, the parameters can evolve in a wide variety of ways, allowing for everything from models exhibiting abrupt change (e.g. threshold autoregressive models or standard structural break models) to those which allow for a gradual evolution of parameters (e.g. smooth transition autoregressive models or time varying parameter models). We show how our model will (approximately) nest virtually every popular model in the regime-switching and structural break literatures. Bayesian econometric methods for inference in this model are developed. Because we stay within a state space framework, these methods are relatively straightforward, drawing on the existing literature. We use arti…cial data to show the advantages of our approach, before providing two empirical illustrations involving the modeling of real GDP growth

Литературные тексты и римские историки

В монографии освещаются проблемы и методы историко-филологической реконструкции античной истории. Автор исследует разные виды текстов и те способы, посредством которых древние авторы воссоздавали историю Рима. В монографии представлены и альтернативные формы нарративной традиции, а также рецепция античной историографии в исторической науке конца XX в.Настоящая монография издана в серии "Approaching the Ancient World". Приложения: каталог античных авторов, представленных в книге, и международные издания их трудов (с. 156-167), избранная библиография (с. 203-211), общий указатель (с. 212-218)

HEA/JISC Open Educational Resources case study: pedagogical development from OER practice: research ethics OER: can they be 'radically repurposed and remixed'?

This case study provides guidance on discovering, reusing and repurposing of Open Educational Resources (OER). It is presented within the context of research ethics OER for higher education learning and teaching and, together with the OER guidance, provides examples of OER found for this subject area

Evaluation of the implementation process of urban road pricing schemes in the United Kingdom and Italy

This paper is based upon detailed research that has taken place in the UK and Italy, on the implementation strategies for urban road pricing schemes. In the UK, both in London and Durham, the Road User Charging schemes required new legislation, and were implemented rapidly. The time from announcement to implementation took three years and the schemes were introduced after short periods of intensive planning, consultations and stakeholder networking. In Italy, the situation has been very different. The road pricing schemes in Rome and Genoa were not introduced under specific legislation but rather evolved from access control zones originally implemented in historic urban centres. The incremental introduction of the Italian road pricing experiments has taken approximately ten years. The paper undertakes a comparison of these different strategies to introduce urban road pricing and the lessons they contain for the development of similar measures elsewhere. The comparison of the different implementing experiences is undertaken using Strategic Policy Niche Management, a method designed to explore, among other factors, the dynamics of the stakeholder networks involved in planning, introducing, marketing and managing radical urban Travel Demand Management policies

Implications of HGV charging for the UK

Road transport taxation in Europe is undergoing a major and radical shift away from fixed charges and fuel duties towards pricing according to distance travelled and externalities produced. Implementation is underway in some states, change being led by national schemes for the freight sector only. The UK is considering such a system for implementation by 2008, to use global positioning system technology. The paper reviews the current developments and considers charging scenarios, including a scenario for covering the full external costs of the UK freight industry. Implications for taxation policy are considered, including whether the doctrine of revenue neutrality is consistent with 'sustainable mobility'. Consideration is given to a transition strategy which could bridge between the current level and structure of prices and a future, more economically efficient approach

A description of within-family resource exchange networks in a Malawian village

In this paper we explore patterns of economic transfers between adults within household and family networks in a village in Malawi’s Rumphi district, using data from the 2006 round of the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health. We fit Exponential-family Random Graph Models (ERGMs) to assess individual, relational, and higher-order network effects. The network effects of cyclic giving, reciprocity, and in-degree and out-degree distribution suggest a network with a tendency away from the formation of hierarchies or "hubs." Effects of age, sex, working status, education, health status, and kinship relation are also considered.Malawi, Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health, networks, resource exchange, social network

Universal properties of many-body delocalization transitions

We study the dynamical melting of "hot" one-dimensional many-body localized systems. As disorder is weakened below a critical value these non-thermal quantum glasses melt via a continuous dynamical phase transition into classical thermal liquids. By accounting for collective resonant tunneling processes, we derive and numerically solve an effective model for such quantum-to-classical transitions and compute their universal critical properties. Notably, the classical thermal liquid exhibits a broad regime of anomalously slow sub-diffusive equilibration dynamics and energy transport. The subdiffusive regime is characterized by a continuously evolving dynamical critical exponent that diverges with a universal power at the transition. Our approach elucidates the universal long-distance, low-energy scaling structure of many-body delocalization transitions in one dimension, in a way that is transparently connected to the underlying microscopic physics.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures; major changes from v1, including a modified approach and new emphasis on conventional MBL systems rather than their critical variant