From books on the shelves to boots on the ground : Mao Zedong's revolutionary guerrilla strategy in context, development, and application.

Between 1950 and 1953, the People's Republic of China (PRC) military leaders subscribed to a doctrine that incorporated revolutionary guerrilla warfare as standard operating procedure during the Korean War. Though influenced by a number of long-standing cultural and philosophical traditions, the Chinese Communist Party Central Military Commission (CCP CMC) relied on Mao Zedong's approach to warfare. Indeed, this doctrine guided Chinese military thought and theory for much of the early twentieth century as the Red Army, the guerrillas of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), transitioned into the People's Liberation Army (PLA), the conventional forces of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Even after the creation of the PRC, the PLA and especially the Chinese People's Volunteer Forces (CPVF) in Korea continued to operate under this doctrine because of the limited industrial and economic development of China. This subscription to Mao military thought, however, did not completely divorce the doctrine of the PRC from traditional approaches to war. Indeed, the revolutionary guerrilla warfare of Mao demonstrated clear continuity with the methods of eras past such as pragmatism, efficiency, and adaptability. The experiences CPVF troops gained from the stalemate of the Korean War demonstrated several implications for the future of the twenty-first century. The Korean War revealed the limited capabilities of revolutionary guerrilla war outside of the country where the cultural-national troops originated. It also demonstrated the military power of the PRC and its ability to halt the advances of industrialized and technologically superior Western forces, signaling the reestablishment of Chinese political and cultural dominance of Asia. Perhaps most important as a "lessons taught" approach to history, the CPVF demonstrated the viability of revolutionary guerrilla warfare as a means for struggling, former colonial states to combat the supposed strengths of Western, industrialized, and modern state military powers

Forecast Errors Before and After the Great Moderation

This paper investigates the change in private-sector and Federal Reserve forecasts before and after the Great Moderation. We view the Great Moderation as a natural experiment. Using forecasts produced by the Survey of Professional Forecasters and the Federal Reserve (Greenbook forecasts) we investigate four questions: 1) How large was the decline in forecast errors? 2) Did forecast accuracy improve relative to the decline in volatility of growth and inflation? 3) Did forecasters respond to the Great Moderation? 4) What are the potential benefits to monetary policymakers of smaller forecast errors? We find that the absolute median error as well as the cross-sectional volatility of forecast errors decreased significantly. Forecasters appeared to have narrowed the dispersion of their forecasts in response to the Great Moderation. Forecast accuracy did not improve relative to the reduction in the volatility of the economy. To the extent that the Fed is forward-looking when it sets its federal funds rate target, improvements in forecast accuracy imply substantial improvements in the Fed’s ability to reach its optimum federal funds rate target.forecast errors, Greenbook, Survey of Professional Forecasters, Great Moderation

Optimal handling characteristics for electric vehicles with torque vectoring.

Torque vectoring by virtue of independent electric motors is the focus of an increasing number of studies as electric vehicles gain prominence as the chosen direction for the automotive industry. Building on active yaw control systems developed over the past decades, torque vectoring benefits from the high-responsiveness and controllability of the electric motor actuator. Furthermore, and especially in the case of vehicles equipped with one independent motor per wheel, the overall performance envelope of the vehicle is significantly improved, as well as the ability to actively shape the vehicle handling. Much attention has been focussed on controller development and control allocation aspects of torque vectoring controllers, but little on the appropriate yaw rate reference. Optimal control studies have been successfully used to mimic the expert driver in both minimum-time circuit racing and high-sideslip rally driving, and can offer insight into how to optimally tune active chassis control systems, such as torque vectoring yaw control. The main aim of this thesis was to investigate the optimal handling characteristics of an electric vehicle with four independent electric motors at the limits of performance. A TV controller was first developed for a prototype sportscar with 4 independent motors, employing a model-based design process that encompassed real-time software in the loop testing. Real-world track testing demonstrated the controller was able to successfully modify the handling characteristic of the vehicle in both understeer and oversteer directions, achieving good controller performance in steady-state and transient manoeuvres. The limit performance of the TV-controlled vehicle was subsequently investigated in the simulation domain. Numerical techniques were used to solve optimal control problems for a single-track vehicle model with linear tyres and an external yaw moment term representing the overall yaw moment arising from the difference in torques at each wheel. For a U-turn manoeuvre, it was shown that torque vectoring significantly lowers manoeuvre time in comparison with the vehicle without TV active, and that modifying the passive understeer gradient does not affect manoeuvre time. The system dynamics were reformulated to include a feedback torque vectoring controller. The target yaw rate reference was varied and it was found that the manoeuvre time was highly sensitive to the yaw rate reference. For minimising laptime, the target understeer gradient should be set to the passive understeer gradient value. The methodology was repeated for a higher fidelity model including nonlinear tyres and lateral load transfer, and found that when the torque vectoring controller was included in the system dynamics, the manoeuvre time showed little sensitivity to the target understeer gradient. Following the contradictory results of the optimal control problems, the vehicle models were investigated next. Time optimal yaw rate gain surfaces were generated from further minimum-time optimal control problems. Open-loop manoeuvres investigating effects of tyre model, lateral load transfer and torque vectoring generation mechanism found that tyre modelling was the dominant differentiator and tyre nonlinearity is an essential modelling consideration. Optimal control techniques have been used for high sideslip manoeuvring for conventional vehicles but no studies have explored the effects of torque vectoring on agility. In the final chapter, an aggressive turn-around manoeuvre was simulated and it was found that torque vectoring can significantly increase agility and reduce the space taken for an aggressive turn-around manoeuvre. Reducing yaw inertia increased agility, as well as increasing longitudinal slips limits. A critique of agility metrics in this context was given.PhD in Transport System

Effect of handling characteristics on minimum time cornering with torque vectoring

In this paper, the effect of both passive and actively-modified vehicle handling characteristics on minimum time manoeuvring for vehicles with 4-wheel torque vectoring (TV) capability is studied. First, a baseline optimal TV strategy is sought, independent of any causal control law. An optimal control problem (OCP) is initially formulated considering 4 independent wheel torque inputs, together with the steering angle rate, as the control variables. Using this formulation, the performance benefit using TV against an electric drive train with a fixed torque distribution, is demonstrated. The sensitivity of TV-controlled manoeuvre time to the passive understeer gradient of the vehicle is then studied. A second formulation of the OCP is introduced where a closed-loop TV controller is incorporated into the system dynamics of the OCP. This formulation allows the effect of actively modifying a vehicle's handling characteristic via TV on its minimum time cornering performance of the vehicle to be assessed. In particular, the effect of the target understeer gradient as the key tuning parameter of the literature-standard steady-state linear single-track model yaw rate reference is analysed

Widening Access to Higher Education for Students from Economically Disadvantaged Backgrounds : What Works and Why? [Summary Report]

There are significant social inequalities in access to higher education internationally. Students from the most disadvantaged backgrounds remain persistently under-represented in higher education (HE). Put simply, university populations fail to reflect their broader societies, with the vast majority of entrants coming from more advantaged backgrounds. Our research contributes to the ongoing effort by systematically examining the evidence for policy and programme interventions that widen access to higher education. We also examined trends in widening access in Scotland, barriers to access, and the impact of the national outreach scheme, the Schools for Higher Education Programme (SHEP), in supporting students to overcome these barriers. We provide recommendations for different stakeholders

Structures of Mycobacterium tuberculosis folylpolyglutamate synthase complexed with ADP and AMPPCP

Crystal structures of M. tuberculosis folylpolyglutamate synthetase complexed with two nucleotides have been determined at 2.0 and 2.3 Å resolution, revealing an active-site loop movement and associated changes that influence substrate binding

Adaptation and enslavement in endosymbiont-host associations

The evolutionary persistence of symbiotic associations is a puzzle. Adaptation should eliminate cooperative traits if it is possible to enjoy the advantages of cooperation without reciprocating - a facet of cooperation known in game theory as the Prisoner's Dilemma. Despite this barrier, symbioses are widespread, and may have been necessary for the evolution of complex life. The discovery of strategies such as tit-for-tat has been presented as a general solution to the problem of cooperation. However, this only holds for within-species cooperation, where a single strategy will come to dominate the population. In a symbiotic association each species may have a different strategy, and the theoretical analysis of the single species problem is no guide to the outcome. We present basic analysis of two-species cooperation and show that a species with a fast adaptation rate is enslaved by a slowly evolving one. Paradoxically, the rapidly evolving species becomes highly cooperative, whereas the slowly evolving one gives little in return. This helps understand the occurrence of endosymbioses where the host benefits, but the symbionts appear to gain little from the association.Comment: v2: Correction made to equations 5 & 6 v3: Revised version accepted in Phys. Rev. E; New figure adde

Stakeholder Theory and Marketing: Moving from a Firm-Centric to a Societal Perspective

This essay is inspired by the ideas and research examined in the special section on “Stakeholder Marketing” of the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing in 2010. The authors argue that stakeholder marketing is slowly coalescing with the broader thinking that has occurred in the stakeholder management and ethics literature streams during the past quarter century. However, the predominant view of stakeholders that many marketers advocate is still primarily pragmatic and company centric. The position advanced herein is that stronger forms of stakeholder marketing that reflect more normative, macro/societal, and network-focused orientations are necessary. The authors briefly explain and justify these characteristics in the context of the growing “prosociety” and “proenvironment” perspectives—orientations that are also in keeping with the public policy focus of this journal. Under the “hard form” of stakeholder theory, which the authors endorse, marketing managers must realize that serving stakeholders sometimes requires sacrificing maximum profits to mitigate outcomes that would inflict major damage on other stakeholders, especially society

Elemental Abundances in the X-Ray Gas of Early-Type Galaxies with XMM and Chandra Observations

The source of hot gas in elliptical galaxies is thought to be due to stellar mass loss, with contributions from supernova events and possibly from infall from a surrounding environment. This picture predicts supersolar values for the metallicity of the gas toward the inner part of the galaxy, which can be tested by measuring the gas phase abundances. We use high-quality data for 10 nearby early-type galaxy from XMM-Newton, featuring both the EPIC and the Reflection Grating Spectrometer, where the strongest emission lines are detected with little blending; some Chandra data are also used. We find excellent consistency in the elemental abundances between the different XMM instruments and good consistency with Chandra. Differences in abundances with aperture size and model complexity are examined, but large differences rarely occur. For a two-temperature thermal model plus a point source contribution, the median Fe and O abundances are 0.86 and 0.44 of the Solar value, while Si and Mg abundances are similar to that for Fe. This is similar to stellar abundances for these galaxies but supernovae were expected to enhance the gas phase abundances considerably, which is not observed.Comment: 35 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journa