'Oligarchs', Business and Russian Foreign Policy: From El'tsin to Putin

The paper investigates the role of private and state-controlled business in the formation and implementation of Russian foreign policy since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The extent to which the 'oligarchs' and business more generally followed their own interests in their external relations or acted as tools of the Russian state is a particular focus. Under President Boris El'tsin, Boris Berezovskii was the only one of the oligarchs to have significant influence on Russian foreign policy. President Vladimir Putin's moves against the oligarchs were motivated partly by the desire to restrict political debate, including on foreign policy, and partly to prevent Mikhail Khodorkovskii from creating a private oil pipeline system which would have subverted Putin's foreign policy, but the main reason was probably the desire to restore state control over key industrial sectors. Under El'tsin, business had followed its own interests, which sometimes conflicted with Russian foreign policy and sometimes reinforced it; but after Putin's attacks on the oligarchs, business seemed more integrated into policy implementation, while still following its own interests where they did not conflict with those of the state, as is suggested by a discussion of Gazprom's foreign policy role

Current Research: Toward a Collaborative Development of a Truly Comprehensive Multi-State Material Culture Database

Throughout the past several years, I have been compiling, with the help of several Caddo researchers, a comprehensive multi-state database primarily composed of whole Caddo vessels from published excavations, private collections, and archaeological reports. At present, the database contains over 13,000 vessel entries from over 500 sites ranging from a single vessel recorded at a site to hundreds. Over the years, the database has evolved to contain, where applicable, attribute fields on type, variety, motif designs (largely using the Glossary of Motifs published in the Spiro shell engravings, collegiate assignment, form, temper, decorative method (incised, brushed, etc.), context (burial #, site #, intra site location), pigment, archaeological phase, collector, repository, associated photographs, and reference citations. The database is managed using Microsoft Access where data are imported into ESRI ArcGIS and spatial analyses can be conducted. This is a continual, and perhaps never-ending, work in progress where attribute fields are added, types are vetted, and new sites are included. In some cases, “Caddo-like” vessels from sites outside the Caddo Archaeological Area, or Caddo Homeland, are included in order to evaluate social interaction and exchange of ideas. Through this process, some initial insights into landscape scale social interactions and interregional relationships using this growing comprehensive database have been explored

A Report on a Long Term Research Program on the Bowman site in Arkansas

The Bowman (3LR46) and Bowman/Wallace (3LR50) sites represent a Caddo multi-mound center on the Red River in Little River County, Arkansas. Southeastern researchers may recognize the site name from an engraved shell cup and several additional “SECC” objects found in Mound 2. Hoffman provides a brief summary of digging at the sites and offers a proposed site organization of eight mounds (both burial and “temple mounds”) surrounding a possible plaza area and at least three offmound cemeteries. Material collected from Mounds 1 and 2 and two off-mound cemeteries suggest Haley phase (ca. A.D. 1200-1400) occupations. Additionally, data from Mound 1 have the potential to “reveal a solid sequence of [Caddo] burial and mortuary artifact styles” beginning with the earliest Caddo occupations in the Red River region

Citizenship, community, and counter-terrorism : UK security discourse, 2001-2011

This paper analyses a corpus of UK policy documents which sets out national security policy as an exemplar of the contemporary discourse of counter-terrorism in Europe, the USA and worldwide. A corpus of 148 documents (c. 2.8 million words) was assembled to reflect the security discourse produced by the UK government before and after the 7/7 attacks on the London Transport system. To enable a chronological comparison, the two sub-corpora were defined: one relating to a discourse of citizenship and community cohesion (2001-2006); and one relating to the ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’ discourse (2007-2011). Wordsmith Tools (Scott 2008) was used to investigate keywords and patterns of collocation. The results present themes emerging from a comparative analysis of the 100 strongest keywords in each sub- corpus; as well as a qualitative analysis of related patterns of the collocation, focusing inparticular on features of connotation and semantic prosody

Noncompact sigma-models: Large N expansion and thermodynamic limit

Noncompact SO(1,N) sigma-models are studied in terms of their large N expansion in a lattice formulation in dimensions d \geq 2. Explicit results for the spin and current two-point functions as well as for the Binder cumulant are presented to next to leading order on a finite lattice. The dynamically generated gap is negative and serves as a coupling-dependent infrared regulator which vanishes in the limit of infinite lattice size. The cancellation of infrared divergences in invariant correlation functions in this limit is nontrivial and is in d=2 demonstrated by explicit computation for the above quantities. For the Binder cumulant the thermodynamic limit is finite and is given by 2/(N+1) in the order considered. Monte Carlo simulations suggest that the remainder is small or zero. The potential implications for ``criticality'' and ``triviality'' of the theories in the SO(1,N) invariant sector are discussed.Comment: 46 pages, 2 figure

A Damping of the de Haas-van Alphen Oscillations in the superconducting state

Deploying a recently developed semiclassical theory of quasiparticles in the superconducting state we study the de Haas-van Alphen effect. We find that the oscillations have the same frequency as in the normal state but their amplitude is reduced. We find an analytic formulae for this damping which is due to tunnelling between semiclassical quasiparticle orbits comprising both particle-like and hole-like segments. The quantitative predictions of the theory are consistent with the available data.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure

Water does partially dissociate on the perfect TiO2(110) surface : a quantitative structure determination

There has been a long-standing controversy as to whether water can dissociate on perfect areas of a TiO2(110) surface; most early theoretical work indicated this dissociation was facile, while experiments indicated little or no dissociation. More recently the consensus of most theoretical calculations is that no dissociation occurs. New results presented here, based on analysis of scanned-energy mode photoelectron diffraction data from the OH component of O 1s photoemission, show the coexistence of molecular water and OH species in both atop (OHt) and bridging (OHbr) sites. OHbr can arise from reaction with oxygen vacancy defect sites (Ovac), but OHt have only been predicted to arise from dissociation on the perfect areas of the surface. The relative concentrations of OHt and OHbr sites arising from these two dissociation mechanisms are found to be fully consistent with the initial concentration Ovac sites, while the associated Ti-O bondlengths of the OHt and OHbr species are found to be 1.85±0.08Å and 1.94±0.07 Å, respectively

Magnetic Gradient Survey at the M. S. Roberts (41HE8) Site in Henderson County, Texas

The M. S. Roberts site is located in Henderson County, Texas and it represents one of the few known Caddo mound sites in the upper Neches River Basin in northeast Texas (Figure 1). The site is situated along Caddo Creek – an eastward-flowing tributary of the Neches River (Perttula et al. 2016; Perttula 2016; Perttula and Walters 2016). The site is located southeast of Athens, Texas. When first recorded, the single mound at the site was approximately 24 m long and 20 m wide and roughly 1.7 m in height (Pearce and Jackson 1931). Directly west of the mound was a large depression, which has since been mostly filled, and likely represents the borrow pit for mound fill. The mound is situated at the southern end of an elevated alluvial landform. The site was first reported to Dr. J. E. Pearce of the University of Texas in September 1931. In October of the same year, archaeologists from the University of Texas began investigating the mound and defining the extent of the associated settlement (Pearce and Jackson 1931). Researchers obtained a surface collection from the site and excavated an unknown number of trenches in the mound where portions of at least one burned and buried Caddo structure was identified. Their excavation notes document that the mound began as a 25 cm deposit of yellow sand constructed on the undisturbed brown sandy loam that defines the alluvial landform. A structure had been built on the yellow sand and then at some point had been burned. The burned structure was then covered with mound fill at least a meter in depth. Materials collected from the surface as part of the 1931 investigations indicate the presence of a Caddo habitation area surrounding the mound and suggest the site was occupied from the fourteenth to the early fifteenth centuries (Perttula et al. 2016; Perttula 2016; Perttula and Walters 2016). At that time, the landscape around the mound was a used as a cotton field and subject to extensive plowing. Today, the landscape is part of a residential ranch development where landowners are stewards of the site with a focus on preservation and research. In January 2015, with the permission of the landowners, renewed interested in the site began with a surface collection and the examination of the artifact collections from the 1931 work held by the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory (Perttula et al. 2016; Perttula 2016; Perttula and Walters 2016). A series of shovel tests and auger holes were then dug in the mound and surrounding habitation area in mid-2015. Shovel tests and auger holes documented organically-stained and charcoal-rich areas within the mound that were thought to represent the remains of several burned Caddo structures, and also identified non-mound habitation deposits at the site. An initial aerial survey was also conducted to map the landform topography, estimate the extent of the current mound dimensions and borrow pit, and to reconstruct changes in the shape and size of the mound since it was first recorded in 1931 (Perttula et al. 2016). The survey employed a small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to map the roughly 20-acre property surrounding the site at a 2 cm per pixel resolution. The aerial survey of the mound and surrounding landscape and the creation of a high-resolution digital elevation model reveal that the mound dimensions have changed significantly from what was reported in 1931 (Perttula et al. 2016). For example, aerial data document both the mound and borrow pit features and show that the mound measures 43 m North-South and 26 m East-West, and is roughly 1 meter above the surrounding terrace surface (Perttula et al. 2016). The aerial survey demonstrates that the mound has elongated over the last century since it was first recorded, likely related to historic landscape modification. In January 2016, the site was again revisited. The purpose of the fieldwork was to better define the spatial extent of archaeological deposits in the non-mounded habitation area and investigate the stratigraphy of mound deposits, identify cultural features in the mound, and hopefully obtain charred plant remains or unburned animal bones from these deposits for AMS dating. To help evaluate and identify the distribution of cultural features in the mound and the surrounding non-mounded habitation area, an area just over 1 hectare or 2.8 acres was surveyed using magnetic gradient and a second aerial survey was completed to refine the overall landscape topography (Figure 2). The magnetic gradient results document the subsurface location of at least two interpreted structures within the mound, the possible locations of three 1931 UT trenches, and several possible pit features proximate to the mound. The combination of aerial and geophysical data and the excavation results are revising our understanding of the archaeological remains and preservation conditions of the site