Pakistan in 2008: Moving Beyond Musharraf

Following the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007 and national elections in February 2008, Pakistan struggled to distance itself from the discredited military regime of President (General) Pervez Musharraf. Competition between the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), once led by Benazir Bhutto and subsequently by her widower Asif Ali Zardari, and the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) led by Nawaz Sharif, however, threatened to thwart the cause of political stability in Pakistan

Pakistan in 2009: Tackling the Taliban?

Party-based political competition played an important part in shaping key events in Pakistan in 2009. This article examines the impact of party-based competition on the much-delayed restoration of Supreme Court Chief Justice Mohammad Iftikhar Chaudhry, efforts to address (with U.S. assistance) Pakistan’s growing Taliban-affiliated insurgency, and both federal and provincial economic policies. This article concludes that party-based competition will continue to shape Pakistan’s evolving security and economic situation in 2010

A Relative Position Code for Saccades in Dorsal Premotor Cortex

Spatial computations underlying the coordination of the hand and eye present formidable geometric challenges. One way for the nervous system to simplify these computations is to directly encode the relative position of the hand and the center of gaze. Neurons in the dorsal premotor cortex (PMd), which is critical for the guidance of arm-reaching movements, encode the relative position of the hand, gaze, and goal of reaching movements. This suggests that PMd can coordinate reaching movements with eye movements. Here, we examine saccade-related signals in PMd to determine whether they also point to a role for PMd in coordinating visual–motor behavior. We first compared the activity of a population of PMd neurons with a population of parietal reach region (PRR) neurons. During center-out reaching and saccade tasks, PMd neurons responded more strongly before saccades than PRR neurons, and PMd contained a larger proportion of exclusively saccade-tuned cells than PRR. During a saccade relative position-coding task, PMd neurons encoded saccade targets in a relative position code that depended on the relative position of gaze, the hand, and the goal of a saccadic eye movement. This relative position code for saccades is similar to the way that PMd neurons encode reach targets. We propose that eye movement and eye position signals in PMd do not drive eye movements, but rather provide spatial information that links the control of eye and arm movements to support coordinated visual–motor behavior

The India-Pakistan relationship: From Delhi to Islamabad via Rawalpindi

Sharif’s presence at Modi’s inauguration was widely perceived by the media as a positive sign for India-Pakistan relations. But Matthew J. Nelson argues that although Sharif might be well-disposed to India’s new administration, increased trade and better relations will rely on India’s support for Sharif’s efforts to persuade the Pakistan Army of the benefits

Impact of Using Spatially Distributed Soils Information on Flood Hydrograph Simulation with HEC-HMS

Hydrologic rainfall-runoff models employ numerical equations to simulate the soil absorption of rainfall and resulting runoff. A number of methods have been developed to model these processes, but the parameters used to define these methods can be difficult to directly measure due to the variable nature of soil properties. They often rely on estimation of hydraulic and hydrologic parameters and calibration to produce accurate results. A challenge with runoff method parameterization is the need for oversimplification using a lumped modeling approach. While distributed hydrologic modeling techniques are now available, distributed runoff methods are limited in use due to the tradition of lumped modeling and lack of widely available runoff parameter datasets. This study sought to define modeling parameters for three runoff methods based on physical soil data contained within the Soil Survey Geographic (SSURGO) database for lumped and distributed modeling approaches. These parameters were defined for 1-foot and 3-foot soil depths for estimating controlling influences on infiltration. The methods investigated are the Deficit and Constant method, the Green and Ampt method, and the SCS Curve Number method. The Salt Creek Basin located in southeast Nebraska was the pilot basin for this study. The basin was modeled using the Hydrologic Engineering Center-Hydrologic Modeling System (HEC-HMS) software package. The model was adapted to the basin using ArcGIS and the HEC-GeoHMS extension. Three different precipitation events were modeled with the simulated runoff hydrographs at seven locations compared to the observed data to assess the model performance. Several trends in the quality of loss parameters were observed. First, Deficit and Constant and Green and Ampt runoff methods produced runoff hydrographs that closely matched observations. Second, distributed loss parameters for these two methods produced more accurate results than their lumped counterparts. Third, the shallower soil depth parameters produced marginally better hydrographs than their counterparts. Finally, the SCS Curve Number method was able to produce accurate peak flow and runoff volume estimates, but performed poorly with the hydrograph timing. Advisor: Ayse Kili

Nicolas Martin, Politics, Landlords and Islam in Pakistan

In his account of landlords and their politics in rural Pakistan (focusing on central Punjab), Nicolas Martin offers a wealth of ethnographic detail. From the homesickness of indentured child servants to clever forms of vote-rigging in local elections as well as notions of spiritual superiority mixed with social critique amongst the impoverished adepts of Sufi Islam, Martin brings fine-grained forms of analysis to bear on several familiar themes in the study of rural Pakistan. Readers will im..