Croatia's bitter harvest: Total National Defence's role in the Croatian War of Independence

Croatia's successful bid for independence was one of the defining moments of the immediate post-Cold War period. Nevertheless, the means that Croatia used to obtain independence remains relatively unexamined by academics. This article focuses on the early period of Croatia's bid for secession, and specifically the role that Yugoslavia's policy of Total National Defence played in facilitating its independence. Unlike in Slovenia, where the legacies of Total National Defence facilitated Slovenia's bid for secession, in Croatia the decision of its political leaders meant that the country largely neglected its positive legacies, resulting in a protracted four-year struggle.     

Baixa do Cassang: Ending the abuse of Portuguese Africans

On 4 January 1961 in Baixa do Cassange, in the north of Angola, the blacks who worked in the cotton fields began a strike. The army with air support was called to quell the rebellion, and the article emphasizes the importance of air support tethered to the ground forces, particularly in a remote and vast area of operations in the tropical rainy season. In this case, the support originally came in the form a squadron of Lockheed PV-2 Harpoons from Luanda, some 300 kilometers away. These open-ocean reconnaissance aircraft and their crews were ill-suited for the task. When this became apparent, four small Auster D5/160s were relocated from Negage to Malange, among the ground forces. The Austers flew reconnaissance missions over the troubled zones, dropped provisions and messages to the advancing ground forces, and served as a backup communications link. When the strike ceased after three weeks, the Austers assumed a humanitarian role in support of the starving population. The conclusion is that air support to ground forces is indispensable, must be properly tailored to the job, and must operate as an integral part of the ground forces.     

Why did Sudan Lose a small war in Southern Sudan?

ABSTRACT

When on the wrong end of an asymmetry in the projection of hard power, weaker sides countenance the grim arithmetic of avoiding direct and massed confrontations. Invariably, insurgents have over the ages tended to employ indirect tactical methods to render their stronger opponents ineffective. Ultimately – interest asymmetry, regime type, asymmetries of strategy, and external intervention – combine in a complex interplay and pattern, to militate against a strong side. In Sudan, these factors interacted throughout the civil wars to produce regional autonomy and finally an independent South Sudan in 2011. Similar strategic logic had confronted many large African states battling insurgencies in Ethiopia, Angola, Nigeria, Zaire, and apartheid-era South Africa. Oftentimes, weakening public resolve has caused these governments to accommodate, capitulate or withdraw even if they try not to blink. Notwithstanding the regime type, it can be concluded that the majority of strong actors are prone to fail in a protracted, asymmetric conflict. Hence, the notion of linking victory in counterinsurgency to the degree of openness (democratic polyarchies); or closeness (totalitarianism) – is still valid but highly contestable in the case of Africa’s large dysfunctional states.     

从王安石变法看政策执行的必备要素

政策的执行是一项系统性工作,其中领导者的综合素质、直达基层的领导骨干、及时高效的反馈机制、牢靠的群众基础以及周密配套的实施方案,都是政策执行的必备要素。讨论政策执行的必备要素,对于政策的执行乃至当前的改革,都具有非常重要的现实意义。     

Steady-state analysis of load balancing with Coxian-2 distributed service times

This paper studies load balancing for many-server (N servers) systems. Each server has a buffer of size b ? 1, and can have at most one job in service and b ? 1 jobs in the buffer. The service time of a job follows the Coxian-2 distribution. We focus on steady-state performance of load balancing policies in the heavy traffic regime such that the normalized load of system is λ = 1 ? N^?α for 0 < α < 0.5. We identify a set of policies that achieve asymptotic zero waiting. The set of policies include several classical policies such as join-the-shortest-queue (JSQ), join-the-idle-queue (JIQ), idle-one-first (I1F) and power-of-d-choices (Po d) with d = O(N^α log N). The proof of the main result is based on Stein's method and state space collapse. A key technical contribution of this paper is the iterative state space collapse approach that leads to a simple generator approximation when applying Stein's method.     

文娱领域综合治理语境下高校艺术学科教师评价与考核机制建设的相关问题研究

文娱领域综合治理是当下的文化热点,但与之相关的高校艺术学科教师的评价与考核机制建设却一直是被学术界忽略的问题。该问题不仅关乎高校教师评价与考核工作的整体进程、艺术学科的健康发展,还关乎国家文艺创作队伍的建设、文娱行业的天清气朗。本文认为艺术学科教师评价与考核机制是决定文娱领域艺人违法失德乱象的重要要素之一,科学、系统、规范的评价与考核机制有利于这一问题的解决。     

新课程呼唤研究型教师

时代的发展、课程改革的需要迫切要求教师中出现一批具有研究、探讨精神的研究型教师。因为研究能提高教师素质,能推动教育改革,能使新课程的实施走向深入,能改变多年来形成的教学教法,能使我们的课堂真正成为一切孩子发展的天地。学校要为教师的研究进行方法指导,提供各种条件,创设研究氛围,以研究促进教学改革和进步。     

论武警法律体系构建与完善

武警法律体系是以武警法为核心，由现行的各种军事法律规范和武警规章为基础，以武警基本法、武警组织法、武警行为法、武警保障与监督检查法等武警法分支为主体而组成的内容协调一致的有机整体。本文是从武警法律体系的角度讨论贯彻实施《人民武装警察法》。从理论的层面讨论有关武警法律体系的内容。     

Steady‐state diffusion approximations for discrete‐time queue in hospital inpatient flow management

In this article, we analyze a discrete‐time queue that is motivated from studying hospital inpatient flow management, where the customer count process captures the midnight inpatient census. The stationary distribution of the customer count has no explicit form and is difficult to compute in certain parameter regimes. Using the Stein's method framework, we identify a continuous random variable to approximate the steady‐state customer count. The continuous random variable corresponds to the stationary distribution of a diffusion process with state‐dependent diffusion coefficients. We characterize the error bounds of this approximation under a variety of system load conditions—from lightly loaded to heavily loaded. We also identify the critical role that the service rate plays in the convergence rate of the error bounds. We perform extensive numerical experiments to support the theoretical findings and to demonstrate the approximation quality. In particular, we show that our approximation performs better than those based on constant diffusion coefficients when the number of servers is small, which is relevant to decision making in a single hospital ward.     

石河子垦区人口结构成因及思考

人口是影响和谐社会建设的一个十分重要的因素。本文从人口出生率和自然增长率逐年下降、生育高峰期妇女生育率下降、独生子女群体日益增大、家庭规模呈日渐缩小、人口老龄化趋势加速五个方面分析了石河子垦区人口结构特征及成因,并就如何统筹解决人口问题,构建和谐垦区提出了思考。