Rossellini,Pontecorvo, and the neorealist cinema of insurgency

This article examines the tradition of Italian neorealism and the importance it has for films depicting guerrilla insurgencies. It looks in particular at the two films by Roberto Rossellini Rome Open City and Paisa as well as the later film by Nanni Loy Four Days in Naples. It then proceeds to locate Gillo Pontecorvo's iconic film The Battle of Algiers within this neorealist tradition and examines the degree to which the director succeeded in continuing the basic traditions of neorealism into the context of the Algerian war of Independence. The article concludes that while this film remains of great interest it should be situated in the period when it was produced and is in many ways radically disconnected from many insurgent movements of the present day.     

Military Expenditure,Economic Growth and Heterogeneity

This paper examines the impact of military expenditure on economic growth on a large balanced panel, using an exogenous growth model and dynamic panel data methods for 106 countries over the period 1988–2010. A major focus of the paper is to consider the possibility group heterogeneity and non-linearity. Having estimated the model for all of the countries in the panel and finding that military burden has a negative effect on growth in the short and long run, the panel is broken down into various groupings based upon a range of potentially relevant factors, and the robustness of the results is evaluated. The factors considered are different levels of income, conflict experience, natural resources abundance, openness and aid. The estimates for the different groups are remarkably consistent with those for the whole panel, providing strong support for the argument that military spending has adverse effects on growth. There are, however, some intriguing results that suggest that for certain types of countries military spending has no significant effect on growth.     

The long shadow of colonial cartography: Britain and the Sino-Indian war of 1962

ABSTRACT

This article examines British responses to the Sino-Indian border war of 1962. It illustrates how, in the years leading up to the war, Britain’s colonial legacy in the Indian subcontinent saw it drawn reluctantly into a territorial dispute between Asia’s two largest and most powerful nations. It analyses disagreements in Whitehall between the Foreign Office and Commonwealth Relations Office over the relative strength of India and China’s border claims, and assesses how these debates reshaped British regional policy. It argues that the border war was instrumental in transforming Britain’s post-colonial relationship with South Asia. Continuing to filter relations with India through an imperial prism proved unsatisfactory, what followed was a more pragmatic Indo-British association.     

A note on testing for exponentiality

In this note some extensions are made to previous work by a number of authors on the development of tests for exponentiality. The most recent example is due to Fercho and Ringer in which they compare the small sample powers of a few well-known test statistics for the hypothesis of a constant failure rate. It is the primary intent of this current work to extend Gnedenko's F test to situations with hypercensoring and to provide guidance for its use, particularly when a log-normal distribution is the alternative.     

State-dependent gap acceptance

This paper considers a traffic problem in which vehicles queue up according to a Poisson process on a single-lane entrance ramp prior to merging into a major stream of vehicular traffic. In order to then prevent the ramp queue from becoming too large, a model is proposed which considers a lowering of the critical gap as the ramp queue size increases. With the critical gap assumed to be a nonincreasing function of the number of vehicles on the ramp at instances that correspond to departure times of lead vehicles from the ramp queue, the resultant model is an M/G/1 queue with state-dependent service times. Some general results are obtained for this model and a specific case discussed in moderate detail.     

Transportation problems with some xij negative and transshipment problems

The general solution process of the Hitchcock transportation problem resulting from the application of the method of reduced matrices may give solutions with some negative x_ij values. This paper is devoted to a review of the reduced matrices method, an examination of suitable interpretation of sets of x_ij which include some negative values, and ways of interpreting these values in useful modifications of the Hitchcock problem. Such modifications include a) the reshipment problem, b) the overshipment problem, and c) the transshipment problem. Techniques are developed for determining and eliminating c_ij which are not optimal. These techniques and results are useful in solving the problems indicated above. The natural applicability of the simple and general method of reduced matrices is emphasized.     

What-If at Waterloo. Carl von Clausewitz’s use of historical counterfactuals in his history of the Campaign of 1815

In this article, I analyze the use of historical counterfactuals in the Campaign of 1815 by Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831). Such is the importance of counterfactuals in this work that its gist can be given in a series of 25 counterfactuals. I claim that a central role is played by evaluative counterfactuals. This specific form of counterfactuals is part of a didactic method that allows Clausewitz to teach young officers a critical method that prepares them for the challenge of decision-making in real warfare. I conclude with the enduring relevance of Clausewitz’s use of evaluative counterfactuals for contemporary military historiography.