Models of scientific and technological review for the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention

ABSTRACT

Science and technology (S&T) review is key to anticipating developments in the life sciences that may benefit or run contrary to the aims of the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. It serves as a mechanism for both preparing against novel biological threats and identifying the best opportunities for developing and sharing the life sciences to the fullest extent. In the age of rapidly advancing biotechnology, S&T review needs to be wide ranging, involve a diverse set of inputs, and be transparent about its methods and data. This viewpoint considers four models of S&T review and their capacity to respond to the challenge of the life sciences: standing advisory boards; ad hoc working groups; peer review; and wikis. It then identifies a hybrid model that is suitably broad, diverse, and transparent.     

The Needs of Political Policy versus the Reality of Military Operations: Royal Navy Opposition to the Arctic Convoys, 1942

It has become commonplace, especially in the post-Vietnam strategic environment, to quote Clausewitz's dictum that war is the continuation of policy by other means. We are told that military operations are dictated by, and must serve, clear political ends. Such thinking has been invoked to support everything from punitive strikes, to peacekeeping missions, to the ‘Powell’ doctrine and its political ‘exit strategies’, but at times political policy and military operations do not mix. In 1942 the Royal Navy bowed to political pressure and, against its collective better judgement, continued the Arctic convoys to the Soviet Union. These military operations culminated in the destruction of convoy PQ 17 in early July. This conflict between political policy and military strategy provides an object lesson of why in war issues of means and priorities must outweigh the importance of any given political policy.     

The inventory packing problem

We study the problem of finding the minimum number of identical storage areas required to hold n items for which demand is known and constant. The replenishments of the items within a single storage area may be time phased so as to minimize the maximum total storage capacity required at any time. This is the inventory-packing problem, which can be considered as a variant of the well-known bin-packing problem, where one constraint is nonlinear. We study the worst-case performance of six heuristics used for that earlier problem since the recognition version of the inventory-packing problem is shown to be NP complete. In addition, we describe several new heuristics developed specifically for the inventory-packing problem, and also study their worst-case performance. Any heuristic which only opens a bin when an item will not fit in any (respectively, the last) open bin needs, asymptotically, no more than 25/12 (resp., 9/4) times the optimal number of bins. Improved performance bounds are obtainable if the range from which item sizes are taken is known to be restricted. Extensive computational testing indicates that the solutions delivered by these heuristics are, for most problems, very close to optimal in value.