The day Stalin died: American plans for exploiting the Soviet succession crisis of 1953

One of the effects of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms is the steady erosion of the ideological integrity of Marxism‐Leninism‐Maoism. To compensate for that erosion, the Chinese Communist Party has turned to patriotic nationalism for a new source of legitimacy. China's new nationalism transcends mere rhetoric but is manifested in the behavior of its armed forces ‐ which makes an understanding of the nationalist ideology of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) important. As revealed in PLA and related military publications, that ideology is a potentially problematic mix of wounded pride, historical resentment, and irredentism.     

Case‐based reasoning and improved adaptive search for project scheduling

Most scheduling problems are notoriously intractable, so the majority of algorithms for them are heuristic in nature. Priority rule‐based methods still constitute the most important class of these heuristics. Of these, in turn, parametrized biased random sampling methods have attracted particular interest, due to the fact that they outperform all other priority rule‐based methods known. Yet, even the “best” such algorithms are unable to relate to the full range of instances of a problem: Usually there will exist instances on which other algorithms do better. We maintain that asking for the one best algorithm for a problem may be asking too much. The recently proposed concept of control schemes, which refers to algorithmic schemes allowing to steer parametrized algorithms, opens up ways to refine existing algorithms in this regard and improve their effectiveness considerably. We extend this approach by integrating heuristics and case‐based reasoning (CBR), an approach that has been successfully used in artificial intelligence applications. Using the resource‐constrained project scheduling problem as a vehicle, we describe how to devise such a CBR system, systematically analyzing the effect of several criteria on algorithmic performance. Extensive computational results validate the efficacy of our approach and reveal a performance similar or close to state‐of‐the‐art heuristics. In addition, the analysis undertaken provides new insight into the behaviour of a wide class of scheduling heuristics. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 47: 201–222, 2000     

A practical organizational efficiency measure

There is often a call in any organization to make the system ‘more efficient’. This document describes a novel framework for measuring organizational efficiency at the microeconomic level. We show how this framework can be used to monitor an organization using data typically available in extant performance management frameworks. This is most useful in large organizations with eclectic outputs where resources may be too constrained to perform industry-level analyses, such as data envelope analysis, to infer efficiency. This method helps illuminate how the factors of an organization’s internal practices can affect its efficient use of resources.     

A Proxemic Account of Bayonet Fighting

The bayonet has long been regarded as an obsolete piece of military technology. This article advances a proxemic account of close combat, which points to its continuing utility under modern battlefield conditions. It is argued that bayonet training remains an effective way of preparing soldiers to psychologically dominate contested spaces on the battlefield. Thus, although other weapons and techniques can fulfil the same role, it can nevertheless be argued that the bayonet’s enduring presence is not simply the result of some atavistic military mind-set.     

Confidence coefficient of approximate two-sided confidence intervals for the binomial probability

The confidence coefficient of a two-sided confidence interval for the binomial parameter p is the infimum of the coverage probability of the interval as p ranges between 0 and 1. The confidence coefficients for five different approximate confidence intervals are computed and compared to the confidence coefficient for the two-sided Clopper-Pearson confidence interval. Pratt's approximation method [10] yields virtually the same confidence coefficients as the Clopper-Pearson interval, and is easily computed without resorting to interative methods.