Statistical Analysis as an Adjunct to Historical Research: Identification of the Likely Manufacturers of British Pattern 1907 Bayonets Supplied by the Birmingham Small Arms Company to the Siamese Government in 1920

In 1920, the Birmingham Small Arms Company supplied 10,000 Pattern 1907 bayonets to the government of Siam to accompany an order for rifles. The original maker of these bayonets was unknown, but historical research indicates that the Wilkinson Sword Co. Ltd. was a primary maker. The weights of some surviving Pattern 1907 bayonets, including twelve bayonets from the 10,000 described above, produced by the six makers in the UK before and during the Great War (1914–1918) period were available. A statistical analysis of the data was performed to compare with the historical research. The results strongly supported that the Wilkinson Sword Co. Ltd. was a primary maker. They were also sufficient to exclude from this batch of twelve bayonets the Royal Small Arms Factory (Enfield) and Vickers Ltd. as manufacturers. The statistical evidence for the presence of bayonets made by J.A. Chapman Ltd., R. Mole & Sons and Sanderson Bros. was weaker than that for the Wilkinson Sword Co. Ltd., but was nevertheless supportive of that hypothesis. Overall, the analysis was consistent with the supply to Siam of commingled bayonets from British government stores. It was noted that the bayonets for the Siam contract fell into a relatively narrow weight range, but the reason for this could not be determined.     

Other side of the Iranian coin: Iran’s counterterrorism apparatus

Iran’s support for terrorist groups is the subject of countless articles and monographs. Less emphasis is placed on Tehran’s efforts to fight terrorist groups targeting the Iranian state. Yet, modern domestic and foreign terrorist groups have targeted Iran for decades. As a result, the country has developed fairly sophisticated, albeit opaque, counterterrorism apparatus and mechanisms. This article sheds light on the Iranian counterterrorism apparatus and efforts since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, drawing on several years of fieldwork in Iran, interviews with current and former officials, and Persian sources.     

Cinema,drone warfare and the framing of counter-terrorism

The study of the cinematic representation is extremely useful in framing of counter-terrorism policies, whether in the US or elsewhere. This paper examines cinema’s interest in drone warfare as well as the lives and personalities of drone pilots. It argues that drone warfare suffers a considerable image problem that has been brought out in several recent features and it is unlikely that any major cinematic myth of drone warfare will easily develop, certainly in comparison to myths concerning special forces and special operations.     

Heterogeneous multitrunking queueing systems with thresholds

Queueing systems with multiple servers are commonly used to model telecommunications systems. But, in general, the service rate of each of the servers is not the same. This fact is indeed true in a communication network where one path (server) may be a terrestrial link and the other (server) a satellite link with its inherent propagation delay. In this article we consider a two-server system where arriving customers are first placed in the queue for the faster server until that queue size reaches a certain threshold, whereupon they are diverted to the slower server. Additional arriving customers are assigned to the slower server until the faster server's queue drops to another lower threshold, at which point arrivals are reassigned to the faster server. We develop an exact mathematical model of the steady-state behavior of each queueing system and a simple analytic approximation.     

A branch-and-bound algorithm for flow-path design of automated guided vehicle systems

An algorithm for determining the optimal, unidirectional flow path for an automated guided vehicle system with a given facility layout is presented. The problem is formulated as an integer program. The objective is to minimize the total distance traveled by vehicles subject to the constraint that the resulting network consists of a single strongly connected component. A specialized branch-and-bound solution procedure is discussed in detail.     

Inventory rotation policies for slow moving items

In this article we present a stochastic model for determining inventory rotation policies for a retail firm which must stock many hundreds of distinctive items having uncertain heterogeneous sales patterns. The model develops explicit decision rules for determining (1) the length of time that an item should remain in inventory before the decision is made on whether or not to rotate the item out of inventory and (2) the minimum sales level necessary for retaining the item in inventory. Two inventory rotation policies are developed, the first of which maximizes cumulative expected sales over a finite planning horizon and the second of which maximizes cumulative expected profit. We also consider the statistical behavior of items having uncertain, discrete, and heterogeneous sales patterns using a two-period prediction methodology where period 1 is used to accumulate information on individual sales rates and this knowledge is then used, in a Bayesian context, to make sales predictions for period 2. This methodology assumes that over an arbitrary time interval sales for each item are Poisson with unknown but stationary mean sales rates and the mean sales rates are distributed gamma across all items. We also report the application of the model to a retail firm which stocks many hundreds of distinctive unframed poster art titles. The application provides some useful insights into the behavior of the model as well as some interesting aspects pertaining to the implementation of the results in a “real-world” situation.     

Bounds for circular error probabilities

Bounds for P(X + X ⩽ k²σ) are given where X₁ and X₂ are independent normal variables having zero means and variances σ, σ, respectively. This is generalized when X₁ and X₂ are dependent variables with known covariance matrix.