Initiating insurgencies abroad: French plans to ‘chouannise’ Britain and Ireland, 1793–1798

Secret French plans to launch guerrilla-style raids on the British Isles devised in the spring of 1796 were referred to as ‘chouanneries’. The name and concept behind these small-war operations were modelled on the irregular tactics used by the Chouan rebels in the Vendée, which the French state army had brutally quashed, but some wished to transfer into their institutional practice. Part of France's ongoing military strategy in the war against Britain, which included fomenting insurrection in Ireland, these irregular operations were to be manned partially by pardoned deserters and released convicts and prisoners of war. Of these, only Tate's brief invasion of Wales in 1797 was realised, but the surviving plans provide insightful historical lessons into an Anglophobic mindset shared by a small network of practitioners and policy deciders on the effectiveness of such shock and awe tactics. Largely motivated by the desire to take revenge for Britain's support of counter-revolutionaries in the Vendée, these plans could more aptly be referred to as counter-‘chouanneries’.     

非相干背景光辐照二波耦合中的最佳匹配随机共振

针对非相干背景光辐照二波耦合中参数的最佳匹配设计问题,提出了一种基于随机共振理论的研究方法。首先,文章通过二波耦合过程进行物理机理分析和数值实验分析,证明了该问题在本质上可归结为一种随机共振现象。其次,从随机共振的角度,研究其中的最佳参数设计问题,给出了一种分布处理的最优参数设计流程。按照该方法,在给定增益要求的情况下,先根据信号光饱和与否来确定晶体长度,最后根据非相干光的比例对增益的影响来确定非相干光的比例。仿真实验表明,经过最佳参数设计后,信号的增益和输出信噪比上均有显著提高。     

Assessing the value of demand sharing in supply chains

We consider the problem of assessing the value of demand sharing in a multistage supply chain in which the retailer observes stationary autoregressive moving average demand with Gaussian white noise (shocks). Similar to previous research, we assume each supply chain player constructs its best linear forecast of the leadtime demand and uses it to determine the order quantity via a periodic review myopic order‐up‐to policy. We demonstrate how a typical supply chain player can determine the extent of its available information in the presence of demand sharing by studying the properties of the moving average polynomials of adjacent supply chain players. The retailer's demand is driven by the random shocks appearing in the autoregressive moving average representation for its demand. Under the assumptions we will make in this article, to the retailer, knowing the shock information is equivalent to knowing the demand process (assuming that the model parameters are also known). Thus (in the event of sharing) the retailer's demand sequence and shock sequence would contain the same information to the retailer's supplier. We will show that, once we consider the dynamics of demand propagation further up the chain, it may be that a player's demand and shock sequences will contain different levels of information for an upstream player. Hence, we study how a player can determine its available information under demand sharing, and use this information to forecast leadtime demand. We characterize the value of demand sharing for a typical supply chain player. Furthermore, we show conditions under which (i) it is equivalent to no sharing, (ii) it is equivalent to full information shock sharing, and (iii) it is intermediate in value to the two previously described arrangements. Although it follows from existing literature that demand sharing is equivalent to full information shock sharing between a retailer and supplier, we demonstrate and characterize when this result does not generalize to upstream supply chain players. We then show that demand propagates through a supply chain where any player may share nothing, its demand, or its full information shocks (FIS) with an adjacent upstream player as quasi‐ARMA in—quasi‐ARMA out. We also provide a convenient form for the propagation of demand in a supply chain that will lend itself to future research applications. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 61: 515–531, 2014     

Poachers turned gamekeepers: A study of the guerrilla phenomenon in Spain, 1808–1840

This article modifies the associations made by historians and political scientists of Spanish guerrilla warfare with revolutionary insurgency. First, it explains how the guerrilla phenomenon moved from a Leftist to a reactionary symbol. Second, it compares the insurgency and counter-insurgency features of the Carlist War (1833–1840) with those of the better-known Peninsular War (1808–1814). Third, it shows how erstwhile guerrilla leaders during the Carlist War made their expertise available to the counter-insurgency, in a socio-economic as well as military setting. This article revises the social banditry paradigm in nineteenth-century Spain in the under-researched context of Europe bloodiest nineteenth-century civil war.     

A branch‐and‐price approach for the stochastic generalized assignment problem

In this article, we address a stochastic generalized assignment machine scheduling problem in which the processing times of jobs are assumed to be random variables. We develop a branch‐and‐price (B&P) approach for solving this problem wherein the pricing problem is separable with respect to each machine, and has the structure of a multidimensional knapsack problem. In addition, we explore two other extensions of this method—one that utilizes a dual‐stabilization technique and another that incorporates an advanced‐start procedure to obtain an initial feasible solution. We compare the performance of these methods with that of the branch‐and‐cut (B&C) method within CPLEX. Our results show that all B&P‐based approaches perform better than the B&C method, with the best performance obtained for the B&P procedure that includes both the extensions aforementioned. We also utilize a Monte Carlo method within the B&P scheme, which affords the use of a small subset of scenarios at a time to estimate the “true” optimal objective function value. Our experimental investigation reveals that this approach readily yields solutions lying within 5% of optimality, while providing more than a 10‐fold savings in CPU times in comparison with the best of the other proposed B&P procedures. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 61: 131–143, 2014     

二阶阶跃畸变模型下的卫星自主完好性监测接收机测距精度分析

测距精度是评估卫星自主完好性监测接收机在导航信号畸变环境下工作性能的一个重要指标。推导了卫星自主完好性监测接收机在国际民航组织二阶阶跃畸变模型下采用早晚相干跟踪处理时测距精度与畸变模型参数的解析表达式,理论分析和仿真结果表明数字畸变将导致接收机伪码鉴相器输出曲线存在过零点偏差,数字畸变量基本不影响接收机测距方差;模拟畸变将扭曲相关峰函数和鉴相器输出曲线,但鉴相器输出基本上不存在过零点偏差,模拟畸变参数、前端滤波器带宽和早晚码间距共同影响接收机的测距方差。     

The political economy of drones

This paper provides a political economy analysis of the evolution of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), or ‘drones’ in the USA. Focus is placed on the interplay between the polity and private economic influences, and their impact on the trajectory of political, economic, and military outcomes. We identify the initial formation of the drone industry, trace how the initial relationships between the military and the private sector expanded over time, and discuss present relationships. Understanding the historical evolution of UAV technology, as well as the major players in the industry today, is important for ongoing policy debates regarding the use of drones both domestically and internationally.     

TERRORISM: FACTS FROM FIGURES 1

If international terrorism is on a rising trend, an important source of confirmation or refutation of this is time‐series data on terrorist activity. Using chiefly data collected by the RAND/MIPT consortium we show using basic statistical analysis that in the period 1968–2005 the yearly number of all international terrorist incidents shows no trend over time, but fluctuates year on year in a random manner. On the other hand some indicators do show a definite trend over time, principally the steady rise in the number of incidents that are death‐dealing in nature. A further conclusion is drawn, showing that the proportion of these incidents leading to deaths above a given level is virtually fixed.     

MONEY IN SOUTHERN AFRICAN POLITICS

“Lack of money is the root of all evil”

George Bernard Shaw

In a environment where party financing, private funding in particular, is generally a laissez-faire business, as in most Southern African countries, there is the real risk that interest groups and wealthy individuals will buy influence in political parties and in so doing erode public confidence in the political system. Because they are neither open to public scrutiny nor subject to any legislative restraints, huge private donations can, and often do, come with strings attached. This lack of transparency and openness, as well as mechanisms to prevent it, provides ample ground for influence peddling, where those who pay the piper call the tune. Left unchecked, this party funding scenario will continue to be a serious indictment of the region's democratisation projects, crippling democracy and stunting economic development. This article consid     

基于云理论一二元语义的雷达装备保障指挥效能评估模型

针对云重心和云模型评判方法存在的信息丢失、难于评判以及信息扭曲等问题,从确定权重等级、评价集和评价结果3个方面对模型进行了改进和完善．应用二元语义确定指标权重,避免了评价信息的丢失和扭曲,采用综合云的思想确定评价集,充分利用评价者给出的信息,简化相似云的理论来定量衡量评价结果,从而建立了基于云理论一二元语义的雷达装备保障指挥效能评估模型．