Reforming the notion of national sovereignty by external intervention

In principle, national sovereignty is the right of a nation to govern its internal affairs without foreign interference. In practice, it is defined by one's interpretation of international law, which may permit legal external intervention under some circumstances, ultimately removing a nation's sovereignty. This paper will examine the current system of international law outlined by the United Nations, analyse the ambiguities contained within its Charter and elaborate on how external intervention can be justified. The case-study of recent developments related to Libya will demonstrate that the manner in which international law is interpreted is changing the notion of principles of sovereignty.     

Attitude,Aptitude, and Testing in the Efficient Mobilization of Military Manpower

Militaries commonly require recruits to pass a test that measures aptitude for military service. In this paper, we show that such tests may also act as a device for screening out low-motivation recruits, even if it is assumed that motivation is not measured by such tests and is not correlated with aptitude.     

Cyclic preference scheduling for nurses using branch and price

This paper presents a new methodology to solve the cyclic preference scheduling problem for hourly workers. The focus is on nurse rostering but is applicable to any organization in which the midterm scheduling decision must take into account a complex of legal, institutional, and preferential constraints. The objective is to strike a balance between satisfying individual preferences and minimizing personnel costs. The common practice is to consider each planning period independently and to generate new rosters at the beginning of each. To reduce some of the instability in the process, there is a growing trend toward cyclic schedules, which are easier to manage and are generally perceived to be more equitable. To address this problem, a new integer programming model is presented that combines the elements of both cyclic and preference scheduling. To find solutions, a branch‐and‐price algorithm is developed that makes use of several branching rules and an extremely effective rounding heuristic. A unique feature of the formulation is that the master problem contains integer rather than binary variables. Computational results are reported for problem instances with up to 200 nurses. Most were solved within 10 minutes and many within 3 minutes when a double aggregation approach was applicable. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007.