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Canada’s "Polite No" to SDI: A Question of Sovereignty?
No full textThis chapter examines the Canadian government’s reaction to the Strategic Defence Initiative and its impact on bilateral relations between Ottawa and Washington. Given Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s priority of improving relations between the two countries, his decision for Canada not to join the SDI research programme appears puzzling. Previous studies have suggested that Canada’s ‘polite no’ was motivated by a desire to defend Canadian interests and sovereignty, as well as Mulroney’s misgivings about the possibility of an arms race in outer space. By contract, this chapter, based on newly declassified sources in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, argues that Mulroney’s overriding priority when considering SDI was in fact closer economic cooperation with the United States. Conscious of public criticism within Canada of pursuing too close a relationship with the United States, Mulroney used his public rejection of SDI as a politically convenient means of demonstrating his defence of Canadian sovereignty days before unveiling his priority: free trade negotiations with the United States. As such, Canadian assessments of whether to participate in the SDI research programme had surprisingly little to do with broader strategic considerations
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Introduction: The Strategic Defence Initiative and the Atlantic Alliance in the 1980s
Get PDFThis chapter introduces the topic and themes of the volume. While existing literature on the SDI has largely focused on its influence on superpower relations during the final years of the Cold War, this chapter explores the impact it had on transatlantic relations, specifically with NATO allies. President Reagan’s SDI speech of March 1983, and the invitation by Secretary of Defense Weinberger two years later for NATO allies to formally join the SDI research programme, provoked tensions within the Alliance during an already febrile period of the Cold War. The chapter explains the responses of eight different NATO governments to the American initiative, and why some opted to join the SDI and why others refused. It also outlines the responses to the SDI among peace organisations, civil society, and the commentariat, highlighting the impact of Star Wars across society. It then considers why, having placed significant strains on relations between the US and its Allies, the SDI ultimately did not lead to an even deeper crisis within NATO in the 1980s
Représentations de l'efficacité chez des cadres supérieurs d'une institution universitaire
No full textEffectuée auprès des cadres supérieurs d'une multi-université, cette
recherche met en évidence leurs représentations de l'efficacité de l'institution universitaire et, de façon plus spécifique, leurs critères pour juger de cette efficacité. De plus, l'étude identifie les approches causales qu'ils privilégient pour corriger les écarts d'efficacité jugés inacceptables. Finalement, leur modèle diagnostique implicite et ses conséquences potentielles sur le devenir de l'université sont discutés.Savoie André, Brunet Luc. Représentations de l'efficacité chez des cadres supérieurs d'une institution universitaire. In: Politiques et management public, vol. 12, n° 2, 1994. Administrer les savoirs : leur production, leur transmission, leur application, leur contrôle - Actes du Sixième Colloque International, Genève - 25/26 mars 1993. pp. 175-186
Consensus-Based Auction Approaches for Decentralized Task Assignment
Get PDFThis work is funded in part by AFOSR STTR # FA9550-06-C-0088 (with Dr. Jim Paduano at Aurora Flight Sciences) and by AFOSR # FA9550-08-1-0086. The authors thank Dr. Mehdi Alighanbari for his invaluable contribution in development of the precursors to the consensus-based auction algorithm
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Special issue on New Histories of Anti-Nuclear Activism in Africa
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Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Consensus-Based Decentralized Auctions for Robust Task Allocation
No full textThis paper addresses task allocation to coordinate a fleet of autonomous vehicles by presenting two decentralized algorithms: the consensus-based auction algorithm (CBAA) and its generalization to the multi-assignment problem, i.e., the consensus-based bundle algorithm (CBBA). These algorithms utilize a market-based decision strategy as the mechanism for decentralized task selection and use a consensus routine based on local communication as the conflict resolution mechanism to achieve agreement on the winning bid values. Under reasonable assumptions on the scoring scheme, both of the proposed algorithms are proven to guarantee convergence to a conflict-free assignment, and it is shown that the converged solutions exhibit provable worst-case performance. It is also demonstrated that CBAA and CBBA produce conflict-free feasible solutions that are robust to both inconsistencies in the situational awareness across the fleet and variations in the communication network topology. Numerical experiments confirm superior convergence properties and performance when compared with existing auction-based task-allocation algorithms.United States. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (Grant FA9550-08-1-0086)United States. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Small Business Technology Transfer (Contract FA9550-06-C-0088
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