1,721,001 research outputs found
Securing the state, undermining democracy: internationalization and privatization of western militaries
Changes in the field of security since the 1990s triggered off a number of still continuing military transformations in liberal democracies. Since their armed forces were designed for the purposes of the bipolar Cold war security constellation, they have been “redesigned” according to the new tasks as agreed upon in the new NATO strategic concepts or the assignments for the Europeanized forces within the European Union: Conflict prevention, crisis intervention, counter-terrorism have been added to the range of deployment missions. This recent transformation of the armed forces is pushed ahead in the political spirit of new public management well known from other policy areas in the OECD countries. The proclaimed reforms are guided by efficiency and effectiveness principles only, issues of democratic control and integration of the armed forces into the society are marginalized in the political discourse. But integration and cooperation within international organizations is only one of the two trends detrimental to democratic control of the military; increasing contracting with Private Security and Military Companies is the other. Contracting is intended to reduce political and financial costs and risks for Western governments. The authors argue that, in the long run, both trends of privatization and internationalization, though they seem to run into opposite directions from a purely etatist perspective, result in the joint effect of exacerbating democratic control and accountability of security policies. This point is illustrated by the employment of private military companies by the US government agencies and US military and the reform of the German armed forces. -- Seit Ende des Ost-West-Konflikts befinden sich die westlichen Streitkräfte in einem anhaltenden Transformationsprozess. Waren die Streitkräfte zuvor an der bipolaren Sicherheitskonstellation des Kalten Krieges ausgerichtet, werden sie seit 1990 umstrukturiert, um neue Missionen zu erfüllen, wie sie in den strategischen Konzepten der NATO oder den Aufgabenfeldern der Europäischen Sicherheits- und Verteidigungspolitik definiert sind. Unter den Vorzeichen eines New Public Managements vorangetrieben, das in den letzten Jahrzehnten als ökonomisch inspiriertes Reformprinzip bereits zahlreiche andere Politikfelder der OECD-Staaten geprägt hat, sind die Umstrukturierungen der Streitkräfte vorwiegend an Effizienz- und Effektivitäts-Gesichtspunkten orientiert. Fragen der demokratischen Kontrolle und der Integration des Militärs in die jeweilige Gesellschaft werden dagegen im politischen Diskurs vernachlässigt. Zwei Entwicklungstrends kennzeichnen derzeit die westliche Sicherheits- und Verteidigungspolitik: die Integration und Kooperation westlicher Streitkräfte im Rahmen von internationalen Organisationen sowie der zunehmende Einsatz privater Sicherheitsunternehmen. Obwohl Internationalisierung und Privatisierung von Sicherheitspolitik in einer staatszentrierten Perspektive auf den ersten Blick gegenläufige Tendenzen einer Stärkung der Exekutive einerseits und der Schwächung des Staates andererseits zu markieren scheinen, tragen jedoch beide zu einer Schädigung der nationalstaatlichen Demokratie bei. Diese These erläutern die Autorinnen anhand des vermehrten Rückgriffs der US-amerikanischen Regierung auf private Sicherheitsanbieter sowie der Transformation der deutschen Streitkräfte.
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The 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
Variations on the Author
“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
We have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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