1,720,957 research outputs found
Failure of the Current Anti-Corruption Strategy in Afghanistan
Get PDFCorruption has come to the forefront in Afghanistan as the United States tries to balance efforts to back anti-corruption strategies while maintaining a positive relationship with the Karzai government. Stalled corruption cases suggest corruption in Afghanistan is systemic and not limited to a particular governing body or official. It is clear that corruption exists in both the upper and lower echelons of Afghan society, and will continue to exist until the U.S.-backed anti-corruption teams are accepted by the Afghan government. The strengthening of key institutions continues to be the recommended international model. As demonstrated in the United States, the integration and overlap of these institutions offers an effective means of combating corruption. These mechanisms, however, have been ineffective in a number of south-central Asia countries. Afghanistan’s unique history and clan structure may provide some rational for these failures. Two socioeconomic models, the principal-agent model and collective action theory, offer perspectives on how Afghanistan’s history and clan structure is inhibiting the implementation of traditional anti-corruption tools. A strong clan history that loathes outsiders and rewards clan loyalties will not yield to strong U.S. anti-corruption mechanisms. The Afghan drug trade offers a glimpse into the patron-client relationships that clans rely on, and demonstrates how the Taliban provide a network of resources to assist the drug mafias and transnational criminal organizations. A strong-arm approach to corruption, like that embraced by the Obama administration, will probably not succeed for a number of years. Before these regulatory mechanisms can work, the clans must be convinced of the credibility of these mechanisms
Defense Base Act Insurance: Allocating Wartime Contracting Risks Between Government and Private Industry
Get PDFMore than ever before, the Department of Defense is relying on contactors to support our men and women in uniform. However, the cost of supporting these contractors has been paid not only with congressional funds but with an unprecedented number of contractor casualties. Sadly, while contractors are dying in record numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan, Congress has been preoccupied with paying less for the statutorily mandated workers’ compensation insurance that is intended to protect these workers. With the advent of Kevlar vests and armored-plated Humvees, contractors are returning home, but often with scars of war both visible and invisible. Rather than being greeted as heroes, they are treated as mercenaries, as insurance carriers deny their medical claims and reap excessive profits. Congress is now developing a new acquisition strategy for Defense Base Act Insurance to address the rising cost of premiums. Regrettably, congressional leaders have all but ignored the issue of insurance carriers denying injured contractors’ claims, especially those related to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI). While Congress and the Department of Defense debate cost-saving strategies, the more poignant question of whether the government owes a greater duty to Americans defending our freedom is subverted. This article argues that Congress must adopt a multiple-provider acquisition strategy until a government self-insurance system can be implemented in the future. These short and long-term strategies offer the government the greatest leveraging capability as it struggles to maintain accountability and morality in a system that has for the last decade exploited injured contractors and disgraced a society that prides itself in leaving no American behind
Discharged and Discarded: The Collateral Consequences of a Less-Than-Honorable Discharge
Get PDFBetween 2011 and 2015, 57,141 soldiers, sailors, and airmen were separated from service with less-than-honorable (LTH) discharges for minor misconduct related to mental health problems. These discharges disproportionately affected servicemembers of color. These veterans and others like them face daunting reintegration challenges when they return to civilian society, as federal agencies and state governments deny them the benefits that usually facilitate a veteran’s smooth transition to civilian society. This Essay adds to the scholarly discourse on military discharges by comparing these veterans’ plight to that of persons arrested or convicted of criminal offenses, who also suffer from collateral consequences related to their criminal records long after their involvement with the criminal legal system. Military review boards, the Department of Defense (DOD) agencies charged with reviewing and correcting veterans’ discharges after service, were never intended to address the collateral consequences of military discharges, and the laws governing discharge review do not provide the boards with the authority to do so; however, DOD may finally be poised to institute reforms. This Essay responds to DOD’s recent call for the military service branches to consider the collateral consequences of military discharges in reviewing veterans’ petitions for discharge upgrades. This Essay examines why current laws and regulations are inadequate to implement DOD’s call and asserts that reform efforts aimed at addressing the collateral consequences of arrests and convictions in the criminal legal system must be replicated in the military. This Essay concludes that, without reform, a permanent class of dishonored veterans will never successfully reintegrate into society
Leaving Other Than Honorable Soldiers Behind
No full textAbout eighty-four percent of all military discharges are characterized as honorable, while the other sixteen percent are characterized as something less than honorable. Unfortunately, thousands of veterans have been wrongfully discharged from military service under other-than-honorable ( OTH ) conditions. This is a serious problem because an OTH discharge carries significant consequences. For example, an OTH discharge bars veterans from receiving most military benefits. Additionally, veterans with OTH discharges often face discrimination when seeking housing and employment, and are usually excluded from legislation supporting veterans. Unless the characterization is corrected, veterans with an OTH discharge carry the OTH label for life
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
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“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
Get PDFWe 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
Get PDFWe 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
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