Sudden Decision Research Articles

The Curious Incident of Mr Cameron and the United Kingdom Defence Budget: A New Legacy?

AbstractDuring 2015 Prime Minister Cameron found himself under intense domestic and international pressure over his apparent reluctance to maintain United Kingdom defence spending at the NATO target level of 2 per cent of GDP. Most commentators attributed this reluctance to the inevitability of defence cuts if the government wished to meet its deficit reduction targets. However, the aftermath of the general election saw a sudden decision to maintain UK defence spending at the NATO target level. This u‐turn is one of the more curious episodes in recent British defence policy. In this article we explore the reasons why, at a time of continuing cuts and austerity measures and against all the political signals, a decision was made to meet the 2 per cent target, and what this means for the UK's defence policy. In doing so, we analyse why most commentators assumed that defence cuts were inevitable, the domestic and international factors that explain the government's apparent u‐turn and what this revised defence budget settlement meant for the new 2015 National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review.

Warfighter Skills

In this article, the author identifies skills that are needed for coping with sudden decisions that must be made in an ever‐changing world that we all live in. This veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps shares skill sets that he learned while serving in the Corps. He uses a lively approach to stimulate those responsible for dynamic management leadership. The key ideas come from the battlefields faced in every life arena. They are: improvise, adapt, and overcome. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

An exploratory study of nonsuicidal self-injury and suicidal behaviors in adolescent Latinas.

To date, there is little research to validate empirically differences between nonsuicidal self-injurious behavior (NSSI) and attempted suicide among Latina adolescents. Understanding the characteristics and contextual features of self-harmful behaviors among Latina teens is a critical public health and social justice matter given the disproportionate rates of attempted suicide and anticipated population growth of this vulnerable group. In this article, we draw on an ecodevelopmental model to focus attention on factors in the sociocultural environment that shape suicidal behaviors and NSSIs. Through analysis of qualitative interviews conducted with girls who used NSSI (n = 18), attempted suicide (n = 29), used NSSI and attempted suicide (n = 8,) and had no reported lifetime history of self-harm (n = 28), we describe the sociocultural factors that shaped psychosocial vulnerabilities and gave rise to decisions to use NSSI or attempt suicide. Our analysis revealed that adolescents who engaged in NSSI perceived their negative feelings as something that could be controlled through self-injurious acts, whereas powerlessness was a theme underlying the emotional states of girls who attempted suicide. When NSSI ceased to function as a mechanism for control, girls came to sudden decisions to attempt suicide. Most teens identified specific, and often multiple, situations that induced intense affective states and shaped decisions to inflict self-harm. Two situational experiences emerged as particularly salient and promising for subsequent studies on self-harmful behaviors among Latina adolescents: transnational stress and bullying. We describe each of these and offer suggestions for future research and practice.

Building the euro area's debt crisis management capacity with the IMF

ABSTRACTSince the financial crisis hit the EU in 2007/8, the governance structures of the euro area have undergone significant changes, most of them incremental. There is, however, one substantial innovation: the euro area's building of its capacity to deal with liquidity crises in member states. This article seeks to explain why the governments, which initially seemed to converge on a euro-area-only approach, decided to shape their crisis management structures around an external actor, the International Monetary Fund. It argues that the concept of learning under severe time constraints and external pressure helps to understand the sudden decisions taken on crisis management and governance reform which embed the IMF in the euro area. The analysis identifies learning in three areas crucial for the design of the crisis management set-up: in the field of practical lending and programme implementation, in the understanding of the nature of the crisis and in the evolving acknowledgement of the incompleteness of the euro area's governance set-up.

The Effects of Psychological Contract Violation on OS User’s Betrayal Behaviors: Window XP Technical Support Ending Case

The Effects of Psychological Contract Violation on OS User’s Betrayal Behaviors: Window XP Technical Support Ending Case

Implementation of Indigenous Rights in Russia: Shortcomings and Recent Developments

After more than 20 years of active engagement in Indigenous issues, RAIPON, the umbrella organization of the Indigenous peoples of the North, Siberia, and the Far East, was ordered to suspend its activities by the Russian Ministry of Justice in November 2012. Eventually, this order was withdrawn provided that RAIPON changed its statute, which subsequently took place in early 2013. Why such sudden and definitive decisions? Apparently, the measures taken against RAIPON were due to its active engagement to defend Indigenous peoples' rights especially vis-à-vis the Russian extractive industry. A starting point for all possible explanations is thus the existing gap between the legal protection of Indigenous peoples' and its enforcement. The aims of this article are thus to gain a deeper understanding of the legal protection of Indigenous peoples’ rights in the Russian Federation, and to explore the interests and the politics lying behind the government attitude vis-à-vis Indigenous peoples.

A Vision of the European Energy Future? The Impact of the German Response to the Fukushima Earthquake

The German response to the Fukushima nuclear power plant incident was possibly the most significant change of policy towards nuclear power outside Japan, leading to a sudden and very significant shift in the underlying power generation structure in Germany. This provides a very useful natural experiment on the impact of increasing proportions of renewable compared to conventional fuel inputs into power production, helping us to see how changed proportions in future as a result of policy moves in favour of renewables are likely to impact. We find through quasi-experimental exploration of a modified demand-supply framework that despite the swift, unpredicted change, the main impact was a significant increase in prices, partly caused by more frequent situations with unilateral market power. The price impact was also most significant in off-peak hours, leading to changed investment incentives. There were no appreciable quantity effects on the market, such as power outages, contrary to some views that the impacts would be significant. Furthermore, we find the sudden and unilateral phase-out decision by the German government has significantly affected electricity prices and thus competitiveness in neighbouring countries.

A Journey to Poland – A Return to the Self in Poland, a Green Country by Aharon Appelfeld

In his mid-life Jacob Fein, a businessman, an ex-officer in the Israeli army, unhappily married, and a failed father of two daughters, embarks on a Journey to the birthplace of his parents—Holocaust survivors—to a small village not far from Krakow. It was a sudden decision, in fact not a decision but an impulsive urge. The journey turns into a pilgrimage of atonement. Jacob, who in his youth made a great effort in order to move away from his parents and their world, to detach himself from the Jewish past and his roots, feels his life hollow. In the journey he becomes acquainted with his parents’ life before the war, with their world, habits, beliefs, and their green and wild environment. The nature there, so different from Tel-Aviv, enchants him. His parents and ancestors, who were in his eyes wretched and miserable, become worthy, full, interesting, and dignified. The world of his parents fills the hollowness of his life and his self. The self which, as he comes to understand in the village, is incomplete and blemished without the past. Perhaps reconciling with the parents is not enough for a complete atonement, but at the end of the Journey Jacob is in a state in which he is allowed to ask for forgiveness.

The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and the Imagists by Helen Carr

Reviewed by: The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and the Imagists by Helen Carr Alec Marsh The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and the Imagists. Helen Carr. London: Jonathan Cape; 2009. 982 pp. £30.00 (hardback). If you are a scholar of Anglo-American literary modernism and an American, this is the most important work in your field that you have never read. Though handsomely printed by Jonathan Cape, now a division of Random House, rather than some obscure University Press, compellingly written, praised by The Guardian, The Independent, The Irish Times, this “group biography” has gone unnoticed in the United States. The reason is twofold. First, it has not been distributed here, and, second, its title proclaims its central concern with two American literary giants. A century on, Pound’s complaint that we live “in a half-savage country, out of date” remains relevant: Q: where is this book? A: it can be ordered on line, from Amazon.co.uk. for example. Just be prepared for a two or three month wait for the tome to pass through customs. The Verse Revolutionaries is without doubt the definitive account of the confluence of people, ideas and events that led to the creation of Imagism and its break up; it is surely the most complete we are ever likely to have. To give you an idea of how exhaustive this study is, consider that Pound’s famous warning, “A Few Don’ts” for would-be imagists does not appear until page 539. Imagism’s model poem, Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” comes a few pages later. Imagism [End Page 98] may seem to have appeared all at once in August 1912, named by Pound, but its gestation took years and spanned continents, while more or less French in inspiration, its sources are as far flung as the British empire and as old as China. Carr wants to account for the whole process and she has a lot to say. Verse Revolutionaries is exhaustive, but it is by no means exhausting. Carr is a fine, lively writer and once you pluck up the courage to open this Cantos-sized volume, you will find it impossible to put down. It is written with the verve, insight, sensitivity and wit of the very best biographies you have read. As a biographer, as well as a critic, Carr has situated herself to follow where curiosity leads, into the human hearts of the Imagists as well as the movement’s intellectual roots and branches, and literary and political implications. Great scholarship, great writing: anything but an “academic” book. As Carr herself, says: “The story of the imagists themselves is full of rich drama, involving passion, betrayal, sexual jealousy, literary envy, bereavement, shell-shock, class antagonisms, friendship, adultery, cruelty, bullying and pique” (2). It was also a political story. It was Richard Aldington who called the imagists, “verse revolutionaries” and it is no coincidence that the Imagist Anthologies are contemporary with the Easter Rising, the Russian Revolution and the Great War. The imagists were part of all that, storm crows as it were, hinting at big changes with the briefest of lyrics. No doubt it is Carr’s authorial position as a woman and a writer that allows her to understand and sympathize especially with the many remarkable women without whom imagism is unthinkable; not only H.D. and Amy Lowell, but others who have hovered about on the fringes of modernist scholarship like moths beating at the window: Margaret Cravens, Frances Gregg, Bridget Patmore, Dora Mardsen, Violet Hunt, to name some of them. Few male critics would have the nerve to correlate the loosening of women’s fashions with the loosening of poetic conventions—a linkage made at the time by those appalled by such ‘free’ innovations, but celebrated by Carr a century later. Indeed Carr makes me see why H.D. was so shattered by Margaret Cravens’ sudden suicide—it represented a route she too must have contemplated taking. Pound was saddened by Cravens’ sudden decision not just because he’d lost a kindred spirit and benefactor, but because the most faithful underwriter of his talent (aside from his own...

Law, Morality, and the Nation-State in the Case of Zhou Zuoren: Revisiting the Rhetoric of “Culpability” *

When the Chinese Revolution led by the Communist Party eventually prevailed in 1949, Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967) wrote to Zhou Enlai—the first premier of the People’s Republic—in the hope of reversing the verdict on his “culpability.” To what extent, Zhou Zuoren asked, was he, a wartime collaborator with the Japanese enemy, recognizable not only as an offender of the traditional moral norms (mingjiao), but also as a traitor of the nation (minzu)? Before the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out, Zhou Zuoren had long been viewed as a leading figure of the Chinese “New Culture.” Zhou Zhuoren’s sudden decision to collaborate with the Japanese Occupation in 1938 then turned out to be a traumatic and scandalous event for the Chinese intellectual community. The whole case of his collaboration exposed, in disturbing ways, the convergences and the divergences of law, morality and politics in China’s modern nation building. By revisiting this controversial case, this paper attempts at a symptomatic reading of the following texts: “An Open Letter to Zhou Zuoren” written collectively by a group of Chinese intellectuals, court documents of the post-war trials, and Zhou Zuoren’s letter to Zhou Enlai. This re-reading focuses on the domain of the cultural-political rhetoric, within which Zhou’s contentious “culpability” has turned into an ambiguous zone of modern law, traditional morality, and nationalism in East Asia.

Foster children who decide to be called by a new first name: links to extreme defences, identity and attachment

This case-based study describes three foster children in the US, who decided to be called by a new first name at a time when hopes of reunification were fading and parental rights were being terminated. Two children decided on their own to be called by a different first name. The third child accepted the idea, which was suggested by her foster mother. Children embraced the name changes because they felt lost and wanted to fit in. For two children, the decision represented an extreme defence. With the name change, the children were able to ward off extreme anxiety and pain set in train by the impending decision about termination, but they also cut themselves off prematurely from their identities and from powerful attachment feelings. Encouraged in therapy to talk about feelings and memories associated with her real name, the third child was better able to integrate past and present, and to move forward. A sudden decision on the part of a foster child to be called by a new first name should alert others to the possible precarious state of the child’s sense of identity and attachment relationships. Helping the child in therapy to access, explore and experience feelings about the name change may have important benefits in integration and help to avoid identity foreclosure.

A Reading of King Lear from the Perspective of Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety and Three Stages of Existence

This essay interprets King Lear from the perspective of Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety and three stages of existence. Kierkegaard evaluates Shakespeare’s genius, especially for his representation of life as it is, including its absurdities and incomprehensibilities. The audience or readers are likely to shudder at the absurdities of human life represented in King Lear. Lear’s sudden decision to divide his kingdom based on his daughters’ love for him, his misperception, and the controversial ending have especially been the focus of critics. My purpose is to show that Kierkegaard’s philosophical concepts could help understand the argumental issues and thus may enrich the meaning of the play. Before arguing the issues, I investigate Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety as a fundamental human feeling, including its origin, its derivation, and its augmentation. Although Kierkegaard based the origin of anxiety on Adam’s fall in Genesis, his argument of anxiety is psychological rather than religious. For him, human anxiety is not an automatic byproduct of Adam’s breach of God’s prohibitory decree. Rather, it draws from Adam’s liberty to keep or breach it. His liberty engenders “a possibility” of disobedience, and the possibility simultaneously produces anxiety in him, in turn motivating him to disobey the order. From this point in the fall, all human sins and anxieties are derived and augmented. The anxiety from “possibility” especially accounts for Lear’s sin, that is, his rash decision to divide his kingdom and disown Cordelia. The spiraling interaction of anxiety and sin drives him even to the point of madness. However, Kierkegaard argues that human recognition from suffering does not help free humans from the vicious cycle, unless they have momentum when they commit to God. Kierkegaard’s three types of human existence, namely, the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious, are applied to understand King Lear in relation to Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety. Lear, as a man dependent on immediacy in the earlier part of the play, can be classified as an aesthete. However, as he suffers, he changes inwardly and becomes ethical. Nonetheless, Lear’s repentance and recognition do not bring him justice or freedom from anxiety and suffering. In other words, Lear does not leap into what Kierkegaard calls the religious stage, where one can commit oneself to God and thereby be free from all human absurdities. Shakespeare perhaps suggests the difficulties and limits of solving absurdities within the human dimension by showing Lear’s ordeal and unfulfilled poetic justice in King Lear.

Personal and family attributes of pregnant teenagers: findings from a community-based study in Sri Lanka

Teenage pregnancies are associated with negative outcomes. Prevention requires understanding them and their families. This study aimed to describe personal and family attributes of pregnant teenagers in Sri Lanka. This was a community-based study in Sri Lanka among 510 pregnant teenagers. Half (50%) of the subjects were 19 years of age at the time of pregnancy. A majority (79.8%) had studied up to grades 6-11. Confidence in decision-making (80.7%) and in refusing unnecessary requests (88.3%) was "excellent" in a majority. Mean age of marriage/co-habiting was 17.6 years. For 31%, marriage/cohabiting was a sudden decision taken jointly with their partner (81.6%) and 83% reported being "legally" married. Substantial proportions of mothers (17.6%) and fathers (13.9%) had not attended school, and 33.1% mothers had worked abroad. Teenagers reported the death of a parent (14.1%), parental separation (10.9%) and being brought up by relatives (20%). Only a few rated strictness of rules/regulations (32.4%), freedom to discuss problems regarding puberty (25.5%), love affairs (12.7%) and sexuality (26.7%) as excellent/good. Of the spouses, 12.9% were <20 years, 71.9% had low education and 98.8% were employed. A majority had "planned" the pregnancy, and for 79.8%, the reason was "husband's wish to have a baby". Pregnant teenagers were mostly in their late teens, from poor families and with low formal education. Though teenagers showed confidence in decision-making, the decision to have a pregnancy had mostly been their spouses. Parents and spouses of the teenagers were also young, less educated and poor. There was evidence of poor parenting practices.

« Ici, l'on danse » : Tahiti et l'opinion publique sous la Monarchie de Juillet

L’opinion, sous la Monarchie de Juillet, n’était pas préparée à la proclamation d’un protectorat sur une île qui évoluait, depuis la fin du xviiie siècle, dans la sphère d’influence britannique. La proclamation du protectorat sur Tahiti (1842), initiative de l’amiral Dupetit-Thouars ratifiée par Guizot, puis la décision, pas davantage préméditée, d’une annexion (1843), désavouée, cette fois, par le gouvernement français (1844) : cette chaîne d’évènements donne à voir une opinion publique mobilisée par une « question tahitienne ».Le protectorat sur Tahiti a trouvé le soutien d’une large partie de l’opinion, sensible à la diffusion des intérêts français aux antipodes. La frange la plus patriotique des libéraux s’est trouvée d’autant plus déçue lorsque Guizot désavoua l’annexion, de crainte de mécontenter la Grande-Bretagne : l’opinion s’était moins souciée, peut-être, d’acquérir Tahiti que de contester la rivale anglaise, dans un océan largement dominée par elle.

News Commentary: Human embryonic stem cell therapy in the post-Geron era

News Commentary: Human embryonic stem cell therapy in the post-Geron era

Was the thrombotic risk of rofecoxib predictible from the French Pharmacovigilance Database before 30 September 2004?

Rofecoxib was withdrawn from the market on 30 September 2004 following the results of a randomized controlled trial. Following this sudden decision, several controversies occurred in the literature to determine whether this adverse drug reaction (ADR) could have been detected earlier. The aim of this study was to investigate whether this kind of signal could have been seen using the French Pharmacovigilance Database before this date of rofecoxib withdrawal. Using cases registered in the French Pharmacovigilance Database from May 2000 to December 2006, we applied the case-noncase method to "serious" thrombotic ADRs reported with oral formulations of rofecoxib or celecoxib in patients older than 15 years. Cases were all notifications of thrombotic ADRs [World Health Organization Adverse Reaction Terminology (WHO-ART) codes 1300] occurred under coxib (rofecoxib, celecoxib) and noncases all other reports registered in the database (whatever the drug). We calculated a cumulative odds ratio (OR) from 20 May 2000 to 31 December 2006, with a special interest for the period before the 30 September 2004. Among the 50,087 "serious" ADRs registered in the database during this period, 1,127 were thrombotic ones. Rofecoxib exposure was significantly associated with high values of odds ratio (OR) [4.2 (95% CI 1.97-8.61)] for thrombotic ADRs as early as the end of 2001. The values of ADR reporting ORs remained high (3.0-3.5) until 2006. For celecoxib, a significant trend occurred only from September 2004. Despite the compulsory limits of the case/noncase methodology, this study found an association between rofecoxib exposure and the occurrence of "serious" thrombotic ADRs as early as the end of the first year of rofecoxib marketing in France. The association between celecoxib and the occurrence of such ADRs appears less clear. Our work also shows the potential use of careful analysis of pharmacovigilance databases (investigating, for example, cumulative values of risk) in the early identification of new ADRs.

Rhetoric and Action in Regulating the Public Schools in Norway and Sweden

In the past few decades, Norway and Sweden, like the rest of the Western world, have attempted to restructure and deregulate education. In both countries, the established governing models were threatened due to lack of legitimacy and efficiency. This article discusses the extent to which the different explanations of stability and institutional change address what happened when Management by Objectives and Results (MbOR) was introduced in Norway and Sweden. However, both the content and the course of change were different in the two countries. More specifically, one can talk about processes combining lock‐in mechanism and layering in the Norwegian course of development. In Sweden, the process of change was characterized by sudden and radical decisions. A decision made in 1991 could be explained as a state of punctuated equilibrium, as strong forces produced a situation where nothing else was to be done except make a radical change, turning the centralized system into a decentralized one. The period has parallels to the concept of ‘critical juncture’, representing a moment of openness to and possibility for different and new actors to influence a new constitution. In Norway, the transformation of policy tools for education purposes has thus far dominated the process and direction of change. In Sweden, through processes of conversion, the policy tool has gained a more dominating influence over education policy. Accordingly, there was a stronger emphasis on MbOR in its original version in Sweden than in Norway, which has transformed and defined the concept in line with educational purposes. This article outlines two cases of institutional change that combine elements of lock in with new developments. In neither Norway nor Sweden was the development pushed further in the same trajectory, rather it was transformed and, in the case of Sweden, radically changed within a larger nationally specific framework of sequence of events, values, norms and traditions of policy making.

Ghostwriting Modernism (review)

When staying in the Duino castle for his second, longer and more productive visit, Rilke, always the perfect guest, got involved in his benefactor's passion, spiritualism. The Princess of Thurn and Taxis organized four séances in September and October 1912 for Rilke and her son Pascha who had discovered he had mediumistic powers—Rilke's protocols have documented the scene. The automatic writing on the board connected them with an "Unknown Lady" who beckoned the participants from a bridge in Toledo. Almost immediately Rilke decided to leave Duino for Spain, making arrangements to spend the winter in Toledo. He would return several times to the evocation of beautiful dead women's spirits in his poems. This vignette is typical of a dominant spiritualist culture that testifies to the way most Modernist poets, writers and artists related to spiritualist invocation of famous or anonymous ghosts: hesitating between ironical skepticism and enthusiastic suspension of disbelief, they often took these messages sent to them from beyond the grave as signals that could fan the waning fire of inspiration or allow them to make sudden decisions in cases of writer's block, protracted unrest or traveler's anxiety. Even those, like Joyce, who professed their cynicism openly, ended up using these otherworldly sessions as literary material, parodying them hilariously, milking them for their obvious comical effects as in several passages of Ulysses, or so as to settle personal accounts with more "literary" mediums as in Finnegans Wake, especially in III, 3.

Evaluating the dialine® vascular prosthesis knitted from an alternative source of polyester yarns

The sudden and unilateral decision by E. I. DuPont de Nemours & Co., Inc., to withdraw its polymers for use in implantable devices has presented the medical device industry with an immediate and serious challenge to find alternative sources of biomaterials. In France, the company Cardial S.A. has already taken steps to find an alternative polyester yarn to replace Dacron by developing a new arterial prosthesis knitted from polyester yarns supplied by Rhône-Poulenc Fibres. This article describes an in vitro and in vivo study of this French device, called the Dialine prosthesis, with a view to determining its relative performance compared to current American and British prostheses, which rely on DuPont's Dacron yarn. In addition to analyses of the morphology and textile structure, and measurements of its physical and chemical properties, the Dialine graft was implanted as a thoracoabdominal bypass in dogs for periods ranging from 4 h to 6 months. In addition to our pathologic and histologic observations, we cleaned and evaluated the explanted prostheses for in vivo changes in dimensions, strength, and crystalline microstructure. The Dialine graft was found to differ structurally from other polyester prostheses because it is warp-knitted from a mixture of flat and texturized yarns with finer filaments. Its denser structure has a lower water permeability, greater flexibility and ease of handling, satisfactory strength, and dimensional stability, and it presents different textures on its luminal and external surfaces. The in vivo trial demonstrated that it has excellent biocompatibility and biostability over 6 months. With no thrombi observed on the luminal surface after 3 months, it has a faster rate of healing, generates compact external and internal capsules with a thinner neointima, and has an overall milder inflammatory response than is normally observed with Dacron-based prostheses.

Caring for boby and soul

Fannie Storr's sudden decision to move to the new and unusual post of Health Development Officer with the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel caused some surprise to those nurses who knew her as the thoughtful and committed Director of Gloucestershire School of Nursing.