International terrorism, domestic political instability, and the escalation effect

What are the main causes of international terrorism? Despite the meticulous examination of various candidate explanations, existing estimates still diverge in sign, size, and significance. This article puts forward a novel explanation and supporting evidence. We argue that domestic political instability provides the learning environment needed to successfully execute international terror attacks. Using a yearly panel of 123 countries over 1973–2003, we find that the occurrence of civil wars increases fatalities and the number of international terrorist acts by 45%. These results hold for alternative indicators of political instability, estimators, subsamples, subperiods, and accounting for competing explanations.

Terrorism and electoral accountability: one strike, you're out!

We examine the relationship between terrorism and electoral accountability. We find that terror has a robust positive effect on the probability that the incumbent government is replaced. The magnitude of the effect increases with the severity of the terrorist attack.

Biometrics in ABC: counter-spoofing research

Automated border control (ABC) is concerned with fast and secure processing for intelligence-led identification. The FastPass project aims to build a harmonised, modular reference system for future European ABC. When biometrics is taken on board as identity, spoofing attacks become a concern. This paper presents current research in algorithm development for counter-spoofing attacks in biometrics. Focussing on three biometric traits, face, fingerprint, and iris, it examines possible types of spoofing attacks, and reviews existing algorithms reported in relevant academic papers in the area of countering measures to biometric spoofing attacks. It indicates that the new developing trend is fusion of multiple biometrics against spoofing attacks.

Cultural equality and its soft power against terrorism

This book is a collection of papers originally presented at a workshop entitled 'After Nine Eleven: Ethics in the Time of Terror' hosted by Monash University on 24 June 2005. The workshop participants included members of the Ethics of War and Peace (EWAP) working group which was inaugurated at the first Oceanic Conference on International Studies in July 2004. EWAP provides a cross-disciplinary forum for scholars and non-academic professionals to exchange and debate ideas on topics including the ethics of armed intervention, the Just War, pacifist ethics, international humanitarian law, ethics in the military profession, and the relationship between law, ethics and politics.

The chapters within this book examine themes including 'lesser evils' and 'dirty hands' in the fight against terrorism, the ethics of intelligence gathering, humanitarian intervention, terrorism and the North-South divide, cultural equality as a response to terrorism, human rights and counterterrorism legislation, and the ethics of defending against 'bioterrorism'. 

Contributors include Alex Bellamy and Richard Devetak (University of Queensland), Baogang He (Deakin University), Christopher Michaelsen (Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe), Jeremy Moses (University of Canterbury), Christian Enemark and Hugh Smith (University of New South Wales, Australian Defence Force Academy).

Balancing the risk of injury to gymnasts : how effective are the counter measures?

Background—To minimise injury risk and maximise gymnastics performance, coaches, parents, and health professionals working with young gymnasts need to understand and practise safe gymnastics.

Aims—To (a) identify the various injury counter measures specific to gymnastics, (b) critically review the literature describing each injury prevention measure, and (c) assess, using available risk factor and injury data, the weight of evidence to support each of these counter measures. Specific recommendations for further research and implementation strategies to prevent injury and improve safety are also given.

Methods—The relevant literature was identified through the use of Medline (1966 to May 1998) and SPORT Discus (1975 to May 1998) searches, hand searching of journals and reference lists, and discussions with key Australian gymnastics organisations.

Results—The key gymnastics injury counter measures identified in this review include coaching (physical preparation, education, spotting, and performance technique), equipment, and the health support system (medical screening, treatment, and rehabilitation). Categorisation of the type of evidence for the effectiveness of each of these counter measures in preventing injury showed that most of it is based on informal opinion/anecdotal evidence, uncontrolled data based studies, and several prospective epidemiological studies. There is no evidence from formally controlled trials or specific evaluation studies of counter measures for gymnastics.

Conclusions—Although gymnastics is a sport associated with young participants and frequent high volume, high impact training, there is a paucity of information on injury risk factors and the effectiveness of injury practices. Further controlled trials are needed to examine the extent to which injury prevention counter measures can prevent or reduce the occurrence of injury and re-injury. Particular attention should be devoted to improving training facilities, the design and testing of apparatus and personal equipment used by gymnasts, and coaching and the role of spotting in preventing injury.

Counter-revolution, order and international politics

Every social revolution has elicited some form of counter-revolutionary response from the international system. The impulse to reverse revolutionary transformation has much to tell us about the dynamics of social revolution as well as the nature of international order. The purpose of this article is to investigate the relationship between counter-revolution and international order. First it establishes a basic conceptual framework of international counter-revolution and argues that counter-revolution should be understood as more than just an active opposition to revolution and also examines the motives of counter-revolutionaries. Second, using two interpretations of the international system – those of Henry Kissinger and Raymond Aron – the article draws several conclusions about the international tendency to attempt to overturn revolution and concludes that there exist international systemic pressures, of a non-neorealist kind, which provide the basis for international order. These pressures not only produce order but, at certain times, impel states to counter radical transformations in parts of the world which seem, at first glance, to have little consequence for the functioning of international order.

An objective function based on Bayesian likelihoods of necessity and sufficiency for concept learning in the absence of labeled counter-examples

Supervised machine learning techniques generally require that the training set on which learning is based contain sufficient examples representative of the target concept, as well as known counter-examples of the concept; however, in many application domains it is not possible to supply a set of labeled counter-examples. This paper proposes an objective function based on Bayesian likelihoods of necessity and sufficiency. This function can be used to guide search towards the discovery of a concept description given only a set of labeled positive examples of the target concept, and as a corpus of unlabeled examples. Results of experiments performed on several datasets from the VCI repository show that the technique achieves comparable accuracy to conventional supervised learning techniques, despite the fact that the latter require a set of labeled counter-examples to be supplied. The technique can be applied in many domains in which the provision of labeled counter-examples is problematic.