Capabilities of Police and Military Forces in Central America -- A Comparative Analysis of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras an d Nicaragua

A difficult transition to a new paradigm of Democratic Security and the subsequent process of military restructuring during the nineties led El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua to re-consider their old structures and functions of their armed forces and police agencies. This study compares the institutions in the four countries mentioned above to assess their current condition and response capacity in view of the contemporary security challenges in Central America. This report reveals that the original intention of limiting armies to defend and protect borders has been threatened by the increasing participation of armies in public security. While the strength of armies has been consolidated in terms of numbers, air and naval forces have failed to become strengthened or sufficiently developed to effectively combat organized crime and drug trafficking and are barely able to conduct air and sea operations. Honduras has been the only country that has maintained a proportional distribution of its armed forces. However, security has been in the hands of a Judicial Police, supervised by the Public Ministry. The Honduran Judicial Police has been limited to exercising preventive police duties, prohibited from carrying out criminal investigations. Nicaragua, meanwhile, possesses a successful police force, socially recognized for maintaining satisfactory levels of security surpassing the Guatemalan and El Salvadoran police, which have not achieved similar results despite of having set up a civilian police force separate from the military. El Salvador meanwhile, has excelled in promoting a Police Academy and career professional education, even while not having military attachés in other countries. Regarding budgetary issues, the four countries allocate almost twice the amount of funding on their security budgets in comparison to what is allocated to their defense budgets. However, spending in both areas is low when taking into account each country's GDP as well as their high crime rates. Regional security challenges must be accompanied by a professionalization of the regional armies focused on protecting and defending borders. Therefore, strong institutional frameworks to support the fight against crime and drug trafficking are required. It will require the strengthening of customs, greater control of illicit arms trafficking, investment in education initiatives, creating employment opportunities and facilitating significant improvements in the judicial system, as well as its accessibility to the average citizen.

Beyond the Pay: Current Illicit Activities of the Armed Forces in Central America

The growth of criminal gangs and organized crime groups has created unprecedented challenges in Central America. Homicide rates are among the highest in the world, countries spend on average close to 10 percent of GDP to respond to the challenges of public insecurity, and the security forces are frequently overwhelmed and at times coopted by the criminal groups they are increasingly tasked to counter. With some 90 percent of the 700 metric tons of cocaine trafficked from South America to the United States passing through Central America, the lure of aiding illegal traffickers through provision of arms, intelligence, or simply withholding or delaying the use of force is enormous. These conditions raise the question: to what extent are militaries in Central America compromised by illicit ties to criminal groups? The study focuses on three cases: Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras. It finds that: Although illicit ties between the military and criminal groups have grown in the last decade, militaries in these countries are not yet “lost’ to criminal groups. Supplying criminal groups with light arms from military stocks is typical and on the rise, but still not common. In general the less exposed services, the navies and air forces, are the most reliable and effective ones in their roles in interdiction. Of the three countries in the study, the Honduran military is the most worrying because it is embedded in a context where civilian corruption is extremely common, state institutions are notoriously weak, and the political system remains polarized and lacks the popular legitimacy and political will needed to make necessary reforms. Overall, the armed forces in the three countries remain less compromised than civilian peers, particularly the police. However, in the worsening crime and insecurity context, there is a limited window of opportunity in which to introduce measures targeted toward the military, and such efforts can only succeed if opportunities for corruption in other sectors of the state, in particular in law enforcement and the justice system, are also addressed. Measures targeted toward the military should include: Enhanced material benefits and professional education opportunities that open doors for soldiers in promising legitimate careers once they leave military service. A clear system of rewards and punishments specifically designed to deter collusion with criminal groups. More effective securing of military arsenals. Skills and external oversight leveraged through combined operations, to build cooperation among those sectors of the military that have successful and clean records in countering criminal groups, and to expose weaker forces to effective best practices.

Making Non-Career Jobs Attractive to Younger Workers

As most hospitality industry managers in the U.S. are already aware, there is a growing and persistent shortage of labor available for service-sector, non-career jobs, the very jobs so vital to the industry. In most cases, recruitment efforts for these jobs are targeted toward younger workers, those under age 25. The authors explore issues regarding the attractiveness of non-career jobs in the eyes of young persons and suggest that, in addition to factors related to the job itself (pay, hours, type of work), the type of procedures used by employers to make selection decisions are equally influential. Recommendations are made concerning how hospitality employers with non-career positions to fill can maximize the chances of successfully staffing their organizations.

Research on the influence of behavioral forces that motivate trader behavior and sentiment- a prospect theory exegesis

This study focuses on empirical investigations and seeks implications by utilizing three different methodologies to test various aspects of trader behavior. The first methodology utilizes Prospect Theory to determine trader behavior during periods of extreme wealth contracting periods. Secondly, a threshold model to examine the sentiment variable is formulated and thirdly a study is made of the contagion effect and trader behavior. The connection between consumers' sense of financial well-being or sentiment and stock market performance has been studied at length. However, without data on actual versus experimental performance, implications based on this relationship are meaningless. The empirical agenda included examining a proprietary file of daily trader activities over a five-year period. Overall, during periods of extreme wealth altering conditions, traders "satisfice" rather than choose the "best" alternative. A trader's degree of loss aversion depends on his/her prior investment performance. A model that explains the behavior of traders during periods of turmoil is developed. Prospect Theory and the data file influenced the design of the model. Additional research included testing a model that permitted the data to signal the crisis through a threshold model. The third empirical study sought to investigate the existence of contagion caused by declining global wealth effects using evidence from the mining industry in Canada. Contagion, where a financial crisis begins locally and subsequently spreads elsewhere, has been studied in terms of correlations among similar regions. The results provide support for Prospect Theory in two out of the three empirical studies. The dissertation emphasizes the need for specifying precise, testable models of investors' expectations by providing tools to identify paradoxical behavior patterns. True enhancements in this field must include empirical research utilizing reliable data sources to mitigate data mining problems and allow researchers to distinguish between expectations-based and risk-based explanations of behavior. Through this type of research, it may be possible to systematically exploit "irrational" market behavior.

A relevância dos eventos culturais para a economia criativa - pesquisa qualitativa na Praia da Pipa, Tibau do Sul/RN

Creative industry has promoted and strengthened the growth of various economic sectors in Brazil and abroad, thus stimulating the local economy in places with attractive and innovative sceneries for the consumer market. This essay focuses on studying the relevance of cultural events for the creative economy, and these may contribute to the social, cultural and economic development in Pipa, located in Rio Grande do Norte (Brazil). Cultural events promote a themed and creative environment which has worked as attraction mechanism for the increase of cultural, gastronomic and social leisure consumptions. Cultural and thematic events has been held in Pipa, such as Festival Literário da Pipa, Fest Bossa & Jazz da Pipa, Festival Literário Alternativo da Pipa and Festival Gastronômico da Pipa, which can attract the local, state, national and international audience. The research is characterized as a qualitative research about the problem approach. The field research is characterized by the ethnographic approach, using the techniques of participant observation, semi-structured interviews and photographic record. With the research results, we can point that Pipa promotes cultural events that move the economic dynamics, social and cultural, inserting new cultural habits in this urban space, and in some cases, rescuing the history of the place. In each event, the economic and political forces connect themselves to promote the infrastructure of these events, supporting the provision of services and products from the creative and cultural sectors. The theming of the studied events plunges the audience into stories that may have (or not) a connection to the local history. Therefore, it is perceived that this work brings the light to a place that presents itself as the protagonist of the state of Rio Grande do Norte in terms of renewal and economic, social and cultural change in its infrastructure and its potential for tourist attraction from the creative and cultural sectors.

The Evolution of Male-Biased Dispersal under the Joint Selective Forces of Inbreeding Load and Demographic and Environmental Stochasticity

Peer reviewed

Machining Unidirectional Composites using Single-Point Tools : Analysis of Cutting Forces, Chip Formation and Surface Integrity

Peer reviewed

Armed Forces Day (Veterans Day)

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Les relations entre les Forces armées révolutionnaires de Colombie : armée du peuple et la population

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Forces délivrées lors de l'expression des mouvements de troisième ordre des appareils orthodontiques préajustés : une étude comparative

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Into the Bends of Time and Musical Forces in Jazz: Group Interaction and Double-time in “My Foolish Heart” as performed by the Bill Evans Trio with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian.

Into the Bends of Time is a 40-minute work in seven movements for a large chamber orchestra with electronics, utilizing real-time computer-assisted processing of music performed by live musicians. The piece explores various combinations of interactive relationships between players and electronics, ranging from relatively basic processing effects to musical gestures achieved through stages of computer analysis, in which resulting sounds are crafted according to parameters of the incoming musical material. Additionally, some elements of interaction are multi-dimensional, in that they rely on the participation of two or more performers fulfilling distinct roles in the interactive process with the computer in order to generate musical material. Through processes of controlled randomness, several electronic effects induce elements of chance into their realization so that no two performances of this work are exactly alike. The piece gets its name from the notion that real-time computer-assisted processing, in which sound pressure waves are transduced into electrical energy, converted to digital data, artfully modified, converted back into electrical energy and transduced into sound waves, represents a “bending” of time.

The Bill Evans Trio featuring bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential piano trios in the history of jazz, lauded for its unparalleled level of group interaction. Most analyses of Bill Evans’ recordings, however, focus on his playing alone and fail to take group interaction into account. This paper examines one performance in particular, of Victor Young’s “My Foolish Heart” as recorded in a live performance by the Bill Evans Trio in 1961. In Part One, I discuss Steve Larson’s theory of musical forces (expanded by Robert S. Hatten) and its applicability to jazz performance. I examine other recordings of ballads by this same trio in order to draw observations about normative ballad performance practice. I discuss meter and phrase structure and show how the relationship between the two is fixed in a formal structure of repeated choruses. I then develop a model of perpetual motion based on the musical forces inherent in this structure. In Part Two, I offer a full transcription and close analysis of “My Foolish Heart,” showing how elements of group interaction work with and against the musical forces inherent in the model of perpetual motion to achieve an unconventional, dynamic use of double-time. I explore the concept of a unified agential persona and discuss its role in imparting the song’s inherent rhetorical tension to the instrumental musical discourse.

Dynamical Heterogeneity and Nonlinear Susceptibility in Short-Ranged Attractive Supercooled Liquids

Recent work has demonstrated the strong qualitative differences between the dynamics near a glass transition driven by short-ranged repulsion and one governed by short-ranged attraction. Here, we study in detail the behavior of non-linear, higher-order correlation functions that measure the growth of length scales associated with dynamical heterogeneity in both types of systems. We find that this measure is qualitatively different in the repulsive and attractive cases with regards to the wave vector dependence as well as the time dependence of the standard non-linear four-point dynamical susceptibility. We discuss the implications of these results for the general understanding of dynamical heterogeneity in glass-forming liquids.

Phase behavior and far-from-equilibrium gelation in charged attractive colloids

In this Rapid Communication we demonstrate the applicability of an augmented Gibbs ensemble Monte Carlo approach for the phase behavior determination of model colloidal systems with short-ranged depletion attraction and long-ranged repulsion. This technique allows for a quantitative determination of the phase boundaries and ground states in such systems. We demonstrate that gelation may occur in systems of this type as the result of arrested microphase separation, even when the equilibrium state of the system is characterized by compact microphase structures.

Forces of agglomeration and dispersal in rural business networks: a social network analysis

Two concepts in rural economic development policy have been the focus of much research and policy action: the identification and support of clusters or networks of firms and the availability and adoption by rural businesses of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). From a theoretical viewpoint these policies are based on two contrasting models, with clustering seen as a process of economic agglomeration, and ICT-mediated communication as a means of facilitating economic dispersion. The study’s conceptual framework is based on four interrelated elements: location, interaction, knowledge, and advantage, together with the concept of networks which is employed as an operationally and theoretically unifying concept. The research questions are developed in four successive categories: Policy, Theory, Networks, and Method. The questions are approached using a study of two contrasting groups of rural small businesses in West Cork, Ireland: (a) Speciality Foods, and (b) firms in Digital Products and Services. The study combines Social Network Analysis (SNA) with Qualitative Thematic Analysis, using data collected from semi-structured interviews with 58 owners or managers of these businesses. Data comprise relational network data on the firms’ connections to suppliers, customers, allies and competitors, together with linked qualitative data on how the firms established connections, and how tacit and codified knowledge was sourced and utilised. The research finds that the key characteristics identified in the cluster literature are evident in the sample of Speciality Food businesses, in relation to flows of tacit knowledge, social embedding, and the development of forms of social capital. In particular the research identified the presence of two distinct forms of collective social capital in this network, termed “community” and “reputation”. By contrast the sample of Digital Products and Services businesses does not have the form of a cluster, but matches more closely to dispersive models, or “chain” structures. Much of the economic and social structure of this set of firms is best explained in terms of “project organisation”, and by the operation of an individual rather than collective form of “reputation”. The rural setting in which these firms are located has resulted in their being service-centric, and consequently they rely on ICT-mediated communication in order to exchange tacit knowledge “at a distance”. It is this factor, rather than inputs of codified knowledge, that most strongly influences their operation and their need for availability and adoption of high quality communication technologies. Thus the findings have applicability in relation to theory in Economic Geography and to policy and practice in Rural Development. In addition the research contributes to methodological questions in SNA, and to methodological questions about the combination or mixing of quantitative and qualitative methods.

Les relations entre les Forces armées révolutionnaires de Colombie : armée du peuple et la population

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.