Download or read book The ALP Programme written by International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions and published by Hague : IFLA. This book was released on 1991 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book An Intimate War written by Mike Martin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Intimate War tells the story of the last thirty-four years of conflict in Helmand Province, Afghani- stan as seen through the eyes of the Helmandis. In the West, this period is often defined through different lenses - the Soviet intervention, the civil war, the Taliban, and the post-2001 nation-building era. Yet, as experienced by local inhabitants, the Helmand conflict is a perennial one, involving the same individuals, families and groups, and driven by the same arguments over land, water and power. This book - based on both military and re- search experience in Helmand and 150 inter- views in Pashto - offers a very different view of Helmand from those in the media. It demonstrates how outsiders have most often misunderstood the ongoing struggle in Helmand and how, in doing so, they have exacerbated the conflict, perpetuated it and made it more violent - precisely the opposite of what was intended when their interventions were launched. Mike Martin's oral history of Helmand under- scores the absolute imperative of understanding the highly local, personal, and non-ideological nature of internal conflict in much of the 'third' world.
Download or read book The Afghan Conundrum intervention statebuilding and resistance written by Jonathan Goodhand and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book covers the period spanning the international invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 to the foreign military withdrawal in 2014. It explores and dissects the conflictual encounter between international troops, statebuilders and donors on the one hand, and Afghan elites and the wider population on the other. It brings together a group of leading experts and analysts on Afghanistan who examine the varied reasons behind the mixed and often perverse effects of exogenous state-building and reflects upon their implications for wider theory and practice. The starting point of the various contributions is a serious engagement with empirical realities, drawing upon extended experience and field research. Their exploration of the unfolding dynamics and effects of external intervention raise fundamental questions about the core premises underlying the state-building project. This book was published as a special issue of Central Asian Survey.
Download or read book Afghanistan written by Musa Khan Jalalzai and published by Vij Books India Pvt Ltd. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writers and analysts have uncovered the illegal role of private militias’ commanders in Afghanistan. These commanders and self-styled leaders were driven overwhelmingly by their personal power, and they were not only considered illegitimate on the domestic political scene, and viewed as irrelevant. The present Afghan government is a mix of all types of its efforts, including war criminals, and militia commanders who smuggle narcotics, drugs, arm, and kill women and children. War criminals and militias commanders have developed complex survival and legitimation strategies beyond their territorial realms. After years of its establishment, the Afghan local police (ALP) was undermined due to its failure to stabilize remote regions of the country. The US proxy militias are the source of consternation. The US Army established an incompetent intelligence agency (NDS) to serve its interest. The NDS established regional militias to support the CIA and Pentagon war mission against the people of the country. The NDS established Unit-01 for Central Region, Unit-02 for Eastern Region, Unit-03 for Southern Region, and Unit-04, as a Khost Protection Force (KPF), and committed war crimes in these regions with the support of the US Army and CIA. This book has documented the role of all internal and external actors, warlords and stakeholders.
Download or read book Afghan National Army written by Musa Khan Jalalzai and published by Vij Books India Pvt Ltd. This book was released on 2020-03-16 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Air Force (AAF) stand today as products of the 2001 war and Western intervention in Afghanistan. This is not only because they were established in 2002 by the government brought to power by that intervention, but even more importantly because they were funded, designed and trained by the intervening forces. It was perhaps inevitable therefore that the question of their sustainability should arise.
Download or read book Unwinnable written by Theo Farrell and published by Random House. This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 515 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Afghanistan was an unwinnable war. As British and American troops withdraw, discover this definitive account that explains why. It could have been a very different story. British forces could have successfully withdrawn from Afghanistan in 2002, having done the job they set out to do: to defeat al-Qaeda. Instead, in the years that followed, Britain paid a devastating price for their presence in Helmand province. So why did Britain enter, and remain, in an ill-fated war? Why did it fail so dramatically, and was this expedition doomed from the beginning? Drawing on unprecedented access to military reports, government documents and senior individuals, Professor Theo Farrell provides an extraordinary work of scholarship. He explains the origins of the war, details the campaigns over the subsequent years, and examines the West's failure to understand the dynamics of local conflict and learn the lessons of history that ultimately led to devastating costs and repercussions still relevant today. 'The best book so far on Britain's...war in Afghanistan' International Affairs 'Masterful, irrefutable... Farrell records all these military encounters with the irresistible pace of a novelist' Sunday Times
Download or read book Logic Programming written by Patricia M. Hill and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-07-24 with total page 579 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Logic Programming, ICLP 2009, held in Pasadena, CA, USA, in July2009. The 29 revised full papers together with 9 short papers, 4 invited talks, 4 invited tutorials, and the abstracts of 18 doctoral consortium articles were carefully reviewed and selected from 69 initial submissions. The papers cover all issues of current research in logic programming, namely semantic foundations, formalisms, nonmonotonic reasoning, knowledge representation, compilation, memory management, virtual machines, parallelism, program analysis, program transformation, validation and verification, debugging, profiling, concurrency, objects, coordination, mobility, higher order, types, modes, programming techniques, abductive logic programming, answer set programming, constraint logic programming, inductive logic programming, alternative inference engines and mechanisms, deductive databases, data integration, software engineering, natural language, web tools, internet agents, artificial intelligence, bioinformatics.
Download or read book Action Programming Languages written by Michael Hexmoor and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 91 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Artificial systems that think and behave intelligently are one of the most exciting and challenging goals of Artificial Intelligence. Action Programming is the art and science of devising high-level control strategies for autonomous systems which employ a mental model of their environment and which reason about their actions as a means to achieve their goals. Applications of this programming paradigm include autonomous software agents, mobile robots with high-level reasoning capabilities, and General Game Playing. These lecture notes give an in-depth introduction to the current state-of-the-art in action programming. The main topics are knowledge representation for actions, procedural action programming, planning, agent logic programs, and reactive, behavior-based agents. The only prerequisite for understanding the material in these lecture notes is some general programming experience and basic knowledge of classical first-order logic. Table of Contents: Introduction / Mathematical Preliminaries / Procedural Action Programs / Action Programs and Planning / Declarative Action Programs / Reactive Action Programs / Suggested Further Reading
Download or read book Logic Programming written by Danny De Schreye and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1999-11-08 with total page 654 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes tutorials, lectures, and refereed papers on all aspects of logic programming, including theoretical foundations, constraints, concurrency and parallelism, deductive databases, language design and implementation, nonmonotonic reasoning, and logic programming and the Internet. The International Conference on Logic Programming, sponsored by the Association for Logic Programming, includes tutorials, lectures, and refereed papers on all aspects of logic programming, including theoretical foundations, constraints, concurrency and parallelism, deductive databases, language design and implementation, nonmonotonic reasoning, and logic programming and the Internet.
Download or read book Security Sector Reform in Conflict Affected Countries written by Mark Sedra and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-03 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the evolution, impact, and future prospects of the Security Sector Reform (SSR) model in conflict-affected countries in the context of the wider debate over the liberal peace project. Since its emergence as a concept in the late 1990s, SSR has represented a paradigm shift in security assistance, from the realist, regime-centric, train-and-equip approach of the Cold War to a new liberal, holistic and people-centred model. The rapid rise of this model, however, belied its rather meagre impact on the ground. This book critically examines the concept and its record of achievement over the past two decades, putting it into the broader context of peace-building and state-building theory and practice. It focuses attention on the most common, celebrated and complex setting for SSR, conflict-affected environments, and comparatively examines the application and impacts of donor-supported SSR programing in a series of conflict-affected countries over the past two decades, including Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, East Timor and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The broader aim of the book is to better understand how the contemporary SSR model has coalesced over the past two decades and become mainstreamed in international development and security policy and practice. This provides a solid foundation to investigate the reasons for the poor performance of the model and to assess its prospects for the future. This book will be of much interest to students of international security, peacebuilding, statebuilding, development studies and IR in general.
Download or read book Reinforcement Learning and Approximate Dynamic Programming for Feedback Control written by Frank L. Lewis and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-01-28 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reinforcement learning (RL) and adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) has been one of the most critical research fields in science and engineering for modern complex systems. This book describes the latest RL and ADP techniques for decision and control in human engineered systems, covering both single player decision and control and multi-player games. Edited by the pioneers of RL and ADP research, the book brings together ideas and methods from many fields and provides an important and timely guidance on controlling a wide variety of systems, such as robots, industrial processes, and economic decision-making.
Download or read book Logic Programming written by Joxan Jaffar and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes tutorials, lectures, and refereed papers on all aspects of logic programming, The Joint International Conference and Symposium on Logic Programming, sponsored by the Association for Logic Programming, includes tutorials, lectures, and refereed papers on all aspects of logic programming, including theoretical foundations, constraints, concurrency and parallelism, deductive databases, language design and implementation, nonmonotonic reasoning, and logic programming and the Internet.
Download or read book Practical Methods for Optimal Control Using Nonlinear Programming Third Edition written by John T. Betts and published by SIAM. This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 748 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do you fly an airplane from one point to another as fast as possible? What is the best way to administer a vaccine to fight the harmful effects of disease? What is the most efficient way to produce a chemical substance? This book presents practical methods for solving real optimal control problems such as these. Practical Methods for Optimal Control Using Nonlinear Programming, Third Edition focuses on the direct transcription method for optimal control. It features a summary of relevant material in constrained optimization, including nonlinear programming; discretization techniques appropriate for ordinary differential equations and differential-algebraic equations; and several examples and descriptions of computational algorithm formulations that implement this discretize-then-optimize strategy. The third edition has been thoroughly updated and includes new material on implicit Runge–Kutta discretization techniques, new chapters on partial differential equations and delay equations, and more than 70 test problems and open source FORTRAN code for all of the problems. This book will be valuable for academic and industrial research and development in optimal control theory and applications. It is appropriate as a primary or supplementary text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students.
Download or read book The Efficiency Savings Programme in Jobcentre Plus written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Work and Pensions Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2006-03-18 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the past two years Jobcentre Plus has faced considerable upheaval in trying to accommodate both organisational change and meet the DWP target for efficiency savings (which requires the loss of 15,000 staff by March 20008). This report looks at how these changes have affected the ability of the Agency to meet its objectives in relation to: employment and training programmes; the capacity and role of Personal Advisors; the performance of the Customer Management System; the principles behind and the performance of Contact Centres. It concludes that too much was attempted too quickly, the planning and IT processes were not up to the job and service levels suffered. As a result Jobcentre Plus failed one of the tests of the Gershon programme that service quality should not deteriorate as a result of the efficiency process.
Download or read book Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning written by Chitta Baral and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-06-06 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning, LPNMR 2007, held in Tempe, AZ, USA, May 2007. This conference encompasses theoretical studies, design and implementation of logic based programming languages and database systems, and development of experimental systems.
Download or read book The Sport Psychologist s Handbook written by Joaquin Dosil and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2006-02-22 with total page 732 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A practical handbook for sports psychologists that outlines the most effective interventions for athletes across a variety of sports. A practical manual for the growing force of sports psychologists helping today's athletes to unprecedented levels of application and success Offers specific guidance on the psychological assessment of athletes, uniquely presented in an accessible sport-by-sport format Written by an experienced practicing sports psychologist and author, who draws on his own methods and experience in the field
Download or read book Warfare and Welfare written by Herbert Obinger and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-21 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the first half of the 20th century was characterized by total war, the second half witnessed, at least in the Western world, a massive expansion of the modern welfare state. A growing share of the population was covered by ever more generous systems of social protection that dramatically reduced poverty and economic inequality in the post-war decades. With it also came a growth in social spending, taxation and regulation that changed the nature of the modern state and the functioning of market economies. Whether and in which ways warfare and the rise of the welfare state are related, is subject of this volume. Distinguishing between three different phases (war preparation, wartime mobilization, and the post-war period), the volume provides the first systematic comparative analysis of the impact of war on welfare state development in the western world. The chapters written by leading scholars in this field examine both short-term responses to and long-term effects of war in fourteen belligerent, occupied, and neutral countries in the age of mass warfare stretching over the period from ca. 1860 to 1960. The volume shows that both world wars are essential for understanding several aspects of welfare state development in the western world.
