<p>This essay aims to analyse if the Russian military operation carried out against Georgia between the 7^th and 12^th of august 2008 were executed with adherence to the Russian principles for military deception, <em>maskirovka</em>.</p><p>   A superior purpose is to assess the situation according to the Swedish Armed Forces task of identifying possible needs for new or changed needs for abilities and competence.</p><p>   The method used is two-alternative hypotheses which are tried by comparing actual events before and during the Russian-Georgian war with the ten methods of <em>maskirovka</em>, compiled from military analytical literature. Such traces of resemblance are further examined, both individually and as a part of a larger indication.</p><p>   Further the essay describes the Russian art of war, the prerequisites for military surprise, information warfare in Russian doctrine, the disputed territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and the principles for <em>maskirovka</em>.</p><p>   The conclusion is that the Russian operation was executed with some adherence to maskirovka, though unspecified of to what degree.</p><p>   Author of this essay is Cadet Martin Svensson of the Swedish Army, currently a student at the Armed Forces Technical School in Halmstad.</p>

This essay aims to analyse if the Russian military operation carried out against Georgia between the 7th and 12th of august 2008 were executed with adherence to the Russian principles for military deception, maskirovka.    A superior purpose is to assess the situation according to the Swedish Armed Forces task of identifying possible needs for new or changed needs for abilities and competence.    The method used is two-alternative hypotheses which are tried by comparing actual events before and during the Russian-Georgian war with the ten methods of maskirovka, compiled from military analytical literature. Such traces of resemblance are further examined, both individually and as a part of a larger indication.    Further the essay describes the Russian art of war, the prerequisites for military surprise, information warfare in Russian doctrine, the disputed territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and the principles for maskirovka.    The conclusion is that the Russian operation was executed with some adherence to maskirovka, though unspecified of to what degree.    Author of this essay is Cadet Martin Svensson of the Swedish Army, currently a student at the Armed Forces Technical School in Halmstad.

An exploration of self-deception in proslavery arguments in the antebellum South. This work explores how proslavery theorists were able to support slavery despite overwhelming evidence that slavery was immoral. By using non-intentional self-deception, slavery supporters tested their hypothesis that slavery was good in a motivationally biased manner that aligned with their interests and desires.

Grice (1982) and Bar-On and Green (2010) each provide 'continuity stories' which attempt to explain how a human-like language could emerge from the primitive communication practices of non-human animals. I offer desiderata for a proper account of linguistic continuity in order to argue that these previous accounts fall short in important ways. I then introduce the recent evolutionary literature on non-cooperative communication in order to construct a continuity story which better satisfies the proposed desiderata while retaining the positive aspects of the proposals of Grice and Bar-On and Green. The outcome of this project is a more tenable and empirically investigable framework chronicling the evolution of human-like language from communicative abilities currently found in non-human animals.

Abstract Methods for tephrochronology are evaluated, in the following way: Lake sediments &lt;500 years old from three small Antarctic lakes were analysed for identification of tephras. Subsamples were analysed for a) grain size, and identification and concentration of volcanogenic grains, b) identification of tephra horizons, c) element abundance by EPMA WDS/EDS and LA-ICP-MS, and d) possible correlations between lakes and volcanoes. Volcanogenic minerals and shards were found all through the sediment cores in all three lakes, in different abundances. A high background population of volcanogenic mineral grains, in all samples, made the identification of tephra horizons difficult, and shards could only be distinguished by certainty after chemical analysis of elements. The tephra layers commonly could not be seen by the naked eye, and, hence they are regarded as cryptotephras. Because of the small size of recent eruptions in the research area, and the travel distance of ash, most shards are small and difficult to analyse. Nine possible tephra horizons have been recorded in the three lakes, and preliminary correlations have been made. But because of analytical problems, the proposed correlations between the lakes and possible volcanic sources are preliminary.

<p>In a democratic society, does the electorate approve of truth and disapprove of deception, do opinion patterns exclusively mimic partisan elite views, or do opinion patterns react exclusively to successful or failed outcomes? Do citizens hold leaders accountable for the perceived truthfulness of foreign policy claims or do they only evaluate whether or not the policies were successful? The existing literature on public opinion and foreign policy calls the accountability role for the public "audience costs," and specifies that concerns about audience costs constrain leaders. However, the literature is not clear on what role normative issues may play in generating audience costs. This gap in the literature is notable because so much of the debate surrounding significant policy issues, especially war-making and military action, is couched in retrospective, normative, moralizing language. These debates make no sense if the pragmatic, forward-looking dimensions of audience costs - reliability and success - are all that exist. Through a survey experiment and four historical case studies developed with primary and secondary historical sources, news articles, and polling data, I find that there is a complex dynamic at work between the public's desire for successful outcomes and the high value placed upon truth-telling and transparency within a democracy. Studying justifications for military action and war, I find that the public will be motivated to punish leaders perceived as deceptive, but that imposition of audience costs will be moderated by factors including partisanship, degree of elite unity, and the leader's damage control strategy in response to disapproval.</p> / Dissertation

As a whole, this work serves to illuminate the tragic as a fundamental human phenomenon and an objective fact that is distinct not only from comedy and irony but from other forms of calamity and modes of failure. I consider three distinct sources of philosophical knowledge on tragedy. The first is tragic drama and literature, the second is the theory of the tragic and the third source consists of the employment of the concept of tragedy to discuss events or characters that one encounters in life. I carefully draw upon the first two sources to thicken the elaborations of four different facets of the third. In this process, I extrapolate Szondi’s notion that tragedy is a specific dialectic in a specific space. In the course of this work, I place a greater emphasis upon this general concept of the tragic as opposed to a poetics of tragedy. The dissertation bears out, however, that it is ultimately poetics - and not the dialectic as general concept - that provide us with the richer insights into tragedy as it unravels in life. The specific dialectic of tragedy unravels so as to cause the irreplaceable loss of something of great value. This provides me with a structuring element that ties the four central chapters together. In terms of content, I emphasize also upon the tragic flaw as a set of character traits (manifested by an individual or some form of collective) which keep tragedy in place. The consideration of the figure of Willy Loman allows me to examine the tragedy of failure of expectations which is a distinct category of the tragic and yet it oscillates such that ties together the other themes. A central idea that emerges from an analysis of the overlapping themes is that prior to tragedy is the investment of the deepest inner resources into a process. This investment gives rise to identity and to expectations. As a tragedy unfolds, the source of the identity or of expectation becomes also the birth place or the generator of all threats to this identity and the collapse of long nurtured expectations.

The Borg Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE) scale is a primary tool for researchers and practitioners in exercise science to describe the intensity level subjects are experiencing when participating in exercise sessions. It has recently been suggested that RPE is not simply the direct result of interpretation of physiological changes as originally postulated, but is also influenced by affect, past experience, and time to completion, a concept coined as teleoanticipation. The purpose of this study was to determine the role of teleoanticipation in a sedentary population, by examining the effect unexpected increases in exercise duration on rating of perceived exertion and affect during low intensity treadmill walking. Based on the findings of prior studies, it is expected that the unexpected duration session will elicit higher RPE values and lower affect scores as measured by the feeling scale (FS) than the expected duration session. Ten participants between the ages of 18 and 45 years participated in the study. All participants were sedentary or insufficiently active with respect to physical activity for at least six months prior to the beginning of the study. Only participants with low to moderate risk according to the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) guidelines were admitted. All volunteers participated in one familiarization session followed by two trials of treadmill exercise. The familiarization trial was used to determine the treadmill speed in subsequent trials. All experimental trials were 30 minutes in length in partial accordance with ACSM guidelines, but the third trial in each group was presented as being 20 minutes and was extended to 30 minutes using a deception procedure employed in related research. Participants were informed at the 20-minute mark that the session would be extended to 30 minutes. Speed remained constant during both experimental trials. RPE and heart rate were recorded every minute to preclude volunteers from noticing the difference an increased interest in RPE responses around the 20-minute mark. Affect was measured by way of the feeling scale (FS) every other minute during the experimental trials. Blood pressure was recorded every five minutes to ensure participant safety. Results indicated a significant main effect for time for RPE (p = 0.001); however, there was no significant main effect for time and no interaction for RPE (p > 0.05) and no significant main effect and no interaction for FS. The primary finding from this investigation was that unexpected exercise durations have no affect on RPE or FS at low intensities in untrained, sedentary populations. Results suggest there may be a threshold of intensity required for a teleoanticipatory effect. More research is needed to further compare these effects with those of moderately and highly trained populations in medium or high intensity situations.

Virtual humans and other virtual agents are becoming more common in our everyday lives. Whether in the form of phone-based personal assistants or automated customer service systems, these technologies have begun to touch more of our activities. This research aims to understand how this technology affects the way we interact with our computer systems. Using a chat bot, I studied the way a conversational computer system affects the way people interact with and perceive automated interviewing systems in two different contexts. Study 1 examines the impact of a conversational agent on behavior during deception. It found that a conversational agent can have a powerful impact on people's perception of the system, resulting in individuals viewing the system as much more engaging and human. The conversational agent further results in a suppression of deception-related cues consistent with a more human-like interaction. Study 2 focuses on the effect of a conversational agent on socially desirable responding. Results of this study indicate that a conversational agent increases social desirability when the topic of the interview is sensitive, but has no effect when the questions are non-sensitive. The results of these two studies indicate that a conversational agent can change the way people interact with a computer system in substantial and meaningful ways. These studies represent a step toward understanding how conversational agents can shape the way we view and interact with computers.

Concealing information, one of the many forms of deception, is a pervasive phenomenon as it is present in virtually every facet of interpersonal communication. In some cases, information concealment can have profound implications (e.g., insider threats in organizations, security screening at the border, and criminal interviews). New technologies are under development to aid in identifying concealed information, however, additional research is needed in three key areas to increase the feasibility of using these technologies in real-world credibility assessment contexts. First, research is needed to investigate the accuracy of new credibility assessment technologies relative to existing deception-detection systems. Demonstrating that new technologies meet or exceed detection accuracies of existing systems (e.g., the polygraph) is critical. Second, research is needed to determine if a targetless Concealed Information Test (CIT) is feasible. Existing CIT research supports the presence of main effect differences between persons concealing information and the control group. These behaviors may permit the detection of concealed information without the use of customized sets of stimuli. Eliminating the need to create customized sets of stimuli for each examinee would drastically increase the ease with which an automated system can be used to conduct a CIT. Finally, research is needed to illuminate various elements of the human-computer interaction that occurs during automated credibility assessments. This is a new domain of human-computer interaction as system users in this context are not instigating the interaction, and in many cases, they may be seeking to limit the effectiveness of the system. Before novel systems designed to conduct credibility assessments can be adopted, further research is needed to illuminate how users perceive, respond to, and strategically manage their behaviors when interacting with systems of this nature. This dissertation contains the results of a research program designed to address each of these areas. First, an experiment was designed to investigate the accuracy rates of two promising noncontact measures of concealed information (oculometrics and vocalics) relative to electrodermal activity (EDA). Second, an experiment was designed to evaluate the feasibility of using a targetless CIT to elicit main effect differences between concealers and the control group to identify concealed information. And third, a thorough analysis of examinees' general perceptions, self-reported stress and arousal, perceived effort and performance, and use of countermeasures within the context of an automated credibility assessment interview was conducted. This research effort has yielded the following findings. First, eye tracking and vocalics can be used to identify significant differences in the behaviors and physiology of examinees concealing information, however, the accuracy with which truth tellers and information concealers can be classified remains impractical for an applied setting. Second, there are main effect differences between persons concealing information and telling the truth, however, the use of countermeasures may limit the accuracy with which concealers can be identified. Finally, the presence of concealed information and the use of crime-relevant questions alter how examinees perceive and react to a system designed to identify concealed information. The limitations of this research, as well as directions for future research, are discussed.