During years of insurgency in Afghanistan the Taliban has not been defeated. They have however adapted into a more sophisticated organization than in the beginning of the insurgency. Rather than identifying them as a simple terror organization this study aims to analyze the Taliban ability to utilize sophisticated tactics and conduct special operations. By using William H. McRavens theory on relative superiority, this studies purpose is to investigate whether the 2012 attack on Helmand’s Camp Bastion can be compared to special operation or not. The study will be conducted as a case study analyzing the reports made by both U.S and British armed forces following the attack. This study concludes that the Taliban attack on Camp Bastion can be comparable to a successful special operation in almost every way according to the theory of relative superiority by McRaven. The study shows that the operation is only lacking parts of the principles simplicity and repetition.

A conventional army is required to meet many needs and face many threats. However, when conventional warfare methods do not make the cut, Special Operations and Special Forces become a necessity. However, there exists few theories that sufficiently explain how Special Forces units around the world accomplishes these Special Operations. One of the few researches who has developed a theory regarding Special Operations is William H. McRaven with his theory of relative superiority.    McRaven´s theory proposes that there are six principles which determine the success of a Special Forces unit´s ability to plan, prepare and execute a Special Operation. The aim of the study is to understand McRaven´s theory´s explanatory power in explaining the results of Operation Neptune Spear and Operation Gothic Serpent.   This study concludes that Operation Neptune spear attained almost all of the required principles. However, Operation Gothic serpent lacked half of the required principles. In order to create a favourable relation, one must create synergy between the principles in order to achieve relative superiority. The study concludes by illustrating that McRaven´s theory´s explanatory power increased.

In New Orleans during the 1830s, Irish immigration became a source of tension between newly settled Anglo-American elites and the long-established Creole hegemony. Out of this tension, in 1835 Anglo-American elites established the Louisiana Native American Association (LNAA) to block Irish immigrants from gaining citizenship and, ultimately, the right to vote. The Whig Party, whom most Louisiana Anglo-Americans supported, promoted nativism to prevent naturalized Irish from voting Democrat, the preferred party of the Creoles. This study will argue that the LNAA, under the leadership of William H. Christy, was not merely a reaction to increased Irish immigration, but was also a strategy used by the Louisiana Whig Party to gain dominion over state politics. In the end, this strategy did more harm than good to the Whigs as the nativist movement led to a fatal split within the party.

No description available.

This doctoral thesis contributes to the ongoing scholarly conversation on literary representation of musical sounds, forms, and compositions. My close examination of the tangible presences of Western art music in the fiction of three contemporary American novelists relocates traditional foci of intermediality and word and music studies from referential precision and structural equivalence across the arts to the problem of readerly experience of music through fictional narrative. Exploring a variety of diegetic encounters with music in William T. Vollmann's Europe Central (2005), William H. Gass's Middle C (2013), and Richard Powers's Orfeo (2014), I draw from cognitive narratology and the philosophy of music, among others, to construct a concise model of musical experience and a system of its literary correlatives, which can provide for the reader's enactive response to music-related themes and means in fiction. I discuss the different strategies the writers apply to communicate the presumably elitist experience of Western classical music as suggestive and relevant to their 21st-century readerships, whether big or small. I order my chapters dialectically, regarding the three authors' literary approaches to musical experience as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. In Chapter I, Vollmann's intermedial transpositions of Dmitri Shostakovich's fictionalized works are shown to be framed by a mimetic bias, under which diegetic music functions as a characterization means for the author's historical preoccupations. The thesis (i) I infer from Vollmann's approach is that music is part of the fictional reality representative/informative/definitive of what that reality is like. Chapter II is devoted to Gass's metafictional distrust of representation, whereupon his novelistic narrative discards diegetic music almost completely and points out ways of experiencing verbal textures musically. Gass's method is thus antithetical (ii) to Vollmann's: music is a metaphor for creativity, indifferent to the subject matter and/or plot, which at representation level may well be a parodic perversion of the very idea of creativity. Powers's balanced treatment of musicalized content and form and his generous supply of multivalent experiential cues are forged to appeal to a broader reading audience, as I argue in Chapter III. In what I see as a synthesis (iii) of Vollmann and Gass, Powers's storyworld contains abundant diegetic music that constructs narrative settings and drives the events of the plot, but is itself graspable through musical metaphors. The findings of the thesis open new directions for research into musico-literary reception. Encouraging a revival of reader-response awareness in literary analysis, musicalized fiction is an untrivial subject for interactive theoretical scrutiny by psychologists and philosophers of music, transmedial narratologists, and cognitive scientists. Empirical studies of actual readers' experience of musicalized prose may prove particularly promising in further investigation of this intersectional phenomenon.

This thesis examines the use of form and spatial language in confessional fiction by men to elucidate how they conceptualise and negotiate material, corporeal, and psychological boundaries amidst the shifting social and political landscape of the United States since the Second World War. In light of increasingly urgent calls to address gender and racial discrimination in the United States, this study offers timely insight into an identity that, while culturally dominant, often escapes examination: white, heterosexual masculinity. Focusing on the representation of forms and spatial imagery, the chapters explore how five formally experimental novelists-Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph McElroy, Harry Mathews, William H. Gass, and Peter Dimock- employ the confessional genre to illustrate the way men perceive themselves as spatially and temporally circumscribed, and to look at the way they reinforce or transgress the boundaries of masculine identity. The post-war period in the United States witnessed a proliferation of confessional writing that coincided with the popularisation of Freudian psychoanalysis, the cold war rhetoric of suspicion, and the rise of second-wave feminism. As a result, the concept of the self increasingly becomes a repository for fantasies of potential discovery and hidden danger that rely, significantly, on metaphors of surface and depth. It is within, and often against, this cultural preoccupation with the self that these writers address, both directly and indirectly, the status of white masculinity. Drawing on innovative theories of forms and spatiality, this study examines the diverse language and imagery men use to describe their sense of selfhood as well as the bonds they form with others. The works considered in this study demonstrate a common preoccupation with the boundaries that separate interior from exterior and private from public. In response to pressures both intimate and impersonal, the narrators of the texts discussed in this thesis turn to confessional practices of written self-examination to locate themselves within networks of fluctuating relations and obligations. The question that this thesis seeks to resolve is whether the forms and spatial language the narrators employ enable or obstruct their efforts to negotiate the competing demands of ethical responsibilities to others and the desire to preserve a stable sense of self.

In the United States, there is a growing trend towards livable cities that facilitate physical, psychological, and social well-being. According to Congress of the New Urbanism, the great American suburb served by the automobile, does not fulfill all these functions. Urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg points out three realms of satisfactory life as work, home and the ‘great good place’ as the third. The third place is one that facilitates barrier free social interaction, for example the American main-street, the English pub, French coffee house etc. Despite the ever existing need for such places, greater travel distances and the ever expanding needs of the automobile era have stripped our urban fabric of these. The Charter of the New Urbanism points out that in the American suburbs, neighborhood parks have the potential to serve as ‘third places.’ The twofold purpose of this research was to examine Steeplechase dog-park using Oldenburg’s Third Place construct as a starting point; and then to operationalize third place by establishing relationships between social characteristics and physical environment. Participant observation, casual conversations and ethnographic interviews were methods used to examine how residents use Steeplechase Park. The observation phase was used to understand on-site behavior, user interests and then establish contacts with participants for recruitment. In-depth interviews were then conducted to examine user history, relationships and attitudes toward the place. Data was coded and analyzed in NVivo 10 utilizing Oldenburg’s framework as a reference, the components of which were then examined for correlations to the physical elements. The findings of suggest that Steeplechase Park functions as a somewhat unique third place in terms of user motivation, companion animal/social lubricant, neutrality and inclusiveness of the place. Findings also establish useful links between the physical design of the space and the social activity; prospect-refuge supported by vegetation and layout, topography, shade, edges and access being the most important aspects. Additionally, lack of maintenance was established as a major concern to sustained use.

No description available.

No description available.

SCH-64874 (5) is a fungal metabolite that inhibits the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), a high-profile oncology target, with an IC50 of 1.0µg/mL. It is of particular interest because it is unlikely to inhibit the protein’s intramolecular kinase domain (as typical chemical EGFR inhibitors do), and may act instead by obstructing the receptor’s ligand binding and/or dimerisation processes. / In this work, the epipolythiodiketopiperazine family of natural products is reviewed, leading to a discussion of the probable biosynthetic pathways by which these complex molecules are produced in nature. A laboratory synthesis based on this proposed biosynthesis was subsequently proposed and undertaken. / The oxidation of aromatic systems was investigated, which led to the synthesis, for the first time, of complex functionalised arene oxides such as 178. The regioselective epoxidation of 178 was accessed by derivatisation as the Diels-Alder adduct 180. Subsequent epoxidation and manipulation led to the amino alcohol 195b, possessing the exo-epoxide endo-alcohol stereochemistry shown. / This stereochemical assignment was based on detailed NMR analysis of the product, and also on AM1 semi-empirical molecular modelling and Ab initio molecular orbital calculations, which were used to evaluate the relative stabilities of the cyclisation products.