A Pattern New in Every Moment: The Temporal Clustering of Markets for Crude Oil, Refined Fuels, and Other Commodities

The identification of critical periods and business cycles contributes significantly to the analysis of financial markets and the macroeconomy. Financialization and cointegration place a premium on the accurate recognition of time-varying volatility in commodity markets, especially those for crude oil and refined fuels. This article seeks to identify critical periods in the trading of energy-related commodities as a step toward understanding the temporal dynamics of those markets. This article proposes a novel application of unsupervised machine learning. A suite of clustering methods, applied to conditional volatility forecasts by trading days and individual assets or asset classes, can identify critical periods in energy-related commodity markets. Unsupervised machine learning achieves this task without rules-based or subjective definitions of crises. Five clustering methods—affinity propagation, mean-shift, spectral, k-means, and hierarchical agglomerative clustering—can identify anomalous periods in commodities trading. These methods identified the financial crisis of 2008–2009 and the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Applied to four energy-related markets—Brent, West Texas intermediate, gasoil, and gasoline—the same methods identified additional periods connected to events such as the September 11 terrorist attacks and the 2003 Persian Gulf war. t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding facilitates the visualization of trading regimes. Temporal clustering of conditional volatility forecasts reveals unusual financial properties that distinguish the trading of energy-related commodities during critical periods from trading during normal periods and from trade in other commodities in all periods. Whereas critical periods for all commodities appear to coincide with broader disruptions in demand for energy, critical periods unique to crude oil and refined fuels appear to arise from acute disruptions in supply. Extensions of these methods include the definition of bull and bear markets and the identification of recessions and recoveries in the real economy.

Design of Reliable Disaster Recovery System through Integrated Server Redundancy

Even before the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001, information systems prepared against disasters in Korea were extremely weak. However, as various domestic and foreign accident cases have occurred, it is recognized that preparations for this are necessary. Accordingly, at present, each institution has prepared and implemented various backup policies to protect the institution's information and data in case of disaster. Therefore, in this paper, we conducted a study to design a more stable and efficient disaster recovery system by building redundancy for server operating in integrated data center. To do this, we analyzed the redundancy design for the integrated disaster recovery server and designed the overall system configuration. Also, the design results were analyzed by testing web server redundancy and switch redundancy. In this paper, the proposed design method for stabilization and efficiency of disaster recovery system is the redundant construction of integrated server and switch. In other words, the disaster recovery system was composed of active storage and standby storage, and data stabilization was promoted through real-time replication of each other. In the existing disaster recovery system, there is a problem in stabilizing replication because there is no monitoring system for internal replication between storage arrays. To solve this problem, we designed a system that replicates all data in active storage to standby storage in real time and monitors the replication status. Therefore, introducing service conversion automation from the main system, which is the method designed in this paper, to the disaster recovery system, improves the stability and reliability of the service of the local governments, so that it is possible to operate a more efficient and advanced disaster recovery system.

‘An endless procession of catastrophes’: Reading the War on Terror in Contemporary HIV Life Writing

This paper examines the shifting paradigms of language used in HIV/AIDS life writing. As a testimonial genre, military metaphors have played a crucial role in mobilising communities and revealing how discourses around chronic illness inscribe themselves on the body. Through a textual analysis of three memoirs, Douglas Wright's Ghost Dance (2004) and Terra Incognito (2006), and David Caron's The Nearness of Others (2014), I argue that these texts represent a shift that instead engage metaphors of terrorism and security to convey meaning of lived experience and negotiate the precariousness of ongoing survival. Simultaneously, Wright and Caron maintain their health through protease inhibitors and reflect on the national anxieties produced by the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States of America. Both writers draw on the language of terrorism, especially the images taken from the Abu Ghraib prison, to inform their own experiences as HIV-positive white, middle-upper class, gay men. The significance of these metaphors can be found in their individual struggles with depression. What this paper contributes to is an understanding of what it means to think about HIV after the pharmaceutical turn when HIV is no longer considered a death sentence in the Western world, how discourses of terror inform public and personal understandings of chronic illness and mental health, and how embodied experience informs autobiographical modes of expression, and vice versa.

Crisis Agenda-Setting and Aviation Security Policy After the September 11 Attacks

The September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States were a focusing event that greatly increased attention to particularly large acts of terrorism as a threat to the United States and to particular interests. One of these interests is the aviation industry. The September 11 attacks exploited features of the aviation industry that made it prone to attack and that made an attack on this industry particularly vivid and attention-grabbing. The September 11 attacks led to policy changes in the United States and around the world with respect to aviation security, but those changes were not made in a vacuum. The changes that followed the September 11 attacks were made possible by efforts to learn from the range of aviation security incidents and challenges that have faced commercial aviation throughout its history. While the September 11 attacks were shocking and seemed novel, prior experience with aviation security crises provided those working in the aviation security policy realm with potential responses. The responses were drawn from a set of politically feasible responses that addressed the lapses in security demonstrated by terrorist attacks. The history of policy changes related to terrorism in aviation parallel the changes to policies that were made across the board in response to the elevation of terrorism on the agenda.

Conclusion

This brief conclusion summarizes the contents of the book’s five chapters and restates the main argument: that Egyptian modern artists showcased a constellation modernism in their artistic approach and that they acknowledged their Islamic context, but refused to be defined by it. In an epilogue, Seggerman addresses the contemporary context of the book’s writing, including the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Arab Spring, and the growth of arts institutions in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. She ends with a call for an ethical art history with greater empathy.

Aircraft-Assisted Pilot Suicides in the General Aviation Increased for One-Year Period after 11 September 2001 Attack in the United States

Pilot aircraft-assisted suicides (AAS) are rare, and there is limited understanding of copycat phenomenon among aviators. The aim of this study was to evaluate the possible effect the 11 September 2001, terrorist attacks had on pilot AASs in the U.S. Fatal aviation accidents in the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) database were searched using the following search words: “suicide”, “murder-suicide” and “homicide-suicide”. The timeline between 11 September 1996, and 11 September 2004, was analyzed. Only those accidents in which NTSB judged that the cause of the accident was suicide were included in the final analysis. The relative risk (RR) of the pilot AASs in all fatal accidents in the U.S. was calculated in order to compare the one, two, and three-year periods after the September 11 terrorist attacks with five years preceding the event. The RR of a fatal general aviation aircraft accident being due to pilot suicide was 3.68-fold (95% confidence interval 1.04–12.98) during the first year after 11 September 2001, but there was not a statistically significant increase in the later years. This study showed an association, albeit not determinate causal effect, of a very specific series of simultaneous terrorist murder-suicides with subsequent pilot AASs.

9. Intelligence and Strategy

This chapter examines the role of intelligence in the development and execution of strategy. It begins with a discussion of what intelligence is all about and how its utility has been viewed by strategists. In particular, it considers the different components of the ‘intelligence cycle’, namely, intelligence collection, intelligence analysis, and special intelligence missions that rest on effective counterintelligence and counterespionage. It then charts the history of US intelligence, from its use to support cold war strategies of containment and deterrence to its more recent support to US strategies for counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. It also reviews the challenges and causes of ‘strategic surprise’, citing a number of historical cases such as the September 11 terrorist attacks. The chapter concludes with an assessment of how the US intelligence community has performed since reforms were made in response to 9/11 and its focus on new threats posed by cyberwar and cyber-attacks.

Arresting Immigrants: Unemployment and Immigration Enforcement

This study provides an examination of immigrant arrests involving two different agencies of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS): The Border Patrol (BP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Descriptive time series analyses track yearly changes in immigrant arrests in the decade following the September 11 terrorist attacks (2002-2013). For many DHS jurisdictions, changes in the rates of immigrant arrest closely mirrored changes in the rates of unemployment. First-difference regression models pooling yearly data for the ICE jurisdictions demonstrate that the associations between changes in unemployment rates and changes in immigrant arrest rates were positive and significant.

Civil War and Terrorism: A Call for Further Theory Building

Since the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, terrorism has gained increased prominence in both scholarship and the media. While international terrorist acts are quite visible and highly publicized, such attacks represent only one type of terrorism within the international system. In fact, a very large number of acts of terrorism take place within the context of civil wars. Given the great disparity in power in most civil wars, it is not surprising that terrorism might be seen as a tactic that is often used by insurgent groups, who may have few resources at their disposal to fight a much stronger opponent. There is a clear linkage between the concepts of terrorism and civil war, yet until recently scholars have largely approached civil war and terrorism separately. Recent literature has attempted to specifically map the intersection of terrorism and civil war, recognizing the extent to which the two overlap. As expected, the findings suggest that civil war and terrorism are highly linked. Other scholars have endeavoured to explain why rebel groups in some civil wars use terrorism, while others do not. Further research focuses on how governments respond to terrorism during civil war or on how the decisions of external actors to intervene in civil wars are affected by the use of terrorism by insurgent groups. These studies show that there is too little theorizing on the relationship between civil war and terrorism; while scholars are finally considering these concepts collectively, the full nature of their relationship remains unexplored. Additional research is needed to better understand the various ways that terrorism and civil war overlap, interact, and mutually affect other important international and domestic political processes.