Human rights and companies in conflict zones

Companies appear to be taking the business ramifications of conflict far more seriously, yet with limited consideration of the full extent of their responsibilities. Certainly, they see conflict resolution as primarily the responsibility of government yet find themselves in context specific situations where they are nevertheless expected to work actively to protect and promote human rights. In addition to “traditional” civil and political rights, companies' human rights responsibilities are increasingly also recognised. It is not impossible to apply human rights principles to conflict situations or to integrate them with a policy of conflict management. The process of managing human rights and a company's economic performance in conflict zones are directly related.     

European security and defence policy: from cologne to sarajevo

This article reviews the development of the EU's European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) from its inception at the Cologne European Council Summit in June 1999 until its most immediate challenge, namely, the establishment of a military mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina to take over from NATO's SFOR mission at the end of 2004. After a general survey, an analysis of the challenges and trends that confront ESDP in the coming period follows. In particular, issues relating to recognition, governance and post-nationalism are explored.     

Determinants and consequences of university spinoff activity: a conceptual framework

The characteristics and behavior of university spinoff activity is an important subject in economic and management studies literature. Such studies merit research because it is suggested that university innovations stimulate economies by spurring product development, by creating new industries, and by contributing to employment and wealth creation. For this reason, universities have come to be highly valued in terms of the economic potential of their research efforts. The aim of this paper is to offer a framework for the study of academic entrepreneurship that explains different aspects of university spinoff behavior in a coherent way. We suggest that the existing literature on this topic can be categorized into six separate streams and synthesized in a framework that captures the determinants and consequences of spinoff activity.      

Exact solutions to Bayesian and maximum likelihood problems in facial identification when population and error distributions are known

The reliability of traditional photogrammetric identification techniques using a small number of facial landmarks has recently come in for criticism. However, the transformation of parameters into a new face space in which the error distributions are orthogonal, yields a maximum likelihood solution to the problem of identifying a photographed face from a small, known, population which, in a simulated example, raises the success rate from 20% to 93%. A full transformation yielding simultaneously independent population and error distributions can be derived from raw population and error data using a straightforward computer procedure. Such a transformation facilitates computations for the situation where a single suspect is held in custody and the likelihood ratio of his being identical with a photograph is desired. It seems premature to condemn photogrammetry until the more efficient data-analysis approach outlined in this paper has been applied and tested.