Robert G. Muncaster – författare

The scientific study of international events has been revolutionized. Writers have long viewed such phenomena as war and peace, conflict and cooperation, as sequences of events—démarches, protests, treaties, crises, armed interventions, conferences, and other occurrences that stand out against the gray background of everyday living. New thinking, however, has given us a more systematic means of analyzing the occurrence of events and of understanding and even predicting the international processes they influence. This book offers insight into the current exploration of a modern and sophisticated analytic and methodological approach to the study of interactions among nation-states, ethnic groups, and other international actors. National Science Foundation support brought together key event-data researchers in Data Development for International Research (DDIR) to assess needs and consider alternative approaches. DDIR has sought to advance the quantitative analysis of international politics. In Phase I it updated, expanded, and developed new national attribute and international conflict data. DDIR Phase II, represented in this book, has two main goals: to systematically enhance and improve currently existing, high-quality event data sets and to develop computer software that can facilitate the future generation of such event data and make data sets more readily accessible to users.

This monograph concerns the development, analysis, and application of the theory of pseudo-rigid bodies. It collects together our work on that subject over the last five years. While some results have appeared else­ where, much of the work is new. Our objective in writing this mono­ graph has been to present a new theory of the deformation of bodies, one that has not only a firm theoretical basis, but also the simplicity to serve as an effective tool in practical problems. Consequently, the main body of the treatise is a multifaceted development of the theory, from foundations to explicit solutions to linearizations to methods of approximation. The fact that this variety of aspects, each examined in considerable detail, can be collected together in a single, unified treat­ ment gives this theory an elegance that we feel sets it apart from many others. While our goal has always been to give a complete treatment of the theory as it now stands, the work here is not meant to be definitive. Theories are not entities that appear suddenly one day and thereafter stand as given. Rather, they must mature and grow with time and experience. Our development is more correctly a beginning, tempting others to explore, appraise, and modify its features so as to produce something better.