When leaders don't fire underperforming executives, they send a bad message to the whole organization. A case in point is the U.S. Army. "To study the change in the army across the two decades between World War II and Vietnam," Ricks writes, "is to learn how a culture of high standards and accountability can deteriorate." In this essay, adapted from his new book, The Generals: American Military...

s I write this warm up, the 2002 Winter Olympics are in full flight at Salt Lake City, Utah. The media response has been rapid and savage. Already dubbed " the Unfriendly Games " , the overwhelming security at the venues and the infrastructure problems is making life extremely difficult by all accounts. 1 Is this the shape of things to come? The thin end of the wedge and all that. Following the...

We designed, implemented and assessed an EBMT system that can be dubbed the “purest ever built”: it strictly does not make any use of variables, templates or training, does not have any explicit transfer component, and does not require any preprocessing of the aligned examples. It uses a specific operation, namely proportional analogy, that implicitly neutralises divergences between languages a...