Coinciding with the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency's (MIGA) twentieth anniversary, "Investing with Confidence: Understanding Political Risk Management in the 21st Century" examines key political risk issues including claims and arbitration, perspectives on pricing from the private, public and multilateral providers, as well as exploring new frontiers in sovereign wealth funds and Islamic finance. These topics are particularly relevant for today's uncertain markets, and provide important analysis and thinking from key practioners and clients. Political risk insurance is critical to maintaining flows of foreign direct investment into developing markets; this volume offers valuable insights for practitioners and investors alike.

International Business: An Asia Pacific Perspective (Second Edition) provides a unique exploration of the topic of international business. It examines decisions relevant to managers in internationalizing and multinational firms operating in the Asia Pacific region. Its uniqueness stems from the cutting-edge conceptual material that underlies the decision-making frameworks in the text and in the numerous Asian company examples and illustrations. Users of this text examine such essential topics as the measurement and analysis of the cultural, political and economic dimensions of the international environment; the formation of internationalization strategies, including entry mode choice and strategic alliances; the analysis of the competitive implications of multinational firms and business groups; multinational, subsidiary and expatriate management; and the management of ethical issues.

When considering intense particle or laser beams propagating in dense plasma or gas, ionization plays an important role. Impact ionization and tunnel ionization may create new plasma electrons, altering the physics of wakefield accelerators, causing blue shifts in laser spectra, creating and modifying instabilities, etc. Here we describe the addition of an impact ionization package into the 3-D, object-oriented, fully parallel PIC code OSIRIS. We apply the simulation tool to simulate the parameters of the upcoming E164 Plasma Wakefield Accelerator experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). We find that impact ionization is dominated by the plasma electrons moving in the wake rather than the 30 GeV drive beam electrons. Impact ionization leads to a significant number of trapped electrons accelerated from rest in the wake.

A new 10 meter diameter telescope is being constructed for deployment at the NSF South Pole research station. The telescope is designed for conducting large-area millimeter and sub-millimeter wave surveys of faint, low contrast emission, as required to map primary and secondary anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. To achieve the required sensitivity and resolution, the telescope design employs an off-axis primary with a 10 m diameter clear aperture. The full aperture and the associated optics will have a combined surface accuracy of better than 20 microns rms to allow precision operation in the submillimeter atmospheric windows. The telescope will be surrounded with a large reflecting ground screen to reduce sensitivity to thermal emission from the ground and local interference. The optics of the telescope will support a square degree field of view at 2mm wavelength and will feed a new 1000-element micro-lithographed planar bolometric array with superconducting transition-edge sensors and frequency-multiplexed readouts. The first key project will be to conduct a survey over 4000 degrees for galaxy clusters using the Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect. This survey should find many thousands of clusters with a mass selection criteria that is remarkably uniform with redshift. Armed with redshifts obtained from optical and infrared follow-up observations, it is expected that the survey will enable significant constraints to be placed on the equation of state of the dark energy.