Personnel, the Class 0 Supply Item: A Logistics Management Approach to Supplying Combatant Commanders with Warfighters

The Air Force\u27s end strength has drawn down from 530,000 to just over 332,000 in the past 20 years. All indications are that resources will continue to become more restricted in the future, including manpower. Meanwhile, studies indicate that the Air Force will likely continue to withdraw permanently stationed forces overseas and rely increasingly on the Air Expeditionary Force (AEF) construct for rapid mobility and force projection. With the AEF and efficient manpower utilization projected to become increasingly important, this study provides the first examination of the AEF as an overarching process for improvement opportunities. It proposes that the concept of AEF requirement fulfillment is actually a supply chain designed to supply Combatant Commanders with equipment and warfighters. It focuses on the fulfillment of manpower requirements, identifying them as a Class 0 Supply Item, and uses Supply Chain and Logistics Management principles to conduct an initial examination of the process to identify overarching relationships and process flow. Using the information gathered, it then maps the conceptual relationships and develops a statistical probability model to aid leaders and future researchers in analyzing expected costs and benefits of various targeted changes within the current construct. The study proposes new methods for managing AEF manpower capabilities and a new application of SCM principles. It also hopes to be a solid platform for a multi-phase study aimed at reengineering the AEF, from force reporting to sourcing in an effort to maximize manpower utilization and provide senior leadership and the planning community with more accurate force accountability

Storytelling for older adults in online social networks with novel web technologies

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Universidade do Porto. Faculdade de Engenharia. 201

Finance for Growth: Policy Choices in a Volatile World

Understanding just how finance contributes to development—and how good policy can help guarantee its contribution—has been the focus of a major research effort in recent years. This research has included systematic case-study analyses of the experiences of specific countries, as well as more recent econometric analyses of extensive cross-country data sets. Finance for Growth draws on this research and uses it to develop an integrated view of how financial sector policy can be used to foster growth, maintain stability and bring about poverty reduction.Financial sector development; financial regulation; globalization of finance; finance in developing countries

Using Web Archives to Enrich the Live Web Experience Through Storytelling

Much of our cultural discourse occurs primarily on the Web. Thus, Web preservation is a fundamental precondition for multiple disciplines. Archiving Web pages into themed collections is a method for ensuring these resources are available for posterity. Services such as Archive-It exists to allow institutions to develop, curate, and preserve collections of Web resources. Understanding the contents and boundaries of these archived collections is a challenge for most people, resulting in the paradox of the larger the collection, the harder it is to understand. Meanwhile, as the sheer volume of data grows on the Web, storytelling is becoming a popular technique in social media for selecting Web resources to support a particular narrative or story . In this dissertation, we address the problem of understanding the archived collections through proposing the Dark and Stormy Archive (DSA) framework, in which we integrate storytelling social media and Web archives. In the DSA framework, we identify, evaluate, and select candidate Web pages from archived collections that summarize the holdings of these collections, arrange them in chronological order, and then visualize these pages using tools that users already are familiar with, such as Storify. To inform our work of generating stories from archived collections, we start by building a baseline for the structural characteristics of popular (i.e., receiving the most views) human-generated stories through investigating stories from Storify. Furthermore, we checked the entire population of Archive-It collections for better understanding the characteristics of the collections we intend to summarize. We then filter off-topic pages from the collections the using different methods to detect when an archived page in a collection has gone off-topic. We created a gold standard dataset from three Archive-It collections to evaluate the proposed methods at different thresholds. From the gold standard dataset, we identified five behaviors for the TimeMaps (a list of archived copies of a page) based on the page’s aboutness. Based on a dynamic slicing algorithm, we divide the collection and cluster the pages in each slice. We then select the best representative page from each cluster based on different quality metrics (e.g., the replay quality, and the quality of the generated snippet from the page). At the end, we put the selected pages in chronological order and visualize them using Storify. For evaluating the DSA framework, we obtained a ground truth dataset of hand-crafted stories from Archive-It collections generated by expert archivists. We used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to evaluate the automatically generated stories against the stories that were created by domain experts. The results show that the automatically generated stories by the DSA are indistinguishable from those created by human subject domain experts, while at the same time both kinds of stories (automatic and human) are easily distinguished from randomly generated storie

Crosswalking EUR-Lex : a proposal for a metadata mapping to improve access to EU documents

The Office for Official Publications of the European Communities offers direct free access to the most complete collection of European Union law via the EUR-Lex online database. The value of the system lies in the extensive sets of metadata which allow for efficient and detailed search options. Nevertheless, the European institutions have each set up their own document register including their own sets of metadata, in order to improve access to their documents and meet the increasing need for transparency. Michael Düro suggests that to simplify access to EU documents, a common single search option could be based on a mapping of the most relevant metadata to the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set. Then a second mapping — linked to the idea of EUR-Lex serving as the single repository for European documents — could prepare the ground for the completion and enrichment of the document and metadata collection. With regard to its inter-institutional context, and using the ideas proposed in this publication, EUR-Lex could enhance, even further, public access to EU documents. "Crosswalking EUR-Lex: a proposal for a metadata mapping to improve access to EU documents" is intended for all those who would like, or need to know more about the European institutions\u27 tools implementing the policy on access to documents. The main proposals could serve as food for thought for those involved in decision-making in that field.1. Kontext und Zielsetzung der Arbeit Viele EU-Bürger stehen den großen europäischen Idealen positiv gegenüber, hegen aber ein gewisses Misstrauen gegenüber den Europäischen Institutionen. Der inzwischen gesetzlich fundierte Anspruch auf Zugang zu den Dokumenten der Europäischen Institutionen, der die Distanz minimieren helfen sollte, hat u. a. zur Einrichtung einer Vielzahl von Datenbanken mit unterschiedlichen Recherchemöglichkeiten geführt. Angesichts dieser Vielfalt ist es Ziel dieser Arbeit, einen Beitrag zur Verbesserung des Zugangs zu leisten: auf eine einführende Beschreibung wichtiger Instrumente bauen Konzepte für eine übergreifende einfache Suche, sowie für den Austausch und Abgleich von Metadaten mittels EUR-Lex als Zentralsystem auf. 2. Gegenstand und Methodisches Untersuchungsgegenstand sind die 7 wichtigsten, von den Europäischen Institutionen vorgehaltenen Online-Datenbanken (Register des EP, des Rates, der Kommission; PreLex; Legislative Observatory; Register der Komitologie; CELEX/EUR-Lex) und ihre über die Suchmöglichkeiten erschlossenen Metadaten. Kern der Betrachtung ist die Analyse dieser Metadaten und eine Präsentation in standardisierter Form. Zur potentiellen Vereinfachung des Zugangs werden in einem ersten Schritt die bei jedem der Instrumente zur einfachen Suche angebotenen Metadaten auf die selbsterklärenden Elemente des Metadaten-Standards "Dublin Core" abgebildet, der so als potentielle Basis für eine übergreifende einfache Suche dienen könnte. Die Erstellung der Metadaten-Konkordanz erfolgt dabei in methodischer Anlehnung an Empfehlungen des Europäischen Komitees für Normung (CEN). In einem zweiten Schritt, und um die Möglichkeiten einer Verbesserung des Zugangs aufzuzeigen, wird EUR-Lex als "One-Stop-Shop" begründet und, in Analogie zum ersten Schritt, eine Abbildung der Metadaten der anderen Instrumente auf die EUR-Lex Metadaten vollzogen. 3. Ergebnis und Ausblick Neben der juristischen Fundierung des Zugangsrechts werden die im Zusammenhang mit dem Zugang zu Dokumenten der Europäischen Institutionen wichtigsten Online-Datenbanken ausführlich dargestellt. Als Anknüpfungspunkt für eine Vereinfachung des Zugangs kann der Nachweis einer guten Abdeckung der Metadaten durch Dublin Core, zusammen mit einem direkt implementierbaren Instrumentarium basierend auf XML (eXtensible Markup Language), dienen. Mit Blick auf die Verbesserung des Zugangs wird der Nachweis einer wiederum guten Abdeckung der Metadaten erbracht und ergänzend für EUR-Lex das Potential als Zentralsystem für EU Dokumente und ihre Metadaten herausgearbeitet. Beide Konzepte sind auch adressiert an die Europäischen Institutionen, so dass abzuwarten bleibt, ob das theoretische Ziel der Arbeit mittels der konzeptionellen und methodischen Ausformulierung eine Auswirkung auf die Lebenswirklichkeit der BürgerInnen und Institutionen der EU entwickeln kann

Non-personal services to provide metering effort at NAB, Little Creek, VA

Issued as Progress reports no. 1-4, and Final report, Project no. A-289

Automated Creation and Provisioning of Value-added Telecommunication Services

The subject of this research is to find a continuous solution, which allows the description, the creation, the provisioning, and the execution of value-added telecommunication services. This work proposes a framework for an easy and timesaving creation and provisioning of value-added telecommunication services in Next Generation Networks. As research method, feasibility, comparative methods are used in this study. Criteria and requirements for service description, service creation, service execution, and service provisioning, are defined and existing technologies are compared with each other and evaluated regarding these criteria and requirements. Extensions to the selected technologies are proposed and possibilities to combine these technologies are researched. From the results of the previous steps, a framework is defined which offers a continuous solution for the description, creation, provisioning and execution of value-added services. In order to test the proof of concept, this framework is prototypically implemented. For a qualitative analysis of the research targets and the proof of concept, an example service is created and executed within the framework prototype. Furthermore, in order to examine the validity of the quantitative aims and objectives of this research work, a second example service is created, and its characteristics are measured and analysed. The result of this research is a novel continuous approach for the creation of value-added telecommunication services. This research introduces new possibilities for the service description, service creation, service provisioning, and service execution through an extension of the common telecommunication real-time execution environment JAIN SLEE. Value-added services are described by using the business process execution language BPEL. This language facilitates a simple and fast service design. The service can automatically be composed from pre-defined and pre-deployed components

Radio Communications

In the last decades the restless evolution of information and communication technologies (ICT) brought to a deep transformation of our habits. The growth of the Internet and the advances in hardware and software implementations modified our way to communicate and to share information. In this book, an overview of the major issues faced today by researchers in the field of radio communications is given through 35 high quality chapters written by specialists working in universities and research centers all over the world. Various aspects will be deeply discussed: channel modeling, beamforming, multiple antennas, cooperative networks, opportunistic scheduling, advanced admission control, handover management, systems performance assessment, routing issues in mobility conditions, localization, web security. Advanced techniques for the radio resource management will be discussed both in single and multiple radio technologies; either in infrastructure, mesh or ad hoc networks

REPORT OF THE ELEVENTH SESSION

INTERNATIONA

HUMAN AND CLIMATE IMPACTS ON FLOODING VIA REMOTE SENSING, BIG DATA ANALYTICS, AND MODELING

Over the last 20 years, the amount of streamflow has greatly increased and spring snowmelt floods have occurred more frequently in the north-central U.S. In the Red River of the North Basin (RRB) overlying portions of North Dakota and Minnesota, six of the 13 major floods over the past 100 years have occurred since the late 1990s. Based on numerous previous studies as well as senior flood forecasters’ experiences, recent hydrological changes related to human modifications [e.g. artificial subsurface drainage (SSD) expansion] and climate change are potential causes of notable forecasting failures over the past decade. My dissertation focuses on the operational and scientific gaps in current forecasting models and observational data and provides insights and value to both the practitioner and the research community. First, the current flood forecasting model needs both the location and installation timing of SSD and SSD physics. SSD maps were developed using satellite “big” data and a machine learning technique. Next, using the maps with a land surface model, the impacts of SSD expansion on regional hydrological changes were quantified. In combination with model physics, the inherent uncertainty in the airborne gamma snow survey observations hinders the accurate flood forecasting model. The operational airborne gamma snow water equivalent (SWE) measurements were improved by updating antecedent surface moisture conditions using satellite observations on soil moisture. From a long-term perspective, flood forecasters and state governments need knowledge of historical changes in snowpack and snowmelt to help flood management and to develop strategies to adapt to climate changes. However, historical snowmelt trends have not been quantified in the north-central U.S. due to the limited historical snow data. To overcome this, the current available historical long-term SWE products were evaluated across diverse regions and conditions. Using the most reliable SWE product, a trend analysis quantified the magnitude of change extreme snowpack and melt events over the past 36 years. Collectively, this body of research demonstrates that human and climate impacts, as well as limited and noisy data, cause uncertainties in flood prediction in the great plains, but integrated approaches using remote sensing, big data analytics, and modeling can quantify the hydrological changes and reduce the uncertainties. This dissertation improves the practice of flood forecasting in Red River of the North Basin and advances research in hydrology and snow science