The Air Warrior\u27s Value of National Security Space

The 2001 Report of the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization recommended that U.S. efforts in national security space be elevated to the highest national security priority. With more focused high-level attention on national security space decisions a measure that captures and quantities the value of space capabilities to combat operations professionals is desired. This thesis models what the air warriors desire from space assets in combat. A Value-Focused Thinking (VFT) approach was used to elicit values from air combat experts with operational experience. An initial Gold Standard value model was constructed and validated by air combat experts with recent experience in joint air operations. The strategic objective Leverage National Security Space Capabilities to Enhance Air Combat Operations was decomposed into values which were structured into a hierarchy. Measures and value functions were identified for the bottom-tier values which were weighted locally to assess their relative importance. The research identified measures of merit with thresholds beneath which value at higher levels is eliminated resulting in a multiplicative value function using indicator variables. An additional result is the separation of communication and navigation measures into pre-flight and in- fight components which has not been documented in previous literature

Development of an unsupervised remote sensing methodology of detect surface leakage from terrestrial CO2 storage sites

Imperial Users onl

Social work with airports passengers

Social work at the airport is in to offer to passengers social services. The main methodological position is that people are under stress, which characterized by a particular set of characteristics in appearance and behavior. In such circumstances passenger attracts in his actions some attention. Only person whom he trusts can help him with the documents or psychologically

Afferents integration and neural adaptive control of breathing

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references.The respiratory regulatory system is one of the most extensively studied homeostatic systems in the body. Despite its deceptively mundane physiological function, the mechanism underlying the robust control of the motor act of breathing in the face of constantly changing internal and external challenges throughout one's life is still poorly understood. Traditionally, control of breathing has been studied with a highly reductionist approach, with specific stimulus-response relationships being taken to reflect distinct feedback/feedforward control laws. It is assumed that the overall respiratory response could be described as the linear sum of all unitary stimulus-response relationships under a Sherringtonian framework. Such a divide-and-conquer approach has proven useful in predicting the independent effects of specific chemical and mechanical inputs. However, it has limited predictive power for the respiratory response in realistic disease states when multiple factors come into play. Instead, vast amounts of evidence have revealed the existence of complex interactions of various afferent-efferent signals in defining the overall respiratory response. This thesis aims to explore the nonlinear interaction of afferents in respiratory control. In a series of computational simulations, it was shown that the respiratory response in humans during muscular exercise under a variety of pulmonary gas exchange defects is consistent with an optimal interaction of mechanical and chemical afferents. This provides a new understanding on the impacts of pulmonary gas exchange on the adaptive control of the exercise respiratory response. Furthermore, from a series of in-vivo neurophysiology experiments in rats, it was discovered that certain respiratory neurons in the dorsolateral pons in the rat brainstem integrate central and peripheral chemoreceptor afferent signals in a hypoadditive manner. Such nonlinear interaction evidences classical (Pavlovian) conditioning of chemoreceptor inputs that modulate the respiratory rhythm and motor output. These findings demonstrate a powerful gain modulation function for control of breathing by the lower brain. The computational and experimental studies in this thesis reveal a form of associative learning important for adaptive control of respiratory regulation, at both behavioral and neuronal levels. Our results shed new light for future experimental and theoretical elucidation of the mechanism of respiratory control from an integrative modeling perspective.by Chung Tin.Ph.D

Applications of dynamical systems in ecology

This thesis consists of five original pieces of work contained in chapters 2, 4, 6, 7 and 8. These cover four topics within the subject area of theoretical ecology: epidemiology, chaos in ecology, evolution and spatially extended ecological systems. Chapter 2 puts forward a new mechanism for producing chaos in ecology. We show that near extinctions in the SEIR model stabilise a chaotic repeller. This mechanism works for a wide-range of parameter values and so resolves the debate about which dynamic regime is associated with realistic values. It also highlights the problem of treating fluctuations as being either deterministically or stochastically produced. Chapter 4 describes a new technique for identifying chaos based on measuring the divergence of trajectories over a range of spatial scales. It correctly identifies noise scales and chaos in model systems and is also applied to some real ecological data sets. In chapters 4 and 5 we set evolutionary game theory in a nonlinear dynamical framework. We introduce a powerful new tool, the selective pressure, for analysing ecological models and identifying evolutionary stable states. It allows analysis of systems where complex attractors exist. We also study the evolution of phenotypic distributions and provide a new mechanism for evolutionary discontinuities. In chapter 6 we look at an individually-based spatially extended system. This model is spatially heterogeneous and stochastic. However we show that the dynamics on a certain scale are deterministic and low-dimensional. We show how to identify the most efficient spatial scale at which to monitor the system

Generic nuclear safety issues : methods of analysis

"Prepared for: Nuclear Safety Analysis Center."Includes bibliographical references (leaves 223-231

Advanced Sensing and Image Processing Techniques for Healthcare Applications

This Special Issue aims to attract the latest research and findings in the design, development and experimentation of healthcare-related technologies. This includes, but is not limited to, using novel sensing, imaging, data processing, machine learning, and artificially intelligent devices and algorithms to assist/monitor the elderly, patients, and the disabled population