"The Fewer the Men, The Greater the Honor": The Naval Doctrine of Republicanism in the First Barbary War

The First Barbary War was a naval conflict fought between the United States and Tripoli from 1801-1805 over the payment of “tribute” to Tripoli so they would not seize American merchant ships. The Jefferson Administration believed that the war would not take more than a few months but it ended up lasting a desultory four years. There were two main theoretical concepts that impacted the war – the idea of the proper role and size of a republican military power and the internal struggle of the U.S. Navy for professionalism and leadership. These two concepts influenced the development of the naval doctrine of republicanism for the U.S. Navy which can be characterized by limited size, firm, yet humane leadership, and aggressiveness toward the enemy. This doctrine is best exemplified by Commodore Edward Preble’s who had a great impact on the young naval officers who fought under him and who would come to lead the U.S. Navy for years afterward

Beyond Personal Identity

This thesis is concerned with what it is to be a person, and with what is involved in being the same person over time. I begin by making a survey of the major theories of personal identity, and mark some important divisions and distinctions between them, primarily between Reductionism and Non-Reductionism and, within this former category, between the Physical and Psychological Criteria, and argue that none of these ha5 proved to be satisfactory. I stress the importance of the work of Derek Parfit, and in particular his shifting of the agenda away from the relation of identity to that of 'Relation R', and his claim that it is the holding of this latter relation - namely psychological continuity by any means - that contains 'all that matters' to us regarding the future, and not necessarily whether I survive. I show how this theory avoids the pitfalls that defeated the other theories, and propose various developments of it. A critical eye is then cast over the methodology of thought-experimentation, so long the cornerstone of philosophical studies of personal identity, whereby conclusions are derived from considerations regarding what we would say if certain hypothetical states of affairs were to occur. The concept of 'theoretical possibility' is employed in order to determine the limits of applicability of such thought-experiments. Many of the most influential arguments and theories regarding issues of personal identity are found to be flawed due to misuse of this methodology, and their conclusions are judged to be unwarranted. The remainder of the thesis is concerned with identifying and discussing issues regarding personal identity that remain, once a more modest methodological framework is imposed. These concern the nature and the limits of psychological unity and continuity, and focus on real-life conditions, both typical and pathological, and are rooted within scientific research (particularly the neuro-sciences) rather than imaginative speculation. My conclusions are for the most part negative, arguing that not only the answers, but the very questions that have been traditionally posed regarding personal identity cease to be relevant, once the flaws in the framework that supported them have been exposed

Bovine and human becomings in histories of dairy technologies: robotic milking systems and remaking animal and human subjectivity

This paper positions the recent emergence of robotic or automatic milking systems (AMS) in relation to discourses surrounding the longer history of milking technologies in the UK and elsewhere. The mechanisation of milking has been associated with sets of hopes and anxieties which permeated the transition from hand to increasingly automated forms of milking. This transition has affected the relationships between humans and cows on dairy farms, producing different modes of cow and human agency and subjectivity. In this paper, drawing on empirical evidence from a research project exploring AMS use in contemporary farms, we examine how ongoing debates about the benefits (or otherwise) of AMS relate to longer-term discursive currents surrounding the historical emergence of milking technologies and their implications for efficient farming and the human and bovine experience of milk production. We illustrate how technological change is in part based on understandings of people and cows, at the same time as bovine and human agency and subjectivity are entrained and reconfigured in relation to emerging milking technologies, so that what it is to be a cow or human becomes different as technologies change. We illustrate how this results from – and in – competing ways of understanding cows: as active agents, as contributing to technological design, as ‘free’, as ‘responsible’ and/or as requiring surveillance and discipline, and as efficient co-producers, with milking technologies, of milk

Distributed computing and farm management with application to the search for heavy gauge bosons using the ATLAS experiment at the LHC (CERN)

The Standard Model of particle physics describes the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces between the fundamental particles of ordinary matter. However, it presents several problems and some questions remain unanswered so it cannot be considered a complete theory of fundamental interactions. Many extensions have been proposed in order to address these problems. Some important recent extensions are the Extra Dimensions theories. In the context of some models with Extra Dimensions of size about $1 TeV^{-}1$, in particular in the ADD model with only fermions confined to a D-brane, heavy Kaluza-Klein excitations are expected, with the same properties as SM gauge bosons but more massive. In this work, three hadronic decay modes of some of such massive gauge bosons, Z* and W*, are investigated using the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), presently under construction at CERN. These hadronic modes are more difficult to detect than the leptonic ones, but they should allow a measurement of the couplings between heavy gauge bosons and quarks. The events were generated using the ATLAS fast simulation and reconstruction MC program Atlfast coupled to the Monte Carlo generator PYTHIA. We found that for an integrated luminosity of $3 × 10^{5} pb^{-}1$ and a heavy gauge boson mass of 2 TeV, the channels Z*->bb and Z*->tt would be difficult to detect because the signal would be very small compared with the expected backgrou nd, although the significance in the case of Z*->tt is larger. In the channel W*->tb , the decay might yield a signal separable from the background and a significance larger than 5 so we conclude that it would be possible to detect this particular mode at the LHC. The analysis was also performed for masses of 1 TeV and we conclude that the observability decreases with the mass. In particular, a significance higher than 5 may be achieved below approximately 1.4, 1.9 and 2.2 TeV for Z*->bb , Z*->tt and W*->tb respectively. The LHC will start to operate in 2008 and collect data in 2009. It will produce roughly 15 Petabytes of data per year. Access to this experimental data has to be provided for some 5,000 scientists working in 500 research institutes and universities. In addition, all data need to be available over the estimated 15-year lifetime of the LHC. The analysis of the data, including comparison with theoretical simulations, requires an enormous computing power. The computing challenges that scientists have to face are the huge amount of data, calculations to perform and collaborators. The Grid has been proposed as a solution for those challenges. The LHC Computing Grid project (LCG) is the Grid used by ATLAS and the other LHC experiments and it is analised in depth with the aim of studying the possible complementary use of it with another Grid project. That is the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network C omputing middle-ware (BOINC) developed for the SETI@home project, a Grid specialised in high CPU requirements and in using volunteer computing resources. Several important packages of physics software used by ATLAS and other LHC experiments have been successfully adapted/ported to be used with this platform with the aim of integrating them into the LHC@home project at CERN: Atlfast, PYTHIA, Geant4 and Garfield. The events used in our physics analysis with Atlfast were reproduced using BOINC obtaining exactly the same results. The LCG software, in particular SEAL, ROOT and the external software, was ported to the Solaris/sparc platform to study it's portability in general as well. A testbed was performed including a big number of heterogeneous hardware and software that involves a farm of 100 computers at CERN's computing center (lxboinc) together with 30 PCs from CIEMAT and 45 from schools from Extremadura (Spain). That required a preliminary study, development and creation of components of the Quattor software and configuration management tool to install and manage the lxboinc farm and it also involved the set up of a collaboration between the Spanish research centers and government and CERN. The testbed was successful and 26,597 Grid jobs were delivered, executed and received successfully. We conclude that BOINC and LCG are complementary and useful kinds of Grid that can be used by ATLAS and the other LHC experiments. LCG has very good data distribution, management and storage capabilities that BOINC does not have. In the other hand, BOINC does not need high bandwidth or Internet speed and it also can provide a huge and inexpensive amount of computing power coming from volunteers. In addition, it is possible to send jobs from LCG to BOINC and vice versa. So, possible complementary cases are to use volunteer BOINC nodes when the LCG nodes have too many jobs to do or to use BOINC for high CPU tasks like event generators or reconstructions while concentrating LCG for data analysis

Developing learner autonomy through the use of a revised learner training programme (RLTP) in King Mongkut's University of Technology Thornburi

This thesis reports the case study research on the effectiveness of a revised version of the original learner training programme which had been integrated into a compulsory English course at King Mongut's University of Technology Thonburi. The Revised Learner Training Programme (RLTP) aimed at providing an environment which encouraged learner autonomy expressed in such features as freedom in learning, an opportunity to make decisions in learning as well as hands-on experience in independent learning so that the students would develop positive attitudes towards being autonomous in learning. It also emphasised the use of metacognitive strategies which helped the students to be self-directed, knowing how to plan, monitor and evaluate their learning performance.The data indicated that the students perceived freedom in learning resulting from being allowed to make decisions in learning, working in groups, and discussing in class. This experience increased the students' motivation to learn English and encouraged them to adopt a deep approach to learning which suggested that they were involved in the learning process actively and interested in the course content. The data indicated an increase in learner autonomy manifested in students' improvement of their attitudes to independent learning mode and confidence to learn by themselves, which might encourage them to undertake the self-study in the self-access centre voluntarily. The data also indicated the effect of the change in relationship between the teacher and the students which made the students feel closer to the teacher. The results from the training on how to use metacognitive strategies indicated that the students used metacognitive strategies more often after the RLTP and they were aware of the usefulness of metacognitive strategies, especially planning. The data suggested factors that might influence the effectiveness of the RLTP, e.g. learning environment and hands-on experience.The implications of the research focus on the development of learner autonomy creating a closer teacher/student relationship which seemed to be teacher-dependent. Nevertheless, the dependence came from the reassurance the students needed while moving into a new approach. The implications also raised the issue of whether learner-autonomy is universal or a cultural construct

Achieving more consistent yields of quality fruit in the Australian Avocado industry

Irregular bearing was identified as a major issue in the Australian avocado industry. An opportunity existed to provide Australian avocado growers with the knowledge required to implement practices that would lead to a more consistent supply of good quality avocado fruit from year to year. The target audience was Australian avocado producers, many of whom were new to growing avocados. Consultants, advisers and re-sellers were also encouraged to participate so the information could be leveraged to growers. There were five main activities: (a) Engage Australia’s commercial avocado growers in a series of regional farm workshops where they would learn about practices that would lead to more consistent yields of high quality fruit. (b) Encourage growers to become more observant in their orchards during the flowering, fruitset and fruit shedding time and therefore be able to implement practices to optimise fruitset and retention. (c) Encourage growers to make use of the ‘Growing’ section of the industry’s on-line ‘Best Practice Resource’ (BPR) to get the most up-to-date information on growing avocados. Part of the strategy was to add new information such as reports and videos on a regular basis. The BPR is intended as a ‘one-stop-shop’ for the Australian avocado industry for information covering all aspects of the industry including comprehensive advice on growing the crop. (d) Update avocado plant nutrition guidelines after a survey of practices and trends, a review of same by a panel of experts and a literature review of avocado plant research. (e) Attend the World Avocado Congress IX in Peru in 2015 to network and find out about the latest research and also visit leading orchards in Peru and Chile on the same trip to learn about the latest developments in orchard practices. Co-organising the grower study tour in Chile attended by 12 Australian participants. Extend the information and applicable production practices to the Australian industry