Advancing Dispute Resolution by Unpacking the Sources of Conflict: Toward an Integrated Framework

Organizational leaders, public policy makers, dispute resolution professionals, and scholars have developed diverse methods for resolving workplace conflict. But there is inadequate recognition that the effectiveness of a dispute resolution method depends on its fit with the source of a particular conflict. Consequently, it is essential to better understand where conflict comes from and how this affects dispute resolution. To these ends, this paper uniquely integrates scholarship from multiple disciplines to develop a multi-dimensional framework on the sources of conflict. This provides an important foundation for theorizing and identifying effective dispute resolution methods, which are more important than ever as the changing world of work raises new issues, conflicts, and institutions

Putin and Putnam: Interpreting Russian Military Activity Through a Three Player, Two-Level Game

Is Vladimir Putin a bad strategist, perhaps irrational? Previous military activity by Russia, such as the annexation of Crimea of 2014, yielded limited international gains, at a significant economic and reputational cost. Yet as the 2022 invasion of Ukraine shows, Putin is willing to commit military power, despite the cost of sanctions and other possible retaliation. This three-player simultaneous game, originally created in June, 2021, demonstrates how domestic and international considerations of President Vladimir Putin might lead to otherwise unpredictable Russian military behavior. In this extended version of Robert Putnam’s “two-level game,” President Putin rationally uses the international venue as a field of manipulation towards his domestic audience. He is not a bad strategist; he is playing a different game – for his own benefit. This game foreshadowed the Russian invasion of Ukraine by nine months and describes what to expect next

Choices for U.S. Contributions to NATO: Stability Policing in the Age of Multi-Domain Operations

The United States Army claims they are a “force out of position” and must transform for large-scale combat operations (LSCO). The current narrative toward LSCO warfighting comes at the expense of lessons hard-won over decades of small wars and stability operations. The focus on LSCO is an oversimplification of the complexity and ambiguity of the future operating environment. The Army is trading clarity of narrative at the expense of a force balanced for both LSCO and non-LSCO operations. LSCO perspective assumes a worst-case scenario of war over more likely scenarios of continuous disruptions across a spectrum of conflict, which may include proxies, hybrid warfare, and gray-zone aggression. These ambiguous forms of non-LSCO conflict are most likely to be prevalent amongst the nuclear armed-great powers that current security documents highlight as the most dangerous to western liberal interests. To get ahead of this eventuality while there is still time to program and develop, the Army must consider how to conduct multinational stability operations with its allies and partners, including the employment of stability police. By examining policy, strategic, operational, and tactical considerations, this paper examines four discrete options for stability policing, including a civilian standby police force, cross-training combat forces in stability policing, a Security Force Assistance Brigade-like stability police force, and a National Guard gendarmerie-type construct. After a review of the background, analysis, and synthesis of relevant information, a new understanding is developed that can guide campaigns of learning amongst subject matter experts around the world. Through the evaluation of seven weighted criteria, the National Guard “State Stability Forces” are recommended to replace several National Guard Brigade Combat Teams. In doing so, states gain a capability more aligned with their Title 32 missions. The U.S. Army gains a competition capability, a crisis-response shaper, and a conflict enabler

Preliminary design study - Oxidizer tank relief valve, Flox-Atlas airborne Final report

Protecting fluorine-liquid oxygen Atlas launch vehicle oxidizer tank against overpressurizatio

Preliminary design study - Oxidizer tank helium pressure regulator, Flox-Atlas, airborne Final report

Oxidizer tank helium pressure regulator compatible with fluorine-liquid oxyge

Ilioinguinal and iliohypogastric nerves cannot be selectively blocked by using ultrasound guidance: a volunteer study

Background Ilioinguinal (IL) and iliohypogastric (IH) nerve blocks are used in patients with chronic postherniorrhaphy pain. The present study tested the hypothesis that our method, previously developed in cadavers, blocks the nerves separately and selectively in human volunteers. Methods We blocked the IL and the IH nerves in 16 volunteers in a single-blinded randomized cross-over setting under direct ultrasound visualization, by injecting two times the ED95 volume of 1% mepivacaine needed to block a peripheral nerve. The anaesthetized skin areas were tested by pinprick and marked on the skin. A digital photo was taken. For further analysis, the parameterized picture data were transformed into a standardized and unified coordinate system to compare and calculate the overlap of the anaesthetized skin areas of the two nerves on each side. An overlap <25% was defined as selective block. Results Fifty nerve blocks could be analysed. The mean volume injected to block a single nerve was 0.9 ml. Using ultrasound, we observed spread from one nerve to the other in 12% of cases. The overlap of the anaesthetized skin areas of the nerves was 60.3% and did not differ after exclusion of the cases with visible spread of local anaesthetic from one nerve to the other. Conclusions The IL and IH nerves cannot be selectively blocked even if volumes below 1 ml are used. The most likely explanation is the spread of local anaesthetic from one nerve to the other, although this could not be directly observed in most case

AIRNET: A real-time comunications network for aircraft

A real-time local area network was developed for use on aircraft and space vehicles. It uses token ring technology to provide high throughput, low latency, and high reliability. The system was implemented on PCs and PC/ATs operating on PCbus, and on Intel 8086/186/286/386s operating on Multibus. A standard IEEE 802.2 logical link control interface was provided to (optional) upper layer software; this permits the controls designer to utilize standard communications protocols (e.g., ISO, TCP/IP) if time permits, or to utilize a very fast link level protocol directly if speed is critical. Both unacknowledged datagram and reliable virtual circuit services are supported. A station operating an 8 MHz Intel 286 as a host can generate a sustained load of 1.8 megabits per second per station, and a 100-byte message can be delivered from the transmitter's user memory to the receiver's user memory, including all operating system and network overhead, in under 4 milliseconds

Citizen Co-Learners: A Transgressive March toward Emancipatory Learning

Spanning continents and cultural borders, the writings of Paolo Freire, bell hooks, and Henry Giroux encompass post/decolonial and standpoint epistemologies focused on student-centered approaches. We seek to model peer learning and knowledge production bell hooks commands in Teaching to Transgress: “I have been most inspired by those teachers who have had the courage to transgress those boundaries that would confine each pupil to a rote, assembly-line approach to learning” (13).With these words in mind, we participate in a content analysis of literature and storytelling, creating sites of resistance at educational boundaries in order to increase accessibility to knowledge and scaffold various forms of meaning-making. We use this pedagogy as a springboard for inquiry into the nature of cultural borders within American Civil Rights and Racial Justice movements. Borders constructed by oppressors were locations in which the civil rights movement created moments of resistance, chronicled in the graphic novel March by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell. Claudia Rankine’s, Citizen: An American Lyric, along with her Situation videos, call into question the cultural borders and vernacular dictates which saturate modern Black American citizenry. Her work reflects the racial justices themes present in NPR StoryCorps animated short entitled Traffic Stop. Through analysis of these works, we seek to model content analysis as a form of border-crossing as co-learners in resistance and facilitators of learning as healing, breaking the boundaries between teacher and student, tending to the wounds created by borders between oppressor and oppressed

Thinking Pigs: Cognition, Emotion, and Personality

An exploration of the cognitive complexity of Sus domesticus, the domestic pig