Project HIAM Informal Report, Dec. 1965 - May 1966

Research on planetary atmospheres, Venus dark side emission, ozone concentration, cloud and aerosol scattering, atmospheric radiation scattering, and earth heat budget and albed

Taking Shots at Private Military Firms: International Law Misses its Mark (Again)

Part I of this Article takes a brief tour through military history on the consistent use of mercenaries through the ages, which Peter Singer illuminates masterfully in Corporate Warriors. Next, a brief overview on the binding nature (or not) of international custom and treaty is explored in Part II and then the codifications of international law are taken up in Part III, beginning with the Hague and Geneva Conventions. Several United Nations (“U.N.”) instruments are analyzed for their efficacy in changing the long-standing customary international law on the use of mercenaries and whether or not each is applicable to PMF contractors. Part IV closes out the Article by discussing alternative bodies of domestic law that provide criminal accountability, including the recent case of Alaa Mohammad Ali, a civilian contractor working in Iraq who was convicted on June 23, 2008 by court martial under the recent changes to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (“UCMJ”)

Smart Power for Hard Problems: The Role of Special Operation Forces Strengthening the Rule of Law and Human Rights in Africa

This article will assess the roles and responsibilities of Special Operations Forces (SOF) within the newly created U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) as an active proponent of a so-called “smart power” national security strategy. In particular, it will outline the economic, political, and military challenges faced in Africa; specifically, how and why SOCAFRICA is the U.S. force of choice for promoting human rights and rule of law in Africa. With the goals of the U.S. military in mind, questions will necessarily arise as to “what success looks like” for both the U.S. and African nations, and the roles of each in joint and combined civil–military initiatives. The concluding comments reflect on how these forces must model “what right looks like,” and provide specific modeling failures, and the consequences when that modeling did not take place

Description of Background for the Children’s Book, Ice Cream Next Summer

Ice Cream Next Summer is not meant to be a trip in nostalgia, although it may well serve that purpose for a reader with first hand experience of ice houses, country stores and their period in American history. It is meant to be, as it was for the author, an investigation into a different time and mood of a slower rural Iowa, a discovery of an out-dated occupational task

The thermodynamics of computational copying in biochemical systems

Living cells use readout molecules to record the state of receptor proteins, similar to measurements or copies in typical computational devices. But is this analogy rigorous? Can cells be optimally efficient, and if not, why? We show that, as in computation, a canonical biochemical readout network generates correlations; extracting no work from these correlations sets a lower bound on dissipation. For general input, the biochemical network cannot reach this bound, even with arbitrarily slow reactions or weak thermodynamic driving. It faces an accuracy-dissipation trade-off that is qualitatively distinct from and worse than implied by the bound, and more complex steady-state copy processes cannot perform better. Nonetheless, the cost remains close to the thermodynamic bound unless accuracy is extremely high. Additionally, we show that biomolecular reactions could be used in thermodynamically optimal devices under exogenous manipulation of chemical fuels, suggesting an experimental system for testing computational thermodynamics.Comment: Accepted versio

Ion Migration in Lead Halide Perovskite Solar Cells

As our world faces climate crisis, there is a global need for cheap and efficient solar cell technologies. Perovskite solar cells have emerged as an exciting technology, combining both these aspects of high energy conversion efficiency together with cheap fabrication methods. They would be outstanding if not for the one issue of their instability: nowadays they are unfortunately still too unstable for commercial applications in the photovoltaic sector. One of the reasons behind this instability is the ion migration process taking place in these cells, where ions from the ABX3 perovskite crystal structure start to migrate within the devices. The research question driving this thesis is the following: "How can we reduce ion migration in lead halide perovskite solar cells?" To answer this question, we use an electric spectroscopy technique, Transient Ion Drift (TID), to measure the ion migration dynamics in a variety of perovskite cells. This powerful technique can quantify key parameters in the ion migration process, such as the activation energy for ion migration and the density of mobile ions. We vary the perovskite composition, morphology and interface layer, and find interesting pathways towards more stable perovskite solar cells exhibiting reduced ion migration