Bush, Obama and a faith-based US foreign policy

In a calculated move to appeal to his core constituency during his first term, President George W. Bush launched domestic and international faith-based initiatives designed to leverage public finance for religious groupings to carry out social and welfare functions formerly performed by government or secular organizations. In December 2002 the Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (CFBCI) was extended to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The Center's intention was to 'create a level playing field' for faith-based and community groups to compete for foreign assistance funding. These presidential initiatives are problematic, however, calling into question the first amendment-the separation of church and state. Upon taking office Barack Obama set up the Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, promising a greater emphasis on community/neighbourhood programs. The CFBCI remains a fixture in USAID and Obama shows as much enthusiasm for the initiative as his predecessor. Faith-based international relations and political science scholars have sought to build on these initiatives and call for a greater role for faith in US foreign policy. On the eve of the 2012 presidential election, this article considers the claims for a faith-based foreign policy by examining the construction of a faith-based discourse by academics and successive presidents. Using faith-based initiatives and USAID as a case-study, the article discusses criticisms of the policy and focuses on the role of a conservative evangelical organization, Samaritan's Purse, to illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of faith-based approaches. © 2012 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2012 The Royal Institute of International Affairs

International Religious Freedom Promotion and US Foreign Policy

The freedom to practice one’s religious belief is a fundamental human right and yet, for millions of people around the world, this right is denied. Yearly reports produced by the US State Department, United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, Open Doors International, Aid to the Church in Need and Release International reveal a disturbing picture of increased religious persecution across much of the world conducted at individual, community and state level conducted by secular, religious, terrorist and state actors. While religious actors both contribute to persecution of those of other faiths and beliefs and are involved in peace and reconciliation initiatives, the acceptance of the freedom to practice one’s faith, to disseminate that faith and to change one’s faith and belief is fundamental to considerations of the intersection of peace, politics and religion. In this article, I examine the political background of the United States’ promotion of international religious freedom, and current progress on advancing this under the Trump administration. International Religious Freedom (IRF) is contentious, and seen by many as the advancement of US national interests by other means. This article argues that through an examination of the accomplishments and various critiques of the IRF programme it is possible, and desirable, to discover what works, and where further progress needs to be made, in order to enable people around the world to enjoy freedom of thought, conscience and religion

Detection of Fatigue Crack Growth in a Simulated Aircraft Fuselage

Acoustic emission (AE) nondestructive testing can detect fatigue cracks as they occur in complex structures. One use for AE has been in-flight detection of fatigue cracks in aircraft. The KC-135 aircraft were successfully monitored as early as 1979. The main problem with this and subsequent applications was an unfavorable signal to noise ratio, the key being to separate the small amplitude crack signals from the large amplitude ambient noise. This was accomplished here through the use of a Kohonen self-organizing map (SOM) neural network. In order to simulate a fuselage undergoing fatigue, a pressure vessel was constructed from a 0.040 inch thick 2024-T3 aluminum cylinder. The vessel contained a rivet line, a round hole with a notch filed in it to provide a stress concentration, and a repair patch and was cyclically pressurized from 20 to 80 psi in order to fatigue the aluminum and generate typical in-flight signals. During the test, AE sensors, powered by a data acquisition system, collected the AE parameter data from metal rubbing at the patch, rivet fretting at the rivet line, and fatigue crack propagation at the stress concentration. The SOM successfully separated the crack signals from the rivet and rubbing signals. A prototype system is currently being built by Martingale Research Corporation to provide aircraft with a real time in-flight fatigue crack growth monitoring capability

Public conceptions and constructions of 'British values': A qualitative analysis

This article draws on original focus group research to explore constructions of ‘British values’, in ‘everyday’ discourse. Two prominent, yet competing, conceptions of this term are identified: political/institutional and social/cultural. Although each of these conceptions risks essentialising ‘British values’, this risk is mitigated by publics in at least three ways: (i) explicit recognition of the term’s ambiguities; (ii) discussion of its political motivations and exclusionary outcomes; and, (iii) identification of qualitative change in the meaning of ‘British values’ over time. As the first exploration of public understandings of this term, their differences, and these complications, the paper offers three contributions: (i) adding breadth to existing studies of everyday nationalism through focus on ‘British values’ specifically; (ii) shedding light on this trope’s work in broader conversations around social and political life in the UK; and (iii) facilitating reflection on the reception of, resistance to, and re-making of elite political discourse

MERMoTT - A multimedia based tool supporting the teaching of entity - relationship modelling within a framework of Structured Systems Analysis.

MERMoTT, Multimedia Entity - relationship modelling Tutor and Tool, is a Microsoft Windows based Computer Aided Learning (CAL) package aimed at the support of first year undergraduates in their study of Structured Analysis techniques, specifically Entity-relationship modelling. The package grew from a final year undergraduate project proposed by the author as a reaction to his needs as a first year lecturer in Systems Analysis. The paper seeks to show the development of MERMoTT as a possible solution to the problems which can arise from the teaching of abstract graphical notations such as these. The paper outlines the difficulties faced by educators in the field of Systems Analysis and how the package, which is based around the CORE approach, seeks to overcome these

Discrete Routh Reduction

This paper develops the theory of abelian Routh reduction for discrete mechanical systems and applies it to the variational integration of mechanical systems with abelian symmetry. The reduction of variational Runge-Kutta discretizations is considered, as well as the extent to which symmetry reduction and discretization commute. These reduced methods allow the direct simulation of dynamical features such as relative equilibria and relative periodic orbits that can be obscured or difficult to identify in the unreduced dynamics. The methods are demonstrated for the dynamics of an Earth orbiting satellite with a non-spherical $J_2$ correction, as well as the double spherical pendulum. The $J_2$ problem is interesting because in the unreduced picture, geometric phases inherent in the model and those due to numerical discretization can be hard to distinguish, but this issue does not appear in the reduced algorithm, where one can directly observe interesting dynamical structures in the reduced phase space (the cotangent bundle of shape space), in which the geometric phases have been removed. The main feature of the double spherical pendulum example is that it has a nontrivial magnetic term in its reduced symplectic form. Our method is still efficient as it can directly handle the essential non-canonical nature of the symplectic structure. In contrast, a traditional symplectic method for canonical systems could require repeated coordinate changes if one is evoking Darboux' theorem to transform the symplectic structure into canonical form, thereby incurring additional computational cost. Our method allows one to design reduced symplectic integrators in a natural way, despite the noncanonical nature of the symplectic structure.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures, numerous minor improvements, references added, fixed typo

Discrete Variational Optimal Control

This paper develops numerical methods for optimal control of mechanical systems in the Lagrangian setting. It extends the theory of discrete mechanics to enable the solutions of optimal control problems through the discretization of variational principles. The key point is to solve the optimal control problem as a variational integrator of a specially constructed higher-dimensional system. The developed framework applies to systems on tangent bundles, Lie groups, underactuated and nonholonomic systems with symmetries, and can approximate either smooth or discontinuous control inputs. The resulting methods inherit the preservation properties of variational integrators and result in numerically robust and easily implementable algorithms. Several theoretical and a practical examples, e.g. the control of an underwater vehicle, will illustrate the application of the proposed approach.Comment: 30 pages, 6 figure

Phase-fitted Discrete Lagrangian Integrators

Phase fitting has been extensively used during the last years to improve the behaviour of numerical integrators on oscillatory problems. In this work, the benefits of the phase fitting technique are embedded in discrete Lagrangian integrators. The results show improved accuracy and total energy behaviour in Hamiltonian systems. Numerical tests on the long term integration (100000 periods) of the 2-body problem with eccentricity even up to 0.95 show the efficiency of the proposed approach. Finally, based on a geometrical evaluation of the frequency of the problem, a new technique for adaptive error control is presented