Leveraging Naval Diplomacy to Reinforce Economic Programs and Compete with China

NPS NRP Executive SummaryAs competition between the U.S. and China intensifies, the U.S. Navy must plan and implement its overseas operations and diplomatic activities to advance U.S. influence. The main purpose of this study is to assess how the USN can leverage its operations and activities to reinforce U.S. economic programs and enhance U.S. influence. Building on an innovative influence framework developed by two of the investigators, it will systematically assess how USN activities and operations such as joint exercises, port calls, humanitarian assistance and disaster response, and training programs, generate influence in three important U.S. partner nations with significant Chinese investment and/or security presence: Chile, Senegal, and the United Arab Emirates. The project will also identify specific ways that USN activities can reinforce USG economic programs and build effective partnerships, specifying the most productive activity groupings, effective sequencing arrangements, and potential obstacles to interagency coordination. The project will produce a final report, as well as briefings to the sponsor and other interested audiences in the Navy. The report will consist of three country case studies and a comparative analysis of their findings. The precise organization and format of the deliverables will be designed to suit the needs of the topic sponsor. Interim reports will be provided to keep the sponsor apprised of our progress and to solicit feedback during the course of study.N3/N5 - Plans & StrategyThis research is supported by funding from the Naval Postgraduate School, Naval Research Program (PE 0605853N/2098). https://nps.edu/nrpChief of Naval Operations (CNO)Approved for public release. Distribution is unlimited.

Safe, in situ methodologies for the destruction of triacetone triperoxide and other explosive peroxides

Triacetone triperoxide (TATP) and other explosives of the peroxide family are safely degraded in situ. Nano and micron size metal particles in an elemental state include pure iron and magnesium or iron and magnesium particles that are mechanically alloyed with palladium and nickel. The metal particles are used in both the elemental state and in emulsions that are made from water, a hydrophobic solvent, such as corn oil, and a food-grade nonionic surfactant. The neat metals and emulsified zero valent metals (EZVM) safely degrade TATP with the major degradation product being acetone. The EZVM system absorbs and dissolves the TATP into the emulsion droplets where TATP degradation occurs. EZVM systems are ideal for degrading dry TATP crystals that may be present on a carpet or door entrance. Both the neat metal system and the emulsion system (EZVM) degrade TATP in an aqueous slurry

Releasing the Inner Artist: Approaching Activities Programming in Long Term Care from a Creative Arts Therapies Perspective

Citation: Sigman, K.L. (2015). Releasing the Inner Artist: Approaching Activities Programming in Long Term Care from a Creative Arts Therapies Perspective. (Unpublished masters report). Kansas State University, Kansas.Master of ScienceGerontologyResidents in long term care facilities still suffer from a poor quality of life, despite the passage of legislation and recent efforts of culture change to make improvements. Engagement in the creative process may be the key to improvement. Research emphasizes the positive impacts creativity can have on well-being in the later years of life. The focus of creative arts therapies is on the facilitation of the creative process. These therapies can therefore serve as a model for activities directors, in order to create programming that focuses on the creative process and harnesses the benefits of creative activity. Programming that utilizes the creative arts therapies model will emphasize the following aspects of creativity: mastery, identity, connection, and meaning-making. Programming in long term care should also include the following components of creative arts therapies to ensure emphasis on the creative process: safe space, group cohesion, ritualized structure, and adaptability. This analysis explores how quality of life in long term care facilities can be improved by approaching activities programming from a creative arts therapies perspective. My personal position and challenges to incorporating this model are also discussed

Learning from the children : exploring preschool children's encounters with ICT at home

This paper is an account of our attempts to understand preschool children's experiences with information and communication technologies (ICT) at home. Using case study data, we focus on what we can learn from talking directly to the children that might otherwise have been overlooked and on describing and evaluating the methods we adopted to ensure that we maximised the children's contributions to the research. By paying attention to the children's perspectives we have learned that they are discriminating users of ICT who evaluate their own performances, know what gives them pleasure and who differentiate between operational competence and the substantive activities made possible by ICT

Strong correlations between text quality and complex networks features

Concepts of complex networks have been used to obtain metrics that were correlated to text quality established by scores assigned by human judges. Texts produced by high-school students in Portuguese were represented as scale-free networks (word adjacency model), from which typical network features such as the in/outdegree, clustering coefficient and shortest path were obtained. Another metric was derived from the dynamics of the network growth, based on the variation of the number of connected components. The scores assigned by the human judges according to three text quality criteria (coherence and cohesion, adherence to standard writing conventions and theme adequacy/development) were correlated with the network measurements. Text quality for all three criteria was found to decrease with increasing average values of outdegrees, clustering coefficient and deviation from the dynamics of network growth. Among the criteria employed, cohesion and coherence showed the strongest correlation, which probably indicates that the network measurements are able to capture how the text is developed in terms of the concepts represented by the nodes in the networks. Though based on a particular set of texts and specific language, the results presented here point to potential applications in other instances of text analysis.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figure

Noise in neurons is message-dependent

Neuronal responses are conspicuously variable. We focus on one particular aspect of that variability: the precision of action potential timing. We show that for common models of noisy spike generation, elementary considerations imply that such variability is a function of the input, and can be made arbitrarily large or small by a suitable choice of inputs. Our considerations are expected to extend to virtually any mechanism of spike generation, and we illustrate them with data from the visual pathway. Thus, a simplification usually made in the application of information theory to neural processing is violated: noise {\sl is not independent of the message}. However, we also show the existence of {\sl error-correcting} topologies, which can achieve better timing reliability than their components.Comment: 6 pages,6 figures. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (in press