Toward a Global Regime of Vessel Anti-Fouling

Vessel anti-fouling is key to the efficient operation of ships, and essential for effective control of invasive species introduced through international shipping. Anti-Fouling Systems, however, pose their own threats to marine environments. The Anti-Fouling Convention of 2001 banned the use of organotin compounds such as Tributyltin, and created a system for adoption of alternative anti-fouling biocides. In 2011, the Marine Environmental Protection Committee of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) released guidelines on bio-fouling management record keeping, installation, inspection, cleaning, maintenance, design and construction. Though these Guidelines provide a template for more effective and environmentally sound anti-fouling control and implementation, they are not mandatory. This article proposes that the member states of the IMO adopt the 2011 Guidelines as a mandatory instrument

DIRSIG digital imaging and remote sensing imaging generation model: Infrared airborne validation & input parameter analysis

The civilian and military need for high resolution infrared imagery has dramatically increased in recent times. Regardless of the user or the need, infrared imagery can provide unique information that is not available in the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Just as the need for real infrared imagery has increased, so has the need for computer generated infrared imagery, also known as synthetic imagery. Synthetic imagery is created by mathematically modeling the real world and the imaging chain, encompassing everything from the target to the sensor characteristics. The amount of faith that can be placed in a synthetic image depends on its accuracy in recreating the real world. The Digital Imaging and Remote Sensing Image Generation Model (DIRSIG) at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) attempts to model the real world. It creates synthetic images through the integration of scene geometry, ray-tracer, thermal, radiometry, and sensor submodels. The focus of this project lies in evaluating the ability of DIRSIG to recreate the imaging chain and produce high resolution synthetic imagery. DIRSIG synthetic imagery of the Kodak Hawkeye plant and the surrounding area was compared to aerial infrared imagery of the same region using root mean square error and rank order correlation. This comparison helped to validate the output from DIRSIG and detect inadequacies in the image chain model. In addition to validating DIRSIG, a procedure for optimizing the input parameters, incorporating a sensitivity analysis, was developed. This reduces the time involved in creating a realistic and accurate synthetic image

Thermal neutron image intensifier tube provides brightly visible radiographic pattern

Vacuum-type neutron image intensifier tube improves image detection in thermal neutron radiographic inspection. This system converts images to an electron image, and with electron acceleration and demagnification between the input target and output screen, produces a bright image viewed through a closed circuit television system

The End of a Myth: Distributed Transactions Can Scale

The common wisdom is that distributed transactions do not scale. But what if distributed transactions could be made scalable using the next generation of networks and a redesign of distributed databases? There would be no need for developers anymore to worry about co-partitioning schemes to achieve decent performance. Application development would become easier as data placement would no longer determine how scalable an application is. Hardware provisioning would be simplified as the system administrator can expect a linear scale-out when adding more machines rather than some complex sub-linear function, which is highly application specific. In this paper, we present the design of our novel scalable database system NAM-DB and show that distributed transactions with the very common Snapshot Isolation guarantee can indeed scale using the next generation of RDMA-enabled network technology without any inherent bottlenecks. Our experiments with the TPC-C benchmark show that our system scales linearly to over 6.5 million new-order (14.5 million total) distributed transactions per second on 56 machines.Comment: 12 page

Can Turkey Legally Close Its Straits to Russian Warships? It’s Complicated

This article originally appeared in Foreign Policy, March 1, 2022, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/ 01/turkey-black-sea-straits-russia-ships-ukraine-war/

The Attack on the Vasily Bekh and Targeting Logistics Ships

This article originally appeared in Articles of War, the online publication of the Lieber Institute at the U.S. Military Academy, July 11, 2022, https://lieber.westpoint.edu/attack-vasily-bekh-targeting-logistics-ships/