Review Essay: In Pursuit of a Disappearing Paradigm

U.S. Naval Strategy and National Security: The Evolution of American Maritime Powe

US-Marinestrategie und Seemacht von der "Maritimen Strategie" (1982-1986) bis zur "Kooperativen Strategie für Seemacht im 21. Jahrhundert" (2007): Politik, Dokumente und Einsätze 1981-2011

The dissertation analyzes the role of the U.S. Navy in U.S. foreign and security policy, spanning the timeframe of 1981-2011. It looks at naval capstone documents in the framework of seapower conceptual thinking. Using historical sources including interviews, the work links the thinking of American naval planners and officers with academic analyses of U.S. Navy strategy.Die Dissertation analysiert die Rolle der US-Seestreitkräfte in der amerikanischen Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik im Zeitraum von 1981 bis 2011. Dazu zieht sie die strategischen Grundlagendokumente heran und bettet es in konzeptionelle Seemachtüberlegungen ein. Die Arbeit zieht geschichtliche Quelle und Interviews heran und verknüpft so das Denken amerikanischer Marineoffiziere und Planungsstäbe mit der wissenschaftlichen Analyse von US-Marinestrategie

Review Essay—The Swartz Festschrift: Conceptualizing Maritime & Naval Strategy: Festschrift for Captain Peter M. Swartz, United States Navy (Ret.)

Captain Peter M. Swartz, USN (Ret.), has been a prominent figure in the maritime-strategy world since the early 1980s, playing a key role in the development and articulation of the noted 1980s Maritime Strategy. After retirement from active duty, he joined the staff at the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA), where he became a noted archivist and analyst of USN strategy documents, as well as an adviser to many naval officers and academics who dealt with strategy. On his retirement from CNA, two academics who had benefited from Swartz’s mentorship put together a Festschrift—a volume of essays to honor him and his work—in this case, on maritime strategy. As the authors note, a Festschrift is a rather rare kind of document, whose purpose for publication is rather narrow

Context-awareness in task automation services by distributed event processing

Everybody has to coordinate several tasks everyday, usually in a manual manner. Recently, the concept of Task Automation Services has been introduced to automate and personalize the task coordination problem. Several user centered platforms and applications have arisen in the last years, that let their users configure their very own automations based on third party services. In this paper, we propose a new system architecture for Task Automation Services in a heterogeneous mobile, smart devices, and cloud services environment. Our architecture is based on the novel idea to employ distributed Complex Event Processing to implement innovative mixed execution profiles. The major advantage of the approach is its ability to incorporate context-awareness and real-time coordination in Task Automation Services

Electron beam induced softening of fused silica

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Constitutive modeling of indentation cracking in fused silica

Fused silica shows three distinct regimes during nanoindentation, that is, plastic deformation, inelastic densification, and cracking. Cohesive zone FEM is used to study these regimes for different indenter geometries. In a three-dimensional model, the median/radial cracking is considered by introducing cohesive element planes that are aligned along the indenter edges perpendicular to the indented surface. In addition to comparing indentation cracking data with experimental data, the role of densification on indentation crack growth is critically examined using a pressure independent von Mises and a pressure dependent Drucker-Prager Cap constitutive model. The results show that the Drucker-Prager Cap model delivers an accurate description of the elastic-plastic deformation conditions for all examined indenter geometries. Material densification leads to shorter crack lengths and thus the approach by Lawn, Evans and Marshall (LEM) [1] results in larger indentation-based fracture toughness values (Equation 1). Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract

Interactive Robot Task Learning: Human Teaching Proficiency with Different Feedback Approaches

The deployment of versatile robot systems in diverse environments requires intuitive approaches for humans to flexibly teach them new skills. In our present work, we investigate different user feedback types to teach a real robot a new movement skill. We compare feedback as star ratings on an absolute scale for single roll-outs versus preference-based feedback for pairwise comparisons with respective optimization algorithms (i.e., a variation of co-variance matrix adaptation -evolution strategy (CMA-ES) and random optimization) to teach the robot the game of skill cup-and-ball. In an experimental investigation with users, we investigated the influence of the feedback type on the user experience of interacting with the different interfaces and the performance of the learning systems. While there is no significant difference for the subjective user experience between the conditions, there is a significant difference in learning performance. The preference-based system learned the task quicker, but this did not influence the users’ evaluation of it. In a follow-up study, we confirmed that the difference in learning performance indeed can be attributed to the human users’ performance

Cd[B2(SO4)4] and H2[B2(SO4)4] – a phyllosilicate-analogous borosulfate and its homeotypic heteropolyacid

Borosulfates consist of heteropolyanionic networks of corner-shared (SO4)- and (BO4)-tetrahedra charge compensated by metal or non-metal cations. The anionic substructures differ significantly, depending on the different branching of the silicate-analogous borosulfate building blocks. However, only one acid has been characterized by single crystal X-ray diffraction so far. Herein, we present H-2[B-2(SO4)(4)] as the first phyllosilicate analogue representative, together with the homeotypic representative Cd[B-2(SO4)(4)]. The latter can be considered the cadmium salt of the former. Their crystal structures and crystallographic relationship are elucidated. For H-2[B-2(SO4)(4)], the bonding situation is examined using Hirshfeld-surface analysis. Further, the optical and thermal properties of Cd[B-2(SO4)(4)] are investigated by FTIR and UV-Vis spectroscopy, thermogravimetry, as well as temperature-programmed powder X-ray diffraction

Promoting the Furan Ring-Opening Reaction to Access New Donor-Acceptor Stenhouse Adducts with Hexafluoroisoproponal

Donor–acceptor Stenhouse adducts (DASAs) are visible‐light‐responsive photoswitches with a variety of emerging applications in photoresponsive materials. Their two‐step modular synthesis, centered on the nucleophilic ring opening of an activated furan, makes DASAs readily accessible. However, the use of less reactive donors or acceptors renders the process slow and low yielding, which has limited their development. We demonstrate here that 1,1,1,3,3,3‐hexafluoro‐2‐propanol (HFIP) promotes the ring‐opening reaction and stabilizes the open isomer, allowing greatly reduced reaction times and increased yields for known derivatives. In addition, it provides access to previously unattainable DASA‐based photoswitches and DASA–polymer conjugates. The role of HFIP and the photochromic properties of a set of new DASAs is probed using a combination of 1H NMR and UV/Vis spectroscopy. The use of sterically hindered, electron‐poor amines enabled the dark equilibrium to be decoupled from closed‐isomer half‐lives for the first time