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Columbia in the Nation’s Service: Warner Burke and the Education of U.S. Army Leaders
No full textIn 1969, Columbia University banned Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) from campus. In 2004, Teachers College’s Warner Burke, a senior professor of psychology and Army officer veteran, saw an opportunity to close this civil–military gap. Burke partnered with West Point to educate West Point cadets’ primary leader developers, its 36 company tactical officers, through hosting them annually in a world-class Master of Social-Organizational Psychology. In 2010, Burke welcomed the Army Fellows program to campus, bringing in one or two senior Army officers a year to study under his mentorship. Since Burke courageously showed the way, Columbia has welcomed ROTC back to campus and now boasts the largest numbers of veteran students in the Ivy League. Most recently, Burke built a third program, this one to educate critical Army leaders who historically did not have access to elite higher education, its noncommissioned officer corps
Genetic algorithms for redundancy in interaction testing
No full textIt is imperative for testing to determine if the components within large-scale software systems operate functionally. Interaction testing involves designing a suite of tests, which guarantees to detect a fault if one exists among a small number of components interacting together. The cost of this testing is typically modeled by the number of tests, and thus much effort has been taken in reducing this number. Here, we incorporate redundancy into the model, which allows for testing in non-deterministic environments. Existing algorithms for constructing these test suites usually involve one fast algorithm for generating most of the tests, and another slower algorithm to complete the test suite. We employ a genetic algorithm that generalizes these approaches that also incorporates redundancy by increasing the number of algorithms chosen, which we call stages. By increasing the number of stages, we show that not only can the number of tests be reduced compared to existing techniques, but the computational time in generating them is also greatly reduced
The Effect of Air Humidity on the Exergy Efficiency of Domestic Heat Pumps
No full textHeat pump systems have been used for decades in refrigeration and the upgrading of heat to temperature levels demanded by consumers. Private housing in Northern Europe and other countries is moving away from direct electric heating, combustion-based heating and even district heating in favour of heat pumps that use a cheap renewable heat source and electricity. The system purchase is motivated by an attractive coefficient of performance (COP), the option to reverse the heat pump operation from heating during winter to cooling during summer, and the increasing availability of (cheap) zero-CO2 electricity. Assessment of the energy efficiency of heat pump systems using exergy analysis is complicated by features of the heat reservoirs, such as humidity of air in a building envelope, becoming important besides temperature levels. In modern buildings, exhaust air heat recovery (EAHR) systems replace the air inside a building every few hours, with a net in- or outflux of humidity as side-effect. In this paper, an exergy analysis is presented that quantifies energy efficiency of a heat pump system as partly determined by the humidity of a building envelope being heated using a ground source or air source heat pump. Humidity control introduces a significant energy penalty. As shown, an EAHR unit can result in a significant increased exergy efficiency, adding to the benefits offered by the heat pump, depending on indoor versus outdoor temperature and humidity, and whether a ground source or air source heat pump is used. Using weather data for 2018, during the coldest months a ground heat source heat pump is clearly more efficient than an air source heat pump for maintaining a modern housing space in Finland at 22 °C and 50% relative humidity year-round. Exergy (in practice electricity) consumption is 20% higher for an air source heat pump compared to a ground source heat pump, with maximum exergy efficiencies of 14% and 11.5%, respectively. Integration with an EAHR system can add up to 20%-points to the exergetic efficiency, irrespective of the type of heat pump making also that a powerful investment
Holistic Cyber Education
Get PDFThis paper provides a multi-level, multidisciplinary approach for holistically integrating cyber into a student’s academic experience. Our approach suggests formally integrating cyber throughout an institution’s curriculum, including within the required general education program, in electives from a variety of disciplines, as multi-course threads, as minors, and in numerous cyber-related majors. Our holistic approach complements in-class curricula with both a pervasive cyber-aware environment and experiential, outside-the-classroom activities that apply concepts and skills in real-world environments. The goal of our approach is to provide all educated individuals a level of cyber education appropriate for their role in society. Throughout the description of our approach, we include examples of its implementation at the United States Military Academy.https://digitalcommons.usmalibrary.org/books/1024/thumbnail.jp
Popular Culture and the Military
No full textThis chapter consolidates just over 100 books and journal articles at the intersection of the military and popular culture in the social science and humanities studies literature. All studies are English language publications and focus on popular culture and the military in the United States and the United Kingdom. The studies coalesce around 18 distinctive topics known as genres in the popular culture literature. The genres include literature/books, films, television, mass media, music, video games, board games, fashion, photography, and sports. Eight emerging genres include food, technology, graffiti, scandals, social media, toys, celebrities, and comics. Most studies are published in the journal Armed Forces & Society followed by the Journal of Popular Culture; Critical Military Studies; and Media, War & Conflict, among other journals, books, and edited volumes. Qualitative methods and films dominate the popular military culture studies. Popular military culture is a burgeoning subdiscipline
Engaging Students through an Interactive Mass Balance Fundamentals Demonstration
No full textEmploying mass balance concepts is one of the fundamental approaches to address many of the National Academy of Engineering’s Grand Challenges of the 21st century. Of the five stated grand challenges, the incorporation of mass balance principles is central to understanding and resolving four of the five technical challenges while it supports and informs decision making in the fifth. For burgeoning environmental engineers, the understanding of mass balance concepts is foundational for recognizing and solving the complex multimedia environmental problems they will face. Environmental engineering curricula therefore requires students to fully understand and demonstrate proficiency in the application of mass balance concepts. Unfortunately, many students struggle to initially visualize key aspects and understand assumptions used with the mass balance approach. A five-minute demonstration provides a visual, interactive classroom experience that improves understanding and learning for a broad spectrum of students’ learning style preferences. The approach presented in this paper has been successfully used in an introductory environmental engineering course taught predominantly to non-engineering majors as part of a three-course environmental engineering sequence. Current data suggests that the incorporation of this demo improves student understanding of mass balance concepts evidenced by improved quantitative testing scores over the past two years. Though longitudinal data is forthcoming on the efficacy on long term retention, we strive for each non-engineering major in the sequence to be able to more broadly contextualize and solve complex problems using mass balance principles by incorporating a deliberate systematic approach. Indeed, for our students to tackle the grand challenges of this century, they must be able to understand the inherent interconnectedness of global and regional environmental systems
Teaching Web-Attacks on a Raspberry Pi Cyber Range
No full textCyber ranges are an important tool for teaching cyber security techniques. However, setting up a cyber range for classroom use can be costly. Prior work on lowering the cost of cyber ranges focuses on open source solutions and virtual machines. Yet, these solutions do not reduce the cost of physical components - namely, the underlying hardware used to build the range. In this paper, we describe a prototype cyber range built out of Raspberry Pis, a type of inexpensive single board computer. To illustrate the functionality of the range, we use Docker and Docker Swarm to deploy a vulnerable web server across four Raspberry Pi nodes and assess it in an undergraduate classroom. Our cyber range costs under $250.00 to build and consumes less than 25 Watts of power. We open-source our materials and provide pre-built Docker images on Docker Hub to enable others to use our work. Our results suggest that cyber ranges built using Raspberry Pi clusters can lower cost and enhance cyber security education
Risk Analysis of Live Fire Shoot House Containment Systems Against Multiple Projectile Impacts
No full textMany analytical and numerical models exist that can describe the effect of single projectile impacts on steel targets. These models are not adequate for the evaluation of live fire shoot house containment systems, which are subjected to repeated impact loading from small caliber projectiles over the lifetime of the structure. Models assuming perfectly rigid projectiles over-predict penetration depths. Models assuming rigid targets cannot predict any penetration, and hydrodynamic models are best suited to high velocity impacts well above the ranges of conventional ordinance. Development of sufficient analytical or numerical tools using traditional techniques would be either intractable, empirically based and unique to a given scenario, require unique material properties that are not commonly available, or require significant computational effort. Due to the limited amount of empirical data on multiple impact failure, classical reliability methods are not suitable for assessing the probability of containment system perforation. Using existing experimental results of .223 caliber ammunition against AR500 steel panels with 2-inch ballistic rubber, a commonly found protective system in these facilities, the cumulative effects of multiple projectiles were quantified to estimate the number of impacts required to perforate the target material. Impacts were simulated from normal distributions of the x and y coordinates describing the impact point using a cartesian coordinate plane. The impact resistance of the steel was also simulated from a triangular distribution to account for the variability of the experimental results. Monte Carlo Simulation was then used to estimate the expected number of impacts to cause failure at a single point on the target. Using this collective model, it was possible to determine that the distribution of the number of rounds to cause target failure approached a normal distribution. The results indicated that the mean impacts at failure was 11800 with a standard deviation of 800 impacts. Finally, targeting the allowable risk level for structural failure from the JCSS probabilistic model code from the simulated normal distribution, it was determined that the safe number of impacts was approximately 7996. Decision makers can utilize the safe number of impacts to inform training guidance for the future use of facilities and to develop effective inspection requirements. This model can also be adapted to evaluate similar training facilities and to assess how other small caliber projectile impacts would affect live fire shoot house containment systems, providing a useful tool for the design and analysis of future and the assessment of existing facilities for use with ammunition that did not exist during its design
Building the Army’s Artificial Intelligence Workforce
No full textIntroducing AI capabilities into the military will impact virtually all Army warfighting functions, including: mission command (e.g., battlefield virtual assistant for command and control), movement and maneuver (e.g., self-driving tanks, helicopters, and other vehicles), fires (e.g., autonomous weapon systems and AI-enabled targeting), sustainment (e.g., predictive maintenance and logistics), protection (e.g., anomaly detection to protect critical infrastructures), intelligence (e.g., AI-based information collection, data fusion and analysis), and special operations. Creating a robust AI workforce challenges the Army’s organizational capacity to best leverage and grow AI talent. At a minimum, changes are needed to ensure that resources will be available to complement the AI workforce changes, but that they will be available in a way that will better support the Army’s operating forces