17 research outputs found
An assessment of email and spontaneous dialog visualizations
No full textAbstract not availableMarcus A. Butavicius, Michael D. Lee, Brandon M. Pincombe, Louise G. Mullen, Daniel J. Navarro, Kathryn M. Parsons and Agata McCorma
Mass action models of Falklands War battles
No full textWe develop a dataset describing variables associated with six Falklands War battles: combatant numbers; deaths; temporal aspects; and offensive support. Linear relationships between battle duration and deaths necessitate using force and loss ratios to remove temporal variation. Mass action models of battle attrition fit this dataset poorly (at best coefficient of determination ). The low level rules in simulations used by military force designers frequently share assumptions with, or are, mass action models. Errors in force balance or constitution are dangerous so exposing problems with and exploring improvements on existing combat models is important. While six data points are too few for a thorough analysis, our results are consistent with: a linear relationship between time in danger and number killed; different times in danger for the two sides, dependent on detection and lethality ranges; and data substructure, even when temporal aspects are removed through ratio models. This data substructure indicates at least one extra variable needs to be considered. We contend that this variable is related to suppression, and this contention is not falsified by the high use of offensive support in the most successful attacks. Mathematical modellers should consider cancelling out temporal variation in combat datasets through ratio models and/or exploring the effects of mutable detection and lethality ranges. Suppression is an attempt to manage exposure to death, to introduce non-stationarity and irregularity into the dataset to benefit the suppressor, to change the bounds of the system using a soft controller; we should investigate how to model it. Force designers should ask simulation modellers whether the mathematical models underlying their simulations represent suppression accurately (or at all) and rethink reductions of simultaneously delivered offensive support available on demand based on models ignoring suppression.
References J. B. A. Bailey. Field artillery and firepower. Routledge, London, 2009. A. Baudry. La Bataille navale: etudes sur les facteurs tactiques. 1912. Translated by C. F. Atkinson. The naval battle: Studies of the tactical factors. Hugh Rees, London, 1914. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k11639411/f9.image S. Biddle. Military power: Explaining victory and defeat in modern battle. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2004. F. D. J. Bowden, B. M. Pincombe and P. B. Williams. Feasible scenario spaces: A new way of measuring capability impacts. In T. Weber, M. J. McPhee and R. S. Anderssen (eds), MODSIM2015, 836–842, 2015. http://www.mssanz.org.au/modsim2015/D3/bowden.pdf D. Brown. The Royal Navy and the Falklands War. Pen and Sword Books, Barnsley, UK, 1987. J. V. Chase. Sea fights: A mathematical investigation of the effect of superiority of force in combats upon the sea. Naval War College Archives, RG 8, Box 109, XTAV (1902), 1902. A. J. Echevarria. After Clausewitz: German military thinkers before the Great War. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA, 2001. J. A. English and B. I. Gudmundsson. On infantry. Praeger, Westport, CT, USA, 1994. B. A. Fiske. American Naval Policy. U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January 1905. L. Freedman. The official history of the Falklands Campaign, Volume 2: War and diplomacy. Routledge, London, 2005. G. Fremont-Barnes. The Falklands 1982: Ground operations in the South Atlantic. Osprey, Oxford, UK, 2012. https://ospreypublishing.com/the-falklands-2130 S. Fitz-Gibbon. Not mentioned in despatches: The history and mythology of the Battle of Goose Green. The Lutterworth Press, Cambridge, UK, 1995. http://www.lutterworth.com/product_info.php/products_id/1019 T. R. Hogan. No shells, no attack! The use of fire support by three Commando Brigade Royal Marines during the 1982 Falkland Islands War. AD-A208862, US Army War College, PA, USA, 1989. http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a208862.pdf. L. R. Kosowski, A. Pincombe and B. Pincombe. Irrelevance of the fractal dimension term in the modified fractal attrition equation. ANZIAM J, 52:C988–C1011, 2011. doi:10.21914/anziamj.v52i0.3963 F. W. Lanchester. Aircraft in warfare: The dawn of the fourth arm. Constable, London, 1916. https://archive.org/details/aircraftinwarfar00lancrich C. D. Landry. British artillery during Operation Corporate. Masters Thesis, United States Marine Corps Command and Staff College, 2002. http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a401278.pdf. T. W. Lucas and T. Turkes. Fitting Lanchester equations to the Battles of Kursk and Ardennes. Nav. Res. Log., 51:95–116, 2004. doi:10.1002/nav.10101 J. Millikan, M. Wong and D. Grieger. Suppression of dismounted soldiers: Towards improving dynamic threat assessment in closed loop combat simulations. In J. Piantadosi, R. S. Anderssen and J. Boland (eds), MODSIM2013, 1054–1060, 2013. http://www.mssanz.org.au/modsim2013/D1/millikan.pdf M. Osipov. The influence of the numerical strength of engaged forces in their casualties. Translated by R. L. Helmbold and A. S. Rehm. Nav. Res. Log., 42:435–490, 1995. doi:10.1002/1520-6750(199504)42:3<435::AID-NAV3220420308>3.0.CO;2-2 R. Peterson. On the logarithmic law of combat and its application to tank combat. Oper. Res., 15:557–558, 1967. doi:10.1287/opre.15.3.557 A. H. Pincombe and B. M. Pincombe. Markov modelling of the effectiveness of arms sanctions: A case study of the Falklands War. ANZIAM J., 48:C527–C541, 2006. doi:10.21914/anziamj.v48i0.80 A. H. Pincombe and B. M. Pincombe. Tractable approximations to multistage decisions in air defence scenarios. ANZIAM J., 49:C273–C288, 2007. doi:10.21914/anziamj.v49i0.349 A. H. Pincombe, B. M. Pincombe and C. E. M. Pearce. Putting the art before the force. ANZIAM J., 51:C482–C496, 2010. doi:10.21914/anziamj.v51i0.2584. A. H. Pincombe, B. M. Pincombe and C. E. M. Pearce. A simple battle model with explanatory power. ANZIAM J., 51:C497–C511, 2010. doi:10.21914/anziamj.v51i0.2585 A. H. Pincombe and B. M. Pincombe. Dispersed combat as many-on-many search: Solving generalised Lanchester equations. ANZIAM J. to appear. doi:10.21914/anziamj.v57i0.10447 B. M. Pincombe and A. H. Pincombe. Scoping a flexible deployment framework using adversarial scenario analysis. Int. J. Intell. Def. Supp. Sys., 3(3/4):225–262, 2010. doi:10.1504/IJIDSS.2010.037092 B. M. Pincombe, S. Blunden, A. H. Pincombe and P. Dexter. Ascertaining a hierarchy of dimensions from time-poor experts: Linking tactical vignettes to strategic scenarios. Technol. Forecast. Soc., 80(4):584–598, 2013. doi:10.1016/j.techfore.2012.05.001 R. H. Scales. Firepower in limited war. National Defense University Press, Washington, DC, 1993. G. Smith. Battle atlas of the Falklands War 1982 by Land, Sea, and Air. Naval-History.net, Penarth, UK, 2006. http://www.naval-history.net/NAVAL1982FALKLANDS.htm G. Hubbard. HMS Yarmouth: Captains Diary. http://www.hms-yarmouth.com/co.diary.htm
Tractable approximations to multistage decisions in air defence scenarios
No full textSimulations are commonly used to investigate the control and resource allocation problems associated with pitting aircraft against ground based air defences. Such simulations rapidly become computationally intractable as units are added. Previous work described an envelope method that retains computational tractability if the lowest and highest cost target sequences can be defined a priori and used to establish solution bounds. This approach must be modified to be applied to the more common case where there are no obvious best or worst sequences of targets. We show that these bounding sequences can be approximated by using binary comparisons and by basing decisions on a heuristic. This approach compares well with exact results in some computationally tractable situations.
References R. E. Ball, The Fundamentals of Aircraft Combat Survivability Analysis and Design (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1985). D. Ghose, M. Krichman, J. L. Speyer and J. S. Shamma, Modeling and analysis of air campaign resource allocation: A spatio-temporal decomposition approach, IEEE Transactions on systems, man and cybernetics- Part A: Systems and humans 32 (2002) 403--418. Jose B. Cruz Jr, Marwan A. Simaan, Aga Gacic, Huihui Jiang, Bruno Letellier, Ming Li and Yong Liu, Game-theoretic modeling and control of a military air operation, IEEE Transactions on aerospace and electronic systems 37 (2001) 1393--1405. Eric V. Larson and Glenn A. Kent, A new methodology for assessing multilayer missile defence options, Monograph Report, RAND Corporation (1994) . W. McEneany, B. Fitzpatrick and I. Lauko, Stochastic game approach to air operations, IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems 40 (2004) 1191--1216. A. H. Pincombe and B. M. Pincombe, A Markov decision model for tactical military engagements, Proceedings of ASOR2001 (2001) . A. H. Pincombe and B. M. Pincombe, A Markov based method for military analysis, Bulletin of the Australian Society for Operations Research 22 (2003) . A. H. Pincombe and B. M. Pincombe, Markov modelling on the effectiveness of sanctions: A case study of the Falklands war, in Proceedings of the 13th Biennial Computational Techniques and Applications Conference, CTAC-2006 (eds. Wayne Read and A. J. Roberts), Volume 48 of ANZIAM J., http://anziamj.austms.org.au/ojs/index.php/ANZIAMJ/article/view/80 [November 14, 2007], C527--C541. A. Tversky and I. Simonson, Context-dependent preferences, Management Science 39 (1993) 1179--1189. Yong Liu, Marwan A. Simaan and Jose B. Cruz Jr, An application of dynamic Nash task assignment strategies to multi-team military air operations, Automatica 39 (2003) 1469--1479
Putting the art before the force
No full textProceedings of EMAC 2009, held at the Unversity of Adelaide, 6-9th December 2009We use a dataset from the Battle of Kursk to test three estimators of attrition: linear, quadratic and log dependence on the number of soldiers in each force. Data giving force numbers per day show significant collinearity, so we use force and loss ratios for our tests. We demonstrate that the strongest correlate in the dataset for a sides attrition is its own force strength. This supports the log estimator, and we evaluate the proposition that this counterintuitive connection is a product of the pre-battle art of war, where commanders attempt to balance their forces to their expectations of threat. Thus expected losses generate actual force numbers whereas we seek information on the ways that force numbers generate actual losses, and both processes are based on the same correlation information. We argue that the dataset must still contain information on the mechanisms of attrition, so we widen our search criteria and uncover some remarkable facts. © Austral. Mathematical Soc. 2010.A. H. Pincombe, B. M. Pincombe and C. E. M. Pearc
Cross-lingual latent semantic analysis
No full textCross-lingual information retrieval is a difficult task typically involving query translation into multiple languages followed by monolingual retrieval in each language. Latent Semantic Analysis allows cross-lingual retrieval without translating queries by working from an already existing corpus of translations. Thus, collecting such a corpus obviates the need to construct complicated translation tools, making this technique particularly applicable to querying less commercially appealing languages. First, we extend work on retrieval from an English-French corpora split into training and test sets to examine the effects of training on a corpus from a completely different. Success is measured by the proportion of direct translations correctly considered most similar by Latent Semantic Analysis. Secondly, an English only similarity task from the literature is also extended to train on a different corpus to the one being tested on. Here the degradation in performance is measured through examining the variation in the correlations between the inter-document similarity judgements calculated by Latent Semantic Analysis and an experimentally derived baseline of human judgements of inter-document similarity. Higher order indexing schemes discarding uncommon terms, sparse matrix representations and the removal of factors with very low eigenvalues are used to enhance efficiency. Performance degradation from exogenous training is shown in both cases. The best results occur using stopping, log-entropy weighting and over 500 factors.
References K. Boerner. Extracting and visualizing semantic structures in retrieval results for browsing. In Peter J. Nuernberg, David L. Hicks and Richard Furuta, editors, Proceedings of the fifth ACM conference on Digital libraries, pages 234--235. ACM 2000. doi:http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/336597.336672 Deerwester, S. C., Dumais, S. T., Landauer, T. K., Fernas, G. W. and Harshman, R. A., Indexing by Latent Semantic Analysis, Journal of the American Society of Information Science, 41, 1990, 391--407. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199009)41:6<391::AID-ASI1>3.0.CO;2-9 S. T. Dumais, T. K. Landauer and M. L. Littman. Automatic cross-linguistic information retrieval using Latent Semantic Indexing. In SIGIR'96 - Workshop on Cross-Linguistic Information Retrieval, pages 16--23. ACM, 1996. T. K. Landauer and M. L. Littman. Fully automatic cross-language document retrieval using latent semantic indexing. In Gregory Grefenstette, editor, Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Conference of the UW Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary and Text Research, pages 31--38. UW Centre for the New OED and Text Research, Waterloo Ontario, 1990. Landauer, T. K., Littman, M. L. and Stornetta, W. S., A statistical method for cross-language information retrieval. Unpublished manuscript, 1992. Landauer, T. K., Foltz, P. W. and Laham, D., Introduction to Latent Semantic Analysis, Discourse Processes, textbf{25}, 1998, 259--284. Lloyd, R. and Shakiban, C., Improvements in Latent Semantic Analysis, American Journal of Undergraduate Research, 3, 2004, 29--34. http://www.ajur.uni.edu/v3n2 B. Pincombe. Comparison of Human and Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) Judgements of Pairwise Document Similarities for a News Corpus. Research Report DSTO-RR-0278. DSTO, 2004. http://dspace.dsto.defence.gov.au/dspace/bitstream/1947/3334/1/DSTO-RR-0278%0PR.pdf P. G. Young. Cross-language information retrieval using latent semantic indexing. Technical Report UT-CS-94-259. University of Tennessee, 1994. M. D. Lee, B. M. Pincombe and M. B. Welsh. An empirical evaluation of models of text document similarity. In Bruno G. Bara, Lawrence Barsalou and Monica Bucciarelli, editors, Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pages 1254--1259. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/2440/2891
Irrelevance of the fractal dimension term in the fractal attrition equation
No full textThe modified Fractal Attrition Equation (mFAE) models the casualties produced by Map Aware Non-uniform Automata (MANA), an agent based combat modelling distillation, at each MANA time step. The mFAE has three important differences from the simple early twentieth century models of casualties that used only the numbers on each side to make predictions. Firstly, only those agents within range of the enemy may inflict casualties. Secondly, the detection range is assumed to be greater than the range of weapons and a fitting factor assumed to represent the gap between these two ranges, is introduced. This builds in one of the assumptions of Network Centric Warfare, that you will be able to see your enemies before they can shoot at you. Thirdly, and novelly, a fractal dimension is introduced. We postulate that the important part of the information used in calculating the fractal dimension has already been incorporated into the model through the consideration of range. We test this hypothesis by comparing the outcomes of the mFAE with and without the fractal term on three scenarios: that used by the developers of the mFAE; best practice MANA tactics from the literature; and a rout scenario. When the two models are scaled to fit the MANA casualties there is no significant difference in fit. We conclude that the fractal term in the mFAE is redundant.
References J. V. Chase, Sea fights, a mathematical investigation of the effect of superiority of force in. RG 8, Box 109, XTAV(1902), Naval War College Archives. F. W. Lanchester, Aircraft in warfare: the dawn of the fourth arm---No. V, The principle of concentration, Engineering 98: 422--423, (1914). http://www.archive.org/details/aircraftinwarfar00lancrich N. J. MacKay, Lanchester combat models, Mathematics Today, 42, pp.170--173, 2006. http://arXiv.org/abs/math/0606300v1 T. W. Lucas and T. Turkes Fitting Lanchester models to the battles of Kursk and Ardennes. Nav Res Log 51: 95--116 (2004). G. C. McIntosh and M. K. Lauren, Incorporating fractal concepts into equations of attrition for military conflicts, Journal of the Operational Research Society, 2(59): 703--713, (2008). doi:10.1057/palgrave.jors.2602383 M. K. Lauren Firepower concentration in cellular automaton combat models---an alternative to Lanchester, Journal of the Operational Research Society, 53: 672--679, (2002). doi:10.1057/palgrave.jors.2601355 M. K. Lauren, J. M. Smith, J. Moffat and N. D. Perry Using the fractal attrition equation to construct a metamodel of the MANA cellular automaton combat model, The Technical Cooperation Program, Joint Systems and Analysis Group, Technical Panel 3, November 2005. G. C. McIntosh, D. P. Galligan, M. A. Anderson and M. K. Lauren, MANA (Map Aware Non-uniform Automata) Version 4 User Manual, DTA Technical Note 2007/3 NR 1465. http://arxiv.org/abs/nlin/0607051v1 J. Moffat, J. Smith and S. Witty, Emergent behaviour: Theory and experimentation using the mana model, Journal of Applied Mathematics and Decision Sciences---JAMDS , 2006, pp.1--14, 2006. doi:10.1155/JAMDS/2006/54846 D. R. Shine, An Exploratory Study of the Army-as-a-System Core Skills: Comparing the Effectiveness of Warfighting Tactics Using MANA, DSTO-TR-1663, (2005), DSTO (Australia). P. Grassberger and I. Procaccia, Characterization of strange attractors, Phys Rev Lett 50(5): 346--349 (1983). doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.50.346 J. G. Eisenhauer, Regression through the Origin, Teaching Statistics, 25(3): 76--80, (2003)
Rethinking assessment for the science modules in the first year nursing programme: Final project report
No full textThis project evaluated an innovative assessment tool that was developed to provide evidence that students were developing science-informed competence for nursing. Measuring and assessing competence in nursing education is a current world-wide concern, with few solutions offered (Anderson, 2008; Cowan et al., 2005; Lauder et al., 2008; Pincombe et al., 2007). At Waikato Institute of Technology, the prescription of Nursing Council of New Zealand (NCNZ) nursing competencies into the science modules of the Bachelor of Nursing curriculum commenced in 2009. Examination of the alignment of pedagogy, curriculum and assessment revealed that existing methods of assessment did not effectively assess all aspects of competence.
This research project investigated what tools could be used to assess evidence of the development of all aspects of science-informed competence in nursing education, and developed a new assessment tool. The tool was evaluated in terms of its construct, concurrent and consequential validity through a variety of data collection methods.
Findings indicated that the new assessment tool enabled assessment of all aspects of competence, including the contribution of student attitudes, values and abilities. It was also effective in providing students with opportunities to make links between science learning and nursing practice. Questionnaire and focus group results indicated that most students had some understanding of the purpose of the assessment tool and understood the practical test as linking to a ‘nursing perspective’. However, the students’ overall perception of the assessment was negative.
We concluded that this was influenced by three main variables; the length of the test, the readability and format of assessment items, and the perceived unfamiliarity of the assessment conditions (Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2007). As a result of these findings, recommendations for practice and further research are offered
Detecting stress from imaging photoplethysmography using high frame rate video and a yellow-green filter: A pilot study
No full textWe investigate the use of a yellow-green filter to increase the signal-to-noise ratio (snr) in imaging photoplethysmography (iPPG) and test if high frame rate (HFR) video improves the accuracy of the derived heart rate variability (HRV). This pilot study is associated with a broader program to use iPPG to detect and monitor stress levels using HRV. To improve the snr of the iPPG signal, we employ two HFR colour video cameras of which one was fitted with a yellow-green filter (corresponding to the haemoglobin absorption peak within the visible spectrum). To our knowledge, the benefit of a yellow-green filter has never been explored. The predominant influence on HRV comes from the autonomic nervous system (ANS), which connects directly to the heart and cues the human body to relax or to stress. The linkage of HRV to the ANS makes HRV a proxy for stress levels. The HRV is derived from the iPPG signal by first using a cubic spline interpolation for more precise peak detection, and then calculating the inter-beat intervals from the peak-to-peak time differences. Instead of interpolating the signal, we hypothesise that a more accurate HRV measurement can be obtained using a HFR video camera, in our case at 200 frames per second.
References
E. B. Blackford, J. R. Estepp, and D. J. McDuff. Remote spectral measurements of the blood volume pulse with applications for imaging photoplethysmography. In G. L. Cote, editor, Optical Diagnostics and Sensing XVIII: Toward Point-of-Care Diagnostics, volume 10501, page 105010Z. International Society for Optics and Photonics, SPIE, 2018. doi:10.1117/12.2291073.
M. Brayne. Trauma and Journalism: A Guide For Journalists, Editors and Managers. DART Center for Journalism and Trauma, 2007. https://dartcenter.org/sites/default/files/DCE_JournoTraumaHandbook.pdf.
L. F. C. Martinez, G. Paez, and M. Strojnik. Optimal wavelength selection for noncontact reflection photoplethysmography. In Proceedings of the 22nd Congress of the International Commission for Optics: Light for the Development of the World, volume 8011, page 801191. International Society for Optics and Photonics, SPIE, 2011. doi:10.1117/12.903190.
Y. Sun, S. Hu, V. Azorin-Peris, R. Kalawsky, and S. E. Greenwald. Noncontact imaging photoplethysmography to effectively access pulse rate variability. J. Biomed. Optics, 18(6):061205, 2013. doi:10.1117/1.JBO.18.6.061205.
A. M. Unakafov. Pulse rate estimation using imaging photoplethysmography: generic framework and comparison of methods on a publicly available dataset. Biomed. Phys. Eng. Exp., 4(4):045001, 2018. doi:10.1088/2057-1976/aabd09
