Search results for "Security studies"
showing 10 items of 314 documents
The Rivalry Strategies of Political Parties in Elections to the Assembly of Citizens of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg
2013
The author undertakes to discuss the problem of rivalry strategies of political parties in elections to the Citizens’ Assembly of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. The broadness and multidimensional character of the subject area requires moving beyond the limits of political science and entering other related domains, like broadly-conceived historical sciences, also reaching for a number of establishments within legal-historical domains. Firmly grounded historical, legal, polity-related and political aspects of the unification of Germany in the context of German federalism, encouraged and obligated the author, to attempt to bring the above problem up to date. I think that thanks to a …
The US-EU Security Relationship: The Tensions Between a European and a Global Agenda
2012
The US-EU security relationship: the tensions between a European and a global agenda, by Wyn Rees, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 224 pp., £35.95 (paperback), ISBN 9780230221857 Overshadowed by ...
‘Mind the Gap: IR and the challenge of international politics'
2015
The discipline of International Relations (IR) for a long time of its history has developed in the form of Great Debates that involved competing paradigms and schools. More recently, it has been described as a cacophony of voices unable to communicate among themselves, but also incapable to provide keys to understand an ever more complex reality. This collection aims at evaluating the heuristic value of a selection of traditional paradigms (realism and liberalism), schools (constructivism), and subdisciplines (security studies and international political economy) so as to assess the challenges before IR theory today and the ability of the discipline to provide tools to make the changed worl…
Development of a Low-Cost IoT System for Lightning Strike Detection and Location
2019
Lightning and thunder are some of the most violent natural phenomena. They generate a great deal of expenditure and economic loss, especially when they strike in cities. The identification of the concrete geographic area where they strike is of critical importance for emergency services in order to enhance their effectiveness by doing an intensive coverage of the affected area. To achieve this purpose at the city scale, this paper proposes the design, prototype, and validation of a distributed network of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The IoT devices are empowered with lightning detection capabilities and are synchronized with the other devices in the sensor network. All of them cooperat…
Response spectrum analysis of frame structures: reliability-based comparison between complete quadratic combination and damping-adjusted combination
2019
In the framework of seismic design of structures, response spectrum analysis (RSA) is the most commonly used approach in practice. The most popular combination rule is the complete quadratic combination (CQC) which is also prescribed by the most of seismic design codes and is based on the assumptions that the seismic acceleration is a white noise process and the peak factor ratios associated to the total and modal responses are unitary. Recently, the damping adjusted combination (DAC) rule has been developed for base-isolated structures to overcome the aforementioned simplified assumptions. Although it has been proved that the simplifications about peak factors lead to noticeable errors in …
Precipitation responses to ENSO and IOD in the Maldives: Implications of large-scale modes of climate variability in weather-related preparedness
2020
Abstract This research seeks to address the extent to which indices of large-scale modes of climate variability (El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD)) can be linked to physical differences in the local mean and extreme rainfall conditions experienced in the Maldives in order to suggest implications for disaster risk reduction (DRR). While some significant differences in precipitation metrics do occur at the local level between different phases of the large-scale modes of climate variability studied, they do not occur for all sites studied. While the constrained availability of historical meteorological data in the region is a limiting factor in this analysis, th…
Influence of column shear failure on pushover based assessment of masonry infilled reinforced concrete framed structures: A case study
2017
Structural frames, constructed either of steel or reinforced concrete (RC), are often infilled with masonry panels. However, during the analysis of the structural frames, it has become common practice to disregard the existence of infills because of the complexity in modeling. This omission should not be allowed because the two contributions (of infills and of frames) complement each other in providing a so different structural system. The use of different modeling assumptions significantly affects the capacity as well as the inelastic demand and safety assessment. In specific, the adoption of equivalent diagonal pin-jointed struts leaves open the problem of the evaluation of the additional…
Lumbriculus variegatus (Annelida) biological responses and sediment sequential extractions indicate ecotoxicity of lake sediments contaminated by bio…
2018
Abstract We assessed potential ecotoxicity of lake sediments affected by biomining effluents in northeastern Finland. Growth, reproduction and behavior of the sediment-dwelling oligochaete Lumbriculus variegatus (Muller 1774) were used as ecotoxicity endpoints. Standardized chronic bioassays were used for growth and reproduction, and acute and chronic tests with Multispecies Freshwater Biomonitor (MFB) for behavior assessments. Sequential extractions were used to characterize metal bioavailability and exposure conditions in the sediments, which indicated mining-induced contamination gradients of S, Cu, Ni and U and also bioavailability gradients of S and Ni. Among the ecotoxicity endpoints,…
Using the critical body residue approach to determine the acute toxicity of cadmium at varying levels of water hardness and dissolved organic carbon …
2011
Abstract The linkage between acute adverse effects of cadmium and internal cadmium levels were investigated for the oligochaete worm Lumbriculus variegatus in water at varying degrees of hardness and two different dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentrations. The LC50s for the effect of cadmium on the survival of the worms greatly differed depending on water hardness and DOC. We found less variability in internal metal toxicity metrics (lethal residue; LR50s) than in external toxicity metrics (lethal concentration; LC50s): LC50s varied from 2.4 to 66.1 μmol/L, while LR50s varied only from 226 to 413 μmol/kg wet weight. The cadmium body burden appeared to be independent of exposure conditio…
Monolingual and cross-lingual intent detection without training data in target languages
2021
Due to recent DNN advancements, many NLP problems can be effectively solved using transformer-based models and supervised data. Unfortunately, such data is not available in some languages. This research is based on assumptions that (1) training data can be obtained by the machine translating it from another language