Search results for "Strategic"
showing 10 items of 847 documents
Diet Macronutrient Composition, Physical Activity, and Body Composition in Soldiers During 6 Months Deployment
2018
Abstract Introduction Optimal diet together with good physical fitness maintains readiness and military performance during longer deployments. The purpose of this study was to describe changes in dietary macronutrient and energy intake, total physical activity and body composition during a 6-month deployment in South Lebanon. Furthermore, associations of diet macronutrient intake and physical activity on body composition were also studied. Materials and Methods Forty male soldiers kept a 3-day food diary and their body composition was measured via bioimpedance and ultrasonography. Total physical activity was evaluated by accelerometers in a subgroup of participants. Measurements were conduc…
Personality Traits and Foreign Policy Attitudes in German Public Opinion
2007
This article examines the effects of personality traits on attitudes toward foreign policy issues among the German public. Building on previous research, it argues that personality characteristics shape an individual's motivation, goals, and values, thereby providing criteria to evaluate external stimuli and affecting foreign policy opinions. An analysis of survey data from a random sample of Germans eligible to vote confirms that the personality traits play a role in attitudes toward foreign policy issues. By and large, personality affects foreign policy opinions roughly as strongly as traditional factors such as partisanship, ideology, and social background. Among the traits studied, agr…
Estimating economic severity of Air Traffic Flow Management regulations
2021
The development of trajectory-based operations and the rolling network operations plan in European air traffic management network implies a move towards more collaborative, strategic flight planning. This opens up the possibility for inclusion of additional information in the collaborative decision-making process. With that in mind, we define the indicator for the economic risk of network elements (e.g., sectors or airports) as the expected costs that the elements impose on airspace users due to Air Traffic Flow Management (ATFM) regulations. The definition of the indicator is based on the analysis of historical ATFM regulations data, that provides an indication of the risk of accruing dela…
Counter-Clock World: How Planning Backwards Helps in Moving Forward in Collapsing Environments
2021
Research on corporate decline and turnarounds as well as the strategic use of history have so far remained two separate research fields. We integrate these two fields with a thought experiment, proposing ways in which strategists can work with, and through time in managing and turning around declines. Our thought experiment involves two very different types of analogies: a textual one from Philip K. Dick’s science fiction novels, on the one hand, and a visual one from Einsteinian relativity science, on the other hand. Inspired and informed by these different conceptualizations of the past and time, we develop four forms of backward strategizing to successfully manage a struggling corporatio…
Exploiting historical rainfall and landslide data in a spatial database for the derivation of critical rainfall thresholds
2017
Critical rainfall thresholds for landslides are powerful tools for preventing landslide hazard. The thresholds are commonly estimated empirically starting from rainfall events that triggered landslides in the past. The creation of the appropriate rainfall–landslide database is one of the main efforts in this approach. In fact, an accurate agreement between the landslide and rainfall information, in terms of location and timing, is essential in order to correctly estimate the rainfall–landslide relationships. A further issue is taking into account the average moisture conditions prior the triggering event, which reasonably may be crucial in determining the sufficient amount of precipitation.…
Stochastic Vulnerability Assessment of Masonry Structures: Concepts, Modeling and Restoration Aspects
2019
A methodology aiming to predict the vulnerability of masonry structures under seismic action is presented herein. Masonry structures, among which many are cultural heritage assets, present high vulnerability under earthquake. Reliable simulations of their response to seismic stresses are exceedingly difficult because of the complexity of the structural system and the anisotropic and brittle behavior of the masonry materials. Furthermore, the majority of the parameters involved in the problem such as the masonry material mechanical characteristics and earthquake loading characteristics have a stochastic-probabilistic nature. Within this framework, a detailed analytical methodological approac…
Adapting rail and road networks to weather extremes: Case studies for southern Germany and Austria
2013
Published version of an article in the journal: Natural Hazards. Also available from the publisher at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11069-013-0969-3 The assessment of the current impacts of extreme weather conditions on transport systems reveals high costs in specific locations. Prominent examples for Europe are the economic consequences of the harsh winter periods 2009/2010 and 2010/2011 and the floods in Austria, Eastern Europe, Germany and the United Kingdom in 2005 and 2007. Departing from the EC-funded project WEATHER, this paper delves into the subject of adaptation strategies by revisiting the project’s general findings on adaptation strategies and by adding two specific cases: (1) adv…
A new hybrid procedure for the definition of seismic vulnerability in Mediterranean cross-border urban areas
2016
Assessment of seismic vulnerability of urban areas provides fundamental information for activities of planning and management of emergencies. The main difficulty encountered when extending vulnerability evaluations to urban contexts is the definition of a framework of assessment appropriate for the specific characteristics of the site and providing reliable results with a reasonable duration of surveys and post-processing of data. The paper proposes a new procedure merging different typologies of information recognized on the territories investigated and for this reason called “hybrid.” Knowledge of historical events influencing urban evolution and analysis of recurrent building technologie…
Comparison of Radiosonde and Remote Sensing Data to Evaluate Convective Forest Fire Risk: The Haines Index
2018
Haines Index (HI) has been associated with convective forest fires risk. Temperatures and humidities in low atmospheric levels are required to compute HI and usually, atmospheric sounding data are used for this purpose. However, spatial and temporal resolutions of these data are coarse and remote sensing data could improve them. Therefore, the aim of this work is to test remote sensing data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on board the EOS Aqua satellite, specifically the Level 2 V6 products (AIRX2RET and AIRS2RET), for this purpose. First, we validated the remote sensing data with radiosonde daytime and nighttime data located in the Iberian Peninsula in 2014. Signifi…
Intervention and peace*
2018
Abstract Intervention often does not lead to peace, but rather to prolonged conflict. Indeed, we document that it is an important source of prolonged conflicts. We introduce a theoretical model of the balance of power to explain why this should be the case and to analyse how peace can be achieved: either a hot peace between hostile neighbours or the peace of the strong dominating the weak. Non-intervention generally leads to peace after defeat of the weak. Hot peace can be achieved with sufficiently strong outside intervention. The latter is thus optimal if the goal of policy is to prevent the strong from dominating the weak.