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Military Academy (military + academy)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences50%

Selected Abstracts

Women in a Man's World: Gender Differences in Leadership at the Military Academy

JOURNAL OF APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 12 2004
Matthew J. Morgan
This study responds to a deficiency of research on military leadership gender differences in spite of widespread interest in women in the military in policymaking and academic circles of various fields. Although scholarship in the field of women's leadership in recent years has asserted that there are stylistic differences between male and female leaders, there were few major differences in this study of 12 specific areas of leadership rated by 3 types of raters. Of the 36 possible occurrences of a statistically significant gender difference, only 6 manifested themselves in the cadet leader ratings. As a whole, evidence supports minimal gender differences in leadership performance or style in the West Point Class of 1998. [source]

An autonomous tracked vehicle with omnidirectional sensing

JOURNAL OF FIELD ROBOTICS (FORMERLY JOURNAL OF ROBOTIC SYSTEMS), Issue 8 2004
R. David Hampton
Operation of an autonomous vehicle along a marked path, in an obstacle-laden environment, requires path detection, relative position detection and control, and obstacle detection and avoidance. The design solution of the team from the U.S. Military Academy is a tracked vehicle operating open-loop in response to position information from an omnidirectional mirror, and to obstacle-detection input from the mirror and from a scanning laser. The use of a tracked rather than a wheeled vehicle is the team's open-loop solution to the problem of wheeled-vehicle slippage on wet and sandy surfaces. The vehicleresponds to sensor information from (1) a digital camera-mounted parabolic omnidirectional mirror for visual inputs and (2) a scanning laser for detecting obstacles in relief. Raw sensor data is converted synchronously into a global virtual context, which places the vehicle's center at the origin of a 2-D Cartesian coordinate system. A four-phase process is used to convert the camera's inputs into the data structures needed to reason about the vehicle's position relative to the course. Development of the path plan proceeds incrementally, using a space-sweeping algorithm to identify safe paths along waypoints within the course boundaries. An attempt is made to minimize translation errors by favoring paths which exhibit fewer sharp turns. Integration of Intel's OpenCV computer vision library and the Independent JPEG Group's JPEG library allow for very good encapsulation of the low-level functions needed to do most of the image processing. Ada95 is the language of choice for the majority of the team-developed software, except where needed to interface to motors and sensors. Use of an object-oriented high-level language has been invaluable in leveraging the efforts of previous years' development activities, and for maximizing the ability to log or otherwise respond to anomalous behavior. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source]

Is There a Stabilizing Selection Around Average Fertility in Modern Human Populations?

POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT REVIEW, Issue 3 2001
Ulrich Mueller
Possibly the greatest challenge for an evolutionary explanation of demographic transition is the fact that fertility levels universally start to fall first among the well-to-do, well-educated, healthy classes, which can be explained only by some voluntary or at least adaptive action. The problem of how restraints on fertility could have evolved by natural selection has been tackled with group selection models as well as with stabilizing selection models. The latter model, which is critically discussed in this article, posits that some intermediate (rather than maximal) level of fertility is optimal for long-term reproductive success. Tests of stabilizing selection in human populations are rare, their results inconclusive. Here four sets of data are analyzed: they are samples drawn from the 'class of 1950 of the US Military Academy at West Point (cohorts 1923,29), retired US noncommissioned officers (cohorts 1913,37), and western German and eastern German physicians (cohorts 1930,35), all containing fertility data over two generations, and from European royalty (cohorts 1790,1939) containing fertility data over four generations. Deterministic as well as stochastic fitness measures are used. It is found that maximal, not average, fertility in the first generation leads to maximal long-term reproductive success. Also against prediction, no decreasing marginal fitness gains by increasing fertility can be observed. The findings leave little space for considering stabilizing selection as a plausible mechanism explaining the course of demographic transition but indicate instead that biological evolution today is as fast and vigorous as ever in human history. Even in large populations, all people living today may be the descendants of just some few percents,a much smaller proportion than generally believed, of the people living some generations ago. [source]

A Survey of Portuguese Mathematics in the Nineteenth Century

CENTAURUS, Issue 4 2000
Luis M. Ribeiro Saraiva
Résumé La reforme de l'Université Portugaise en 1772, qui avait pour but la mettre au niveau des meilleures Universités d'Europe, n'a pas eu le temps de se développer, opposée par des forces rétrogrades. En conséquence de ce fait et du climat d'agitation politique et sociale qui a caractérisé la Portugal dans la première moitié du dixneuvième siècle, la production mathématique dans cette époque fut minimale. Les académies militaires étaient alors les principaux centres de transmission des connaissances mathématiques, et les articles de mathématique en ce temps étaient publiés dans sa majorité par l'Académie de Sciences de Lisbonne. Dans la deuxième moitié du dixneuvième siècle le Portugal entra dans une période de stabilité. La reforme de l'enseignement de 1836, et les nouveaux status de l'Académie de 1851 ont proporcionné un développement de l'activité mathématique, qui fut acompagnée de la restructuration des académies militaires ou de leur transformation en Ecoles Polytechniques; l'Ecole Polytechnique de Lisbonne fut spécialement importante. A partir de 1877, avec la publication du premier journal de mathématique qui ne dépendait pas de l'Académie, et qui avait pour but spécifique briser l'isolement des mathématiques portugaises, la recherche en ce champs s'est encore plus développée. Dans la dernière partie de cet article nous donnons quelques éléments sur la vie et l'oeuvre de deux importants mathématiciens portugais du dixneuvième siècle: Daniel Augusto da Silva (1814,1878) et Francisco Gomes Teixeira (1851,1933). Abstract The Portuguese University was briefly reformed in 1772, aiming to bring it to the level of its European counterparts; but this was soon cut short by the return to power of reactionary forces. As a consequence of this, and the political and social unrest that characterized the first half of the nineteenth century in Portugal, there was very little production of mathematics in this period. The military academies were the main centres of transmission of mathematical knowledge, and mathematical works were mostly published by the Lisbon Academy of Sciences. In the second half of the nineteenth century the country entered a period of stability. The education reform of 1836 and the Academy's new statutes of 1851 set in train a blossoming of mathematical activity, reflected in the restructuring of the military academies, or their transformation into Polytechnic Schools, of which the Polytechnic School of Lisbon is of particular importance. Mathematics research was further promoted from 1877 onwards by the publication of the first mathematics journal independent of the Academy, which aimed specifically at ending the isolation of Portuguese mathematics. In the final pages of this survey some data is given on the life and work of the two outstanding Portuguese mathematicians of the nineteenth century: Daniel Augusto da Silva (1814,1878) and Francisco Gomes Teixeira (1851,1933). [source]