In the early 1990s, I spent a couple of years as Chief of the Criminal Division in the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. One of my principal responsibilities was to hear “appeals” from defense lawyers, usually, although not exclusively, in white collar crime cases. These lawyers felt that their clients should not be indicted, or that the plea offer they had rece...

This chapter is based on a presentation “Lessons from the DoD Gulf War Illnesses Research Investment – Neuroepidemiology, Environmental Exposures, and Soldier Well-being” made at the NATO/PfP Workshop on Environmental and Industrial Health Hazards (EIHH) and Public Health Concerns in International Missions in Umea, Sweden, on 14 October 2004. A more comprehensive version is being prepared for p...

IN 1883, one year before the invention of the dirigible, Albert Robida’s book War in the Twentieth Century envisaged a sudden, crushing air strike, while Ivan S. Bloch’s 1898 treatise on warfare expected bombardment from airships in the near future. With the evolu­ tion of airships—in particular, the flights of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s dirigibles toward the end of the first decade of the ...

Entertainment software developers face significant challenges in designing games with broad appeal. One of the challenges concerns creating nonplayer (computer-controlled) characters that can adapt their behavior in light of the current and prospective situation, possibly emulating human behaviors. This adaptation should be inherently novel, unrepeatable, yet within the bounds of realism. Evolu...

Theory without practice is lame, and practice without theory is blind. This is an old saying, but it bears repeating because too many emergency managers are inclined to dismiss academic research as " ivory tower " abstraction. They do not realize that the best research in emergency management is essentially the study of past and current practices, conducted for the sake of establishing clearer ...

Chemical weapons have given the human experience of warfare a uniquely terrifying quality that has inspired a general repugnance and led to periodic attempts to ban their use. Nevertheless, since ancient times, toxic agents have been consistently employed to kill and terrorize target populations. The evolution of these weapons is examined here in ways that may allow military, law enforcement, a...

Photonics plays a critical role in the modern information society and human's daily life. Photonic technology is increasingly used instrumentation measurement for applications oil gas industry, electric power system, space missions, transportation, civil structure, military defense, ocean exploration, biomedical detection, environmental monitoring other areas. The field related to many of faste...

A s Surgeon General for the Canadian Forces (CF), I am also the commander of the Canadian Forces Health Services (CFHS), which is responsible for delivering quality health care both in Canada and on deployments around the world. Providing health care in an operational setting is always a challenge, especially when this occurs in a hostile or combat setting with limitations posed by tactical and...

A quantitative understanding of cities' demographic dynamics is becoming a potentially useful tool for planning sustainable growth. The concomitant theory should reveal details of the cities' past and also of its interaction with nearby urban conglomerates for providing a reasonably complete picture. Using the exhaustive database of the Census Bureau in a time window of 170 years, we exhibit he...