The research deals with the development of participatory municipal democracy, with inter-communal relations, and with the relations between communities and the urban establishment regarding urban development in towns. The study analyses and examine the processes in which residents, members of a geographical community whose borders overlap the residential units in a town, and who are not elected or appointed by the authorities, can influence decisions relating to the policy, planning, and design of a town's urban space. Part I - Chapter 1 presents an overview of the paper. Chapter 2 positions the context of the research in the space and time in which Israeli society and its urban fabric have developed. Part II - presents the methodology and methods of the research. In Chapter 3, the theoretical framework of the study discusses issues like the geographical community, relation between civil society and the state, and new social, urban, and physical realities in a community. Chapter 4 presents the research objectives, the research questions, and the method of data collection applied in the study, such as the questionnaires administered to 73 heads of local authorities throughout Israel; questionnaires administered to 243 residents; interviews with some 20 experts and 11 players in the case-study analysis of 16 events of communal involvement that took place in 14 different local authorities; text analyses, and an analysis of urban plans. Part ill - presents in Chapter 5 a review of the field and general background of the Issue. Part IV - presents the current social context in Israel. Chapter 6 describes actual changes and events that influenced the issue, while Chapter 7 outlines the characteristics of community involvement. Part V - the case-study of Mevasseret Ziyyon is presented - displaying social action in urban development, with an analysis of community involvement and conflict in city planning. Chapter 8 provides the story of the place and the master-plan in conflict;Chapter 9 presents the context of the conflict. Chapter 10 presents the practical dimensions and dynamic of the conflict. Chapter 11 describes the dimension of human influence, and Chapter 12 shows the symbolic dimension of values, events, and interpretation of the community and establishment. Part VI - sets out the conclusions of the research. Chapter 13 presents the finding of the research, Chapter 14 the discussion while Chapter 15 the contribution of the study. The main fmdings show that, despite the importance attributed by the community and the establishment to communal involvement in urban development, there is a gap between the reality and what is aspired to. There is disparity between the declaration made by the mayors regarding the importance of community involvement, and what they actually do in this context. The civil culture of the community is not sufficiently developed and only a minority of the community residents (15%) is in fact involved. Community involvement takes place in two polar patterns of activity: conflict from 'below' when the community objects to the establishment, and cooperation from 'above' with the establishment. Cooperation was found to be the more successful optiol1.' At the community level, during a conflict about the master-plan of Mevasseret Ziyyon, the members of the elite the residing in the community appear to be at an advantage, due to their ability to recruit knowledge and information, and also because of their understanding of the 'language' of urban planning, in designing and planning space in a manner that accords with their values, beliefs and needs. The study can be seen from two points of view. The first, which relates to the construction of social reality, deals with the development of urban participatory democracy, and addresses issues such as education for democracy and active citizenship, and a fair dialogue with the community in terms of quality of life and the environment. The second relates to the construction of a physical reality, and deals with the design and plarming of the environment. It relates to issues such as learning and understanding interpretations of urban space, the design thereof, how the city will look, who will live in it and how, and what sense of place and quality of life those people will have.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering / Master / Master of Philosophy

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Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / This thesis attempts to lay a foundation for producing a real-time rope model suitable for game engine usage. The model presented here is only one of the many possible approaches in modeling a rope. The basic premise used was derived from Erkin Tunca's source code. The concept is then attempted on the Open Dynamics Engine (ODE) built by Russell Smith. This work shows promise but much still needs to be done. This thesis only scratches the surface on the subject. In addition, ODE is primarily designed for (articulated) rigid bodies. Therefore, the next step is to create a deformable body (the rope) in ODE. / Major, United States Army

Due to declining budgets and decreases in ammunition allowances, the opportunity to conduct live fire artillery training has been greatly reduced. The available simulation trainers are either outdated, require specialize contractor support, or are not deployable. FOPCSim was developed at no cost, is freely available, takes advantages of modern 3D graphics, eliminates costly contractor support, and will run on laptops in support of deploying units. The simulator provides users with real-time performance feedback based on the Marine Corps Training and Readiness standards and was designed according to a cognitive task analysis of the call for fire procedures. To evaluate how well FOPCSim trains the call for fire procedures, an experiment was conducted at The Basic School in Quantico, Virginia. FOPCSim was used in place of the current simulation: Training Set, Fire Observation (TSFO) to evaluate its training effectiveness. By eliminating the overhead associated with most simulators, FOPCSim allows users to perform the call for fire procedures with a high degree of repetitiveness which is needed to train this type of task.

A family of advanced weapon systems that deserves special attention comprises aerial autonomous weapons called Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs), which are characterized by the ability to loiter in the target area, sense the targets, acquire the targets, and then engage them. Modeling this combination of capabilities in a specific operational setting is necessary for addressing design and operational issues of this weapon. This work focuses on the development of an analytic probability model that captures key aspects of the autonomous weapon systems' engagement process. Special attention is given to simultaneous attack occurrences, imperfect battle damage assessment, and attack coordination properties. The model is a continuous-time Markov Chain and for its implementation a state generator and an algorithm that computes the transition and limiting probabilities has been developed and programmed in Java based software. The Markovmodel derives values for several measures of effectiveness (MOEs), and the average engagement time. Different operational scenarios and design configurations are examined in a sample analysis to demonstrate the model's capabilities. Tradeoffs among sensing, data processing capabilities, vulnerability and lethality of UCAVs are explicitly represented with respect to selected MOEs.