Over the past twenty years, the cooperation within the European Union (EU) has strengthened and expanded with both more number of Member States and stronger influence on international politics. The unique character of the Union and its ability to enforce peace and humanitarian intervention has attracted attention in political science. This prominent position of the Union is perceived by many scholars who often hold this derived from the Union's influence in international relations. Various terms have been used to define the powers of the Union. The British researcher Ian Manners states that the unique identity of the Union in the international arena is formed by its normative power.    An important policy area within the Union is the environmental cooperation. It is essential to have a global understanding that an increasing cooperation within the environmental policy area is necessary in order to combat environmental degradation and climate change. In this study I have therefore chosen to examine if the Union can be considered a normative power in the area of environmental policy. To fulfill the purpose of my study I choose to examine the Kyoto protocol (2008- 2012). The Kyoto Protocol is an extension of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change and is the dominant global initiative in global environmental activities.   After studying the way towards global cooperation in the battle against climate change I would say that it is obvious that the EU has guided a number of stages of key importance. In international cooperation, states are usually not willing to accept the costs they may incur from taking on greater responsibilities than other parties. The Union’s imprint as a leading party in the global fight against climate change is in many ways tangible.

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Class of 2016 Abstract / Objectives: To determine if obese patients receiving parenteral nutrition (PN) require an increased amount of potassium, magnesium, and phosphorus electrolyte provisions compared to non-obese patients. Methods: The project design was an institutional review board-approved, retrospective, descriptive chart review. Electronic medical records and physical parenteral nutrition order cards were accessed to identify patients who met the inclusion and exclusion criteria of the study. The total amounts of potassium, phosphorous, and magnesium received by patients over the initial seven days of PN therapy were calculated. The Chi-squared and independent t-tests were utilized to evaluate the statistical significance for all nominal and interval data respectively. Results: 112 samples met the inclusion criteria of the study. There were 75 samples in the non-obese group (mean age=55.1 years, mean BMI=22 kg/m2, 53% female), and 37 samples in the obese group (mean age=57.1 years, mean BMI=33.8 kg/m2, 51% female). The daily average and seven-day totals of potassium, magnesium, and phosphorus did not significantly differ between the non-obese and obese groups (average daily potassium (P=0.6224), weekly total potassium (P=0.7551), average daily magnesium (P=0.8068), weekly total magnesium (P=0.3863), average daily phosphorus (P=0.9698), weekly total phosphorus (P=0.0603)). Conclusions: Potassium, magnesium, and phosphorus electrolyte provisions administered through PN over a week appear to be similar for both non-obese and obese patients. Our study results indicate that the same standard set for dosing initial PN electrolyte provisions in a non-obese patient may be applied to dosing similar provisions for an obese patient.

With a focus of always being connected, it's become typical for laptops and mobile devices to include multiple wireless network devices. Though the additional network devices have created mobility and versatility of how a user is connected, it is common for only one to be active at any given time. While likely that new mesh protocols will help maximize connectivity and power consumption by utilizing lower-power multi-hop techniques, it is still difficult to visualize these protocols due to the complexity created by each node's simple choices. Further challenges are presented by the variety of network devices which share frequency ranges with different output power, sensitivities, and antenna radiation patterns. Due to the complexity of these configurations and environments, it becomes clear that reproducible simulations are required. While several network simulators have been thoroughly tested over their many years of use, they often lack realistic handling of key factors that affect wireless networks. A few examples include cross-channel interference, propagation delays, interference caused by nodes beyond communication range, channel switching delays, and non-uniform radiation patterns. Another key limitation of these past tools is their limited methods for clearly displaying characteristics of multi-channel communication. Furthermore, these past utilities lack the graphical and interactive functions which promote the discovery of edge cases through the use of human intuition and pattern recognition. Even with their other limitations, many of these simulators are also extendable with new components and simulation abilities. As a result, a large set of protocols and other useful discoveries have been developed. While the concepts are well tested and verified, a new challenge is found when moving code from prototype to production due to code portability problems. Due to the sophistication of these creations, even small changes in code during a protocols release can have dramatic effects on its functionality. Both to encourage quicker development cycles and maintain code validation, it would be advantageous to provide simulation interfaces which directly match that of production systems. To overcome the various challenges presented and encourage the use of innate human abilities, this paper presents a novel simulation framework, Network Channel Visualizing Simulator (NCVS), with a real-time, interactive, 3D environment with clear representation and simulation of multi-channel RF communication through multiple network device types.

Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) can be widely used in veterinary medicine in different areas. Studies using PRP frequently use different methodologies making for difficult comparison. The objective of this study was to evaluate the purity and platelet activation of a PRP protocol. A total of 18 blood samples were drawn from six dogs, collected once per week over a total of three weeks. Blood samples were centrifuged six times at 300g for 5 min. Ultra-pure PRP (OP) was obtained by adding PRP a Optiprep 1.063g/mL density barrier and centrifuged at 350g for 15 min. Mean platelet recovery from whole blood was 62.90% in PRP and 45.24% in OP. PRP and OP showed high platelet purity; blood cell contamination <0.01%. Flow cytometry for platelet activation markers was consistent with minimal platelet activation. This study describes the optimization of PRP protocol with high platelet purity, minimal platelet activation, high reliability and reproducibility.

This research considered the efficient transmission of data within a wireless local area network (WLAN) system. A simulation model was developed to study the performance of our protocol, AGG-MAC (aggregated medium access control). AGG-MAC is a simple and elegant medium access control (MAC) protocol designed to improve performance by transmitting a maximal quantity of data with minimal overhead. Our enhancement to IEEE 802.11, AGG-MAC yields dramatic improvements in both local and global throughput. It furthermore reduces jitter in support of real time communications requirements such as voice over IP (VoIP). In support of heterogeneous roaming between Third Generation (3G) Wideband CDMA (WCDMA), specifically Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) and WLAN systems, we constructed a simulation environment which allowed the evaluation of AGG-MAC in such a system. We further demonstrated the suitability of AGG-MAC throughout a range of infrastructure and ad hoc based WLAN scenarios. The AGG-MAC protocol enhancement provides significant performance improvements across a range of wireless applications, while interoperating with standard IEEE 802.11 stations. Performance is commensurate to original WLAN MAC performance for applications that do not benefit from packet level aggregation. The key contributions of this research were two-fold. First was the development of an OPNET simulation environment suitable for evaluation of future protocols supporting tightly coupled, heterogeneous WLAN and 3G systems. Secondly was the implementation and testing of the AGG-MAC protocol which aggregates suboptimal size packets together into a single frame, thereby amortizing the overhead. / Ph. D.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / Special Forces are crucial in specific military operations. They usually operate in hostile territory where communications are difficult to establish and preserve, since the operations are often carried out in a remote environment and the communications need to be highly mobile. The delivery of information about the geographical parameters of the area can be crucial for the completion of their mission. But in that highly mobile environment, the connectivity of the established wireless networks (LANs) can be unstable and intermittently unavailable. Existing content transfer protocols are not adaptive to volatile network connectivity. If a physical connection is lost, any information or part of a file already retrieved is discarded and the same information must be retransmitted again after the reestablishment of the lost session. The intention of this Thesis is to develop a protocol in the application layer that preserves the already transmitted part of the file, and when the session is reestablished, the information server can continue sending the rest of the file to the requesting host. Further, if the same content is available from another server through a better route, the new server should be able to continue to serve the content, starting from where the session with the previous server ended. / Lieutenant, Hellenic Navy

Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited / With the rapidly growing demand for portable devices such as laptops, handheld computers and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) with wireless networking capabilities, the need for reliable wireless data network communication has also increased. Just like in mobile voice communication, users demand uninterrupted, secure wireless data communication as they move from place to place. Mobile IP satisfies some of these demands - it enables mobile devices with fixed IP addresses to be permanently reachable even as their point of attachment to the network changes. This allows for routing of data packets to and from the mobile device irrespective of its location on the network. While uninterrupted data flow can be achieved with Mobile IP, it introduces additional security vulnerabilities, including data privacy, data integrity and authentication. The goal of this thesis is to investigate such vulnerabilities and explore implementations to overcome them. / Civilian, National Science Foundation

Thesis (M.S. in Computer Science)--Naval Postgraduate School, March 2005. / Thesis Advisor(s): Su Wen, Arijit Das. Includes bibliographical references (p. 149 p.). Also available online.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Delaware, 2005. / Principal faculty adviser: Paul D. Amer, Dept. of Computer & Information Sciences. Includes bibliographical references.