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Predicting short term wind speed is essential in order to prevent systems in-action from the effects of strong winds. It also helps in using wind energy as an alternative source of energy, mainly for Electrical power generation. Wind speed prediction has applications in Military and civilian fields for air traffic control, rocket launch, ship navigation etc. The wind speed in near future depends on the values of other meteorological variables, such as atmospheric pressure, moisture content, humidity, rainfall etc. The values of these parameters are obtained from a nearest weather station and are used to train various forms of neural networks. The trained model of neural networks is validated using a similar set of data. The model is then used to predict the wind speed, using the same meteorological information. This paper reports an Artificial Neural Network model for short term wind speed prediction, which uses back propagation algorithm.

RésuméCet article étudie les flux économiques et sociaux à la Nouvelle-Orléans auxviiiesiècle. Il a pour objectif de démontrer que les thèses de Braudel sur l'influence des courants maritimes et la force d'attraction du capitalisme peuvent être étendues à la « Méditerranée du Nouveau monde» qu'était la région comprise entre le Mississippi et les Caraïbes. Les Amérindiens voyageaient et commerçaient dans la région depuis fort longtemps, ce qui a influencé le choix du site de La Nouvelle-Orléans, tandis que la navigation était rendue possible par les marins et constructeurs de bateaux d'origine africaine. Cependant, l'économie maritime de La Nouvelle-Orléans ne peut être uniquement expliquée par le jeu du capitalisme classique. La contrebande et le capital social ont joué un rôle extrêmement important dans la formation de la ville. La Nouvelle-Orléans n'était qu'un des nombreux mondes clandestins qui s'épanouissaient à l'époque en marge des voies commerciales officielles.

AbstractOne of the great engineering projects of the Victorian era, the Manchester Ship Canal extends for 55 km from central Manchester to the Mersey estuary on England's northwest coast. In addition to providing navigation to Manchester for ocean‐going ships, the canal drains a total catchment of over 3000 km2. As such, the canal plays a vital role in the prevention of flooding in central Manchester and Warrington. Despite its importance in terms of flood relief, the unique character and ownership of the canal have left it excluded from legislation regarding flood management. Unlike the majority of rivers, no model of the canal had ever been constructed, leaving a missing piece in the puzzle of flood management in the northwest. This paper describes the creation of a one‐dimensional ISIS hydrodynamic model of the canal and the testing of a range of flood scenarios with that model.

President James Polk's cancellation of a treaty permitting joint occupancy of Oregon with Great Britain; Polk's leadership in the 1846-48 Mexican War; President Millard Fillmore's decisions dealing with crises involving Haiti and the Comoro Island of Johanna; President Franklin Pierce's termination of a navigation and commerce treaty with Denmark, together with his orders to conduct reprisal attacks against Greytown, Nicaragua and to intervene in New Grenada, Panama; and President James Buchanan's order to capture and bring to the United States a general who pursued taking control of Nicaragua. The primary shortcomings are the inconsistent number of subjects covered in the chapters, which alternate between one and several, as well as the lack of chronological presentation of material, particularly in part I. Still, Currie's study is by far the most comprehensive and compelling analysis of how Congress construed the Constitution's relevance in controversies that defined antebellum America.

This article posits that the menace of terrorism at sea has traditionally been overlooked, especially since the events of September 11 in New York that were perpetrated by air. Beginning with a general discussion of what motivates a terrorist and the different kinds of terrorism, the article then moves on to maritime terrorism and piracy and their legal and practical distinctions. The Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Maritime Navigation of 1988, which made great strides in detailing and codifying terrorism at sea, is discussed, as well as the role of the UN International Maritime Organization in combating terrorism at sea. Finally, the article sums up the current state of affairs and what still remains to be accomplished to effectively battle international maritime terrorism, which the author sees as the world's next great threat.

Die Europäische Union betreibt ein eigenes Raumfahrtprogramm, das Europa einen internationalen Spitzenplatz in der kommerziellen Nutzung des Weltraums verschaffen soll. Gleichzeitig will die EU die gemeinsame europäische Sicherheitspolitik mit eigenen Weltraumkapazitäten auf eine leistungsfähige technische Grundlage stellen - unabhängig vom amerikanischen "Global Positioning System" (GPS), einem Satellitensystem für Funknavigation und Ortung. Das EU-Programm umfaßt ein System von Funknavigationssatelliten (Galileo) sowie die Satellitenkomponente des Erdbeobachtungssystems "Global Monitoring for Environment and Security" (GMES). Es dient Zwecken der zivilen Sicherheit, eignet sich aber auch für militärische Aufgaben der Aufklärung, der Navigation von Militärfahrzeugen sowie der Planung und Koordination militärischer Operationen. Ohne die zivil-militärische "dual-use"-Eignung ihrer Weltraumprojekte zu leugnen, spricht die EU-Kommission beharrlich von "zivilen Systemen unter ziviler Kontrolle" und ignoriert die breiten militärischen Nutzungsmöglichkeiten, aber auch Gefährdungen der EU-Sicherheit, die diese Systeme mit sich bringen. Weiterhin riskiert die EU mit ihrer einseitig auf die zivile Nutzung ausgerichteten Raumfahrtpolitik bedeutende Nachteile. Sie nutzt vorhandene Möglichkeiten ihrer militärischen Verteidigung nicht im vollen, durch Sparzwänge gebotenen Umfang. Im eigenen Interesse muß die EU die möglichen militärischen Folgen ihrer Raumfahrtprojekte berücksichtigen und fehlende sicherheitspolitische Orientierungen nachholen. Vordringlich ist, die EU-Raumfahrt in die Streitkräfteplanung der EU-Länder, des Eurokorps und der NATO einzubeziehen sowie geeignete Entscheidungs- und Vollzugsorgane für die vielfältigen Verwendungen von Galileo und GMES zu schaffen. (SWP-Studie / SWP)

The Royal Institute Elcano(dagger) (Real Instituto Elcano) in Spain is a prestigious independent political institute whose mission is to comment on the political situation in the world focusing on its relation to Spain. As part of its dissemination strategy it operates a public website. The online content can be accessed by navigating through categories or by a keyword-based, full text search engine. The work described in this paper aims at improving access to the content. We describe an approach, tools and techniques that allow building a semantic portal, where access is based on the meaning of concepts and relations of the International Affairs domain. The approach comprises an automatic ontology-based annotator, a semantic search engine with a natural language inter-face, a web publication tool allowing semantic navigation, and a 3D visualization component. The semantic portal is currently being tested by the Institute.

Argues that recent claims that global warming could open the Northwest Passage for shipping & thereby allow foreign, including US, interests to threaten Canada's sovereignty to waters between the Arctic islands should be tempered with hard scientific data & logical economic & foreign policy. The sovereignty-on-thinning-ice thesis overstates assumptions & interpretations about ice conditions & understates the difficulty of navigation in arctic conditions. The optimistic outlook is based on a linear & uniform improvement over the coming decades & ignores previous views that separate estimations of warming in the Arctic Ocean from those of the Canadian archipelago. Canada's current stance on sovereignty relies on the Inuit rights, but this indigenous group has been excluded from management decisions. Canadian views on the thinning-ice theory have fluctuated between alarm & passivity, both of which undermine logical action & leave the issue subject to reaction, rather than Canadian ambition. L. A. Hoffman

The morphology of an estuary (its shape and underwater contours) affects, and is in turn affected by, issues relating to flood defence, water quality, conservation and navigation. This report provide answers to some of the key questions that face those concerned with such issues: estuary managers, stakeholders and interest groups. The report result from Phase 1 of the UK Estuaries Research Programme undertaken by the EMPHSYS consortium, which comprises 13 partners including practitioners and researchers with widely varying and complementary areas of expertise. Links are made between the understanding and prediction of changes in estuarine morphology and the resulting changes in the ecology and water quality that are subject to legislative constraints, policy and directives. The recommendations in this report put forward a coherent, forward-looking and user-oriented programme of research for Phase 2, to build on the solid foundation laid down in Phase 1.

During the XVIth Century the Spanish science reached a great development, especially in some fields like that of navigation, mining, natural history, etc. The discovery of the New World was an essential factor in the impulse of that scientific development, that favored and stimulated by Felipe II, was bindered also during their reign, in great measure due to the burden religious, economic and political problems that thought about in those years. ; A lo largo del siglo XVI la ciencia española alcanzó un gran desarrollo, especialmente en algunos campos como el de la navegación, la minería, la historia natural, etc. El descubrimiento del Nuevo Mundo fue factor esencial en el impulso de ese desarrollo científico, que favorecido y estimulado por Felipe II, fue también dificultado durante su reinado, en gran medida debido a los graves problemas religiosos, económicos y políticos que se plantearon en esos años.

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Leuven, Belgium, 1998 ; This paper presents a fuzzy perception planner that takes into account the time cost, the suitability of every landmark detection and the different uncertainties the robot encounters along its path for mobile robot localization. The sensor used is a camera with a motorized zoom on a pan & tilt platform and the artificial landmarks are circles detected through normalized grayscale correlation. An Extended Kalman Filter is used to correct the position and orientation of the vehicle. The resulting self-localization module has been integrated successfully in a more complicated navigation system. ; The authors gratefully acknowledge the funds provided by the Spanish Government through the CICYT projects TAP94-711 and TAP96-657, and thank B.J. Carabao and M.J. Lopez for their experimental work with the planner using the B2 1 robot. ; Publicado

As aircraft and other systems become more automated, a shift is occurring in human operator participation in these systems. This shift is away from manual control and toward activities that tap the higher mental functioning of human operators. Therefore, an experiment was performed in a moving-base flight simulator to assess mediational (cognitive) workload measurement. Specifically, 16 workload estimation techniques were evaluated as to their sensitivity and intrusion in a flight task emphasizing mediational behavior. Task loading, using navigation problems presented on a display, was treated as an independent variable, and workload-measure values were treated as dependent variables. Results indicate that two mediational task measures, two rating scale measures, time estimation, and two eye behavior measures were reliably sensitive to mediational loading. The time estimation measure did, however, intrude on mediational task performance. Several of the remaining measures were completely insensitive to mediational load.

During recent years it has become apparent that space is an important theater for the military activities and aspirations of the great powers. The scenarios of war in space have moved from the field of pure science fiction-oriented speculations to become part of arms race and arms control discussions. It has been estimated that some 75% of all satellites orbiting earth are performing mainly military tasks such as surveillance, early-warning, communications and navigation. The military importance of satellites has in turn inspired military planners to develop anti-satellite systems. And the feasibility of various space- based weapon systems to be used against targets on the ground or against attacking strategic missiles has from time to time been studied in defence departments. These developments have implications not only for the use of space as such but also for the strategic balance between the leading great powers.

The decision of the United States and 22 other countries not to sign the Law of the Sea Convention in Montego Bay, Jamaica, on December 10, 1982, raises the important question of the legal effects of the. Convention upon nonsignatories (hereinafter referred to as "third states"). Will the latter be entitled to claim and enjoy treaty provisions beneficial to them, such as those pertaining to military or commercial navigation through international straits, including submerged passage and overflight rights, or will these rights be considered as contractual in nature, exercisable only by states parties? Clearly, the question is of critical importance to the regime of the law of the sea. Since there has been to date no systematic legal analysis of this important question in debates surrounding the Law of the Sea Convention, this essentially legal question has been consigned to general policy pronouncements.

During recent years it has become apparent that space is an important theater for the military activities & aspirations of the great powers. The scenarios of war in space have moved from the field of pure science fiction-oriented speculations to become part of arms race & arms control discussions. It has been estimated that some 75% of all satellites orbiting earth are performing mainly military tasks, eg, surveillance, early-warning, communications, & navigation. The military importance of satellites has, in turn, inspired military planners to develop antisatellite systems. The feasibility of various space-based weapon systems to be used against targets on the ground or against attacking strategic missiles has from time to time been studied in defense departments. These developments have implications not only for the use of space as such but also for the strategic balance between the leading great powers. 1 Figure. HA.