Integrated Modeling, Mapping, and Simulation (IMMS) Framework for Exercise and Response Planning

EmergenCy management personnel at federal, stale, and local levels can benefit from the increased situational awareness and operational efficiency afforded by simulation and modeling for emergency preparedness, including planning, training and exercises. To support this goal, the Department of Homeland Security's Science & Technology Directorate is funding the Integrated Modeling, Mapping, and Simulation (IMMS) program to create an integrating framework that brings together diverse models for use by the emergency response community. SUMMIT, one piece of the IMMS program, is the initial software framework that connects users such as emergency planners and exercise developers with modeling resources, bridging the gap in expertise and technical skills between these two communities. SUMMIT was recently deployed to support exercise planning for National Level Exercise 2010. Threat, casualty. infrastructure, and medical surge models were combined within SUMMIT to estimate health care resource requirements for the exercise ground truth

Light scattering from disordered overlayers of metallic nanoparticles

We develop a theory for light scattering from a disordered layer of metal nanoparticles resting on a sample. Averaging over different disorder realizations is done by a coherent potential approximation. The calculational scheme takes into account effects of retardation, multipole excitations, and interactions with the sample. We apply the theory to a system similar to the one studied experimentally by Stuart and Hall [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 80}, 5663 (1998)] who used a layered Si/SiO$_2$/Si sample. The calculated results agree rather well with the experimental ones. In particular we find conspicuous maxima in the scattering intensity at long wavelengths (much longer than those corresponding to plasmon resonances in the particles). We show that these maxima have their origin in interference phenomena in the layered sample.Comment: 19 pages, 12 figure

An in/divisible whole : time, space, and technologies of mediation in the Musée de l'Homme

This thesis examines the development of cinema as part of the broader institutional ecology of the Musée de l’Homme between the 1930s and 1960s. In particular, it asks how film was used to analyse, illustrate, promote, and critique the emerging synergistic theorisation of the unity of humanity as – in the words of the museum’s first director, Paul Rivet – an “indivisible whole, not only in space, but also in time”. Film was adopted by the community of the museum in diverse and innovative ways to bridge numerous paradoxes and lacunae that arose in the institution’s mission and practices. These included how to foster feelings of identification between visitors and various kinds of ‘others’ represented in the museum; how to depict shared human connection across scale, from the particular to the universal; and how to interrelate different orders of information, including anthropological theory, scientific data, museum collections, and the perspectives of visitors. Film, here, integrated various facets of the museum in unique medium-specific ways that most fully actualised the institution’s theories. By examining its place in the museum, I analyse film as what I term a ‘technology of mediation’, tracing its singular capacity to bring otherwise discrete ontological orders into relationship. Methodologically, this involves examining film’s position within the expanded field of the museum, and how it was used to interact with and respond to disjunctures in institutional theory and practice. This thesis is the first extended analysis of the use of film in the Musée de l’Homme. It contributes to the study of film in institutional settings beyond ‘the cinema’, highlighting film’s understudied mediatory qualities. It also offers a novel model for engaging with history and theory, not as ‘context’, but rather as a broader institutional assemblage of which film is a part, and centrally mediates."This work was supported by the University of St Andrews, in particular the Film Studies Departmental Scholarship, the St Leonards Scholarship and the Russell Trust Postgraduate Award." -- Fundin