When foresight seems impeccable, things still go wrong. Why?
Purpose – This article seeks to provide a systematic examination of the unanticipated results following the introduction of various types of new policy, process, design, product or service.Design/methodology/approach – A rough taxonomy categorizes the generic kinds of unintentional consequences.Findings – Careless political, technical, commercial, military or even personal decisions often underlie the most problematic of secondary effects.Originality/value – Unscheduled second‐ or third‐order effects have often been attributed to a “law” governing such phenomena. Although no such law exists, there exist indeed the unwanted effects – and sometimes on a grand scale, too often a bane of humankind.
War, Science and Terrorism: From Laboratory to Open Conflict
Part 1 Preparation for conflict: from bows and arrows to missiles and aircraft the real stakes in the space adventure are military slipping the warrior beneath the sea the German and Anglo-American race to nuclear armament Russia and other powers hurry to catch up with the nucleus optimizing human resources -procurement, training, management. Part 2 Warfare and its management: endologistics - forts, food, feed, fuel and freight exologistics - how the natural environment conditions battle communicating, commanding, controlling ... and a little deception from military aviation's radar to computer notebooks military medicine saves fighting strength simulating strategy, operations, tactics. Part 3 Behind the action, and wars to come: who are the scientists working with the military? what role for the scientist in future wars?.
Ceramic microwave antennas for mobile applications
Due to their medium to high permittivity values, ceramic microwave materials are attractive as building blocks for miniaturised antenna solutions. Further advantages are low dielectric losses and an excellent temperature stability of standard ceramic materials. Yet, the permittivity of the ceramic material also has a strong influence on the radiation efficiency and bandwidth of the antenna. This implies that in the design process a suitable compromise has to be found between the degree of miniaturisation on the one hand and the antenna efficiency and bandwidth on the other. We describe two approaches towards efficient miniaturised ceramic microwave antennas: the dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) with partial metallisation and the shorting post patch antenna. We focus on design steps taken to ensure both a high degree of miniaturisation and high values of the radiation efficiency, the choice of the ceramic material and the experimental performance of the antennas.