To Dare Mighty Things

by Michael O'Hanlon

2026 · Yale University Press

The definitive history of U.S. defense strategy Much of the history of U.S. defense over the course of 250 years has been a story of success. Insulated by two oceans and mostly friendly neighbors, but constantly ambitious abroad, America has dared mighty things and often achieved them, argues defense analyst Michael O’Hanlon. After growing into a continental power, largely through force of arms, during the first half of its history, it then led the way to coalition victories in two world wars, pursued peace in the Cold War, and has contributed to the most democratic period in human history. But it is a more “dangerous nation” than most citizens appreciate, given that its leaders, as well as its people, are highly self-confident and activist. O’Hanlon claims that only by understanding this “national DNA” can we hope to steer safely through the twenty-first century. He further argues that, in contrast to its consistently assertive grand strategy, there has been no single defining American “way of war” since 1775—a good thing, since what often worked for the country in the past may be of less relevance for the modern age.

Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Judicature of the State of Indiana

by Indiana. Supreme Court, Horace E. Carter, Albert Gallatin Porter, Gordon Tanner, Benjamin Harrison, Michael Crawford Kerr, James Buckley Black, Augustus Newton Martin, Francis Marion Dice, John Worth Kern, John Lewis Griffiths, Sidney Romelee Moon, Charles Frederick Remy

1873

"With tables of the cases and principal matters" (varies).

Declarative Logic-Programming Components for Information Agents

by Michael Fink

2002 · diplom.de

Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: At present, the World Wide Web faces several problems regarding the search for specific in formation, arising, on the one hand, from the vast number of information sources available, and, on the other hand, from their intrinsic heterogeneity. A promising approach for solving the complex problems emerging in this context is the use of information agents in a multi-agent environment, which cooperatively solve advanced information-retrieval problems. An intelligent information agent provides advanced capabilities resorting to some form of logical reasoning, based on ad-hoc-knowledge about the task in question and on background knowledge of the domain, suitably represented in a knowledge base. In this thesis, our interest is in the role which some methods from the field of declarative logic programming can play in the realization of reasoning capabilities for intelligent information agents. We consider the task of updating extended logic programs (ELPs), since, in order to ensure adaptivity, an agent s knowledge base is subject to change. To this end, we develop update agents, which follow a declarative update policy and a reimplemented in the IMPACT agent environment. The proposed update agents adhere to a clear semantics and are able to deal with incomplete or in consistent information in an appropriate way. Furthermore, we introduce a framework for reasoning about evolving knowledgebases, which are represented as ELPs and maintained by an update policy. We describe a formal model which captures various update approaches, and define a logical language for expressing properties of evolving knowledge bases. We further investigate these mantical properties of knowledge states with respect to reasoning. In particular, we describe finitary characterizations of the knowledge evolution, and derive complexity results for our framework. Finally, we consider aparticular problem of information agents, namely information source selection, and develop an intelligent site-selection agent. We use ELPs for representing relevant knowledge and for declarative query an alysis and query abstraction. We define syntax and semantics of declarative site-selection programs, making use of advanced methods from answer set programming for priority handling and quantitative reasoning. A site selection component is implemented on top of the DLVKR system and its plp front-end for prioritized ELPs. We report experimental results for this implementation, [...]