USMA Athena
USMA Athena is a secure digital service managed by the United States Military Academy Library to make the work of USMA scholars freely available, while also ensuring these resources are organized to preserve the legacy of USMA scholarship. The mission of USMA Athena is to showcase the academic impact and intellectual capital that has become synonymous with the celebrated heritage of educational prowess attributed to the Long Gray Line. Scholarship submitted to USMA Athena benefits from added visibility and discoverability via Google Scholar in addition to the use of persistent URLs that will provide enduring access to the work over time.
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Recent Submissions
Mechanics Escape Room: Escaping the Monotony of Solving Problems
(Journal of Civil Engineering Education, 2024-07) Rocha, Brett; McMullen, Kevin
Completion of an escape room activity requires participants to work as a team to find hidden clues and solve challenging puzzles to escape before time expires. The use of escape rooms for active learning may produce a positive classroom environment by improving teamwork skills, encouraging engagement with course materials, fostering intellectual curiosity, and facilitating conceptual understanding beyond the prescribed procedure. An escape room was developed for the Mechanics of Materials course at the United States Military Academy. The escape room was designed based on a hypothetical theme to increase student motivation and curiosity. Students were required to complete five puzzles that involved navigating through underground steam tunnels to locate the boiler in the classroom building where their final examination would take place. This task was intended to force the cancellation of the examination. The five puzzles assessed the students’ knowledge of torsional members, statically indeterminate axially loaded members, flexural members, stress transformation, strain transformation, and thin-walled pressure vessels. The escape room was piloted in five sections ranging from 15 to 18 students. Teams of five to six students completed the escape room activity. The escape room increased active participation and made the students aware of the concepts they needed to focus on for the final examination. This case study includes details on the complete design of the escape room, including the problems presented, results of student teams, and student feedback.
When AI Fails, Who Do We Blame? Attributing Responsibility in Human-AI Interactions
(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2024-01-10) Schoenherr, Jordan Richard; Thomson, Robert
While previous studies of trust in artificial intelligence have focused on perceived user trust, the paper examines how an external agent (e.g., an auditor) assigns responsibility, perceives trustworthiness, and explains the successes and failures of AI. In two experiments, participants (university students) reviewed scenarios about automation failures and assigned perceived responsibility, trustworthiness, and preferred explanation type. Participants’ cumulative responsibility ratings for three agents (operators, developers, and AI) exceeded 100%, implying that participants were not attributing trust in a wholly rational manner, and that trust in the AI might serve as a proxy for trust in the human software developer. Dissociation between responsibility and trustworthiness suggested that participants used different cues, with the kind of technology and perceived autonomy affecting judgments. Finally, we additionally found that the kind of explanation used to understand a situation differed based on whether the AI succeeded or failed.
“I Hope to Have Justice Done Me or I Can’t Get Along Here”: James Webster Smith and West Point
(The Journal of Military History, 2023-10) McGovern, Rory; Campbell, Makonen; Koebrich, Louisa
James W. Smith’s experience as West Point’s first Black cadet is a microcosm of Reconstruction and the struggle to integrate West Point. It began with the best of intentions, but ultimately failed due to a destructive combination of racist antipathy and the apathy of those who could have intervened on his behalf. His extraordinary persistence and perseverance changed the environment at the Academy, forcing the West Point community to shift from active to passive resistance. Although he did not reap the rewards himself, Smith made graduation possible, if still not probable, for those African American cadets who followed.
Combatants, Masculinity, and Just War Theory
(Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 2023-12-12) Parsons, Graham
Over that last several decades the ethics of war has grown into a major subfield in philosophy at the same time as large literatures have developed on the relation between gender and war as well as feminist approaches to the ethics of war. This article aims to contribute to these literatures and to bring them into closer contact. It argues that canonical just war theorists such as Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel, and Walzer rely on appeals to masculinity to help ground the obligations of soldiers to participate in war upon command. This appeal helps them overcome their otherwise weak arguments for the political subordination of soldiers, or what I call the Internal Problem of the soldier. It also helps explain a problem that has vexed contemporary ethics of war scholars, namely, the supposed equal right to kill combatants in war, or what I call the External Problem of the soldier. If this is true, then just war theorists should be much more concerned with the gender and war literature and find common ground with feminists who have treated the problem of the political standing of soldiers as a philosophical priority.
A Comprehensive Approach to Molten Salt Reactor Source Term Generation and Shielding Analyses
(Informa UK Limited, 2023-07-24) Carberry, Kyle; Petrovic, Bojan
The research presented herein outlines a comprehensive process for characterizing the major radiological source terms necessary for radiation protection and licensing activities that one would expect in a liquid-fueled molten salt reactor. This process leverages organic simulation tools in the SCALE modeling and simulation code suite to provide an “off-the-shelf” solution for shielding assessments of this reactor type. Ultimately, this source development process is applied to a representative molten salt reactor system to assess the impact of ex-core source terms on shielding in varying operating conditions. The results of the analysis determined that while the prompt core source is the major dose contributor outside the radiological shielding, specific ex-core features, such as the primary salt loop components and configuration, can have an appreciable dose impact, and thus must be accounted for.