Concept development and experimentation

Concept development and experimentation (CD&E) is the application of the structure and methods of experimental science to the challenge of developing future military capability.

CD&E is a forward-looking process for developing and evaluating new concepts, before committing extensive resources. CDE is a process to identify the best solution not only from a technical perspective, but also for possible solutions for challenges involving doctrine, organization, training, and material to achieve significant advances in future operations. CD&E is a way of thinking your way through the future before spending money.

Developing and identifying future-oriented concepts allows one to:

The potential impacts on interoperability and increased capabilities by emerging concepts must be captured by some process and exploited.

Concept development gives broad and sometimes ill-defined ideas a chance to be examined by groups of experts in a logical process. These ideas can come from different sources: e.g. Ministry of Defense, industry, servicemen organizations or partners. They can be generated by staff processes, operational experience, formal analytical work, or published proposals. There need be no boundaries on the types of ideas that enter the concept development process, although some simpler ones that modify techniques or procedures might be ‘fast-tracked’ into practice because they are intuitively sound. Typically, promising ideas with a broader scope are explored and refined through workshops and larger seminars to the point where more mature concepts are formed. These concepts are further debated in committees or working groups and, if accepted, are submitted to the experimental process.

CD-RW

CD-RW (Compact Disc-ReWritable) is a digital optical disc storage format. A CD-RW disc is a compact disc that can be written, read arbitrarily many times, erased, and written again. The technology was introduced in 1997.

CD-RW discs (CD-RWs) require readers that have more sensitive laser optics than are required to read plain CDs. Consequently, CD-RWs cannot be read in many CD readers built prior to the introduction of CD-RW. CD-ROM drives that bear a "MultiRead" certification claim compatibility.

CD-RW discs need to be blanked before reuse. Different blanking methods can be used, including "full" blanking in which the entire surface of the disc is cleared, and "fast" blanking in which only metadata areas are cleared: PMA, TOC and pregap, comprising a few percent of the disc. Fast blanking is much quicker, and is usually sufficient to allow rewriting the disc. Full blanking removes traces of the former data, often for confidentiality reasons. It may be possible to recover data from full-blanked CD-RWs with specialty data recovery equipment; however, this is generally not used except by government agencies due to cost.

CD1E

T-cell surface glycoprotein CD1e, membrane-associated is a protein that in humans is encoded by the CD1E gene.

This gene encodes a member of the CD1 family of transmembrane glycoproteins, which are structurally related to the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) proteins and form heterodimers with beta-2-microglobulin. The CD1 proteins mediate the presentation of primarily lipid and glycolipid antigens of self or microbial origin to T cells. The human genome contains five CD1 family genes organized in a cluster on chromosome 1. The CD1 family members are thought to differ in their cellular localization and specificity for particular lipid ligands. The protein encoded by this gene localizes within Golgi compartments, endosomes, and lysosomes, and is cleaved into a stable soluble form. The soluble form is required for the intracellular processing of some glycolipids into a form that can be presented by other CD1 family members. Several alternatively spliced transcript variants encoding different isoforms have been described. Additional transcript variants have been found; however, their biological validity has not been determined.