Security Analysis: A Critical Thinking Approach

Security Analysis: A Critical-Thinking Approach is for anyone desiring to learn techniques for generating the best answers to complex questions and best solutions to complex problems. It furnishes current and future analysts in national security, homeland security, law enforcement, and corporate security an alternative, comprehensive process for conducting both intelligence analysis and policy analysis. The target audience is upper-division undergraduate students and new graduate students, along with entry-level practitioner trainees. The book centers on a Security Analysis Critical-Thinking Framework that synthesizes critical-thinking and existing analytic techniques. Ample examples are provided to assist readers in comprehending the material. Newly created material includes techniques for analyzing beliefs and political cultures. The book also functions as an introduction to Foreign Policy and Security Studies.https://encompass.eku.edu/ekuopen/1005/thumbnail.jp

Technology assessment of portable energy RDT and P

Results are presented of a workshop conducted to assess portable energy technology. The results were evaluated and areas for future research were considered. Several research categories were studied: increasing presently available fuel supplies, developing new fuel sources, utilization of new transportation fuels, improving conservation practices, and equitable distribution of fuel supplies. Several research projects were proposed, and work statements were constructed for those considered suitable

The influence of proficiency and age of acquisition on second language processing: An fMRI study of Mandarin-English bilinguals

Research investigating the neural correlates of second language (L2) processing has usually studied age of acquisition (AoA) and proficiency separately. Presently, we examined both in parallel, treated as continuous variables. We used fMRI to study neural activity for L2 processing in adult native Mandarin speakers who are L2 English speakers. Behavioral measures of language proficiency and AoA were obtained from subjects prior to performing a picture-word matching task during an fMRI scan. Brain activity during L2 English processing was shown to be independently affected by AoA and proficiency; activity in left superior temporal gyrus and right parahippocampal gyrus was modulated by AoA when L2 proficiency is accounted for, while activity in right insula, right middle temporal gyrus, and left parahippocampal gyrus was modulated by L2 proficiency regardless of AoA. These results suggest that brain organization of L2 lexico-semantic processing is susceptible to L2 ability levels as well as age-dependent learning

Planning and evaluation parameters for offshore complexes

Issues are presented for consideration in the planning and design of offshore artificial complexes. The construction of such complexes, their social, economic, and ecological impacts, and the legal-political-institutional environments within which their development could occur, are discussed. Planning, design, and construction of near-shore complexes located off the Mid-Atlantic coast of the United States is emphasized

Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation: Special Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

This Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX) has been jointly coordinated by Working Groups I (WGI) and II (WGII) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report focuses on the relationship between climate change and extreme weather and climate events, the impacts of such events, and the strategies to manage the associated risks. The IPCC was jointly established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), in particular to assess in a comprehensive, objective, and transparent manner all the relevant scientific, technical, and socioeconomic information to contribute in understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, the potential impacts, and the adaptation and mitigation options. Beginning in 1990, the IPCC has produced a series of Assessment Reports, Special Reports, Technical Papers, methodologies, and other key documents which have since become the standard references for policymakers and scientists.This Special Report, in particular, contributes to frame the challenge of dealing with extreme weather and climate events as an issue in decisionmaking under uncertainty, analyzing response in the context of risk management. The report consists of nine chapters, covering risk management; observed and projected changes in extreme weather and climate events; exposure and vulnerability to as well as losses resulting from such events; adaptation options from the local to the international scale; the role of sustainable development in modulating risks; and insights from specific case studies

Acquiring and Harnessing Verb Knowledge for Multilingual Natural Language Processing

Advances in representation learning have enabled natural language processing models to derive non-negligible linguistic information directly from text corpora in an unsupervised fashion. However, this signal is underused in downstream tasks, where they tend to fall back on superficial cues and heuristics to solve the problem at hand. Further progress relies on identifying and filling the gaps in linguistic knowledge captured in their parameters. The objective of this thesis is to address these challenges focusing on the issues of resource scarcity, interpretability, and lexical knowledge injection, with an emphasis on the category of verbs. To this end, I propose a novel paradigm for efficient acquisition of lexical knowledge leveraging native speakers’ intuitions about verb meaning to support development and downstream performance of NLP models across languages. First, I investigate the potential of acquiring semantic verb classes from non-experts through manual clustering. This subsequently informs the development of a two-phase semantic dataset creation methodology, which combines semantic clustering with fine-grained semantic similarity judgments collected through spatial arrangements of lexical stimuli. The method is tested on English and then applied to a typologically diverse sample of languages to produce the first large-scale multilingual verb dataset of this kind. I demonstrate its utility as a diagnostic tool by carrying out a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art NLP models, probing representation quality across languages and domains of verb meaning, and shedding light on their deficiencies. Subsequently, I directly address these shortcomings by injecting lexical knowledge into large pretrained language models. I demonstrate that external manually curated information about verbs’ lexical properties can support data-driven models in tasks where accurate verb processing is key. Moreover, I examine the potential of extending these benefits from resource-rich to resource-poor languages through translation-based transfer. The results emphasise the usefulness of human-generated lexical knowledge in supporting NLP models and suggest that time-efficient construction of lexicons similar to those developed in this work, especially in under-resourced languages, can play an important role in boosting their linguistic capacity.ESRC Doctoral Fellowship [ES/J500033/1], ERC Consolidator Grant LEXICAL [648909

The influence of a country's brands and industry on its image

Purpose Extant research has largely treated country image (CI) as an exogenous variable, focusing mostly on its consequences for consumers’ evaluations and purchases of products or brands originating from a country. Scant research has examined the instrumental role of a country’s brands and products in the evaluations of CI. This study aims to investigate how the brands of a country contribute to CI ratings and the conditions underlying their effect on CI. Design/methodology/approach Three experimental studies test the hypotheses, one pertaining to the effect of brands on CI (N = 227), the second to the effect of products on CI (N = 116) and the third to the effect of brands and products on industry image (N = 215). The experimental approach overcomes the limitations of cross-sectional surveys commonly used in CI studies to detect the direction of the observed effects. Furthermore, respondents (British consumers) were allowed to determine the brands and products associated with a country. Findings Drawing on memory schema theory, across three studies, the authors identify two types of reverse inferences: from brand to CI and from product category to CI. The reverse inference from a brand to a superordinate image is stronger for industry image than for CI. Research limitations/implications This research focuses on consumers’ evaluations from only one country (the UK). Further research could replicate the studies across different countries and with different countries of origin (COOs). Researchers could also examine the influence of brands misidentified with the wrong COO and mistakenly stored as such in consumers’ memories. Practical implications The results are relevant for managers and consultants working with country- (place-) branding campaigns. Brands and industries can help strengthen the evaluations of the economic dimension of different countries; however, these assets are underdeveloped in country-branding campaigns. Linking countries with brands and industries in campaigns could result in positive associations, which, in turn, could enhance the reputational rating of the countries. Originality/value This research extends previous studies on the effects of a country’s products and brands on CI by incorporating the mediating role of industry image between brands/products and CI, separating the effects of brand and product category on CI, allowing consumers to determine, which brands and products are associated with a country and adopting an experimental methodology to ascertain the causal direction of the effects

The Effect of Age, Syntax Complexity, and Cognitive Ability on the Rate of Semantic Illusions

Semantic illusions are recognition errors that occur when an individual fails to notice that information contradicts their prior knowledge (Barton & Sanford, 1993; Erickson & Mattson, 1981). For example, after hearing the question, “If a plane crashes while flying over state lines, where should the survivors be buried?” many start to consider the legality or appropriateness of the scenario despite knowing “survivors” should not be buried. Having more knowledge does not necessarily prevent individuals from overlooking illusory information/misinformation. Older adults tend to have greater crystallized intelligence than young adults, yet these age groups appear to detect illusory information at equivalent rates (Umanath & Marsh, 2012; Umanath, 2014). However, there is also evidence that older adults experience more semantic illusions than young adults in general (Umanath et al., 2012). Previous research demonstrates that the rate of semantic illusions is sensitive to specific language structure manipulations, such as syntax structure or word placement that facilitate overlooking the illusory information (Bredart and Modolo, 1988; Büttner, 2007; Wang, Hagoort, & Yang, 2009). Furthermore, there is evidence that disrupting processing fluency by increasing the difficulty of reading enables more frequent detection of illusory information (Song, 2009). Although this effect has been demonstrated using easy- versus difficult-to-read font, increasing syntax complexity also increases reading difficulty and requires more effort for comprehension (e.g., Kemtes & Kemper, 1997; Stromswold et al., 1996). The current study used a combined experimental-correlational approach to investigate the effects of age, language structure, and cognitive ability on the rate of semantic illusions experienced in response to general knowledge questions. The experimental approach compared the rate of semantic illusions between young and older adult age groups for illusory information embedded in sentences with either simple or complex syntax structures. The correlational approach examined the best cognitive predictors of increased detection of illusory information among composite scores for crystallized intelligence, fluid intelligence, and rationality. The sample of 203 participants, including 114 young adults ( M = 24.98, SD = 4.06) and 89 older adults ( M = 65.63; SD = 4.93), was administered a semantic illusion task, general knowledge check, and reading comprehension task, along with a battery of cognitive measures assessing fluid intelligence, crystallized intelligence, and rational thinking (Comprehensive Assessment of Rational Thinking [CART]; Stanovich, 2016). The semantic illusion task included general knowledge questions that either contained the correct information (target item), e.g., “How many animals of each kind did Noah bring on the ark?” or incorrect information (illusion item), e.g., How many animals of each kind did Moses bring on the ark?”. The sentence structure of the general knowledge questions varied across syntax complexity condition, such that participants experienced target items and illusion items in both simple (right-branching) versus complex (left-branching, middle-branching) syntax structures. Scoring procedures assessed frequencies for: (a) correct responses on target items (target score), (b) successful detection of illusory information (detection score), and (c) failures to detect illusory information (illusion score). The results of the experimental portion of the study confirmed an interaction of age and syntax for detection scores. Older adults detected illusory information more frequently than young adults, and complex versus simple syntax increased this advantage for the older adult age group. Alternatively, the pattern of results for illusion scores, or overlooking the illusory information, produced a main effect of age with older adults experiencing more semantic illusions than young adults regardless of syntax condition. Although counterintuitive, older adults had a higher baseline of prior knowledge, and therefore had more opportunities than young adults to detect and overlook the illusory information at higher rates. The correlational portion was largely data-driven, and investigated which cognitive composites for fluid intelligence, crystallized intelligence, and rationality best predicted detection scores. Results demonstrated varying patterns between age groups, such that young adult detection scores were most accurately predicted by the rationality composite scores. However, older adult detection scores were best predicted by crystallized intelligence. Although both crystallized intelligence and rationality are positively associated with detection of illusory information (Hannon & Daneman, 2001; Mata et al., 2014), a mediation analysis revealed a potential underlying cause to the age-differences in the outcomes. A bootstrap mediation analysis indicated the effect of age group on detection scores was fully mediated by crystallized intelligence. More specifically, older adults had more prior knowledge than young adults to such a disparity, variation in detection scores between age groups can be fully accounted for by differences in crystallized intelligence between young and older adults. Overall, increased syntax complexity facilitates detection of illusory information compared to simple syntax. Furthermore, increased crystallized intelligence is associated with more frequent detection of illusory information. Yet, with less prior knowledge, performance on rational thinking problems is the better predictor of detecting illusory information

Genetic Addiction Risk Score (GARS): Molecular Neurogenetic Evidence for Predisposition to Reward Deficiency Syndrome (RDS)

We have published extensively on the neuro- genetics of brain reward systems with reference to the genes related to dopaminergic function in particular. In 1996, we coined “ Reward Deficiency Syndrome ” (RDS), to portray behaviors found to have gene-based association with hypodopaminergic function. RDS as a useful concept has been embraced in many subsequent studies, to increase our understanding of Substance Use Disorder (SUD), addictions, and other obsessive, compulsive, and impulsive behaviors. Interestingly, albeit others, in one published study, we were able to describe lifetime RDS behaviors in a recovering addict (17 years sober) blindly by assessing resultant Genetic Addic- tion Risk Score (GARS ™ ) data only. We hypothesize that genetic testing at an early age may be an effective preventive strategy to reduce or eliminate pathological substance and behavioral seeking activity. Here, we consider a select number of genes, their polymorphisms, and associated risks for RDS whereby, utilizing GWAS, there is evidence for convergence to reward candidate genes. The evidence presented serves as a plausible brain-print providing relevant genetic information that will reinforce targeted therapies, to improve recovery and prevent relapse on an individualized basis. The primary driver of RDS is a hypodopaminergic trait (genes) as well as epige- netic states (methylation and deacetylation on chromatin structure). We now have entered a new era in addiction med- icine that embraces the neuroscience of addiction and RDS as a pathological condition in brain reward circuitry that calls for appropriate evidence-based therapy and early genetic diagno- sis and that requires further intensive investigation