Whom the Gods Would Destroy

The ability of the U.S. nuclear arsenal to deter and compel smaller WMD-owning adversaries is growing smaller; an alternative strategy is required. Information warfare can provide that alternative

U.S. Military Overseas Basing: New Developments and Oversight Issues for Congress

This report contains the new developments and oversight issues for Congress on the United States military overseas basing

Strategies for the replacement of chromic acid anodising for the structural bonding of aluminium alloys

The 40/50V Bengough-Stuart chromic acid anodise process is widely used in demanding applications as a prebond treatment. This process has a number of disadvantages and its replacement is the subject of much interest in the aerospace, automotive and defence sectors, amongst others. This paper details a number of modifications to the standard boric-sulphuric acid anodising (BSAA) process specifically to achieve satisfactory structural bond performance. These included: variations in the deoxidiser and anodising parameters, and; the use of a post anodising dip. It has been demonstrated in these studies that there are three possible methods of providing excellent durability using a variation of the standard BSAA process: the use of an electrolytic phosphoric acid deoxidiser (EPAD); a high temperature anodise at 35°C, and; the use of a post anodise phosphoric acid dip (PAD)

The generalized Robinson-Foulds metric

The Robinson-Foulds (RF) metric is arguably the most widely used measure of phylogenetic tree similarity, despite its well-known shortcomings: For example, moving a single taxon in a tree can result in a tree that has maximum distance to the original one; but the two trees are identical if we remove the single taxon. To this end, we propose a natural extension of the RF metric that does not simply count identical clades but instead, also takes similar clades into consideration. In contrast to previous approaches, our model requires the matching between clades to respect the structure of the two trees, a property that the classical RF metric exhibits, too. We show that computing this generalized RF metric is, unfortunately, NP-hard. We then present a simple Integer Linear Program for its computation, and evaluate it by an all-against-all comparison of 100 trees from a benchmark data set. We find that matchings that respect the tree structure differ significantly from those that do not, underlining the importance of this natural condition.Comment: Peer-reviewed and presented as part of the 13th Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI2013

‘Draw, write and tell’. A literature review and methodological development on the ‘draw and write’ research method.

The creative research method ‘draw and write’ has been used in health, social care and education research for several decades. A literature search of studies utilising this method was conducted during the planning stages of a study exploring primary school children’s perceptions of infant feeding. A review of this literature noted a range of benefits of ‘draw and write’ in enabling child participation. However, it also identified that the method has been used inconsistently and found that there are issues for researchers in relation to interpretation of creative work and analysis of data. As a result of this, an improvement on this method, entitled ‘draw, write and tell’, was developed in an attempt to provide a more child-orientated and consistent approach to data collection, interpretation and analysis. This article identifies the issues relating to ‘draw and write’ and describes the development and application of ‘draw, write and tell’ as a case study, noting its limitations and benefit

Tracking Multiple Topics for Finding Interesting Articles

We introduce multiple topic tracking (MTT) for iScore to better recommend news articles for users with multiple interests and to address changes in user interests over time. As an extension of the basic Rocchio algorithm, traditional topic detection and tracking, and single-pass clustering, MTT maintains multiple interest profiles to identify interesting articles for a specific user given user-feedback. Focusing on only interesting topics enables iScore to discard useless profiles to address changes in user interests and to achieve a balance between resource consumption and classification accuracy. iScore is able to achieve higher quality results than traditional methods such as the Rocchio algorithm. We identify several operating parameters that work well for MTT. Using the same parameters, we show that MTT alone yields high quality results for recommending interesting articles from several corpora. The inclusion of MTT improves iScore's performance by 25% in recommending news articles from the Yahoo! News RSS feeds and the TREC11 adaptive filter article collection. And through a small user study, we show that iScore can still perform well when only provided with little user feedback

Louse (Insecta : Phthiraptera) mitochondrial 12S rRNA secondary structure is highly variable

Lice are ectoparasitic insects hosted by birds and mammals. Mitochondrial 12S rRNA sequences obtained from lice show considerable length variation and are very difficult to align. We show that the louse 12S rRNA domain III secondary structure displays considerable variation compared to other insects, in both the shape and number of stems and loops. Phylogenetic trees constructed from tree edit distances between louse 12S rRNA structures do not closely resemble trees constructed from sequence data, suggesting that at least some of this structural variation has arisen independently in different louse lineages. Taken together with previous work on mitochondrial gene order and elevated rates of substitution in louse mitochondrial sequences, the structural variation in louse 12S rRNA confirms the highly distinctive nature of molecular evolution in these insects