Technological Change and the United States Navy, 1865–1945

This is not a technological history of the U.S. Navy per se but rather an explora- tion of how the dominant culture of the Navy’s leadership drove specific techno- logical choices in the transition from the sailing ship of the line to the battle- ship and then to the aircraft carrier. McBride’s thesis centers on two points: that the organization and culture of the U.S. Navy have traditionally been defined by its capital ships; and that new technol- ogies challenging the relevance of the current capital ship are generally resisted by senior leaders, who seek both to main- tain control over change and to inhibit any developments that suggest a transfer of power to individuals with the skills, functions, and organizational relation- ships of a new “technological paradigm.

The Cultural Challenge of Information Technology

There has been increasing speculation over the past several years that rapid advances in information technologies will enable tremendous leaps in future combat systems performance. Perhaps the most significant development is the prospect that new high-data-rate communication satellites will soon offer worldwide wireless information transmission capacities that can fully exploit the tremendous speed of modern infomration processing

Technological Change and the Future of Warfare,

Over the past several years, the U.S. mil- itary has officially embraced the idea that rapidly evolving technologies soon will lead to a profound change in the conduct of warfare. The need to inno- vate in response to a prospective revolu- tion in military affairs is the central theme of Joint Vision 2010 and similar force-planning documents. Some stud- ies, such as the congressionally man- dated National Defense Panel, have concluded that only immediate and radical transformation to new systems, new operational concepts, and new or- ganizations will enable the U.S. military to retain its battlefield dominance

The Limits of Transformation

In the shadow of the recent Iraq war, it is easy to accept that “growth and diffusion of stealth, precision, and information technology” has truly heralded the long-awaited revolution in military affairs. American leaders—from the President to the Pentagon military and civilian leadership—have called for dramatic transformation of each of the services to fit this revolution. In many ways, this is a far harder task.https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/usnwc-newport-papers/1015/thumbnail.jp

A Neurodynamic Account of Spontaneous Behaviour

The current article suggests that deterministic chaos self-organized in cortical dynamics could be responsible for the generation of spontaneous action sequences. Recently, various psychological observations have suggested that humans and primates can learn to extract statistical structures hidden in perceptual sequences experienced during active environmental interactions. Although it has been suggested that such statistical structures involve chunking or compositional primitives, their neuronal implementations in brains have not yet been clarified. Therefore, to reconstruct the phenomena, synthetic neuro-robotics experiments were conducted by using a neural network model, which is characterized by a generative model with intentional states and its multiple timescales dynamics. The experimental results showed that the robot successfully learned to imitate tutored behavioral sequence patterns by extracting the underlying transition probability among primitive actions. An analysis revealed that a set of primitive action patterns was embedded in the fast dynamics part, and the chaotic dynamics of spontaneously sequencing these action primitive patterns was structured in the slow dynamics part, provided that the timescale was adequately set for each part. It was also shown that self-organization of this type of functional hierarchy ensured robust action generation by the robot in its interactions with a noisy environment. This article discusses the correspondence of the synthetic experiments with the known hierarchy of the prefrontal cortex, the supplementary motor area, and the primary motor cortex for action generation. We speculate that deterministic dynamical structures organized in the prefrontal cortex could be essential because they can account for the generation of both intentional behaviors of fixed action sequences and spontaneous behaviors of pseudo-stochastic action sequences by the same mechanism

Fasting and surgery timing (FaST) audit

Background & aimsInternational guidance advocates the avoidance of prolonged preoperative fasting due to its negative impact on perioperative hydration. This study aimed to assess the adherence to these guidelines for fasting in patients undergoing elective and emergency surgery in the East Midlands region of the UK.MethodsThis prospective audit was performed over a two-month period at five National Health Service (NHS) Trusts across the East Midlands region of the UK. Demographic data, admission and operative details, and length of preoperative fasting were collected on adult patients listed for emergency and elective surgery.ResultsOf the 343 surgical patients included within the study, 50% (n = 172) were male, 78% (n = 266) had elective surgery and 22% (n = 77) underwent emergency surgery. Overall median fasting times (Q1, Q3) were 16.1 (13.0, 19.4) hours for food and 5.8 (3.5, 10.7) hours for clear fluids. Prolonged fasting >12 h was documented in 73% (n = 250) for food, and 21% (n = 71) for clear fluids. Median fasting times from clear fluids and food were longer in the those undergoing emergency surgery when compared with those undergoing elective surgery: 13.0 (6.4, 22.6) vs. 4.9 (3.3, 7.8) hours, and 22.0 (14.0, 37.4) vs. 15.6 (12.9, 17.8) hours respectively, p < 0.0001.ConclusionsDespite international consensus on the duration of preoperative fasting, patients continue to fast from clear fluids and food for prolonged lengths of time. Patients admitted for emergency surgery were more likely to fast for longer than those having elective surgery