Beyond Air-Sea Battle: The Debate over US Military Strategy in Asia,by Aaron L. Friedberg

Normally, a recommendation regarding for which audience a book is best suited comes at the end of the review. In this case, it comes first because Professor Aaron Friedberg provides a tight mono- graph that illuminates areas of great misunderstanding to a large population in the policy and defense communities: the debate over the concept of Air-Sea Battle (ASB) and the vernacular of mod- ern maritime strategy

Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman behind the Making of On War, by Vanya Eftimova Bellinger

One is tempted to ask why naval officers should be interested in reading a biog- raphy of the wife of the famous Prussian philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz. In answer we might go to the words of Marie von Clausewitz herself, from her letter of dedication to Carl’s unfinished masterpiece On War: “Readers will be rightly surprised that a woman should dare to write a preface for such a work as this. My friends will need no explanation. . . . Those who knew of our happy marriage and knew that we shared every- thing, not only joy and pain but also every occupation, every concern of daily life, will realize that a task of this kind could not occupy my beloved husband without at the same time becoming thoroughly familiar to me” (preface to Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans

Theodore Roosevelt’s Naval Diplomacy: The U.S. Navy and the Birth of the American Century

Commander Henry J. Hendrix has writ- ten a neat monograph based on his doctoral work. He makes two related arguments: first, that one cannot understand the diplomatic style of President Theodore Roosevelt without first understanding his attitude toward the efficacy and use of naval power; and second, that the existing literature has not adequately integrated naval and military historical methods of analysis with existing diplomatic historical approaches. Consequently, previous interpretations of Roosevelt’s foreign policy decisions, as they relate to incidents that involved the use of naval power, are incomplete, precisely because they do not fuse the diplomatic and political with the naval—especially the perspective reflected by the navalist attitudes of Theodore Roosevelt

Review Essay—Adaptation and the School of War: Mars Adapting: Military Change during War

Retired Marine officer and National Defense University research fellow Frank Hoffman’s Mars Adapting is, first and foremost, a work of military theory. Hoffman initially achieved notoriety for his work and briefs about something he characterized as hybrid or compound warfare, since popularized alongside the rise in interest in gray-zone conflict. This book’s major contribution is similarly theoretical, but in the area of institutional learning, not modalities of war. Hoffman argues “for greater consideration of Organizational Learning Theory [OLT] to establish an analytical framework.

Alteration of Microbial Communities Colonizing Leaf Litter in a Temperate Woodland Stream by Growth of Trees Under Conditions of Elevated Atmospheric CO\u3csub\u3e2\u3c/sub\u3e

Elevated atmospheric CO2 can cause increased carbon fixation and altered foliar chemical composition in a variety of plants, which has the potential to impact forested headwater streams because they are detritus-based ecosystems that rely on leaf litter as their primary source of organic carbon. Fungi and bacteria play key roles in the entry of terrestrial carbon into aquatic food webs, as they decompose leaf litter and serve as a source of nutrition for invertebrate consumers. This study tested the hypothesis that changes in leaf chemistry caused by elevated atmospheric CO2 would result in changes in the size and composition of microbial communities colonizing leaves in a woodland stream. Three tree species, Populus tremuloides, Salix alba, and Acer saccharum, were grown under ambient (360 ppm) or elevated (720 ppm) CO2, and their leaves were incubated in a woodland stream. Elevated-CO2 treatment resulted in significant increases in the phenolic and tannin contents and C/N ratios of leaves. Microbial effects, which occurred only for P. tremuloides leaves, included decreased fungal biomass and decreased bacterial counts. Analysis of fungal and bacterial communities on P. tremuloides leaves via terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) and clone library sequencing revealed that fungal community composition was mostly unchanged by the elevated-CO2 treatment, whereas bacterial communities showed a significant shift in composition and a significant increase in diversity. Specific changes in bacterial communities included increased numbers of alphaproteobacterial and cytophaga-flavobacter-bacteroides (CFB) group sequences and decreased numbers of betaproteobacterial and firmicutes sequences, as well as a pronounced decrease in overall Gram-positive bacterial sequences

Assaying the regulatory potential of mammalian conserved non-coding sequences in human cells

The fraction of experimentally active conserved non-coding sequences within any given cell type is low, so classical assays are unlikely to expose their potential

Efficient Gene Targeting by Homologous Recombination in Rat Embryonic Stem Cells

The rat is the preferred experimental animal in many biological studies. With the recent derivation of authentic rat embryonic stem (ES) cells it is now feasible to apply state-of-the art genetic engineering in this species using homologous recombination. To establish whether rat ES cells are amenable to in vivo recombination, we tested targeted disruption of the hypoxanthine phosphoribosyltransferase (hprt) locus in ES cells derived from both inbred and outbred strains of rats. Targeting vectors that replace exons 7 and 8 of the hprt gene with neomycinR/thymidine kinase selection cassettes were electroporated into male Fisher F344 and Sprague Dawley rat ES cells. Approximately 2% of the G418 resistant colonies also tolerated selection with 6-thioguanine, indicating inactivation of the hprt gene. PCR and Southern blot analysis confirmed correct site-specific targeting of the hprt locus in these clones. Embryoid body and monolayer differentiation of targeted cell lines established that they retained differentiation potential following targeting and selection. This report demonstrates that gene modification via homologous recombination in rat ES cells is efficient, and should facilitate implementation of targeted, genetic manipulation in the rat

The Astropy Problem

The Astropy Project (http://astropy.org) is, in its own words, "a community effort to develop a single core package for Astronomy in Python and foster interoperability between Python astronomy packages." For five years this project has been managed, written, and operated as a grassroots, self-organized, almost entirely volunteer effort while the software is used by the majority of the astronomical community. Despite this, the project has always been and remains to this day effectively unfunded. Further, contributors receive little or no formal recognition for creating and supporting what is now critical software. This paper explores the problem in detail, outlines possible solutions to correct this, and presents a few suggestions on how to address the sustainability of general purpose astronomical software