A Failure of Policy: How U.S. Leaders Neglected to Shape, Lead, and Leverage Intelligence Concerning Japan During the Interwar Period, 1918-1941

This dissertation explores the perspective and performance of U.S. intelligence professionals and the intelligence organizations in which they served concerning Japan during the interwar period, the timespan ranging approximately from the conclusion of World War I in November 1918 through the entry of the United States into World War II in December 1941. Research for this dissertation focused predominantly on official and other primary documents, including U.S. intelligence reports and memoranda; intercepted, decrypted, and translated Japanese cablegrams; personal letters by and concerning U.S. intelligence professionals; and other primary source materials related to intelligence professionals and services available via the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Maryland. Some of these official and other primary documents were available from a number of online repositories providing access to U.S. intelligence documents concerning Japan during the interwar period. The published memoirs of particular key intelligence professionals, who focused particularly on Japan, and other actors, also proved important primary resources to completing this dissertation. Secondary sources augmented and occasionally corroborated the events related in the primary documents and memoirs. U.S. intelligence professionals produced intelligence informing U.S. civilian and military leaders of the increasing competition between U.S. and Japanese national interests and commercial objectives in the Asia-Pacific region, in addition to Japan’s perspective concerning the growing impasse. Particular intelligence professionals, whose exploits and experiences focusing particularly on Japan during the interwar period, provided an important foundation for this dissertation. These intelligence professionals took seriously the increasing threat that Japan posed to U.S. interests. For approximately two decades, they acquired intelligence from Japanese counterparts; defended U.S. interests against Japanese counterintelligence threats; and endeavored to influence their Japanese counterparts, often intelligence professionals and officers in Japan’s armed services, into reducing their concern regarding U.S. objectives in the Asia-Pacific region, particularly regarding Japan. In the end, war arrived in the form of a widespread and shocking series of Japanese attacks and invasions by sea, air, and land, reaching as far east as the waters just off of the California coast and targeting U.S., British, and Dutch military bases and colonies. The most famous aspect of the Pacific War’s start was the multiple air and sea attacks against Pearl Harbor and other U.S. military installations in the Hawaiian Islands, which sank of the U.S. Pacific fleet, claimed 2,403 lives, and caused the United States to declare war against Japan. Although some U.S. civilian and military leaders realized that war was increasingly likely as negotiations with Japan failed to yield solutions to U.S.-Japanese disagreements, the United States remained unprepared for war with Japan. Ultimately, the failure of U.S. leaders to use intelligence resources at their disposal and to empower intelligence collectors, in order to prepare the United States for a war with Japan, constituted a comprehensive leadership failure, rather than an intelligence failure

Noncommutative Field Theory and Lorentz Violation

The role of Lorentz symmetry in noncommutative field theory is considered. Any realistic noncommutative theory is found to be physically equivalent to a subset of a general Lorentz-violating standard-model extension involving ordinary fields. Some theoretical consequences are discussed. Existing experiments bound the scale of the noncommutativity parameter to (10 TeV)^{-2}.Comment: 4 page

Does Digital Transformation of the Australian Healthcare supply chain improve clinical safety?

Digital transformation of the healthcare supply chain has the potential to improve clinical safety. The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed healthcare supply chain deficiencies through shortages of Personal Protective Equipment and vaccines. Many healthcare supply chain processes are manual due to complexity, costs and lack of solutions and current capability to benefit from digitization, use of unique identifiers and aggregated data. This study follows the implementation of a digital tool to enable electronic procurement between healthcare providers and their suppliers. An artifact (Clinical Safety Evaluation Model) is under development to measure the key clinical safety indicators both pre and post digital transformation of the healthcare supply chain for small to medium healthcare providers. The results of this study will produce an empirical evaluation model for use by healthcare service providers. The findings are expected to confirm that digital transformation of the healthcare supply chain improves clinical safety

Digital Transformation of the Healthcare Supply Chain: A Clinical Safety Evaluation Model

The Healthcare Supply Chain (HSC) plays a key role in the safety and quality of healthcare services. A growing awareness of the complexities of the HSC has highlighted the potential usefulness of digital systems to deliver efficiencies which may lead to improved clinical safety. The business benefits of digital transformation of the HSC have been identified however there has been no clear methodology proposed to the author’s knowledge to measure the clinical safety benefits. This study will examine the performance of a Clinical Safety Evaluation Model (CSEM) created to provide healthcare organisations a measure of clinical safety through digital transformation of their supply chain. The CSEM uses an adaptation of the DeLone and McLean Information Success Model blended with proven clinical safety criterion within the healthcare supply chain sphere. The study will provide measures on both the effectiveness of the model and the potential for use of the CSEM in industry application to improve clinical safety

Possible mechanisms of CO₂ reduction by H₂ via prebiotic vectorial electrochemistry

Methanogens are putatively ancestral autotrophs that reduce CO2 with H2 to form biomass using a membrane-bound, proton-motive Fe(Ni)S protein called the energy-converting hydrogenase (Ech). At the origin of life, geologically sustained H+ gradients across inorganic barriers containing Fe(Ni)S minerals could theoretically have driven CO2 reduction by H2 through vectorial chemistry in a similar way to Ech. pH modulation of the redox potentials of H2, CO2 and Fe(Ni)S minerals could in principle enable an otherwise endergonic reaction. Here, we analyse whether vectorial electrochemistry can facilitate the reduction of CO2 by H2 under alkaline hydrothermal conditions using a microfluidic reactor. We present pilot data showing that steep pH gradients of approximately 5 pH units can be sustained over greater than 5 h across Fe(Ni)S barriers, with H+-flux across the barrier about two million-fold faster than OH--flux. This high flux produces a calculated 3-pH unit-gradient (equating to 180 mV) across single approximately 25-nm Fe(Ni)S nanocrystals, which is close to that required to reduce CO2. However, the poor solubility of H2 at atmospheric pressure limits CO2 reduction by H2, explaining why organic synthesis has so far proved elusive in our reactor. Higher H2 concentration will be needed in future to facilitate CO2 reduction through prebiotic vectorial electrochemistry

A Dyadic Perspective On Speech Accommodation and Social Connection: Both Partners\u27 Rejection Sensitivity Matters

Findings from confederate paradigms predict that mimicry is an adaptive route to social connection for rejection-sensitive individuals (Lakin, Chartrand, & Arkin, 2008). However, dyadic perspectives predict that whether mimicry leads to perceived connection depends on the rejection sensitivity (RS) of both partners in an interaction. We investigated these predictions in 50 college women who completed a dyadic cooperative task in which members were matched or mismatched in being dispositionally high or low in RS. We used a psycholinguistics paradigm to assess, through independent listeners\u27 judgments (N=162), how much interacting individuals accommodate phonetic aspects of their speech toward each other. Results confirmed predictions from confederate paradigms in matched RS dyads. However, mismatched dyads showed an asymmetry in levels of accommodation and perceived connection: Those high in RS accommodated more than their low-RS partner but emerged feeling less connected. Mediational analyses indicated that low-RS individuals\u27 nonaccommodation in mismatched dyads helped explain their high-RS partners\u27 relatively low perceived connection to them. Establishing whether mimicry is an adaptive route to social connection requires analyzing mimicry as a dyadic process influenced by the needs of each dyad member

Visualization Evaluation for Cyber Security: Trends and Future Directions

The Visualization for Cyber Security research community (VizSec) addresses longstanding challenges in cyber security by adapting and evaluating information visualization techniques with application to the cyber security domain. This research effort has created many tools and techniques that could be applied to improve cyber security, yet the community has not yet established unified standards for evaluating these approaches to predict their operational validity. In this paper, we survey and categorize the evaluation metrics, components and techniques that have been utilized in the past decade of VizSec research literature. We also discuss existing methodological gaps in evaluating visualization in cyber security, and suggest potential avenues for future re- search in order to help establish an agenda for advancing the state-of-the-art in evaluating cyber security visualization

A prebiotic basis for ATP as the universal energy currency

ATP is universally conserved as the principal energy currency in cells, driving metabolism through phosphorylation and condensation reactions. Such deep conservation suggests that ATP arose at an early stage of biochemical evolution. Yet purine synthesis requires 6 phosphorylation steps linked to ATP hydrolysis. This autocatalytic requirement for ATP to synthesize ATP implies the need for an earlier prebiotic ATP equivalent, which could drive protometabolism before purine synthesis. Why this early phosphorylating agent was replaced, and specifically with ATP rather than other nucleoside triphosphates, remains a mystery. Here, we show that the deep conservation of ATP might reflect its prebiotic chemistry in relation to another universally conserved intermediate, acetyl phosphate (AcP), which bridges between thioester and phosphate metabolism by linking acetyl CoA to the substrate-level phosphorylation of ADP. We confirm earlier results showing that AcP can phosphorylate ADP to ATP at nearly 20% yield in water in the presence of Fe3+ ions. We then show that Fe3+ and AcP are surprisingly favoured. A wide range of prebiotically relevant ions and minerals failed to catalyse ADP phosphorylation. From a panel of prebiotic phosphorylating agents, only AcP, and to a lesser extent carbamoyl phosphate, showed any significant phosphorylating potential. Critically, AcP did not phosphorylate any other nucleoside diphosphate. We use these data, reaction kinetics, and molecular dynamic simulations to infer a possible mechanism. Our findings might suggest that the reason ATP is universally conserved across life is that its formation is chemically favoured in aqueous solution under mild prebiotic conditions