Racial Tropes in the Foreign Policy Bureaucracy: A Computational Text Analysis

How do racial stereotypes affect perceptions in foreign policy? Race and racism as topics have long been marginalized in the study of international relations but are receiving renewed attention. In this article we assess the role of implicit racial bias in internal, originally classified assessments by the US foreign policy bureaucracy during the Cold War. We use a combination of dictionary-based and supervised machine learning techniques to identify the presence of four racial tropes in a unique corpus of intelligence documents: almost 5,000 President's Daily Briefs given to Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford. We argue and find that entries about countries that the US deemed “racialized Others”—specifically, countries in the Global South, newly independent states, and some specific regional groupings—feature an especially large number of racial tropes. Entries about foreign developments in these places are more likely to feature interpretations that infantilize, invoke animal-based analogies, or imply irrationality or belligerence. This association holds even when accounting for the presence of conflict, the regime type of the country being analyzed, the invocation of leaders, and the topics being discussed. The article makes two primary contributions. First, it adds to the revival of attention to race but gives special emphasis to implicit racialized thinking and its appearance in bureaucratic settings. Second, we show the promise of new tools for identifying racial and other forms of implicit bias in foreign policy texts

Target: The Epic Search for Equilibrium

Target\u27s expansion into food retailing is discussed, along with market share of competitors and future growth plans

Comparing Morse Complexes Using Optimal Transport: An Experimental Study

Morse complexes and Morse-Smale complexes are topological descriptors popular in topology-based visualization. Comparing these complexes plays an important role in their applications in feature correspondences, feature tracking, symmetry detection, and uncertainty visualization. Leveraging recent advances in optimal transport, we apply a class of optimal transport distances to the comparative analysis of Morse complexes. Contrasting with existing comparative measures, such distances are easy and efficient to compute, and naturally provide structural matching between Morse complexes. We perform an experimental study involving scientific simulation datasets and discuss the effectiveness of these distances as comparative measures for Morse complexes. We also provide an initial guideline for choosing the optimal transport distances under various data assumptions.Comment: IEEE Visualization Conference (IEEE VIS) Short Paper, accepted, 2023; supplementary materials: http://www.sci.utah.edu/~beiwang/publications/GWMC_VIS_Short_BeiWang_2023_Supplement.pd

When performativity fails: Implications for Critical Management Studies

This article argues that recent calls in this journal and elsewhere for Critical Management Studies scholars to embrace rather than reject performativity presents an overly optimistic view of (a) the power of language to achieve emancipatory organizational change and (b) the capability of lone Critical Management Studies researchers to resignify management discourses. We introduce the notion of failed performatives to extend this argument and discuss its implications for critical inquiry. If Critical Management Studies seeks to make a practical difference in business and society, and realize its ideals of emancipation, we suggest alternative methods of impact must be explored

The Association of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors with Delirium in Post-Operative Adults: A Secondary Analysis of a Post-Operative Dataset with Daily Severity of Illness Adjustment

Background Postoperative delirium is a prevalent condition associated with increased mortality, difficulties with physical recovery from surgery and decreased long-term cognitive function, especially in older adults. Currently, there are no direct medical treatments for delirium. We recently found an association between SSRI administration and reduced delirium in a critically ill medical population. We sought to evaluate this association in a surgical population. SSRIs may provide a new treatment option for delirium; further exploration is warranted. We aimed to assess the association between selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and delirium in postoperative adults. Methods We undertook a secondary analysis of an existing cohort in a large Academic Medical Centre in the Southeast United States. Patients were adults (aged 18-99) requiring at least one night of hospital admission following a scheduled surgery, enrolled from July 2017 to September 2017. Our primary outcome was the incidence of delirium 24 hours after administration of an SSRI. Our exposure variable was any SSRI administration in the preceding 24 hours. We collected data on demographics, SSRI administration, overall severity of illness via the ASA grading system, and daily severity of illness via the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) score from the electronic medical record review. Results We collected data on 191 patients (mean age 56.8 years, SD +/- 16.7). One hundred ten (57.6%) were female, and 149 (78%) were White. Most patients, 183 (95.8%), were non-Hispanic. Twenty-eight (14.6%) were prescribed SSRIs at any point during the study period and 35 (18.3%) were delirious on day one. Unadjusted analysis demonstrated that patients receiving SSRIs had OR 1.60 for delirium the next day (p=0.41). After adjusting for age ASA, age, hospital LOS, and SOFA, patients receiving SSRIs had OR 1.44 for next-day delirium (p=0.48). Conclusions SSRIs administered in the postoperative period were not associated with delirium on the subsequent day. This finding conflicts with prior results from a critically ill population. The association of SSRIs with delirium requires further investigation

Concert recording 2019-03-09a

[Tracks 1-2]. Duo sonata / Gregory Wanamaker -- [Track 3]. Aulos - In memorium a Debussy / Ivana Loudova -- [Track 4]. Strange humors / John Mackey -- [Track 5]. Circus parade / Pierre Max Dubois -- [Track 6]. Parable XI for solo alto saxophone / Vincent Persichetti -- [Track 7]. Three preludes / George Gershwin arranged by Ryan Reynolds

Software Agents as Facilitators of Coherent Coalition Operations

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.Software agents can be viewed as semi-autonomous entities which help people cope with the complexities of working collaboratively in a distributed information environment. This paper describes the research that DERA is carrying out into Software Agents for use in Command Systems and the collaborative work with the 16 partners of an international Coalition Agents Experiment. Specifically, the paper aims to show that using software agent-based C2 frameworks is a useful way of dealing with the complexity of real-world problems such as supporting agile and robust Coalition operations and enabling interoperability between legacy or previously incompatible systems. In addition, Agent-enabled 'grids' can be used to rapidly integrate a wide variety of agents and infrastructures, with domain management services structuring agent relationships, limiting their behaviours and enforcing Coalition policies

Association between Postoperative Delirium and Long-term Cognitive Function after Major Nonemergent Surgery

Importance: Postoperative delirium is associated with decreases in long-term cognitive function in elderly populations. Objective: To determine whether postoperative delirium is associated with decreased long-term cognition in a younger, more heterogeneous population. Design, Setting, and Participants: A prospective cohort study was conducted at a single academic medical center (≥800 beds) in the southeastern United States from September 5, 2017, through January 15, 2018. A total of 191 patients aged 18 years or older who were English-speaking and were anticipated to require at least 1 night of hospital admission after a scheduled major nonemergent surgery were included. Prisoners, individuals without baseline cognitive assessments, and those who could not provide informed consent were excluded. Ninety-day follow-up assessments were performed on 135 patients (70.7%). Exposures: The primary exposure was postoperative delirium defined as any instance of delirium occurring 24 to 72 hours after an operation. Delirium was diagnosed by the research team using the Confusion Assessment Method (CAM). Main Outcomes and Measures: The primary outcome was change in cognition at 90 days after surgery compared with baseline, preoperative cognition. Cognition was measured using a telephone version of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (T-MoCA) with cognitive impairment defined as a score less than 18 on a scale of 0 to 22. Results: Of the 191 patients included in the study, 110 (57.6%) were women; the mean (SD) age was 56.8 (16.7) years. For the primary outcome of interest, patients with and without delirium had a small increase in T-MoCA scores at 90 days compared with baseline on unadjusted analysis (with delirium, 0.69; 95% CI, -0.34 to 1.73 vs without delirium, 0.67; 95% CI, 0.17-1.16). The initial multivariate linear regression model included age, preoperative American Society of Anesthesiologists Physical Status Classification System score, preoperative cognitive impairment, and duration of anesthesia. Preoperative cognitive impairment proved to be the only notable confounder: when adjusted for preoperative cognitive impairment, patients with delirium had a 0.70-point greater decrease in 90-day T-MoCA scores than those without delirium compared with their respective baseline scores (with delirium, 0.16; 95% CI, -0.63 to 0.94 vs without delirium, 0.86; 95% CI, 0.40-1.33). Conclusions and Relevance: Although a statistically significant association between 90-day cognition and postoperative delirium was not noted, patients with preoperative cognitive impairment appeared to have improvements in cognition 90 days after surgery; however, this finding was attenuated if they became delirious. Preoperative cognitive impairment alone should not preclude patients from undergoing indicated surgical procedures