Review of Jon Tetsuro Sumida’s In Defence of Naval Supremacy: Finance, Technology and British Naval Policy, 1889-1914

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Keeping the Germans out of the straits: The five ottoman dreadnought thesis reconsidered

This article contests Sean McMeekin’s claims concerning Russian culpability for the First World War. McMeekin maintains that Ottoman rearmament, particularly the purchase of several battleships released onto the global arms market by South American states, threatened to create a situation where the Russian Black Sea Fleet would be outclassed by its Ottoman opposite number. Rather than waiting for this to happen, the tsarist regime chose to go to war. Yet, contrary to McMeekin’s claims, the Ottoman naval expansion never assumed threatening dimensions because the Porte was unable to purchase battleships from Chile or Argentina. As a result, it provided no incentive for Russia to go to war in 1914

The Royal Navy and the German Threat, 1901-1914

Attached is a final draft version of the 'Introduction' to Matthew Seligmann's book The Royal Navy and the German Threat, 1901-1914. Re-distributed with permission from Oxford University Press.When and why did the Royal Navy come to view the expansion of German maritime power as a threat to British maritime security? Contrary to current thinking, Matthew S. Seligmann argues that Germany emerged as a major threat at the outset of the twentieth century, not because of its growing battle fleet, but because the British Admiralty (rightly) believed that Germany's naval planners intended to arm their country's fast merchant vessels in wartime and send them out to attack British trade in the manner of the privateers of old. This threat to British seaborne commerce was so serious that the leadership of the Royal Navy spent twelve years trying to work out how best to counter it. Ever more elaborate measures were devised to this end. These included building 'fighting liners' to run down the German ones; devising a specialized warship, the battle cruiser, as a weapon of trade defence; attempting to change international law to prohibit the conversion of merchant vessels into warships on the high seas; establishing a global intelligence network to monitor German shipping movements; and, finally, the arming of British merchant vessels in self-defence. The manner in which German schemes for commerce warfare drove British naval policy for over a decade before 1914 has not been recognized before. The Royal Navy and the German Threat illustrates a new and important aspect of British naval history

Identification of antigenic targets of paraproteins by expression cloning does not support a causal role of chronic antigenic stimulation in the pathogenesis of multiple myeloma and MGUS

Antigenic targets of monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS) and multiple myeloma (MM) paraproteins have been suggested to play an important role as growth stimulators in the pathogenesis of these neoplasms. To identify such targets, we screened cDNA libraries from human testis, lung and breast cancer, bovine and porcine muscle and wheat germ for reactivity with paraproteins in the sera from 115 patients with MGUS and MM. Of >6 x 10(8) paraprotein-antigen interactions screened, an IgA paraprotein from a female patient bound to sperm-specific cylicin-2, and 3 IgG paraproteins bound to tripeptidyl-peptidase-II (TPP-2), insulin-like growth-factor binding-protein-2 (IGFBP-2) and porcine kinesin. Specificity was confirmed by reverse Western blots using recombinant antigens. The broad spectrum of auto-, allo- and heteroantigens as targets of human paraproteins in patients without signs of chronic antigenic stimulation renders a causal role of the antigenic stimulus in the pathogenesis of MGUS and MM unlikely

Innovation Mashups: Academic Rigor Meets Social Networking Buzz

Exploring new options for publishing and content delivery offers an enormous opportunity to improve the state of the art and further modernize academic and professional publications. Traditional organizations such as the IEEE Computer Society, ACM, and Usenix have been encountering increasing competition from new ways of rapid publishing and dissemination, including social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+), blogs with enabled commenting, video posting (YouTube), Slashdot, and many other types of media. Liking is replacing traditional impact factors, comments left on authors\u27 webpages or blogs are replacing formal reviews, and site visits have more relevance than the number of article citations

Naval History by Conspiracy Theory: The British Admiralty before the First World War and the Methodology of Revisionism

Revisionist interpretations of British naval policy in the Fisher era claim that an elaborate smoke screen was created to hide the Royal Navy’s real policies; while documents showing the true goals were systematically destroyed. By asserting this, revisionists are able to dismiss those parts of the documentary record that contradict their theories, while simultaneously excusing the lack of evidence for their theories by claiming it has been destroyed. This article shows that this methodology is misleading and untenable

Non-Abelian hydrodynamics and the flow of spin in spin-orbit coupled substances

Motivated by heavy ion collision experiments, we study the hydrodynamic properties of non-Abelian systems. These issues arise in condensed matter physics in the context of transport of spins in the presence of spin orbit coupling: the Pauli Hamiltonian governing the leading relativistic corrections in condensed matter systems can be rewritten in a language of SU(2) covariant derivatives, where the role of the non-Abelian gauge fields is taken by the physical electromagnetic fields. Taking a similar perspective as Jackiw and coworkers, we show that non-abelian hydrodynamical currents can be factored in a non-coherent 'classical' part, and a coherent part requiring macroscopic non-abelian quantum entanglement. Non-abelian flow being thus a much richer affair than familiar hydrodynamics, permits us to classify the various spin transport phenomena in in condensed matter physics in a unifying framework.In semiconductor spintronics, the absence of hydrodynamics is well known, but in our formulation it is directly associated with the fact that non-abelian currents are only covariantly conserved.We analyze the quantum mechanical single particle currents of relevance to mesoscopic transport with as highlight the Aharonov-Casher effect, where we demonstrate that the non-abelian transport structure renders it much more fragile than its abelian counterpart, the Aharonov-Bohm effect. We subsequently focus on spin flows protected by order parameters, of which the spin-spiral magnets and the spin superfluids are important examples. The surprising bonus is that the presence of an order parameter, being single-valued, restores hydrodynamics. We demonstrate a new effect: the trapping of electrical line charge, being the 'fixed frame' non-Abelian analogue of the familiar magnetic flux trapping by superconductors.Comment: 23 pages, 7 figure