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"Smithson, Ryan"
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Ghosts of war : the true story of a 19-year-old GI
Ryan Smithson joined the Army Reserve when he was seventeen. Two year later, he was deployed to Iraq as an Army engineer. In this memoir, readers march along one GI's tour of duty. This is an account of the motivations and life of a contemporary soldier.
Book
Ten klicks south of whiskey: A play in three acts
Ten Klicks South of Whiskey is a stage performance in three acts, consisting mostly of monologues from soldiers of various backgrounds. It follows the trials of 4th platoon, Delta Troop, 463rd Cavalry Squadron, a fictional unit that achieves a near-mythic reputation of heroism and invulnerability in Iraq. As the monologues begin to reveal, however, not every tale about the 463rd can be substantiated. The audience is first challenged to search for truth and then to understand that truth is not the ultimate--or even the desired--goal of war stories. The platoon's leader, Lieutenant Ty Gage, having a photographic memory, stands as a symbol of objective truth. On the other hand, Private Charles Main copes with loss by stealing the identity of one his fallen soldiers, literally living a lie after coming home from war. In between these two extremes is the writer, Specialist Andrew Sullivan, a personification of balance and reconciliation, but one who does not always remain in balance himself. This play is an effort to share the struggles of contemporary U.S. soldiers with the citizens they swore to defend. It is not an attempt to answer the many questions that follow one home from a warzone. Rather, by placing the audience face to face with veterans telling their stories, it forces them to ask the questions themselves, and to wonder if there really are any answers.
Dissertation
Evaluating the promise of recombinant transmissible vaccines
•Transmissible vaccines can spread between hosts, increasing vaccination efficiency.•Recombinant transmissible vaccines (RTVs) are built from a vector virus and pathogen antigen.•If the vector is endemic, cross-immunity between the vector and vaccine hampers vaccine spread.•Vector-vaccine competition displaces vaccine unless supplemented with manual vaccination.•RTVs enhance effectiveness of vaccination programs if supplemented with manual vaccinations.
Transmissible vaccines have the potential to revolutionize infectious disease control by reducing the vaccination effort required to protect a population against a disease. Recent efforts to develop transmissible vaccines focus on recombinant transmissible vaccine designs (RTVs) because they pose reduced risk if intra-host evolution causes the vaccine to revert to its vector form. However, the shared antigenicity of the vaccine and vector may confer vaccine-immunity to hosts infected with the vector, thwarting the ability of the vaccine to spread through the population. We build a mathematical model to test whether a RTV can facilitate disease management in instances where reversion is likely to introduce the vector into the population or when the vector organism is already established in the host population, and the vector and vaccine share perfect cross-immunity. Our results show that a RTV can autonomously eradicate a pathogen, or protect a population from pathogen invasion, when cross-immunity between vaccine and vector is absent. If cross-immunity between vaccine and vector exists, however, our results show that a RTV can substantially reduce the vaccination effort necessary to control or eradicate a pathogen only when continuously augmented with direct manual vaccination. These results demonstrate that estimating the extent of cross-immunity between vector and vaccine is a critical step in RTV design, and that herpesvirus vectors showing facile reinfection and weak cross-immunity are promising.
Journal Article
A Comparison of an Electronic Version of the SF-36 General Health Questionnaire to the Standard Paper Version
Because of its sound psychometric properties the SF-36 General Health Questionnaire is used throughout the world, yet it is difficult to analyse and score. Using a newly developed software package, onto which any questionnaire can be loaded, we developed an electronic version of the SF-36 General Health Questionnaire. The purpose of this study is test the effect of the electronic mode of administration on the measurement properties of the SF-36. In a randomised cross-over design study 79 healthy individuals and 36 chronic pain patients completed both electronic and paper versions of the SF-36. Seventy-one percent preferred the electronic SF-36, 7% stated no preference, and 22% preferred the paper version. Completion time for the electronic SF-36 was slightly less, and there were no missing or problematical responses, whereas 44% of participants had at least one missing or problematical response in the paper version. Data entry and auditing time was 8 hours. There was less than 4% inter-version difference for any of the SF-36 sub-scales. The electronic SF-36 was well accepted and slightly quicker to complete than the paper version. We conclude that the electronic SF-36 is equivalent in performance and more effective than the paper version.
Journal Article
Phylogeny and systematics of Arabian lacertids from the Mesalina guttulata species complex (Squamata, Lacertidae), with the description of a new species
Background
The lacertid genus
Mesalina
has been the subject of several phylogenetic and biogeographic studies as well as taxonomic revisions within the last decade. The genus is partitioned into seven main clades, some of which represent species complexes of morphologically very similar species. The
Mesalina guttulata
species complex is one such case. This complex currently comprises four described species that occur through Arabia and northern Africa, however, the presence of a cryptic species in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Jordan was pointed out recently. For this study, we collected new material of the various species of the
M. guttulata
complex, including the undescribed lineage from across Saudi Arabia. We carried out multilocus phylogenetic analyses using three mitochondrial and three nuclear markers and analysis of morphological data to verify whether the undescribed lineage deserves a species rank.
Results
The results show that the lineage is clearly genetically separated from the other species of the complex and shows morphological differentiation from the other species. Therefore, we describe it herein as a new species,
Mesalina cryptica
sp. nov.
Conclusions
We contribute to the taxonomy of Arabian lacertid lizards by describing a new species distributed in central Saudi Arabia, with isolated populations occurring in Kuwait and Jordan. Despite its large range, the species is genetically and morphologically homogeneous. The gap in its distribution between the Jordan and Saudi Arabia populations is ascribable to the paucity of sampling along the Saudi/Iraqi border.
Journal Article
Applying Action Masking and Curriculum Learning Techniques to Improve Data Efficiency and Overall Performance in Operational Technology Cyber Security using Reinforcement Learning
In previous work, the IPMSRL environment (Integrated Platform Management System Reinforcement Learning environment) was developed with the aim of training defensive RL agents in a simulator representing a subset of an IPMS on a maritime vessel under a cyber-attack. This paper extends the use of IPMSRL to enhance realism including the additional dynamics of false positive alerts and alert delay. Applying curriculum learning, in the most difficult environment tested, resulted in an episode reward mean increasing from a baseline result of -2.791 to -0.569. Applying action masking, in the most difficult environment tested, resulted in an episode reward mean increasing from a baseline result of -2.791 to -0.743. Importantly, this level of performance was reached in less than 1 million timesteps, which was far more data efficient than vanilla PPO which reached a lower level of performance after 2.5 million timesteps. The training method which resulted in the highest level of performance observed in this paper was a combination of the application of curriculum learning and action masking, with a mean episode reward of 0.137. This paper also introduces a basic hardcoded defensive agent encoding a representation of cyber security best practice, which provides context to the episode reward mean figures reached by the RL agents. The hardcoded agent managed an episode reward mean of -1.895. This paper therefore shows that applications of curriculum learning and action masking, both independently and in tandem, present a way to overcome the complex real-world dynamics that are present in operational technology cyber security threat remediation.
Paper