Executive Order Research Articles

Learning and forgetting interactions within a collaborative human-centric manufacturing network

Learning and forgetting (LaF) phenomena are characteristic of labor-intensive production and service industries. To mitigate the effects of LaF in a human-centric manufacturing system integrated with outsourcing, managers need to coordinate their decisions with partners for assigning operations and scheduling processes following a hierarchy. A model that addresses this should consider the expected latency of various tasks across assignments and production sequences and similarities among jobs as that affects learning. This paper develops a novel bi-level LaF model to help determine the leader-follower decisions in a decentralized network. It models the learning concept as a factor of task execution order and task variety. The mixed-integer non-linear optimization model determines the best order coordination and scheduling scheme by minimizing the processing, operating, and holding costs and penalties for missing deadlines. This study also develops an efficient column-and-constraint generation algorithm based on the duplication method, which enables solving bi-level models in which the lower-level model includes integer variables. This study also provides an illustrative real-sized example to validate the model and prove the efficiency of our resolution method. The results indicate that adopting compromise solutions enables preoccupied workers to be released earlier than expected, reducing the costs associated with learning and forgetting (due to latency). Despite the effects of LaF and the decentralized structure of the supply chain, which includes rising network costs, the schedules become more precise, and the cost balance among actors effectively increases.

Executive Orders: Mandating Inclusion in the Federal Workplace: Insights from Federal Executive Departments’ Strategic Plans

Inclusion remains a very real and legitimate concern in contemporary workplaces. This research examines how executive orders from the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations influenced Biden era Federal Executive Departments’ strategic plans. This study analyzed the interpretation and understanding of departments’ prioritization and articulation of inclusion across seven core functional areas: (a) leadership; (b) policies, practices, and procedures; (c) human resource management; (d) culture, climate, and norms; (e) emotion, engagement, and perceptions; (f) training and professional development; and (g) accountability and sustainability. The findings reveal that inclusion cannot be mandated or rubberstamped. Inclusion is a subjective endeavor that can result in multiple realities as different employees can experience/observe the same event differently, sometimes infinitely so. The seven core functional areas offer a pathway to embedding inclusive practices and initiatives in the workplace. They create a common approach the federal government can undertake, prioritizing broader knowledge and fundamental awareness of the intertwined nature of experiences, perceptions, emotions, and reasons to foster a sense of belonging.

Supply chains in the automotive industry during the COVID-19 pandemic (the case of Polish companies)

The aim of the article is to present disruptions in the COVID-19 pandemic occurring in the supply chain of companies from the automotive industry. The specific objectives are: identification and characterization of companies operating in automotive supply chains, defining changes in the automotive industry during the pandemic, showing the types of disruptions in supply chains and ways to counteract these unfavorable situations. Companies from the automotive industry operating in Poland were selected for the research purposefully. Using the random selection method, 500 companies from the automotive industry were selected for the study, which constituted a large research sample. According to estimates, there were about 2,000 in Poland. companies strictly focused on the automotive industry and several thousand with indirect connections, e.g. car repair shops. The data sources were surveys conducted in June 2023 among 500 enterprises in the form of a direct telephone interview. The main disruptions and problems in the supply chain were longer order execution times, increased costs of transport, storage and labour, as well as limited timeliness of deliveries. However, as a rule, disruptions lasted up to 1 year. One in ten enterprises declared that the disturbances are still ongoing. Half of the enterprises did not experience support from their partners in the supply chain. Despite this, 60% of enterprises did not seek or use alternative suppliers or buyers. The same share of enterprises made operational decisions during the pandemic, while ¼ made strategic decisions. The pandemic also did not affect radical changes in supply chains, such as resigning from Asian suppliers in favor of European ones. Keywords: Supply chains, COVID-19 pandemic, automotive industry.

Afro-Asian Antagonism and the Long Korean War

American racial politics during the long Korean War formed what this essay terms Afro-Asian antagonism, a racial hate between African Americans and Asians (and Asian Americans). When the Truman administration issued Executive Order 9981 and proclaimed its commitment to military racial integration in 1948, two years before the outbreak of the Korean War, it seemed to signal a significant step of racial progress. Black servicemen who enlisted in the “liberalized” military, however, were strategically deployed to represent American national violence, especially to the eyes of Asians who were internalizing antiblack racism imported from the United States through the military apparatus. In the face of decolonization and an upsurge in civil rights movements, this article argues, the executive order molded Black Korean War veterans into an instrument to abort Afro-Asian connections while promoting racial liberalism to a global audience. The Korean War inaugurated the American Cold War racial formation that endures into the twenty-first century. Contrasting two Korean War novels written by Asian American and African American authors—Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl (2002) and Toni Morrison’s Home (2012)—this article traces how Afro-Asian orphans and a Black veteran internalize and challenge the Afro-Asian antagonisms of the long Korean War.

Termination and Expressiveness of Execution Strategies for Networks of Bidirectional Model Transformations

When developers describe a software system with multiple models, such as architecture diagrams, deployment descriptions, and source code, these models must represent the system in a uniform way, i.e., they must be and stay consistent . One means to automatically preserve consistency after changes to models are model transformations, of which bidirectional transformations that preserve consistency between two models have been well researched. To preserve consistency between multiple models, such transformations can be combined to networks. When transformations are developed independently and reused modularly, the resulting network can be of arbitrary topology. For such networks, no universal strategy exists to orchestrate the execution of transformations such that the resulting models are consistent. In this article, we prove that termination of such a strategy can only be guaranteed if it is incomplete, i.e., if it is allowed to fail to restore consistency for some changes although an execution order of transformations exists that yields consistent models. We propose such a strategy, for which we prove termination and show that and why it makes it easier for users of model transformation networks to understand the reasons whenever the strategy fails. In addition, we provide a simulator for the comparison of different execution strategies. These findings help transformation developers and users in understanding when and why they can expect the execution of a transformation network to terminate and when they can even expect it to succeed. Furthermore, the proposed strategy guarantees them termination and supports them in finding the reason whenever it is not successful.

The Historical Presidency: Rethinking the origins of national security classification

AbstractThis article reconstructs the bureaucratic and legal processes that culminated in the creation of the modern national security classification system in Executive Order No. 10,290, issued by Harry Truman in 1951. It argues that classification was shaped by processes of improvisation endogenous to the federal bureaucracy, which produced the problems of overclassification, definitional vagueness, and ambiguous constitutional status that have haunted the secrecy regime until the present. In so doing, it provides new insight into the development of the modern presidency, the national security state, and American democracy, and suggests possible paths to reform the contemporary pathologies of the classification system.

Divided Government, Strategic Substitution, and Presidential Unilateralism

AbstractPresidents select from a range of instruments when creating new policies through executive action. We study strategic substitution in this context and argue that presidents use less visible means of unilateral instruments when Congress is likely to scrutinize presidential action. Using data on unilateral orders issued between 1946 and 2020, we report two main findings. First, analyzing presidents’ choice of instruments, we show that presidents are more likely to substitute memoranda and other less visible instruments for executive orders and proclamations during periods of divided government. Second, after accounting for the substitution of executive orders with other instruments, we find that presidents issue greater numbers of directives during divided government than during unified government. These findings provide new evidence about the limitations of the separation of powers as a constraint on presidential unilateralism and highlight the importance of accounting for the variety of instruments through which presidents create unilateral policies.

Interpreting US Cryptocurrency Regulation through Biden’s Executive Orders: Foretelling the Regulatory Framework for Digital Assets and the Metaverse

Interpreting US Cryptocurrency Regulation through Biden’s Executive Orders: Foretelling the Regulatory Framework for Digital Assets and the Metaverse

"With a Stroke of a Pen": Executive Order 9981 in American Memory

Abstract: On July 26, 2017, President Donald Trump banned transgender personnel from serving in the military via Twitter. This blow to civil rights did not happen on a random date. Sixty-nine years earlier, President Harry Truman had issued Executive Order 9981 which, according to public memory, ended racial segregation in the American military "with a stroke of a pen." This article takes a closer look at how Truman's federal directive has been remembered and commemorated since its passage. By analyzing newspaper articles and speeches, it reveals the exclusion of Black activism as well as the overemphasis on presidential leadership and resolve.

Chargemaster Pricing Variation for Commonly Billed Procedures in Interventional Cardiology.

A chargemaster is a database of all of the billable items offered by a hospital with their base price listings. A 2018 executive order required all American hospitals to publish their chargemasters to increase price transparency and reduce healthcare expenditures. Chargemaster listings, however, demonstrate marked variability and inconsistency and have not been associated with consumer benefit. The objective of this study was to analyze chargemasters for commonly billed interventional cardiology procedures across five diverse states to explore relationships between price listings and hospital characteristics, ownership, location, and hospital quality. Chargemasters were downloaded from hospitals in five states selected to represent the nation's healthcare diversity. Price listings for five interventional cardiology procedures (percutaneous coronary angiography, coronary angiography, single-vessel angioplasty, single-vessel stent, and percutaneous coronary intervention of acute myocardial infarction) were extracted. Statistical analyses such as the Kruskal-Wallis test were performed to explore relationships between mean chargemaster price listings for each procedure and hospital characteristics, ownership, location, and quality ratings. The median mean chargemaster price of four of the five interventional cardiology procedures significantly differed across all states. Price listings were significantly higher in urban versus rural areas and in general acute care hospitals and state government-owned facilities. The highest prices were found with the highest hospital quality rating. Chargemaster price listings for common interventional cardiology procedures varied significantly across these five states. Urban and metropolitan hospital location, hospital type, and hospital ownership could be factors driving increased chargemaster procedure prices. Prices were highest at hospitals with the highest quality rating.

"With a Stroke of a Pen": Executive Order 9981 in American Memory

Abstract: On July 26, 2017, President Donald Trump banned transgender personnel from serving in the military via Twitter. This blow to civil rights did not happen on a random date. Sixty-nine years earlier, President Harry Truman had issued Executive Order 9981 which, according to public memory, ended racial segregation in the American military "with a stroke of a pen." This article takes a closer look at how Truman's federal directive has been remembered and commemorated since its passage. By analyzing newspaper articles and speeches, it reveals the exclusion of Black activism as well as the overemphasis on presidential leadership and resolve.

Classifying mature federal forests in the United States: The forest inventory growth stage system

President Biden’s executive order, ‘Strengthening the Nation's Forests, Communities, and Local Economies,’ (EO#14072, April 22, 2022) acknowledges the interest in mature and old-growth (MOG) forests by directing U.S. Federal agencies to define and inventory these resources on United States Forest Service (USFS) and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands. We propose using an effective and enduring mature forest classification system that could be adaptable to social paradigms, monitoring data streams, scientific information, and global change factors. We accommodate these design aspects by defining mature forests as a growth stage prior to the onset of old-growth attributes within a proposed Forest Inventory Growth Stage System (FIGSS). FIGSS uses the long-established USFS old-growth assessments often conducted in concert with public dialogues to identify key structural indicators of older forests. The system informs inverse modeling of the prior “mature” stage’s structural thresholds enabling initial population estimates of mature forest extent using the USFS’ nationally consistent Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program data. With this approach, we estimate that approximately 45 percent of all USFS/BLM forest is mature. The FIGSS system is based on a variety of components that could be used to account for cultural values ascribed to forest conditions which could be refined across future versions such as assumptions about the relative length of growth stages, incorporating data from emerging monitoring technologies along with old-growth/mature field sampling campaigns, accommodating spectrums of site-limited and/or disturbance-driven stand development, refined variable selection processes such as machine-learning, and consideration of traditional ecological knowledge.

Scope-shifting: Bureaucracy, Energy Justice and the Dakota Access Pipeline

Through a study of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' (USACE) environmental assessment (EA) of the Dakota Access Pipeline's crossing of Lake Oahe near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, this paper explores regulatory agencies’ “interpretive implementation.” We find that, in implementing the National Environmental Policy Act and Executive Order 12898 on Environmental Justice, USACE “scope-shifted”—facultatively expanding and contracting the scopes of its spatial, scientific and cost–benefit impact analyses—to expedite industrial expansion, contravening the policies’ original intents. In doing so, USACE's EA created various energy injustices by excluding local tribes (especially the Standing Rock Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux Tribes) and their concerns, e.g. treaty rights, local histories, climate change and especially potential oil spills with impacts on human health and subsistence resources. We analyze this scope-shifting through the lens of Karl Polayni's double movement between socioenvironmental protections and capitalist development. We elaborate this framework further via a triple-helix model that analyses ideologies, power relations and policies (here further complicated by both “law” and “interpretation” threads), as three intertwined strands that pull with or against each other, jointly progressing toward greater rights for vulnerable communities, “retrograding” toward earlier, oppressive conditions or simply stagnating. Ultimately, we argue that understanding scope-shifting and other forms of interpretive implementation as threads within the triple-helix policy strand, in dynamic tension or synchrony with other threads and strands, can help explicate agency decision-making processes. We hope that this conceptualization can elucidate the capacity of seemingly mundane bureaucratic practices for exacerbating, or potentially alleviating, energy injustice.

Lodestar: An Integrated Embedded Real-Time Control Engine.

In this work we present Lodestar, an integrated engine for rapid real-time control system development. Using a functional block diagram paradigm, Lodestar allows for complex multi-disciplinary control software design, while automatically resolving execution order, circular data-dependencies, and networking. In particular, Lodestar presents a unified set of control, signal processing, and computer vision routines to users, which may be interfaced with external hardware and software packages using interoperable user-defined wrappers. Lodestar allows for user-defined block diagrams to be directly executed, or for them to be translated to overhead-free source code for integration in other programs. We demonstrate how our framework departs from approaches used in state-of-the-art simulation frameworks to enable real-time performance, and compare its capabilities to existing solutions in the realm of control software, emphasizing the convenience of using Lodestar in low-level control system design and implementation. To demonstrate the utility of Lodestar in real-time control systems design, we have applied Lodestar to implement a real-time torque-based controller for a robotic arm. To compare the algorithm design approach in Lodestar to a classical ground-up approach, we have developed a novel autofocus algorithm for use in thermography-based localization and parameter estimation in electrosurgery and other areas of robot-assisted surgery. We use this example to illustrate that Lodestar considerably eases the design process. We also show how Lodestar can seamlessly interface with existing simulation and networking framework in a number of simulation examples.

Regulating Generative AI: A Pathway to Ethical and Responsible Implementation

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more and more prevalent in our daily lives, and its potential applications are practically limitless. However, as with any technology, there are concerns about how AI could be misused or abused. One of the most serious concerns is the potential for discrimination, particularly against women or minorities, when AI systems are used for tasks like job hiring. Additionally, there are concerns about privacy and security, as AI could be used to monitor people's movements or launch cyberattacks. To address these concerns, regulations must be developed to ensure that AI is developed and used ethically and responsibly. These regulations should address issues like safety, privacy, security, and discrimination. Finally, it is important to educate the public about AI and how to use it safely and responsibly. In this paper, I will examine the AI regulations and challenges that exist today, particularly in the United States. Two regulations I will focus on are the AI in Government Act of 2020 and the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act of 2020. Additionally, I will examine two Executive Orders that have addressed the issue of AI in the federal government. Finally, I will conclude with some policy considerations and recommendations for federal agencies.

Faster variational quantum algorithms with quantum kernel-based surrogate models

Abstract We present a new optimization strategy for small-to-intermediate scale variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) on noisy near-term quantum processors which uses a Gaussian process surrogate model equipped with a classically-evaluated quantum kernel. VQAs are typically optimized using gradient-based approaches however these are difficult to implement on current noisy devices, requiring large numbers of objective function evaluations. Our approach shifts this computational burden onto the classical optimizer component of these hybrid algorithms, greatly reducing the number of quantum circuit evaluations required from the quantum processor. We focus on the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithm and demonstrate numerically that these surrogate models are particularly well suited to the algorithm’s objective function. Next, we apply these models to both noiseless and noisy VQE simulations and show that they exhibit better performance than widely-used classical kernels in terms of final accuracy and convergence speed. Compared to the typically-used stochastic gradient-descent approach to VQAs, our quantum kernel-based approach is found to consistently achieve significantly higher accuracy while requiring less than an order of magnitude fewer quantum circuit executions. We analyze the performance of the quantum kernel-based models in terms of the kernels’ induced feature spaces and explicitly construct their feature maps. Finally, we describe a scheme for approximating the best-performing quantum kernel using a classically-efficient tensor network representation of its input state and so provide a pathway for scaling this strategy to larger systems.

SPRC19: A Database of State Policy Responses to COVID-19 in the United States

SPRC19 is a new database that seeks to capture a wide range of state policy actions in response to COVID-19 in the United States. Since March 2020 we have monitored state governments’ and multi-state associations’ websites for executive orders, agency rules, new legislation, and court decisions. We categorize each policy action into one of 206 distinct policies, then document the branch of government, source document, announcement date, implementation date, and expiration date (if applicable). We also record whether the action represents the introduction of a new policy or the expansion or contraction of an existing policy. The current release of SPRC19, v3.0, captures over 13,000 distinct policy actions through April 2020, which constitutes thousands more actions than similar resources over the same time period.

Seizing the policy moment in crop biotech regulation: an interdisciplinary response to the Executive Order on biotechnology.

Seizing the policy moment in crop biotech regulation: an interdisciplinary response to the Executive Order on biotechnology.

Turn-Taking Strategies of Secretary Harry Roque as a Presidential Spokesperson: A Conversation Analysis

This research aimed to analyze the conversation style used by former Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque in political interviews. Specifically, it aims to determine the turn-taking strategies used by former Sec. In political interviews, Roque identifies corresponding pragmatic power relations based on the dominant turn-taking strategies employedbyformer Sec. Inpoliticalinterviews, Roqueascertainstheoverallconversational style portrayed by former Sec. Roque, and glean the conversational style used by Sec. Roque. To achieve these, a descriptive research design was utilized. Five political interviews featuring Roque with accumulated airtime of three hours were transcribed to acquire on-hand data from the conversations. The conversation analysis revealed that Spokesperson Roque employed dominant turn-taking strategies such as overlapping, directness, and indirectness to control the conversation and assert his authority. He did not conform to the traditional manner of politicians, as he was straightforward in his utterances and did not use evasion when asked questions. Spokesperson Roque’s conversation style aimed to command attention, assert authority, talk upfront, and talk longer in political interviews. However, this style aligns differently with the mandate of being a spokesperson as promulgated in Executive Order No. 4, 2010, which emphasizes information sharing and trust building. Notably, Spokesperson Roque’s conversation style was like that of former President Duterte, which highlights the critical role that Presidential Spokespersons play in shaping public perception of the President and their administration. This study underscores the importance of understanding the complex dynamics that govern the relationships between Presidential Spokespersons and the leaders they serve, particularly in modern political communication.

The robust cyclic job shop problem

This paper deals with the cyclic job shop problem where the task durations are uncertain and belong to a polyhedral uncertainty set. We formulate the cyclic job shop problem as a two-stage robust optimization model. The cycle time and the execution order of tasks executed on the same machines correspond to the here-and-now decisions and have to be decided before the realization of the uncertainty. The starting times of tasks corresponding to the wait-and-see decisions are delayed and can be adjusted after the uncertain parameters are known. In the last decades, different solution approaches have been developed for two-stage robust optimization problems. Among them, the use of affine policies, row and row-and-column generation algorithms are the most common. In this paper, we propose a branch-and-bound algorithm to tackle the robust cyclic job shop problem with cycle time minimization. The algorithm uses, at each node of the search tree, a robust version of the Howard’s algorithm to derive a lower bound on the optimal cycle time. Moreover, we design a row generation algorithm and a column-and-row generation algorithm and compare it to the branch-and-bound method. Finally, encouraging preliminary results on numerical experiments performed on randomly generated instances are presented.