On 11 December 1941, four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States declaration of war against the Japanese Empire, Nazi Germany declared war against the United States, in response to what was claimed to be a series of provocations by the United States government when the US was still officially neutral during World War II. The decision to declare war was made by Adolf Hitler, apparently offhand, almost without consultation.  Later that day, the United States declared war on Germany.
Background

The course of relations between Germany and the United States had deteriorated since the beginning of World War II, inevitably so given the increasing cooperation between the United States and the United Kingdom. The Destroyers for Bases Agreement, Lend-Lease, the Atlantic Charter, the hand-over of military control of Iceland from the United Kingdom to the United States, the extension of the Pan-American Security Zone, and many other results of the special relationship which had developed between the two countries had put a strain on relations between the US, still technically a neutral country, and Nazi Germany. US destroyers escorting American supply vessels bound for the UK were already engaged in a de facto war with German U-Boats.[1] Roosevelt's desire to help the UK, despite the objections of the influential US isolationist lobby, and legal impediments imposed by Congress which prevented direct involvement in the war, brought the US to push hard against the traditional boundaries of neutrality.
On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched an attack on the US naval and army base on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, beginning a war between Japan and the United States. Japan had not informed its ally, Germany, in advance of the attack, although the Japanese ambassador had informed the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, at the beginning of December that relations between the US and the Japanese Empire were at a breaking point, and that war was imminent.  He was instructed to ask Germany for commitment to declare war under the terms of the Tripartite Pact should that occur.  Hitler and Ribbentrop had been urging Japan to attack and take over Singapore from the British, on the theory that doing so would not only hurt the UK, but would also serve to help keep the US out of the war.[2]

According to the terms of their agreements, Germany was obliged to come to the aid of Japan if a third country attacked Japan, but not if Japan attacked a third country. Ribbentrop reminded Hitler of this, and pointed out that to declare war against the US would add to the number of enemies Germany was fighting against, but Hitler dismissed this concern as not being important,[2] and, almost entirely without consultation, chose to declare war against the US, wanting to do so before, he thought, Roosevelt would declare war on Germany.[3][4][5]
In fact, Hitler's declaration of war came as a great relief to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who feared the possibility of two parallel but disconnected wars – the UK and Soviet Union versus Germany in Europe, and the US and the British Empire versus Japan in the Far East and the Pacific. With Nazi Germany's declaration against the United States in effect, American assistance for Britain in both theaters of war as a full ally was assured.  It also simplified matters for the American government, as John Kenneth Galbraith recalled:
When Pearl Harbor happened, we [Roosevelt's advisors] were desperate. ... We were all in agony.  The mood of the American people was obvious – they were determined that the Japanese had to be punished.  We could have been forced to concentrate all our efforts on the Pacific, unable from then on to give more than purely peripheral help to Britain. It was truly astounding when Hitler declared war on us three days later. I cannot tell you our feelings of triumph.  It was a totally irrational thing for him to do, and I think it saved Europe."[6]
Hitler's reasons for declaring war against the US when he was not obligated to were numerous. One was an emotional response: the Japanese tactic of using a surprise attack without making a declaration of war appealed to him – he had done the same thing when he attacked the Soviet Union with Operation Barbarossa in June 1941; indeed, he told the Japanese ambassador "[O]ne should strike – as hard as possible – and not waste time declaring war."[2]  Also, the prospect of a worldwide war fed Hitler's tendency towards grandiose thinking, and reinforced his feeling that he was a world-historical figure of destiny.  As he said in his declaration speech to the Reichstag:
I can only be grateful to Providence that it entrusted me with the leadership in this historic struggle which, for the next five hundred or a thousand years, will be described as decisive, not only for the history of Germany, but for the whole of Europe and indeed the whole world.[2]
Hitler's lack of knowledge about the US and its industrial and demographic capacity for mounting a war on two fronts also entered into his decision.[2] As early as mid-March 1941 – nine months before the Japanese attack – President Roosevelt was acutely aware of Hitler's hostility towards the United States, and the destructive potential it presented. Due to this attitude within the White House, and the rapidly progressing efforts of the Americans' industrial capacity before and through 1941 to start providing its armed forces with the ordnance, combat aircraft and ships that would be required to defeat the Axis as a whole, the US was already well on its way towards the full-scale wartime economy which would make it the "arsenal of democracy" for itself and its allies.
Finally, Hitler's deeply-held racial prejudices made him see the US as a decadent bourgeois democracy filled with people of mixed race, a population heavily under the influence of Jews and "Negroes", with no history of authoritarian discipline to control and direct them, interested only in luxury and living the "good life" while dancing, drinking and enjoying "negrofied" music.  Such a country, in Hitler's mind, would never be willing to make the economic and human sacrifices necessary to threaten National Socialist Germany[2] — and thus set the stage for a dangerously inaccurate view of the very nation that Hitler had stated in his unpublished Zweites Buch (Second Book, 1928) would be the Third Reich's most serious challenge beyond his intended defeat of the Soviet Union.[7]
The economic potential and racial composition of America had implications for Hitler's own ideological construct, indeed, how he saw Germany’s current problems and future hopes. His central ideas of 'living space' and race held the key to his image of the United States. To Hitler the United States was a country with a white 'Nordic' racial core, to which he attributed its economic success and standard of living, and in which he saw a model for his vision of German 'living space' in Europe.[8]

The one advantage of the declaration of war against the US provided for Hitler was as a propaganda diversion for the German public, to distract them from the state of the war against the Soviet Union, in which Germany had suffered severe setbacks and an unexpectedly prolonged engagement.  Hitler had assured the German people that the Soviet Union would be crushed well before the onset of winter, but that, in fact, did not happen, and there was little in the way of good news. The timing of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor enabled Hitler to angle his planned speech to the Reichstag in a more positive fashion, squeezing as much propaganda value out of it as possible.  Hitler, in fact, put off the speech – and the declaration of war – for several days, trying to arrive at the proper psychological moment to make the announcement.[9]  Still, the propaganda motive was hardly sufficient to justify declaring war on the US, especially considering that doing so would create an otherwise "unnatural alliance" between two disparate and heretofore antagonistic polities, the United States and the Soviet Union.  Joachim C. Fest, one of Hitler's biographers, has argued that Hitler's decision was "really no longer an act of his own volition, but a gesture governed by a sudden awareness of his own impotence. That gesture was Hitler's last strategic initiative of any importance."[4]
Regardless of Hitler's reasons for the declaration, the decision is generally seen as an enormous strategic blunder on his part, as it allowed the United States to enter the European war in support of the United Kingdom and the Allies without much public opposition, while still facing the Japanese threat in the Pacific. Hitler had, in fact, committed Germany to fight the US while in the midst of a war of extermination against Russia, and without having first defeated the UK, instead of taking the option of putting off a conflict with the US for as long as possible, forcing it to concentrate on the war in the Pacific against Japan, and making it much more difficult for it to become involved in the European war.  At least to some extent he had held in his hands the power to control the timing of the intervention of the US, and instead, by declaring war against America, he freed Roosevelt and Churchill to act as they saw fit.[1][4][5][10][11][12][13]
From the point of view of Hitler and much of the German political and military elite, declaring war against the U.S. in response to the Pearl Harbor attack was a calculated risk in fighting the U.S. before they were prepared to effectively defend themselves.  By that time, the German leadership believed that the United States was effectively acting as a belligerent in the conflict, given actions such as Lend-Lease of supplies to Britain to sustain their war effort, President Roosevelt's public statements, the deployment of American soldiers and Marines to Iceland, and U.S. Navy escorts of convoys across the Atlantic, which sometimes came into contact with U-boats; these acts, as well as America's previous intervention in World War I, led to the assumption that war between them was inevitable.  As such, the decision was made to use the attack as a rationale for an official declaration of war in order to drive Britain out of the conflict by widening submarine operations and directly attacking U.S. commercial shipping.  While Hitler's declaration of war against the United States eventually led to his downfall, initially it seemed successful in its objective of more effectively cutting Britain's supply lines, as the U.S. military's lack of tactics, equipment, and procedures for fighting U-boats caused 1942 to be the most devastating year of the war for shipping losses;[14] the war declaration made the Second Happy Time possible for U-boats.[15]
According to Hitler's Naval Adjutant, Admiral von Puttkamer, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor actually buoyed Hitler's assurance in winning the war, and improved morale among the high leadership of the armed forces. Peter Padfield writes:
The news [of Pearl Harbor] came as a surprise to Hitler although he knew of their intention to attack somewhere at some time and had made up his mind to support them if they attacked the United States.  Now frivolously disregarding the huge financial and productive power of America and, according to ... von Puttkamer, blind to the realization that this power could be projected across the Atlantic, he gained renewed confidence in a victorious outcome to the war.  His generals suffered from the same land-locked hallucination: his entire headquarters staff gave themselves up to 'an ecstasy of rejoicing'; the few who saw further 'became even lonelier'. Naval officers saw no more clearly than the generals.[16]
Text of the German declaration
On December 11, 1941, American Chargé d'Affaires Leland B. Morris, the highest ranking American diplomat in Germany, was summoned to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop's office where Ribbentrop read Morris the formal declaration.[17] The text was:

MR. CHARGE D'AFFAIRES:
The Government of the United States having violated in the most flagrant manner and in ever increasing measure all rules of neutrality in favor of the adversaries of Germany and having continually been guilty of the most severe provocations toward Germany ever since the outbreak of the European war, provoked by the British declaration of war against Germany on September 3, 1939, has finally resorted to open military acts of aggression.
On September 11, 1941, the President of the United States publicly declared that he had ordered the American Navy and Air Force to shoot on sight at any German war vessel. In his speech of October 27, 1941, he once more expressly affirmed that this order was in force. Acting under this order, vessels of the American Navy, since early September 1941, have systematically attacked German naval forces. Thus, American destroyers, as for instance the Greer, the Kearney and the Reuben James, have opened fire on German submarines according to plan. The Secretary of the American Navy, Mr. Knox, himself confirmed that-American destroyers attacked German submarines.
Furthermore, the naval forces of the United States, under order of their Government and contrary to international law have treated and seized German merchant vessels on the high seas as enemy ships.
The German Government therefore establishes the following facts:
Although Germany on her part has strictly adhered to the rules of international law in her relations with the United States during every period of the present war, the Government of the United States from initial violations of neutrality has finally proceeded to open acts of war against Germany. The Government of the United States has thereby virtually created a state of war.
The German Government, consequently, discontinues diplomatic relations with the United States of America and declares that under these circumstances brought about by President Roosevelt Germany too, as from today, considers herself as being in a state of war with the United States of America.
Accept, Mr. Charge d'Affaires, the expression of my high consideration.
December 11, 1941.

RIBBENTROP.[18]
See also
Kellogg–Briand Pact

Notes

Bibliography
Genoud, François (ed.) (1961) The Testament of Adolf Hitler. The Hitler–Bormann Documents, February–April 1945. London.
Hillgruber, Andreas (1981) Germany and the Two World Wars Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN0-674-35322-6.
Kershaw, Ian (2007) Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions the Changed the World, 1940-1941 New York: Penguin. ISBN978-1-59420-123-3
Kershaw, Ian (2000) Hitler: 1936–1945: Nemesis London.
United States Department of State (December 13, 1941) Department of State Bulletin. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office

 Works related to Adolf Hitler's Declaration of War against the United States at Wikisource

German declaration of war against the United States


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Banksia coccinea, commonly known as the scarlet banksia, waratah banksia or Albany banksia, is an erect shrub or small tree in the family Proteaceae. The Noongar peoples know the tree as Waddib.[2] Its distribution in the wild is along the south west coast of Western Australia, from Denmark to the Stokes National Park, and north to the Stirling Range, growing on white or grey sand in shrubland, heath or open woodland. Reaching up to 8m (26ft) in height, it is a single-stemmed plant that has oblong leaves, which are 3–9cm (1.2–3.5in) long and 2–7cm (0.8–2.8in) wide. The prominent red and white flower spikes appear mainly in the spring. As they age they develop small follicles that store seeds until opened by fire. Though widely occurring, it is highly sensitive to dieback and large populations of plants have succumbed to the disease.
Collected and described by Robert Brown in the early 19th century, Banksia coccinea appears to be most closely related to Banksia speciosa and B.baxteri. Banksia coccinea plants are killed by bushfire, and regenerate from seed. The flowers attract nectar- and insect-feeding birds, particularly honeyeaters, and a variety of insects. Widely considered one of the most attractive Banksia species, B.coccinea is a popular garden plant and one of the most important Banksia species for the cut flower industry; it is grown commercially in several countries including Australia, South Africa, Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Israel. In cultivation, B.coccinea grows well in a sunny location on well-drained soil, but it cannot survive in areas with humid or wet summers.
Description

The scarlet banksia grows as an erect shrub or small tree, generally around 2–4m (6.6–13.1ft) tall, with little lateral spread.[3] However, it can reach 8 metres (26ft) in height, particularly in the vicinity of Albany. The trunk is generally single at the base before branching, and covered with smooth grey bark that is 2–5mm (0.079–0.197in) thick and lacking in lenticels.[4] Peaking in the summer months,[3] the pinkish-brown new growth is densely hairy. The oblong, cordate or obcordate leaves are 3–9cm (1.2–3.5in) long and 2–7cm (0.8–2.8in) wide, with 3–5mm (0.12–0.20in) long petioles. Truncate at the apex, they have dentate margins with small (1–3mm long) teeth 3–18mm (0.12–0.71in) apart, separated by shallow u- or v-shaped sinuses. The upper surface is covered in fine fur when young and becomes smooth with age, while the undersurface is covered with white fur, particularly along the midrib.[4]
The process of flowering takes 9–12 months; the stems begin developing microscopically in spring, with no visible evidence of flower spike development for around five months before the buds actually appear.[5] Flower spikes are in bloom from May to December or January, peaking between July and October.[3] The distinctive inflorescences arise from the ends of one-year-old branchlets.[4] Squat and roughly cylindrical, they are 3–6cm (1.2–2.4in) high and 8–10cm (3–4in) wide.[6] A field study on the southern sandplains revealed an average count of around 286 individual flowers on each spike.[7] The white flower is covered in grey or pale brown fur, and there is little variation in colour. The style is generally scarlet, but can be dark red, orange or pink.[5] The perianth is 3–3.2cm (1.2–1.3in) long, while the style is 4–4.8cm (1.6–1.9in) long and strongly recurved or looped until they are released at anthesis.[4] Anthesis is acropetal, that is, the flowers open from the base up the spike to the apex.[5]
The flowers of all banksias arise in a spiral pattern around the flower spike axis; however in Banksia coccinea they develop into distinctive vertical columns, which are strongly accentuated by large gaps in between.[4] Paired in columns, the red styles contrast with the grey-white perianth making a striking flower spike.[8]
The infructescence is small, with up to 20 small follicles concentrated at the lower end of the spike.[6] Each follicle is 6–8mm (0.24–0.31in) long, 1–2mm (0.039–0.079in) high, and 2–3mm (c. 0.1in) wide and usually opens with fire. The 1.1–1.4cm (0.43–0.55in) long seed is composed of the cuneate (wedge-shaped) seed body proper, measuring  0.5–0.7cm (0.2–0.3in) long and 0.4–0.7cm (0.2–0.3in) wide, and a papery wing. One side, termed the outer surface, is grey-black and wrinkled and the other—the inner surface—protrudes and is black and glistening. The seeds are separated by a dark brown seed separator that is roughly the same shape as the seeds with a depression where the seed body sits adjacent to it in the follicle. It measures 1.1–1.4cm (0.4–0.6in) long and 0.7–0.8cm (0.3–0.3in) wide. The dull green cotyledons of seedlings are 0.8–0.9cm (0.3–0.4in) long and 0.5–0.6cm (0.2–0.2in) wide, described by Alex George as "cuneate to obovate". Each cotyledon has a 1mm (0.04in) auricle at its base. The thick, smooth hypocotyl is 1cm (0.5in) high and 1.5mm thick. The seedling leaves are crowded above the cotyledons and linear to spathulate in shape, with recurved and deeply serrated margins with v-shaped sinuses, almost dividing the leaves into triangular lobes. The first pair are 0.8–1.2cm (0.3–0.5in) long, with the next 2–4 leaves up to  1.7cm (0.7in) long. Successive leaves are more obovate in shape and up to 4cm (2in) long and 1.4cm (0.6in) wide. The seedling stems are covered in white hair.[4]
Taxonomy

Discovery and naming

The first known specimens of Banksia coccinea were collected in December 1801, during the visit to King George Sound of HMS Investigator under the command of Matthew Flinders. On board were botanist Robert Brown, botanical artist Ferdinand Bauer, and gardener Peter Good. All three men gathered plant specimens, but those collected by Bauer and Good were incorporated into Brown's herbarium without attribution, so it is not possible to identify the actual collector of this species.[9][10] The surviving specimen of B.coccinea, held by the Natural History Museum in London, is annotated in Brown's hand "King George IIIds Sound Princess Royal Harbour especially near the observatory".[11] The observatory was apparently located in what is now the central business district of Albany.[12] No further information on the collection is available, as the species is mentioned in neither Brown's nor Good's diary.[13][14]
Good also made a separate seed collection, which included B.coccinea,[15] and the species was drawn by Bauer. Like nearly all of Bauer's field drawings of Proteaceae, the original field sketch of B.coccinea was destroyed in a Hofburg fire in 1945.[16] However a watercolour painting by Bauer, based on his field sketches, still survives at the Natural History Museum in London,[17] and a hand-coloured copper engraving from that painting was published as Plate 3 of Bauer's 1813 Illustrationes Florae Novae Hollandiae.[18][19] German botanist Adalbert Schnizlein described B.purpurea in 1843, now regarded as a synonym of B.coccinea.[20] Common names include scarlet banksia, waratah banksia and Albany banksia.[1]
Brown published the species in his 1810 On the Proteaceae of Jussieu, its species name derived from the Latin coccineus, meaning "scarlet", and referring to the pistils.[6] He recorded 31 species of Banksia in his 1810 work Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae et Insulae Van Diemen, and, in his taxonomic arrangement, placed the taxon in the subgenus Banksia verae, the "true banksias", because the inflorescence is a typical Banksia flower spike.[21] By the time Carl Meissner published his 1856 arrangement of the genus, there were 58 described Banksia species. Meissner divided Brown's Banksia verae, which had been renamed Eubanksia by Stephan Endlicher in 1847,[4] into four series based on leaf properties. He placed B.coccinea in the series Quercinae.[22]
George Bentham published a thorough revision of Banksia in his landmark publication Flora Australiensis in 1870. In Bentham's arrangement, the number of recognised Banksia species was reduced from 60 to 46. Bentham defined four sections based on leaf, style and pollen-presenter characters. Banksia coccinea was placed in section Orthostylis.[23]
In 1891, German botanist Otto Kuntze challenged the generic name Banksia L.f., on the grounds that the name Banksia had previously been published in 1775 as Banksia J.R.Forst & G.Forst, referring to the genus now known as Pimelea. Kuntze proposed Sirmuellera as an alternative, republishing B.coccinea as Sirmuellera coccinea.[24] The challenge failed, and Banksia L.f. was formally conserved.[4]
Alex George published a new taxonomic arrangement of Banksia in his classic 1981 monograph The genus Banksia L.f. (Proteaceae). Endlicher's Eubanksia became B.subgenus Banksia, and was divided into three sections. George placed Banksia coccinea in its own series—Banksia series Coccineae—within the section B.section Banksia on account of a unique combination of characters, namely the vertical arrangement of flowers on the spike, combined with the branched open habit, broad leaves and very small follicles. Members of the series Quercinae and five species within the series Spicigerae share the vertically aligned flowers, but do not wholly exhibit the other characters.[4]
Kevin Thiele and Pauline Ladiges published a new arrangement for the genus in 1996; their morphological cladistic analysis yielded a cladogram significantly different from George's arrangement. They were uncertain of B.coccinea's placement as it had highly autapomorphic characteristics which made analysis of its relationships difficult. Hence, in their arrangement it was located within series Banksia but not allocated to a subseries (incertae sedis).[25] It was reclassified in its own section Coccinea in 1996 by Tina Maguire and colleagues; pollen compatibility tests indicated its pollen was most compatible with Banksia ericifolia, B.micrantha and B.sphaerocarpa, all of section Oncostylis. However, they did not place it in that section as all members of Oncostylis have hooked styles at anthesis.[26] This was upheld by George in his monograph for the Flora of Australia series.[27] B.coccinea's placement within Banksia according to Flora of Australia is as follows:
Genus Banksia
Subgenus Banksia
Section Banksia sect. Coccineae
B.coccinea
In 2002, a molecular study by Austin Mast again showed Banksia coccinea to be the next closest relative of a group comprising Banksia speciosa and B.baxteri and only distantly related to other members of the series Banksia.[28] This was reinforced in a 2013 molecular study by Marcel Cardillo and colleagues using chloroplast DNA and combining it with earlier results.[29]
Mast, Eric Jones and Shawn Havery published the results of their cladistic analyses of DNA sequence data for Banksia in 2005. They inferred a phylogeny greatly different from the accepted taxonomic arrangement, including finding Banksia to be paraphyletic with respect to Dryandra.[30] A new taxonomic arrangement was not published at the time, but early in 2007 Mast and Thiele initiated a rearrangement by transferring Dryandra to Banksia, and publishing B.subgenus Spathulatae for the species having spoon-shaped cotyledons; in this way they also redefined the autonym B.subg. Banksia. They foreshadowed publishing a full arrangement once DNA sampling of Dryandra was complete. In the meantime, if Mast and Thiele's nomenclatural changes are taken as an interim arrangement, then B.coccinea is placed in B.subg. Banksia.[31]
No subspecies are recognised, although DNA analysis showed that a population at Redmond was genetically distinctive, while those at Gull Rock, Two Peoples Bay and Cheyne Beach were unusually diverse.[32]
Distribution and habitat

B.coccinea occurs close to the south coast of Western Australia, from the Hay River northeast of Denmark Albany in the west, east to Stokes National Park southeast of Munglinup and inland to the Stirling Range and the northern border of Fitzgerald River National Park. Around 47% of plants are protected in conservation areas, while 13% are located on road verges.[3] It prefers deep white or grey sand, among tall shrubland, heath, mallee-heath, associated with such species as Banksia baxteri, B.speciosa, B.attenuata and Lambertia inermis, or low open woodland in the Stirling Range and near Albany, where it is found with Eucalyptus marginata, Banksia attenuata and B.ilicifolia.[4] Most of its range has a gently undulating topography, but it also occurs on a steep rocky slope at Ellen Peak in the Stirling Ranges.[3] The annual rainfall is 400–800mm (16–31in).[33]
Ecology

A field study conducted around Albany found the honey possum (Tarsipes rostratus) sometimes visit Banksia coccinea, as do the New Holland honeyeater (Phylidonyris novaehollandiae), white-cheeked honeyeater (P.nigra),[34] and western spinebill (Acanthorhynchus superciliosus).[3] Banksia coccinea flowers are visited by colletid bees Hylaeus alcyoneus and  H.sanguinipictus.[35] The short-billed black cockatoo breaks off old cones with follicles to eat the seed, often doing so before the seed is ripe.[7]
B. coccinea is killed by fire and regenerates afterwards from seed released from burnt follicles.[4] It has is some degree of serotiny, that is, it has an aerial seed bank in its canopy in the form of the follicles of the old flower spikes. However, numbers of seed are less than other co-occurring species of banksia on the southern plains and peak several years after a fire. Unusually for banksias, B. coccinea can release seed with resulting seedlings growing in the absence of a bushfire trigger. Plants flower and fruit three years after germination and are shorter-lived than other banksias, appearing in poor health or dying before 20 years of age. They hence appear to be suited to fire intervals of less than 20 years.[7]
Manipulating growing conditions on plants in cultivation showed that longer daylight (16 hours vs 8 hours) led to development of more flower spikes, indicating that flower initiation was related to day length.[36]
Extremely sensitive to dieback caused by Phytophthora cinnamomi,[37] Banksia coccinea is an indicator species for the presence of the disease.[38] There is no known means of eradicating dieback. Much of the Stirling Range National Park is infested, though Fitzgerald River National Park has been largely spared.[39] Applying phosphite to infested areas has been shown to reduce the mortality rates to around 50%.[40] B. coccinea has shown some symptoms of toxicity to application of phosphite, with some patchy necrosis of leaves, but the plant's uptake of the compound is somewhat lower compared with uptake by other shrub species. Unusually, the symptoms do not appear to be proportional to exposure levels.[41]
Dying stands of B. coccinea were observed in 1989, and the fungus Cryptodiaporthe melanocraspedia isolated as the cause in 1995. The disease, a form of aerial canker, manifested initially as dead dry brown leaves and the tips of new growth. Plants would die from the top downwards, with larger branches affected over time. Under the outer bark, orange and brown patches of necrosis spread out from leaf nodes until they encircle the stem, which then dies. Flower spikes may be affected during flowering season. In humid spells during warm weather, white or pink spore tendrils are produced on dead wood. One affected stand monitored over three years from October 1989 to June 1992 showed a 97% mortality of plants (compared with a baseline 40%). Investigators Bryan Shearer and colleagues isolated another virulent pathogen that they identified as a species of Zythiostroma, however it appeared to invoke an immune response in the plant. This immune response, coupled with the fact that it had not been observed in the wild, led them to believe it was not a major pathogen of the species.[42] This species has since been reclassified and named as Luteocirrhus shearii.[43]
B. coccinea is a host for the gall midge Dasineura banksiae, a species of fly that attacks and lays eggs on the leaves between late October and early December. The round white hairy galls are 5–7mm in diameter and generally contain one larva, or up to five on severely infested plants. The larvae moult and feed until January to March, when they reduce activity until early October. Although these are not harmful to the plant, they disfigure the cut foliage and hence reduce its value.[44]
Cultivation
Widely considered one of the most attractive Banksia species, B.coccinea is a popular garden plant and one of the most important Banksia species for the cut flower industry; it is grown commercially in Australia, South Africa, Canada, the United States, New Zealand, Israel, and trialled in France, Spain and South America.[6] Its striking terminal inflorescences and furry new growth are its main horticultural attributes. However, it is highly sensitive to dieback and succumbs readily when exposed. It is difficult to keep alive in areas of heavy soils or summer rainfall or humidity, such as the Australian east coast. Furthermore, flowering may be sparse or not occur when cultivated in warmer climates such as Perth.[6] Pruning promotes branching, which leads to more flower spikes being produced.[45]
Propagation is by seed, though these can be difficult to extract from the follicles.[45] Seeds do not require any treatment before sowing, and take 12 to 48 days to germinate.[46] Cultivars require propagation by cutting for progeny to grow true. Cuttings are slow to strike.[6] Attempts to graft B.coccinea have met with little success.[45]
In a breeding program conducted by Margaret Sedgley of the Department of Horticulture, Viticulture and Oenology, Waite Agricultural Research Institute  of the University of Adelaide in Adelaide, South Australia, two forms of Banksia coccinea  were bred, registered under plant breeders' rights (PBR), and commercially propagated, mainly for the cut flower industry. Banksia 'Waite Flame' is an early flowering somewhat orange-hued form, and B.'Waite Crimson' is a red-flowering form that peaks mid-season.[8]

When was the banksia coccinea first identified?


Opinion mining (sometimes known as sentiment analysis or emotion AI) refers to the use of natural language processing, text analysis, computational linguistics, and biometrics to systematically identify, extract, quantify, and study affective states and subjective information. Sentiment analysis is widely applied to voice of the customer materials such as reviews and survey responses, online and social media, and healthcare materials for applications that range from marketing to customer service to clinical medicine.
Examples
The objective and challenges of sentiment analysis can be shown through some simple examples.
Simple cases
Coronet has the best lines of all day cruisers.
Bertram has a deep V hull and runs easily through seas.
Pastel-colored 1980s day cruisers from Florida are ugly.
I dislike old cabin cruisers.
More challenging examples
I do not dislike cabin cruisers. (Negation handling)
Disliking watercraft is not really my thing. (Negation, inverted word order)
Sometimes I really hate RIBs. (Adverbial modifies the sentiment)
I'd really truly love going out in this weather! (Possibly sarcastic)
Chris Craft is better looking than Limestone. (Two brand names, identifying target of attitude is difficult).
Chris Craft is better looking than Limestone, but Limestone projects seaworthiness and reliability. (Two attitudes, two brand names).
The movie is surprising with plenty of unsettling plot twists. (Negative term used in a positive sense in certain domains).
You should see their decadent dessert menu. (Attitudinal term has shifted polarity recently in certain domains)
I love my mobile but would not recommend it to any of my colleagues. (Qualified positive sentiment, difficult to categorise)
Next week's gig will be right koide9! ("Quoi de neuf?" Fr.: "what's new?". Newly minted terms can be highly attitudinal but volatile in polarity and often out of known vocabulary.)
Types
A basic task in sentiment analysis is classifying the polarity of a given text at the document, sentence, or feature/aspect level—whether the expressed opinion in a document, a sentence or an entity feature/aspect is positive, negative, or neutral. Advanced, "beyond polarity" sentiment classification looks, for instance, at emotional states such as "angry", "sad", and "happy".
Precursors to sentimental analysis include the General Inquirer,[1] which provided hints toward quantifying patterns in text and, separately, psychological research that examined a person's psychological state based on analysis of their verbal behavior.[2]
Subsequently, the method described in a patent by Volcani and Fogel,[3] looked specifically at sentiment and identified individual words and phrases in text with respect to different emotional scales. A current system based on their work, called EffectCheck, presents synonyms that can be used to increase or decrease the level of evoked emotion in each scale.
Many other subsequent efforts were less sophisticated, using a mere polar view of sentiment, from positive to negative, such as work by Turney,[4] and Pang[5] who applied different methods for detecting the polarity of product reviews and movie reviews respectively. This work is at the document level. One can also classify a document's polarity on a multi-way scale, which was attempted by Pang[6] and Snyder[7] among others: Pang and Lee[6] expanded the basic task of classifying a movie review as either positive or negative to predict star ratings on either a 3- or a 4-star scale, while Snyder[7] performed an in-depth analysis of restaurant reviews, predicting ratings for various aspects of the given restaurant, such as the food and atmosphere (on a five-star scale).
First steps to bringing together various approaches—learning, lexical, knowledge-based, etc.—were taken in the 2004 AAAI Spring Symposium where linguists, computer scientists, and other interested researchers first aligned interests and proposed shared tasks and benchmark data sets for the systematic computational research on affect, appeal, subjectivity, and sentiment in text.[8]
Even though in most statistical classification methods, the neutral class is ignored under the assumption that neutral texts lie near the boundary of the binary classifier, several researchers suggest that, as in every polarity problem, three categories must be identified. Moreover, it can be proven that specific classifiers such as the Max Entropy[9] and SVMs[10] can benefit from the introduction of a neutral class and improve the overall accuracy of the classification. There are in principle two ways for operating with a neutral class. Either, the algorithm proceeds by first identifying the neutral language, filtering it out and then assessing the rest in terms of positive and negative sentiments, or it builds a three-way classification in one step.[11] This second approach often involves estimating a probability distribution over all categories (e.g. naive Bayes classifiers as implemented by the NLTK). Whether and how to use a neutral class depends on the nature of the data: if the data is clearly clustered into neutral, negative and positive language, it makes sense to filter the neutral language out and focus on the polarity between positive and negative sentiments. If, in contrast, the data are mostly neutral with small deviations towards positive and negative affect, this strategy would make it harder to clearly distinguish between the two poles.
A different method for determining sentiment is the use of a scaling system whereby words commonly associated with having a negative, neutral, or positive sentiment with them are given an associated number on a −10 to +10 scale (most negative up to most positive) or simply from 0 to a positive upper limit such as +4. This makes it possible to adjust the sentiment of a given term relative to its environment (usually on the level of the sentence). When a piece of unstructured text is analyzed using natural language processing, each concept in the specified environment is given a score based on the way sentiment words relate to the concept and its associated score.[12][13] This allows movement to a more sophisticated understanding of sentiment, because it is now possible to adjust the sentiment value of a concept relative to modifications that may surround it. Words, for example, that intensify, relax or negate the sentiment expressed by the concept can affect its score. Alternatively, texts can be given a positive and negative sentiment strength score if the goal is to determine the sentiment in a text rather than the overall polarity and strength of the text.[14]
Subjectivity/objectivity identification
This task is commonly defined as classifying a given text (usually a sentence) into one of two classes: objective or subjective.[15] This problem can sometimes be more difficult than polarity classification.[16] The subjectivity of words and phrases may depend on their context and an objective document may contain subjective sentences (e.g., a news article quoting people's opinions). Moreover, as mentioned by Su,[17] results are largely dependent on the definition of subjectivity used when annotating texts. However, Pang[18] showed that removing objective sentences from a document before classifying its polarity helped improve performance.
Feature/aspect-based
It refers to determining the opinions or sentiments expressed on different features or aspects of entities, e.g., of a cell phone, a digital camera, or a bank.[19] A feature or aspect is an attribute or component of an entity, e.g., the screen of a cell phone, the service for a restaurant, or the picture quality of a camera. The advantage of feature-based sentiment analysis is the possibility to capture nuances about objects of interest. Different features can generate different sentiment responses, for example a hotel can have a convenient location, but mediocre food.[20] This problem involves several sub-problems, e.g., identifying relevant entities, extracting their features/aspects, and determining whether an opinion expressed on each feature/aspect is positive, negative or neutral.[21] The automatic identification of features can be performed with syntactic methods, with topic modeling,[22][23] or with deep learning.[24] More detailed discussions about this level of sentiment analysis can be found in Liu's work.[25]
Methods and features
Existing approaches to sentiment analysis can be grouped into three main categories: knowledge-based techniques, statistical methods, and hybrid approaches.[26] Knowledge-based techniques classify text by affect categories based on the presence of unambiguous affect words such as happy, sad, afraid, and bored.[27] Some knowledge bases not only list obvious affect words, but also assign arbitrary words a probable "affinity" to particular emotions.[28] Statistical methods leverage elements from machine learning such as latent semantic analysis, support vector machines, "bag of words", "Pointwise Mutual Information" for Semantic Orientation[4], and deep learning. More sophisticated methods try to detect the holder of a sentiment (i.e., the person who maintains that affective state) and the target (i.e., the entity about which the affect is felt).[29] To mine the opinion in context and get the feature about which the speaker has opined, the grammatical relationships of words are used. Grammatical dependency relations are obtained by deep parsing of the text.[30] Hybrid approaches leverage both machine learning and elements from knowledge representation such as ontologies and semantic networks in order to detect semantics that are expressed in a subtle manner, e.g., through the analysis of concepts that do not explicitly convey relevant information, but which are implicitly linked to other concepts that do so.[31]
Open source software tools deploy machine learning, statistics, and natural language processing techniques to automate sentiment analysis on large collections of texts, including web pages, online news, internet discussion groups, online reviews, web blogs, and social media.[32] Knowledge-based systems, on the other hand, make use of publicly available resources, to extract the semantic and affective information associated with natural language concepts. Sentiment analysis can also be performed on visual content, i.e., images and videos (see Multimodal sentiment analysis). One of the first approaches in this direction is SentiBank[33] utilizing an adjective noun pair representation of visual content. In addition, the vast majority of sentiment classification approaches rely on the bag-of-words model, which disregards context, grammar and even word order. Approaches that analyses the sentiment based on how words compose the meaning of longer phrases have shown better result,[34] but they incur an additional annotation overhead.
A human analysis component is required in sentiment analysis, as automated systems are not able to analyze historical tendencies of the individual commenter, or the platform and are often classified incorrectly in their expressed sentiment. Automation impacts approximately 23% of comments that are correctly classified by humans.[35] However, humans often disagree, and it is argued that the inter-human agreement provides an upper bound that automated sentiment classifiers can eventually reach.[36]
Sometimes, the structure of sentiments and topics is fairly complex. Also, the problem of sentiment analysis is non-monotonic in respect to sentence extension and stop-word substitution (compare THEY would not let my dog stay in this hotel vs I would not let my dog stay in this hotel). To address this issue a number of rule-based and reasoning-based approaches have been applied to sentiment analysis, including defeasible logic programming.[37] Also, there is a number of tree traversal rules applied to syntactic parse tree to extract the topicality of sentiment in open domain setting.[38][39]
Evaluation
The accuracy of a sentiment analysis system is, in principle, how well it agrees with human judgments. This is usually measured by variant measures based on precision and recall over the two target categories of negative and positive texts. However, according to research human raters typically only agree about 80%[40] of the time (see Inter-rater reliability). Thus, a program which achieves 70% accuracy in classifying sentiment is doing nearly as well as humans, even though such accuracy may not sound impressive. If a program were "right" 100% of the time, humans would still disagree with it about 20% of the time, since they disagree that much about any answer.[41] On the other hand, computer systems will make very different errors than human assessors, and thus the figures are not entirely comparable. For instance, a computer system will have trouble with negations, exaggerations, jokes, or sarcasm, which typically are easy to handle for a human reader: some errors a computer system makes will seem overly naive to a human. In general, the utility for practical commercial tasks of sentiment analysis as it is defined in academic research has been called into question, mostly since the simple one-dimensional model of sentiment from negative to positive yields rather little actionable information for a client worrying about the effect of public discourse on e.g. brand or corporate reputation.[42][43][44]
To better fit market needs, evaluation of sentiment analysis has moved to more task-based measures, formulated together with representatives from PR agencies and market research professionals. The focus in e.g. the RepLab evaluation data set is less on the content of the text under consideration and more on the effect of the text in question on brand reputation.[45][46][47]
Web 2.0

The rise of social media such as blogs and social networks has fueled interest in sentiment analysis.  With the proliferation of reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression, online opinion has turned into a kind of virtual currency for businesses looking to market their products, identify new opportunities and manage their reputations.  As businesses look to automate the process of filtering out the noise, understanding the conversations, identifying the relevant content and actioning it appropriately, many are now looking to the field of sentiment analysis.[48] Further complicating the matter, is the rise of anonymous social media platforms such as 4chan and Reddit.[49] If web 2.0 was all about democratizing publishing, then the next stage of the web may well be based on democratizing data mining of all the content that is getting published.[50]
One step towards this aim is accomplished in research. Several research teams in universities around the world currently focus on understanding the dynamics of sentiment in e-communities through sentiment analysis.[51] The CyberEmotions project, for instance, recently identified the role of negative emotions in driving social networks discussions.[52]
The problem is that most sentiment analysis algorithms use simple terms to express sentiment about a product or service.  However, cultural factors, linguistic nuances and differing contexts make it extremely difficult to turn a string of written text into a simple pro or con sentiment.[48]  The fact that humans often disagree on the sentiment of text illustrates how big a task it is for computers to get this right.  The shorter the string of text, the harder it becomes.
Even though short text strings might be a problem, sentiment analysis within microblogging has shown that Twitter can be seen as a valid online indicator of political sentiment. Tweets' political sentiment demonstrates close correspondence to parties' and politicians' political positions, indicating that the content of Twitter messages plausibly reflects the offline political landscape.[53] Furthermore, sentiment analysis on Twitter has also been shown to capture the public mood behind human reproduction cycles on a planetary scale,[54] as well as other problems of public-health relevance such as adverse drug reactions.[55]
Application in recommender systems

For a recommender system, sentiment analysis has been proven to be a valuable technique. A recommender system aims to predict the preference to an item of a target user. Mainstream recommender systems work on explicit data set. For example, collaborative filtering works on the rating matrix, and content-based filtering works on the meta-data of the items.
In many social networking services or e-commerce websites, users can provide text review, comment or feedback to the items. These user-generated text provide a rich source of user's sentiment opinions about numerous products and items. Potentially, for an item, such text can reveal both the related feature/aspects of the item and the users' sentiments on each feature.[56] The item's feature/aspects described in the text play the same role with the meta-data in content-based filtering, but the former are more valuable for the recommender system. Since these features are broadly mentioned by users in their reviews, they can be seen as the most crucial features that can significantly influence the user's experience on the item, while the meta-data of the item (usually provided by the producers instead of consumers) may ignore features that are concerned by the users. For different items with common features, a user may give different sentiments. Also, a feature of the same item may receive different sentiments from different users. Users' sentiments on the features can be regarded as a multi-dimensional rating score, reflecting their preference on the items.
Based on the feature/aspects and the sentiments extracted from the user-generated text, a hybrid recommender system can be constructed.[57] There are two types of motivation to recommend a candidate item to a user. The first motivation is the candidate item have numerous common features with the user's preferred items,[58] while the second motivation is that the candidate item receives a high sentiment on its features. For a preferred item, it is reasonable to believe that items with the same features will have a similar function or utility. So, these items will also likely to be preferred by the user. On the other hand, for a shared feature of two candidate items, other users may give positive sentiment to one of them while give negative sentiment to another. Clearly, the high evaluated item should be recommended to the user. Based on these two motivations, a combination ranking score of similarity and sentiment rating can be constructed for each candidate item.[57]
Except the difficulty of the sentiment analysis itself, applying sentiment analysis on reviews or feedback also face the challenge of spam and biased reviews. One direction of work is focused on evaluating the helpfulness of each review.[59] Review or feedback poorly written are hardly helpful for recommender system. Besides, a review can be designed to hinder sales of a target product, thus be harmful to the recommender system even it is well written.
Researchers also found that long and short form of user-generated text should be treated differently. An interesting result shows that short form reviews are sometimes more helpful than long form,[60] because it is easier to filter out the noise in a short form text. For the long form text, the growing length of the text does not always bring a proportionate increase of the number of features or sentiments in the text.
See also
Emotion recognition
Market sentiment


Paul Rodney McHugh  (born 1931) is an American psychiatrist, researcher, and educator. He is University Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine[1] and the author, co-author, or editor of seven books within his field.
Education
Paul McHugh was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the son of a Lowell High School teacher and a homemaker.[2][3] He graduated from Harvard College in 1952 and from Harvard Medical School in 1956. While at Harvard he was "introduced to and ultimately directed away from the Freudian school of psychiatry."[4][5]
After medical school, McHugh's education was influenced by George Thorn, the Physician-in-Chief at the Harvard-affiliated Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (now Brigham and Women's Hospital). Thorn was disillusioned with Freudian psychiatry and felt that those who devoted themselves to it became single-minded, failing to improve as doctors. Thorn encouraged McHugh to develop a different career path, suggesting that he enter the field of psychiatry by first studying neurology. At Thorn's recommendation, McHugh was accepted into the neurology and neuropathology residency program at the Massachusetts General Hospital where he studied for three years under Dr. Raymond Adams, the chief of the Neurology Department.[6]
From Massachusetts General, McHugh went to the Institute of Psychiatry in London (where he studied under Sir Aubrey Lewis and was supervised by James Gibbons and Gerald Russell). Following his year in London, McHugh went to the Division of Neuropsychiatry at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.[7]
McHugh is a practicing Catholic.[2] According to a 2002 New York Times article, he is a Democrat "who describes himself as religiously orthodox, politically liberal and culturally conservative -- a believer in marriage and the Marines, a supporter of institutions and family values."[2]
Career
After his training, McHugh held various academic and administrative positions, including Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College (where he founded the Bourne Behavioral Research Laboratory), Clinical Director and Director of Residency Education at the New York Presbyterian Hospital Westchester Division. After reportedly being passed over for the Cornell chair in favor of Robert Michels (physician), he left New York to become Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oregon.
From 1975 till 2001, McHugh was the Henry Phipps Professor of Psychiatry and the director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at the Johns Hopkins University. At the same time, he was psychiatrist-in-chief at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He is currently University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.[8]
His own research has focused on the neuroscientific foundations of motivated behaviors, psychiatric genetics, epidemiology, and neuropsychiatry.[9]
During the 1960s, McHugh co-authored papers on hydrocephalus, depression and suicide, and amygdaloid stimulation.
In 1975, McHugh co-authored (along with M. F. Folstein and S. E. Folstein) a paper entitled "Mini-Mental State: A Practical Method for Grading the Cognitive State of Patients for the Clinician." This paper details the Mini Mental State Exam (MMSE), an exam consisting of just eleven questions, that quickly and accurately assesses patients for signs of dementia and other states of cognitive impairment. It is one of the most widely used tests in the mental health field.
In 1979, in his capacity as chair of the Department of Psychiatry, McHugh ended gender reassignment surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital.[10]
In 1983, McHugh and colleague Phillip R. Slavney co-authored The Perspectives of Psychiatry, which presents the Johns Hopkins approach to psychiatry. The book "seeks to systematically apply the best work of behaviorists, psychotherapists, social scientists and other specialists long viewed as at odds with each other."[5] A second edition was published in 1998.
McHugh also treated author Tom Wolfe for depression suffered following coronary bypass surgery. Wolfe dedicated his 1998 novel, A Man in Full to McHugh, “whose brilliance, comradeship and unfailing kindness saved the day.”[11]
In 1992, McHugh announced that he was going to leave Johns Hopkins and accept a position as director and CEO of Friends Hospital in Philadelphia. The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine quickly sought to retain him and was successful in doing so.[5]
In 1992, McHugh was elected to the Institute of Medicine (IOM) - National Academies of Science - now the National Academy of Medicine.[12]
Throughout the decade of the 1990s, McHugh was active in debunking the idea of recovered memory — that is, the idea that people could suddenly and spontaneously remember childhood sexual abuse.[4][5]
In 2001, McHugh was appointed by President George W. Bush to the Presidential Council on Bioethics.[13]  The Council was charged with the task of making recommendations as to what the U.S. federal government's policy regarding embryonic stem cells should be. McHugh was against using new lines of embryonic stem cells derived from in vitro fertilization but was in favor of the use of stem cells derived from somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). In SCNT, the nucleus of a cell is removed and replaced by another cell nucleus. McHugh felt that cells created in this fashion could be regarded as tissue; whereas, stem cells taken from embryos caused the killing of an unborn child.[14]
In 2002, McHugh was appointed to a lay panel assembled by the Roman Catholic Church to look into sexual abuse by priests.[2] This appointment was controversial, as McHugh had previously served as expert witness in the defense of numerous priests accused of child sexual abuse.[15]
McHugh was featured in a 2017 Netflix Documentary, The Keepers, for his role in the defense in the 1995 trial, Jane Doe et al. v. A. Joseph Maskell et al., which was a case involving the sexual abuse of two women at the hands of a Catholic Priest, Father Joseph Maskell.[16]
Gender, sexuality and sex reassignment surgery
McHugh opposes sex reassignment surgery for transgender people.[17] In 1979, he shut down the gender identity clinic at Johns Hopkins, saying that another researcher found that most of the people he tracked down who had undergone this type of surgery "were contented with what they had done and that only a few regretted it. But in every other respect, they were little changed in their psychological condition. They had much the same problems with relationships, work, and emotions as before. The hope that they would emerge now from their emotional difficulties to flourish psychologically had not been fulfilled."[18]  He has said that  medical treatment for transgender youth is “like performing liposuction on an anorexic child”,[19] described post-operative transgender women as “caricatures of women” because the surgery failed to change many of their male traits,[18] and stated that “The transgendered suffer a disorder of 'assumption.'”[17]  McHugh considers homosexuality to be an “erroneous desire”[20] and supported California Proposition 8.[21]  He co-authored a criticism of medical treatment for transgender youth[22] published by the American College of Pediatricians.
In August 2016, McHugh co-authored a 143-page review of the scientific literature on gender and sexuality in The New Atlantis, a journal published under the auspices of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.[23][24]
Books
Author
McHugh, P. R. (2006). Try to Remember: Psychiatry's Clash over Meaning, Memory, and Mind. New York: DANA.
---. (2008). The Mind Has Mountains: Reflections on Society and Psychiatry. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Co-author
Hedblom, J. H., & McHugh, P. R. (2007). Last Call: Alcoholism and Recovery.
Fagan, P. J., & McHugh, P. R. Sexual Disorders: Perspectives on Diagnosis and Treatment.
Neubauer, D. N., & McHugh, P. R. Understanding Sleeplessness: Perspectives on Insomnia.
McHugh, P. R., & Slavney, P. R. (1998). The Perspectives of Psychiatry, 2nd ed. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Editor
McHugh, P. R., & McKusick. Eds. (1990). Genes, Brain, and Behavior.

's profile at Johns Hopkins Medicine
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Who is the head of the Psychology department at Johns Hopkins University?