43,964 research outputs found
The Kelly Gang reborn: The first Australian mounted unit to see active service in the Second World War
In the pre-dawn chill the sentries shifted in their positions and stared at the rocky hills and mountains beyond their position. The camp stirred to the familiar smell of horse feed and the jingle of a bridle as the men, adorned in their distinctive slouch hats, prepared for their early morning patrol. Before them lay the vast expanse of the Middle East. The desert, rock and sands of Syria.
The Middle East; desert, sand, horses and slouch hats invokes the images of the triumphant Australian Light Horse of World War One. It brings to mind images and memories such as the charge at Beersheba and the ride to Damascus. But this was not 1918, but 1941. Most of the men who mounted these steady beasts had not been born as the Light Horse had conducted the last great mounted campaign in military history. In the intervening years the horse had given way to sounds and throbs of diesel engines, to armoured plate and the crack of high velocity cannon. So what were these Australian horsemen doing in Syria, a generation on from the Light Horse and light years on in technology?
The “Kelly Gang” as this Light Horse troop came to be known was the first mounted Australian unit to see active service in the Second World War. They formed part of the 7th Australian Division AIF (2 Brigades) under the command of Major-General John Lavarack who were responsible for the coastal and central sectors of the British invasion of Vichy French held Syria.
Although vastly outnumbered and outgunned by the opposing Vichy French forces the operations that commenced on 6 June, 1941 were initially successful. By the 14 June the Australians had reached the line of Sidon –Jezzine- Merdajayoun. The French command reacted by assembling their superior armoured forces to counter-attack the advancing Australian units. The coastal thrust was brought to a standstill and Merdajayoun recaptured.
\u27The Kelly Gang Reborn: The first Australian mounted unit to see active service in the Second World War\u27, has been published as
Effect of nuclear structure on Type Ia supernova nucleosynthesis
The relationship among nuclear structure, the weak processes in nuclei, and
astrophysics becomes quite apparent in supernova explosion and nucleosynthesis
studies. In this brief article, I report on progress made in the last few years
on calculating electron capture and beta-decay rates in iron-group nuclei. I
also report on applications of these rates to Type-Ia nucleosynthesis studies.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of Nuclei In the Cosmos 200
Scalable Estimation of Precision Maps in a MapReduce Framework
This paper presents a large-scale strip adjustment method for LiDAR mobile
mapping data, yielding highly precise maps. It uses several concepts to achieve
scalability. First, an efficient graph-based pre-segmentation is used, which
directly operates on LiDAR scan strip data, rather than on point clouds.
Second, observation equations are obtained from a dense matching, which is
formulated in terms of an estimation of a latent map. As a result of this
formulation, the number of observation equations is not quadratic, but rather
linear in the number of scan strips. Third, the dynamic Bayes network, which
results from all observation and condition equations, is partitioned into two
sub-networks. Consequently, the estimation matrices for all position and
orientation corrections are linear instead of quadratic in the number of
unknowns and can be solved very efficiently using an alternating least squares
approach. It is shown how this approach can be mapped to a standard key/value
MapReduce implementation, where each of the processing nodes operates
independently on small chunks of data, leading to essentially linear
scalability. Results are demonstrated for a dataset of one billion measured
LiDAR points and 278,000 unknowns, leading to maps with a precision of a few
millimeters.Comment: ACM SIGSPATIAL'16, October 31-November 03, 2016, Burlingame, CA, US
Monte Carlo methods and applications for the nuclear shell model
The shell-model Monte Carlo (SMMC) technique transforms the traditional
nuclear shell-model problem into a path-integral over auxiliary fields. We
describe below the method and its applications to four physics issues:
calculations of sdpf- shell nuclei, a discussion of electron-capture rates in
pf-shell nuclei, exploration of pairing correlations in unstable nuclei, and
level densities in rare earth systems.Comment: Proceedings of the Nuclear Structure '98 conference, Gatlinburg, TN,
10-15 August 199
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