Proving Grounds of Urbicide: Civil and Urban Perspectives on the Bombing of Capital Cities

In the bombing of urban settlements, the main impacts have been on resident civilians, living space and non-military functions. This is shown in the bombing of London, Berlin and Tokyo in the Second World War, arguably the first and only serious tests of strategic air power and urbicide to determine war outcomes. The history and scope of raiding of these capital cities differed in many ways, but the civilian experience and urban implications were very similar. The bombings attacked the most vulnerable areas, where resident populations found themselves poorly protected at best. The intentions, as well as results, of the raiding are examples of urbicide, planned to kill indiscriminately and destroy all elements of urban existence. Yet, a disarticulation emerges between the political, industrial and war-controlling functions of the capitals, which the bombing was supposed to disable but could not, and the plight of their citizens. The bombing was encouraged as ‘spectacular violence’, even though militarily inconclusive and, in seeking to avoid combat while terrorising non-combatants, it experimented with an approach to armed violence that would prevail after 1945. Despite enormous changes since 1945, the plight of bombed civilians has changed little

Modelling and simulation of advanced non-linear autopilot designs

This paper presents the simulation in ESL of a non-linear 6 degree-of-freedom missile model with an advanced, non-linear, multivariable autopilot designed using Rate Actuated Inverse Dynamics (RAID) methods. High performance control of non-linear systems requires the design of advanced, non-linear control systems, such as those used in autopilot design. Traditional linear control system design and analysis techniques are not sufficient for non-linear systems and current non-linear analysis methods are extremely limited. Therefore, the only method available to fully assess the performance of non-linear controller designs is simulation of the non-linear system. For this reason it is an essential part of the analysis and design process of these types of controllers. Non-linear dynamics can be continuous or discontinuous, the aerodynamics of a missile are non-linear but since they are continuous they do not represent a simulation challenge. However, there are multiple sets of discontinuous dynamics present in both the missile control surface model and the autopilot which can lead to multiple discontinuities being reached simultaneously, providing a challenging modeling exercise. The paper demonstrates how this kind of behavior can be successfully modeled and simulated within ESL using a simple switching logic

Memories and Reflections on the Dieppe Raid of 19 August 1942

Editor’s Note: John S. Edmondson was born in Estevan, Saskatchewan in 1919. He joined the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry in 1938, and then served with the South Saskatchewan Regiment during the Second World War in the Defence of England, on the Dieppe Raid and in the Normandy Campaign until wounded during the capture of Falaise. After the war, he was transferred to the Black Watch (RHR) Regiment of Canada. He served in Canada in many roles, and as an exchange officer with the British 4th Division in West Germany as part of NATO. In addition, he served with the UN Military Observer Group in Kashmir, India and Pakistan. He served until reaching the mandatory retirement age in 1971. John, with the assistance of his son Doug, wrote this account of his experiences at Pourville in 1993, revising it in 2003

Data acquisition system for the MuLan muon lifetime experiment

We describe the data acquisition system for the MuLan muon lifetime experiment at Paul Scherrer Institute. The system was designed to record muon decays at rates up to 1 MHz and acquire data at rates up to 60 MB/sec. The system employed a parallel network of dual-processor machines and repeating acquisition cycles of deadtime-free time segments in order to reach the design goals. The system incorporated a versatile scheme for control and diagnostics and a custom web interface for monitoring experimental conditions.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figures, submitted to Nuclear Instruments and Methods

Progressive Neural Networks

Learning to solve complex sequences of tasks--while both leveraging transfer and avoiding catastrophic forgetting--remains a key obstacle to achieving human-level intelligence. The progressive networks approach represents a step forward in this direction: they are immune to forgetting and can leverage prior knowledge via lateral connections to previously learned features. We evaluate this architecture extensively on a wide variety of reinforcement learning tasks (Atari and 3D maze games), and show that it outperforms common baselines based on pretraining and finetuning. Using a novel sensitivity measure, we demonstrate that transfer occurs at both low-level sensory and high-level control layers of the learned policy

Defending Against Denial of Service

Civil Society currently faces significant cyber threats. At the top of the list of those threats are Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. The websites of many organizations and individuals have already come under such attacks, and the frequency of those attacks are on the rise. Civil Society frequently does not have the kinds of resources or technical know-how that is available to commercial enterprise and government websites, and often have to exist in adverse political environments where every avenue available, both legal and illegal, is used against them. Therefore, the threat of DoS attacks is unlikely to go away any time soon.A Denial of Service (DoS) attack is any attack that overwhelms a website, causing the content normally provided by that website to no longer be available to regular visitors of the website. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are traffic volumebased attacks originating from a large number of computers, which are usually compromised workstations. These workstations, known as 'zombies', form a widely distributed attack network called a 'botnet'. While many modern Denial of Service attacks are Distributed Denial of Service attacks, this is certainly not true for all denials of service experienced by websites. Therefore, when users first start experiencing difficulty in getting to the website content, it should not be assumed that the site is under a DDoS attack. Many forms of DoS are far easier to implement than DDoS, and so these attacks are still used by parties with malicious intent. Many such DoS attacks are easier to defend against once the mechanism used to cause the denial of service is known. Therefore, it is paramount to do proper analysis of attack traffic when a site becomes unable to perform its normal function. There are two parts to this guide. The first part outlines preparatory steps that can be taken by Civil Society organizations to improve their website's resilience, should it come under attack. However, we do understand that most Civil Society organizations' first introduction to DoS attacks comes when they suddenly find themselves the victim of an attack. The second part of this guide provides a step-by-step process to assist the staff of NGOs to efficiently deal with that stressful situation

A Lesson in Success: The Calonne Trench Raid, 17 January 1917

The Allied armies slugged it out on the Western front for nearly four years before finally achieving the breakout sought since November 1914. The four-division strong Canadian Corps led this “spearhead to victory.” Its commander was Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Currie, and his corps was commonly referred to as the “shock troops” of the British Expeditionary Force and as “the enemy’s elite soldiers” by the German high command. This reputation stemmed from the Canadians’ impressive record of success in raiding the German lines throughout the war. The Canadian Corps’ flexibility, and initiative, the aggressiveness of its soldiers, and their ever improving skills of fire and movement continually added to the growing legend of Canadians being masters of the art of the trench raid. One operation in particular, a raid against the German lines along the Lens-Bethune railway northeast of Cite Calonne on 17 January 1917, was almost flawless in its planning and preparation, and near text-book in its execution and resulting effect