Some Personal Recollections of Army Operations Research on Radar in World War II

Operational Research had its origin at the beginning of the Second World War, and made important early contributions to many aspects of the Air Defence of Great Britain, an activity of monumental significance in the war. Air defence depended for its success on the development of a command, control, communication and information system on a scale that had never been approached before. It also depended on other types of technology, such as high performance aircraft, air-to-air weapons and anti-aircraft artillery, and, most critically, on the new science of radar. All of these offered opportunities for applications of operational research, as did the study of tactics for individual engagements and of strategy for the optimum allocation of dangerously scarce resources. Of the many technological developments that made advances throughout the course of World War II, radar was the one which saw the greatest improvement in capabilities and had the most significant influence on operations. The contributions of radar to fire control of weapons, and the direction and navigation of aircraft and ships, called for systematic studies of the technical design and performance of the radar, of the weapons depending on its information, of the capabilities of the human operators, and of the design and effectiveness of the entire system of which the radar was one vital part. This provided a glorious opportunity for operational research. There was an atmosphere of extreme urgency. There were no worries about budgets. There was no time for extensive instrumented field trials or operational evaluation-new equipment was rushed into service. The data on effectiveness under field conditions was obtained from real operations. In earlier years it was possible to find people who held senior positions in organizations conducting important military operations, and could therefore give a first hand account of the critical decisions and results as seen “top down” from the highest level. But if one wants to go back as far as World War II, where operational research was born, it is getting increasingly difficult to find survivors who held senior appointments in the early 1940s. I am not one of these. However, I was fortunate enough to have been able to participate in operational research during World War II at a junior level, and to have spent most of the half century since then in the study and practice of military OR. I am going to describe a few incidents which occurred in the life of a junior army officer engaged in military operational research on the applications of radar to air defence, during an extremely active period. So what you are going to receive is a bottom up worm’s eye view of operational research during its interesting pioneer period fifty years ago

Towards memory supporting personal information management tools

In this article we discuss re-retrieving personal information objects and relate the task to recovering from lapse(s) in memory. We propose that fundamentally it is lapses in memory that impede users from successfully re-finding the information they need. Our hypothesis is that by learning more about memory lapses in non-computing contexts and how people cope and recover from these lapses, we can better inform the design of PIM tools and improve the user's ability to re-access and re-use objects. We describe a diary study that investigates the everyday memory problems of 25 people from a wide range of backgrounds. Based on the findings, we present a series of principles that we hypothesize will improve the design of personal information management tools. This hypothesis is validated by an evaluation of a tool for managing personal photographs, which was designed with respect to our findings. The evaluation suggests that users' performance when re-finding objects can be improved by building personal information management tools to support characteristics of human memory

Our teachers: Collected memories of primary education in Derbyshire schools from 1944 - 2009

This paper presents findings from narrative interviews undertaken with 24 narrators who attended primary school in the decades from 1944 - 2009. Deductive themes were first selected by examining the quantity of content and relevance to the study. Four deductive themes were drawn from the narrators’ recollections: Our Teachers; The Lessons We Learned; Our Friendships and the Games We Played and finally The Books we Read. The focus of this paper is on the findings from one of the deductive themes: Our Teachers. Once the stories had been transcribed, they were analysed for inductive themes. These were identified as: Pupil-teacher relationship, noted across each of the decades. A gendered workforce, reflected in each decade, except 1999-2009. Teacher personality was common across all decades. Corporal punishment was common in the decades from 1944-1987, but not present after 1987. Finally, Teacher professionalism was a prevalent theme in most decades except 1999-2009. Key findings related to the connections that come with the relationship the teacher forms with their pupils. Teachers who break the mould are well remembered by pupils. The nature of the primary school workforce has changed since 1944, and is now perceived as being female dominated. Because of changes to legislation, the role of the teacher has evolved, the changes in professional behaviour are noted in the narrators’ stories, from decade to decade.N/

Re-enacting Early Video Art as a Research Tool for Media Art Histories

This paper will discuss re-enactment as a relevant tool for practice-based research to investigate pioneering video performances and video artworks from the 1970s and 1980s from a theoretical, art-historical and curatorial point of view. Since the early 2000s, the re-enactment of artists’ performance has been growing as an art practice internationally and has been investigated in several studies and exhibitions. In this paper, I will pro- pose that the re-enactment of early video artworks can open up critical analysis on the original work—its nature, form and content—as well as on collective and personal memory and mediation. Re-enactment becomes a research tool that investigates the nature of video which was at the time a relatively new medium. Re-enactment informs the research into the original piece, its documentation, the relationships between the artist and the body, the work and the viewer. It investigates the effects of analogue video on the viewer and the artist in comparison with the digital video employed in the re-enactment and its documentation. The paper will analyse case studies from the research projects REWIND, REWINDItalia and EWVA (European Women’s Video Art in the 70s and 80s)

Recollections of My Research in Developing the Heart-Lung Machine at Jefferson Medical College

A personal memoir written by Dr. Bernard J. Miller about his introduction to and interest in medical research as well as his experiences working on the heart-lung machine. He focuses specifically on his working relationship with John H. Gibbon, Jr., the development of a viable oxygenator and ventilator, and early testing of the machine on animal

Early Development of Total Hip Replacement

Annotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 14 March 2006. Introduction by Dr Francis Neary and Professor John Pickstone. First published by the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, 2007. ©The Trustee of the Wellcome Trust, London, 2007. All volumes are freely available online at: www.history.qmul.ac.uk/research/modbiomed/wellcome_witnesses/Annotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 14 March 2006. Introduction by Dr Francis Neary and Professor John Pickstone,Annotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 14 March 2006. Introduction by Dr Francis Neary and Professor John Pickstone,Annotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 14 March 2006. Introduction by Dr Francis Neary and Professor John Pickstone,Annotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 14 March 2006. Introduction by Dr Francis Neary and Professor John Pickstone,Annotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 14 March 2006. Introduction by Dr Francis Neary and Professor John Pickstone,Annotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 14 March 2006. Introduction by Dr Francis Neary and Professor John Pickstone,Total hip replacement effectively began in the UK in 1938 and has led to widely used, commercially successful, mass-produced devices that relieve pain for an ever increasing period. The Witness Seminar, chaired by Mr Alan Lettin, discussed the remarkable postwar collaboration of British surgeons, engineers and manufacturing firms in the development of efficient alloys, surgical procedures, instruments and the implementation of clean, bacteria-reduced air in enclosed operating theatres, as illustrated by successful prostheses and techniques developed in Norwich (Kenneth McKee), Wrightington (Sir John Charnley), Stanmore (John Scales), Redhill (Peter Ring), and Exeter (Robin Ling and Clive Lee). Early failures - such as loosening from infection, osteolysis, and wear debris - stimulated the search for improved materials and fixation methods, as well as the addition of antibiotics to bone cement to reduce infection. National hip registers that record the survival of different implants were adopted in Europe in the 1970s (2003 in the UK), and they pinpoint the successful devices, as measured by survival and low rates of revision. An introduction to the volume by Dr Francis Neary and Professor John Pickstone, and appendices on materials by Professor Alan Swanson; on international standards by Mr Victor Wheble; and of details of selected prosthesis supplement the transcript. Contributors include: Lady Charnley, the late Mr Harry Craven, Mr Graham Deane, Professor Duncan Dowson, Mr Reg Elson, Dr Alex Faulkner, Professor Michael Freeman, Mrs Phyllis Hampson, Mr Kevin Hardinge, Mr Mike Heywood-Waddington, Mr John Kirkup, Mr Krishna (Ravi) Kunzru, Miss Betty Lee, Mr Alan Lettin (chair), Mr John Older, Mr John Read, Mr Peter Ring, Mr Ian Stephen, Mr Malcolm Swann, Professor Alan Swanson, Sir Rodney Sweetnam, Mr Keith Tucker, Mr Victor Wheble and Professor Michael Wroblewski. Reynolds L A, Tansey E M. (eds) (2007) Early development of total hip replacement, Wellcome Witnesses to Twentieth Century Medicine, vol. 29. London: The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL.The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL is funded by the Wellcome Trust, which is a registered charity, no. 210183

Design of engineering systems in Polish mines in the third quarter of the 20th century

Participation of mathematicians in the implementation of economic projects in Poland, in which mathematics-based methods played an important role, happened sporadically in the past. Usually methods known from publications and verified were adapted to solving related problems. The subject of this paper is the cooperation between mathematicians and engineers in Wroc{\l}aw in the second half of the twentieth century established in the form of an analysis of the effectiveness of engineering systems used in mining. The results of this cooperation showed that at the design stage of technical systems it is necessary to take into account factors that could not have been rationally controlled before. The need to explain various aspects of future exploitation was a strong motivation for the development of mathematical modeling methods. These methods also opened research topics in the theory of stochastic processes and graph theory. The social aspects of this cooperation are also interesting.Comment: 45 pages, 11 figures, 116 reference