The Long Wait (Part I): A Personal Account of Infantry Training in Britain, June 1942–June 1943

In the early summer of 1942, Harold (Hal) MacDonald, a young infantry officer from Saint John, New Brunswick, was posted overseas to join the North Shore (New Brunswick) Regiment, then stationed in Great Britain. The North Shores were part of a growing Canadian military presence in Britain, preparing for the day when the Allies would return to the continent to help defeat the armies of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Canadian troops had begun to arrive in England in 1939, and indeed, after the fall of France in the late spring of 1940, formed an important part of Britain’s defence forces at a time when it and the Commonwealth stood alone against the combined might of Germany and Italy. By the time that MacDonald arrived, the number of Canadian troops had swelled to some 130,000, for the most part concentrated in the south of England, where they underwent rigorous training exercises and highly realistic simulated battles designed to prepare them to meet the enemy

Adjusted Plus-Minus for NHL Players using Ridge Regression with Goals, Shots, Fenwick, and Corsi

Regression-based adjusted plus-minus statistics were developed in basketball and have recently come to hockey. The purpose of these statistics is to provide an estimate of each player's contribution to his team, independent of the strength of his teammates, the strength of his opponents, and other variables that are out of his control. One of the main downsides of the ordinary least squares regression models is that the estimates have large error bounds. Since certain pairs of teammates play together frequently, collinearity is present in the data and is one reason for the large errors. In hockey, the relative lack of scoring compared to basketball is another reason. To deal with these issues, we use ridge regression, a method that is commonly used in lieu of ordinary least squares regression when collinearity is present in the data. We also create models that use not only goals, but also shots, Fenwick rating (shots plus missed shots), and Corsi rating (shots, missed shots, and blocked shots). One benefit of using these statistics is that there are roughly ten times as many shots as goals, so there is much more data when using these statistics and the resulting estimates have smaller error bounds. The results of our ridge regression models are estimates of the offensive and defensive contributions of forwards and defensemen during even strength, power play, and short handed situations, in terms of goals per 60 minutes. The estimates are independent of strength of teammates, strength of opponents, and the zone in which a player's shift begins.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figures, 7 table

Groundwater, health and livelihoods in Africa

Groundwater is Africa’s most precious natural resource, providing reliable water supplies to at least a third of the continent’s population. Where it can be found, groundwater has many advantages over river water: it is naturally protected from contamination, able to provide water throughout dry seasons and droughts, and can often be found close to the point of need and therefore developed incrementally and at low cost

Space and the Atom: On the Popular Geopolitics of Cold War Rocketry

This paper considers the imbricated domains of space exploration and Cold War geopolitics by following the trajectory of the 'Corporal', the world's first guided missile authorised to carry a nuclear warhead. It examines the popular geopolitics of rocketry as both a technology of mass destruction and as a vehicle for the transcendent dreams of extra-terrestrial discovery. Avoiding both technical and statist accounts, the paper shows how these technologies of Cold War strategic advantage were activated and sustained through popular media and everyday experience. Particular attention is given to such mundane activities as children's play, citing the example of die-cast miniature toys of the Corporal. Through such apparently modest means, nuclear weapons were made intelligible in, and transposable to, a domestic context. The paper is also situated within a wider emerging literature on geographies and geopolitics of outer space.</p