Constructing the “Ace”: Feature Films in the Interwar Period and the Great War in the Air

Robert Morley is a PhD Candidate at the University of Saskatchewan. He is currently working on a dissertation that explores the depiction of aviation on screen in Great Britain during the interwar period

Inflation in the G7: mind the gap(s)?

We investigate the importance of trend inflation and the real-activity gap for explaining observed inflation variation in G7 countries since 1960. Our results are based on a bivariate unobserved-components model of inflation and unemployment in which inflation is decomposed into a stochastic trend and transitory component. As in recent implementations of the New Keynesian Phillips Curve, it is the transitory component of inflation, or “inflation gap”, that is driven by the real-activity gap, which we measure as the deviation of unemployment from its natural rate. Even when allowing for changes in the contributions of trend inflation and the inflation gap, we find that both are important determinants of inflation variation at business cycle horizons for all G7 countries throughout much of the past 50 years. Also, the real-activity gap explains a large fraction of the variation in the inflation gap for each country, both historically and in recent years. Taken together, the results suggest the New Keynesian Phillips Curve, once augmented to include trend inflation, is an empirically relevant model for the G7 countries. We also provide new estimates of trend inflation for the G7 that incorporate information in the real-activity gap for identification and, through formal model comparisons, new statistical evidence regarding structural breaks in the variability of trend inflation and the inflation gap.Inflation (Finance) ; Phillips curve

THE SCREEN’S THREATENING SKIES: AERIAL WARFARE AND BRITISH CINEMA, 1927-1939

This dissertation supplements previously conducted research on aviation in interwar Britain by providing a necessary examination of the appearance of aerial warfare on British cinema screens between 1927 and 1939. It examines the presentation of the First World War, military aviators, the Royal Air Force, bombing, and aerial warfare to the British public. More specifically, it examines the connections between flying, aerial warfare, cinema, and the popular imagination in interwar Great Britain. It uses feature films, specifically Hell’s Angels, The Dawn Patrol, Things to Come, documentaries like RAF, The Gap, and The Warning, and newsreels. In additional to examining cinematic sources, it also extensively utilizes film press books, scripts, programmes, and British Government documents to determine the motives for producing these pictures, what influenced their writing, how they were promoted to the British public, and how cinema reviewers responded to them. It reveals that the cinema helped shape British perceptions of aerial warfare (and the First World War) during the interwar period, providing insight into how the British state and military interacted with the nation’s mass media complex. In doing so, it highlights the important, and often underappreciated, symbiotic relationship between mass culture and government policy

West Cornwall Methodism Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: A Missional Ecclesiology

The thesis considers a missional ecclesiology, arising out of and applicable to the experience of Methodism in West Cornwall. It is important therefore to take a historical overview of West Cornwall Methodists, believing that the problems and opportunities of today in areas of mission and ministry can be traced though that history. And as against a superficial reading, the purpose is not merely negative. In fact, the conclusion is one of cautious optimism, to seek and find a positive future. Each of the history chapters will demonstrate the evolution of various factors that constitute that which makes West Cornish Methodism what it is today. It will be demonstrated that it has been moulded by certain unique facets including the Cornish personality of independence and tenacity, furthered by geographical remoteness. Added to this there were dangerous industries such as mining and fishing, and the decline of an indigenous people that held, at least formerly, strong religious beliefs. The latter chapters will focus on how national Methodism by its pervading inflexible structures has been a mixed blessing leading to perceived tensions in the practice of the local churches. Conference initiatives, taken in areas of considerable concern, coupled to long-term numerical decline have led to insecurity and hesitancy as to the future. The fundamental reason for the last four chapters is that they will demonstrate how the previously discussed historical context shapes the here and now and indeed the future. In seeking a positive future, theological concepts such as Missio Dei and Volkstum will be defined and discussed as a basis for further mission. For this there will be a need for the local churches to prepare themselves for a positive role in the communities of which they are a part

Earning their wings : British pilot training, 1912-1918

This thesis outlines the development of Royal Flying Corps’s (RFC) training programme from 1912 to 1918. It is based largely on archival sources from the National Archives and Imperial War Museum (London) and the Bundesarchiv (Freiburg, Germany). It considers the changes to the theoretical, practical and in-flight instruction methods used by the Royal Flying Corps. Within this discussion it analyzes the difficulties encountered by the RFC while attempting to train their aviators. It argues that initially the training programme was a detriment to British war effort in the air, as many pilots entered combat without sufficient training. This, however, was not the result of a flawed training regimen. Actually, the RFC training programme remained in tune with the realities of the war over the Western Front. The problems encountered by the RFC were largely the result of the circumvention or ignorance of the training programme by instructors. Nevertheless, British pilot training improved as the war went on both theoretically and practically and ultimately became more efficient than the training programmes in France and Germany. It pays special attention to the use of dual-control aircraft for the purposes of training and the positive effects these changes had on the British war effort. It also touches on some thematic issues such as gender, individuality, modernity and technology

The Mason Test: A Defense Against Sybil Attacks in Wireless Networks Without Trusted Authorities

Wireless networks are vulnerable to Sybil attacks, in which a malicious node poses as many identities in order to gain disproportionate influence. Many defenses based on spatial variability of wireless channels exist, but depend either on detailed, multi-tap channel estimation - something not exposed on commodity 802.11 devices - or valid RSSI observations from multiple trusted sources, e.g., corporate access points - something not directly available in ad hoc and delay-tolerant networks with potentially malicious neighbors. We extend these techniques to be practical for wireless ad hoc networks of commodity 802.11 devices. Specifically, we propose two efficient methods for separating the valid RSSI observations of behaving nodes from those falsified by malicious participants. Further, we note that prior signalprint methods are easily defeated by mobile attackers and develop an appropriate challenge-response defense. Finally, we present the Mason test, the first implementation of these techniques for ad hoc and delay-tolerant networks of commodity 802.11 devices. We illustrate its performance in several real-world scenarios

Taarifa - Improving Public Service Provision in the Developing World Through a Crowd-sourced Location Based Reporting Application

Public service provision in the developing world is challenged by a lack of coherence and consistency in the amount of resources local authorities have in their endowment. Especially where non-planned urban settlements (e.g. slums) are present, the frequent and constant change of the urban environment poses big challenges to the effective delivery of services. In this paper we report on our experiences with Taarifa: a location-based application built through community development that allows community reporting and managing of local issues

Shear Capacity of Reinforced Concrete T-Beams Retrofit with Externally Bonded CFRP Fabric: A New Perspective

Unanchored U-wrapped externally bonded carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) fabrics are widely used to increase the design shear strength of existing reinforced concrete slab-on-beam structures, but current design models do not accurately predict the degree of enhancement. Experimental investigations further indicate that some T-beams retrofit with externally bonded CFRP fabric fail at lower shear loads than nominally identical nonretrofit reference counterparts, suggesting a negative experimental CFRP contribution. This work finds a new application for the upper-bound theorem of plasticity in analyzing the problem of U-wrapped externally bonded CFRP-retrofit beam behavior. The study provides insight into the poor historical prediction of the CFRP contribution, and demonstrates the limitations of a widely used experimental approach to determining this contribution. The analysis suggests a new way of thinking about the behavior of slab-on-beam structures retrofit with unanchored U-wrapped externally bonded CFRP. The upper-bound plastic analysis provides better predictions of retrofit shear capacity than some widely used design models, indicating that this approach can lead to better design of retrofit interventions in future. This work proposes a new design limit on enhancement that can reduce the likelihood of unsafe design in practice