“The Rock of Accomplishment”: The Loyal Edmonton Regiment at Ortona

The struggle for Ortona is one of the best known battles fought by Canadians in the Second World War. Matthew Halton, the CBC’s chief radio correspondent in Italy, made “Moro River” and “Ortona” household words in 1943 and since then veterans as well as war correspondents and historians have offered numerous accounts of that December in Abruzzi. This article focuses on the role of the Loyal Edmonton Regiment in clearing the town of Ortona, but it is important to remind ourselves of the context within which the battle was fought. The Allies had invaded the Italian mainland to force Italy out of the war, to establish air bases for the strategic bombers, and to draw off the maximum number of German troops. Hitler’s decision to stand south of Rome was all that sensible Allied planners could have hoped for. The Foggia plains were suitable for air bases and the Germans poured resources into Italy to meet the Allied advance and into the Balkans to replace the Italian Army

The politics of magnificence in Ferrara, 1405-1505 : a study in the socio-political implications of the Renaissance spectacle

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:D42204/82 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Multi‐diagnostic multi‐model ensemble forecasts of aviation turbulence

Turbulence is one of the major weather hazards to aviation. Studies have shown that clear‐air turbulence may well occur more frequently with future climate change. Currently the two World Area Forecast Centres use deterministic models to generate forecasts of turbulence. It has been shown that the use of multi‐model ensembles can lead to more skilful turbulence forecasts. It has also been shown that the combination of turbulence diagnostics can also produce more skilful forecasts using deterministic models. This study puts the two approaches together to expand the range of diagnostics to include predictors of both convective and mountain wave turbulence, in addition to clear‐air turbulence, using two ensemble model systems. Results from a 12 month global trial from September 2016 to August 2017 show the increased skill and economic value of including a wider range of diagnostics in a multi‐diagnostic multi‐model ensemble

An analysis of break-even prices and yields between dryland and irrigated cropping in Saskatchewan

Non-Peer Reviewe

QCD with dynamical Wilson fermions at β=5.5\beta=5.5

We study QCD with two flavors of dynamical Wilson fermions at $\beta = 5.5$ and three values of $\kappa$. The corresponding pion masses are 0.375, 0.324 and 0.262 in lattice units, with pion to rho mass ratios of 0.76, 0.71 and 0.62, respectively. We use the configurations to compute the heavy quark potential, leading to lattice spacings of 0.110, 0.105 and 0.099 fm, and to compute spectroscopy for several different valence quark $\kappa$'s.Comment: LaTex 4 pages, 4 figures. Talk presented at LATTICE96(spectrum

L^2-Betti numbers of one-relator groups

We determine the L^2-Betti numbers of all one-relator groups and all surface-plus-one-relation groups (surface-plus-one-relation groups were introduced by Hempel who called them one-relator surface groups). In particular we show that for all such groups G, the L^2-Betti numbers b_n^{(2)}(G) are 0 for all n>1. We also obtain some information about the L^2-cohomology of left-orderable groups, and deduce the non-L^2 result that, in any left-orderable group of homological dimension one, all two-generator subgroups are free.Comment: 18 pages, version 3, minor changes. To appear in Math. An

Aligning archive maps and extracting footprints for analysis of historic urban environments.

Archive cartography and archaeologist's sketches are invaluable resources when analysing a historic town or city. A virtual reconstruction of a city provides the user with the ability to navigate and explore an environment which no longer exists to obtain better insight into its design and purpose. However, the process of reconstructing the city from maps depicting features such as building footprints and roads can be labour intensive. In this paper we present techniques to aid in the semi-automatic extraction of building footprints from digital images of archive maps and sketches. Archive maps often exhibit problems in the form of inaccuracies and inconsistencies in scale which can lead to incorrect reconstructions. By aligning archive maps to accurate modern vector data one may reduce these problems. Furthermore, the efficiency of the footprint extraction methods may be improved by aligning either modern vector data or previously extracted footprints, since common elements can be identified between maps of differing time periods and only the difference between the two needs to be extracted. An evaluation of two alignment approaches is presented: using a linear affine transformation and a set of piecewise linear affine transformations

A 3-d modular gripper design tool

Modular fixturing kits are precisely machined sets of components used for flexible, short-turnaround construction of fixtures for a variety of manufacturing purposes. A modular vise is a parallel-jaw vise, where each jaw is a modular fixture plate with a regular grid of precisely positioned holes. A modular vise can be used to locate and hold parts for machining, assembly, and inspection tasks. To fixture a part, one places pins in some of the holes so that when the vise is closed, the part is reliably located and completely constrained. The modular vise concept can be adapted easily to the design of modular parallel-jaw grippers for robots. By attaching a grid plate to each jaw of a parallel-jaw gripper, the authors gain the ability to easily construct high-quality grasps for a wide variety of parts from a standard set of hardware. Wallack and Canny developed a previous algorithm for planning planar grasp configurations for the modular vise. In this paper, the authors expand this work to produce a 3-d fixture/gripper design tool. They describe several analyses added to the planar algorithm to improve its utility, including a three-dimensional grasp quality metric based on geometric and force information, three-dimensional geometric loading analysis, and inter-gripper interference analysis to determine the compatibility of multiple grasps for handing the part from one gripper to another. Finally, the authors describe two applications which combine the utility of modular vise-style grasping with inter-gripper interference: The first is the design of a flexible part-handling subsystem for a part cleaning workcell under development at Sandia National Laboratories; the second is the automatic design of grippers that support the assembly of multiple products on a single assembly line

Cosmological equations and Thermodynamics on Apparent Horizon in Thick Braneworld

We derive the generalized Friedmann equation governing the cosmological evolution inside the thick brane model in the presence of two curvature correction terms: a four-dimensional scalar curvature from induced gravity on the brane, and a five-dimensional Gauss-Bonnet curvature term. We find two effective four-dimensional reductions of the Friedmann equation in some limits and demonstrate that they can be rewritten as the first law of thermodynamics on the apparent horizon of thick braneworld.Comment: 25 pages, no figure, a definition corrected, several references added, more motivation and discussio