“The Battle of Moyland Wood”: The Regina Rifle Regiment, 16–19 February 1945

Although I have written accounts about the D-Day Landings in Normandy and several costly battles from the beaches to Falaise, I have always been reluctant to write about the tragic events at Moyland Wood in Germany. My reluctance stems from the fact that this operation was the most traumatic for me personally and, I think, for our commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Allan Gregory, DSO, during the fighting in Western Europe. I take no pride in telling this story because my own performance in battle was inadequate. Further, I don’t wish to offend anyone by resurrecting memories that might better be forgotten, or to reveal information that does not reflect favourably on anyone. However, battle conditions place intolerable pressures on people, with unpredictable results. A hero today can fail tomorrow. A great leader last week can suffer from battle exhaustion this week. Fortunately, the Regina Rifles still had many heroes at Moyland Wood. Unfortunately, most of them were either killed or wounded. That’s why this story must be told

Choosing a Company's Building Design: Models for Strategic Design Decisions

Improving the linkage between real estate strategy and building design can help competitive business strategy. Differentiating building design from product design is important. Problems in making design choices derive from received paradigmatic knowledge that misrepresents the design decision processes. Architectural selection problems are explained with reference to design decision processes and dilemmas of testing the design. Because comparison is the underlying method of evaluation, the design competition is discussed as a model to evaluate the design of a company’s proposed high profile buildings in relation to corporate strategy. The Appendix describes the process and the recent and past history of competitions.

Design and Value: Spatial Form and the Economic Failure of a Mall

Real estate analysts have not had the tools to identify the functional problems of real estate because they have not focused on configuration. Space syntax is a way to represent, describe and evaluate spatial configurations or patterns created through building and urban design. Space syntax was used to systematically describe the configuration of a failed luxury shopping mall. Shape recognition techniques transform the plan into a mathematical network that can be analyzed. Network node parameters can be related to more traditional measures like occupancy and revenues by location. Thus revealed, the underlying spatial structure of the failed mall is compared to that of a similar but successful mall and its functional deficiencies identified.

Facilitating open plot structures in story driven video games using situation generation

Story driven video games are rising in popularity, along with the players desire to make meaningful choice within the plot and therefore become more involved and immersed within the experience. This paper investigates the problems which arise from implementing interactive narrative within video games and potential techniques to solve those problems. The main focus of the study was the situation generation technique, used to maintain the continuity within open, emergent plot structures, using behaviour trees as a means to implement and traverse plot sequences. The ISGEngine was developed during the course of this study in order to implement and evaluate the situation generation technique

The Effect of Walkthrough Observations on Teacher Perspectives in Christian Schools

This study investigated the effects on teacher perceptions of frequent, brief classroom observations in Christian schools. Teachers (N=111) responded to 13 belief and value statements prior to and after the term during which administrators conducted weekly, brief, unannounced observations in their classes. Teachers reported significant positive change regarding (a) analyzing reasons for selecting methods to assess learning, (b) being encouraged after class observations, and (c) being encouraged after receiving feedback related to the observations

Signalling C-Type Lectins in Antimicrobial Immunity

Funding: This work was funded by the Wellcome Trust, Medical Research Council and the University of Aberdeen. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD