The Kelly Gang reborn: The first Australian mounted unit to see active service in the Second World War

In the pre-dawn chill the sentries shifted in their positions and stared at the rocky hills and mountains beyond their position. The camp stirred to the familiar smell of horse feed and the jingle of a bridle as the men, adorned in their distinctive slouch hats, prepared for their early morning patrol. Before them lay the vast expanse of the Middle East. The desert, rock and sands of Syria. The Middle East; desert, sand, horses and slouch hats invokes the images of the triumphant Australian Light Horse of World War One. It brings to mind images and memories such as the charge at Beersheba and the ride to Damascus. But this was not 1918, but 1941. Most of the men who mounted these steady beasts had not been born as the Light Horse had conducted the last great mounted campaign in military history. In the intervening years the horse had given way to sounds and throbs of diesel engines, to armoured plate and the crack of high velocity cannon. So what were these Australian horsemen doing in Syria, a generation on from the Light Horse and light years on in technology? The “Kelly Gang” as this Light Horse troop came to be known was the first mounted Australian unit to see active service in the Second World War. They formed part of the 7th Australian Division AIF (2 Brigades) under the command of Major-General John Lavarack who were responsible for the coastal and central sectors of the British invasion of Vichy French held Syria. Although vastly outnumbered and outgunned by the opposing Vichy French forces the operations that commenced on 6 June, 1941 were initially successful. By the 14 June the Australians had reached the line of Sidon –Jezzine- Merdajayoun. The French command reacted by assembling their superior armoured forces to counter-attack the advancing Australian units. The coastal thrust was brought to a standstill and Merdajayoun recaptured. \u27The Kelly Gang Reborn: The first Australian mounted unit to see active service in the Second World War\u27, has been published as

Effect of nuclear structure on Type Ia supernova nucleosynthesis

The relationship among nuclear structure, the weak processes in nuclei, and astrophysics becomes quite apparent in supernova explosion and nucleosynthesis studies. In this brief article, I report on progress made in the last few years on calculating electron capture and beta-decay rates in iron-group nuclei. I also report on applications of these rates to Type-Ia nucleosynthesis studies.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of Nuclei In the Cosmos 200

Scalable Estimation of Precision Maps in a MapReduce Framework

This paper presents a large-scale strip adjustment method for LiDAR mobile mapping data, yielding highly precise maps. It uses several concepts to achieve scalability. First, an efficient graph-based pre-segmentation is used, which directly operates on LiDAR scan strip data, rather than on point clouds. Second, observation equations are obtained from a dense matching, which is formulated in terms of an estimation of a latent map. As a result of this formulation, the number of observation equations is not quadratic, but rather linear in the number of scan strips. Third, the dynamic Bayes network, which results from all observation and condition equations, is partitioned into two sub-networks. Consequently, the estimation matrices for all position and orientation corrections are linear instead of quadratic in the number of unknowns and can be solved very efficiently using an alternating least squares approach. It is shown how this approach can be mapped to a standard key/value MapReduce implementation, where each of the processing nodes operates independently on small chunks of data, leading to essentially linear scalability. Results are demonstrated for a dataset of one billion measured LiDAR points and 278,000 unknowns, leading to maps with a precision of a few millimeters.Comment: ACM SIGSPATIAL'16, October 31-November 03, 2016, Burlingame, CA, US

Monte Carlo methods and applications for the nuclear shell model

The shell-model Monte Carlo (SMMC) technique transforms the traditional nuclear shell-model problem into a path-integral over auxiliary fields. We describe below the method and its applications to four physics issues: calculations of sdpf- shell nuclei, a discussion of electron-capture rates in pf-shell nuclei, exploration of pairing correlations in unstable nuclei, and level densities in rare earth systems.Comment: Proceedings of the Nuclear Structure '98 conference, Gatlinburg, TN, 10-15 August 199