The Pawns of War: A Personal Account of the Attack on Verrères Ridge by The South Saskatchewan Regiment, 20 July 1944

A number of current books deal with Operations Goodwood and Atlantic, but scant attention has been paid to the 6th Canadian Infantry Brigade and its three regiments, the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders of Canada (CAM), the Fusiliers Mont-Royal (FMR) and the South Saskatchewan Regiment (SSR), and to the Essex Scottish Regiment which was attached to 6th Brigade during this operation. When our role has been discussed at all, historians have inferred that the SSR fled or withdrew in panic in this action. My role was as Commander “B” Company of the SSR, and later as Acting Commanding Officer (A/CO) of the SSR during this operation. I wish to record my memories of the battle supplemented by historical documentation which I hope will cause historians to review the 6th Brigade action of 20 July 1944

Memories and Reflections on the Dieppe Raid of 19 August 1942

Editor’s Note: John S. Edmondson was born in Estevan, Saskatchewan in 1919. He joined the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry in 1938, and then served with the South Saskatchewan Regiment during the Second World War in the Defence of England, on the Dieppe Raid and in the Normandy Campaign until wounded during the capture of Falaise. After the war, he was transferred to the Black Watch (RHR) Regiment of Canada. He served in Canada in many roles, and as an exchange officer with the British 4th Division in West Germany as part of NATO. In addition, he served with the UN Military Observer Group in Kashmir, India and Pakistan. He served until reaching the mandatory retirement age in 1971. John, with the assistance of his son Doug, wrote this account of his experiences at Pourville in 1993, revising it in 2003

Label Placement in Road Maps

A road map can be interpreted as a graph embedded in the plane, in which each vertex corresponds to a road junction and each edge to a particular road section. We consider the cartographic problem to place non-overlapping road labels along the edges so that as many road sections as possible are identified by their name, i.e., covered by a label. We show that this is NP-hard in general, but the problem can be solved in polynomial time if the road map is an embedded tree.Comment: extended version of a CIAC 2015 pape

Espionage in Transnational Law

Traditionally, spies have been defined as secret agents of a State sent abroad for the purpose of obtaining clandestinely information in regard to military or political secrets. Older authorities have stated emphatically that the gravamen of espionage is the employment of disguise or false pretense. Such deception has been the justification for visiting the severest of penalties upon the captured spy. Curiously, however, the employment of spies has not been considered reprehensible conduct. The refusal to officially acknowledge the commissioning of a spy operated to relieve the government of any responsibility either to the offended state or to the secret agent. As a result, espionage in the classic sense can be characterized in two distinct ways: as to the nation, it was an extraterritorial act of state for which the state was not responsible; as to the agent, it was an intentional act of deception which rendered him personally and criminally liable to the offended government. The industrial revolution of the past century coupled with the rapid technological advancement of the present have placed great strains on the definition, as well as on the dual nature, of espionage. Beginning at least as early as the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the concept of control of information began to weigh heavily in the minds of those responsible for national security

The pros and cons of using photographs in nursing research

Background: Traditional approaches to research can sometimes face difficulties in engaging participants, allowing flexibility and ultimately eliciting data about people’s experiences. When this occurs researchers should be more innovative with research design. Visual methods are an alternative approach to interview based qualitative research, where images (often photographs) are used as stimuli and/or structure within the interview. However, little has been published in the nursing literature to guide nurse researchers in applying and evaluating this method. Aim: To increase nurse researchers’ awareness of visual methods and their potential, to enable them to make informed choices about methods in health research. Discussion: Visual methods with a particular focus on methods which use photographs within health research are introduced. The benefits of using photographs in health research, such as reducing the gap between researcher and participant; and facilitating expression of meaningful data, are discussed along with ethical, analytical and practical difficulties. Discussion points are illustrated with reflections from health research, and a comparison of interviews with and without the use of photographs is also presented. Conclusion: Using photographs offers a good alternative to more traditional approaches but the exact benefits are difficult to evidence because of the complexities of the research interaction. Implications for practice: this detailed discussion of visual methods and the associated methodological issues should increase nurse researchers’ awareness of the method, assist them in making informed choices about research methods, and encourage their use in health research

The Reduction of the Permeability of a Lateritic Soil through the Application of Microbially Induced Calcite Precipitation

Lateritic soils are frequently utilised in tropical areas of the developing world as an engineering material in the construction of rural earth roads, usually in the form of engineered natural surface (ENS) roads. The heavy, seasonal rainfalls common to the tropics results in ENS roads becoming quickly saturated with rainwater, and no longer accessible to motorised transportation. Microbially induced calcite precipitation (MICP) has been successfully used as a treatment process to decrease the permeability of clean, cohesionless sands by studies trying to impede the movement of groundwater, and any pollutants they may contain. In order to see if MICP treatment can also reduce the susceptibility of ENS road lateritic soils to rainwater saturation, this study has treated a Brazilian sample extracted from an ENS road in Espirito do Santo, Brazil, using the MICP bacterium Sporosarcina pasteurii contained within a urea-calcium chloride solution inoculum. Investigation, by means of a Rowe cell, of the post-treatment permeability, to untreated control samples, has shown an average decrease in the vertical coefficient of permeability of 83%, from 1.15 × 10-7 m/s for the untreated control samples, to 1.92 × 10-8 m/s in treated samples