Trial by Fire: Major-General Christopher Vokes at the Battles of the Moro River and Ortona, December 1943

During the month of December 1943, the 1st Canadian Infantry Division (1st Cdn Div) underwent the most severe trial yet experienced by Canadian troops in Italy, when it crossed the Moro River, engaged two German divisions in rapid succession and, after a week of vicious street fighting, took the town of Ortona. Hailed at the time as victories, these battles have since been the subject of considerable debate among soldiers and historians alike. Much of the controversy has revolved around the division’s commander, Major-General Christopher Vokes, who has been accused by some of mishandling his formation, and has been castigated by others for the heavy cost in lives that resulted.1 Are these verdicts too harsh? Was he solely to blame for the manner in which the battles of the Moro River and Ortona evolved, and for their tragic cost? In order to better understand Chris Vokes’ actions during his first divisional battle, it will be argued that he did indeed make mistakes but at the same time was forced to deal with an extremely difficult set of circumstances that largely dictated the course and outcome of the battle. These included a strategic situation that created the conditions for a war of attrition; an unrealistic Army Grouplevel plan; unfavourable terrain and weather; unexpected changes in German defensive tactics; the “fog of war”; and his own inexperience as a divisional commander. As a result Vokes faced the toughest challenge of his military career

Dual Language and ENL Comprehension: A First Grade Study for Students at Risk for Delayed English Language Development

This research began by asking how dual language programming impacts English comprehension for ENL students. Research was conducted within one first grade dual language cohort with five bilingual students. The data was collected by interviewing teachers and students, utilizing historical comprehension data, observing read alouds, and assessing student comprehension. Findings revealed that comprehension in a participant’s first language was positively related to English comprehension. However, individual student differences impacted the extent of the correlation. Furthermore, dual language teachers implemented common instructional practices to scaffold ENL student comprehension. Therefore, the data implied that native language instruction is integral, student backgrounds and differences need to be analyzed, and dual language educators need adequate professional development to best aid ENL comprehension

Deterioration and Noise in Technologies of Audio Reproduction

No abstract supplied. This thesis also contains music files - please contact the author if you wish to access these file

Securing State Commitments to Family Economic Prosperity

Reviews states' approaches to reducing family poverty and improving economic security, including expanding access to education and increasing income supports to raise standards of living while also improving job quality. Includes recommendations

Conformal invariants measuring the best constants for Gagliardo-Nirenberg-Sobolev inequalities

We introduce a family of conformal invariants associated to a smooth metric measure space which generalize the relationship between the Yamabe constant and the best constant for the Sobolev inequality to the best constants for Gagliardo-Nirenberg-Sobolev inequalities $\|w\r|_q \leq C\|\nabla w\|_2^\theta \|w\|_p^{1-\theta}$. These invariants are constructed via a minimization procedure for the weighted scalar curvature functional in the conformal class of a smooth metric measure space. We then describe critical points which are also critical points for variations in the metric or the measure. When the measure is assumed to take a special form --- for example, as the volume element of an Einstein metric --- we use this description to show that minimizers of our invariants are only critical for certain values of $p$ and $q$. In particular, on Euclidean space our result states that either $p=2(q-1)$ or $q=2(p-1)$, giving a new characterization of the GNS inequalities whose sharp constants were computed by Del Pino and Dolbeault.Comment: 20 page

Sharp weighted Sobolev trace inequalities and fractional powers of the Laplacian

We establish a family of sharp Sobolev trace inequalities involving the $W^{k,2}(\mathbb{R}_+^{n+1},y^a)$-norm. These inequalities are closely related to the realization of fractional powers of the Laplacian on $\mathbb{R}^n=\partial\mathbb{R}_+^{n+1}$ as generalized Dirichlet-to-Neumann operators associated to powers of the weighted Laplacian in upper half space, generalizing observations of Caffarelli--Silvestre and of Yang.Comment: 25 page

Deregulation: Invitation to Disaster in the S&L Industry

This speech was given by Professor Case as part of the Annual Financial Institutions and Regulation Symposium at the Fordham School of Law