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‘Tanks in Unexpected Places’: The Fighting Effectiveness of 4th (Independent) Armoured Brigade, 1943-45
Get PDFThis thesis considers how fighting effectiveness was both produced and maintained during the Second World War. 4th Independent Armoured Brigade, the subject of this study, was part of the relatively small minority of British formations that fought in several theatres during that war. The thesis demonstrates that the brigade’s ubiquity was due in large parts to its ability to generate and sustain fighting effectiveness. To this end, the work examines three key areas; leadership, morale and organisational learning at the tactical level in the British Army during the Second World War with a particular focus on 1943 to 1945. It demonstrates the ways in which these wider organisational influences worked within a single brigade. The thesis seeks to define and assess fighting effectiveness at formation level, which, it will be seen, is largely shaped by the three areas mentioned. The brigade was one of the small number of formations transferred from the Mediterranean to support the largely inexperienced 21st Army Group. The performance of the veteran formations has been controversial and they have been the subject of considerable criticism. This thesis argues that 4th Armoured Brigade performed significantly better than many of the veteran formations, and indeed many other formations within 21st Army Group, and will explain why this was the case. The exceptional leadership provided by the brigade’s two main commanders during the period was important. John Currie and Michael Carver were both highly capable. Carver would go on to become chief of the defence staff. The climate generated by both men had an effect on the way the brigade was led and the way it operated in battle. Additionally, this thesis shows that the brigade’s composition, in terms of the units it contained and their individual ethoses, as well as the experiences they had undergone, had a powerful effect on the brigade’s morale, motivation and professionalism. The army of the 1939–45 period was a heterogenous organisation with strong and varied localised traditions. This was compounded by the dispersed nature of British forces between 1941 and 1943. The thesis demonstrates the varied effects of this and the degree of difference that could be found between some British formations. Fighting in Italy and then across North-West Europe from Normandy to the Baltic, 4th Armoured Brigade encountered a great variety of enemy formations in a huge array of landscapes. The study shows the differing influences of both and how they drove tactical and organisational change within the brigade. The three influences of leadership, tactical learning and morale were filtered through the impact produced by enemy action and difficulties stemming from the terrain and climate. The thesis proposes a model of fighting effectiveness drawn from the operational successes of 4th Armoured Brigade
Disaster for Darwin vs Australia on Fire – a Politico-Legal Review of Governments in Action
Get PDFFor two days in December 1974, from 24 to 26 December, Cyclone Tracy hit Darwin, in the Northern Territory of Australia, killing 71 people, seriously injuring 145, impacting 500 with minor injuries, damaging buildings, tearing roofs from houses, sweeping up trees and rubbish bins, tearing up children’s playground equipment, bending in half the anemometer needle in Darwin Airport control tower. The festive season ended with a damage bill topping 103b. During Black Summer, the land expanse devastated was as if, experienced in England, the entire country was burning from Dover to the Scots’ border.
These disasters found both Prime Ministers absent overseas at crucial times. Gough Whitlam, Prime Minister during the cyclone disaster, returned from Greece immediately. Scott Morrison, Prime Minister during the fires left in the midst of the conflagration. Whitlam set up a Darwin Reconstruction Commission. No Bushfire Reconstruction Commission was established by Morrison. Two different responses from government. This paper explores the disasters and the differences, politico-legal dimensions of the way governments can respond or fail, and the process of recovery.
Key words: Cyclone Tracy, Australian bushfires, climate change, global warming, Gough Whitlam, Scot Morrison, disaster management, Darwin Reconstruction Commission, Royal Commission into Bushfires, 2019 ‘Black Summer
Unincorporated Associations and the Property Problem: The Contract-Holding Theory as the Ace of Clubs?
Get PDFThis article provides an examination of the contract-holding theory and reveals its flaws, proving it to be a misnomer. Sustained analysis also shows this method has much in common with other, supposedly distinct, property-holding methods, and that a contract is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for an unincorporated association
One of Us: Corpo-Reality and the Disabled Body in the Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky
No full textOften accused of being gratuitously “grotesque” (one contemporary New York Times reviewer of Fando y Lis troublingly describes it as a “selection of freaks”), Jodorowsky composes a series of considered aesthetic and ethical provocations not simply to the sensibility of the cinema audience or the board of censors, but to the mechanical apparatus of the camera itself (1970). If, as he once remarked, “We have the language of the body and we need to do something together”, this enigmatic “something” might take the form of a rehabilitative inclusive project which gives voice, or visibility, to bodies suppressed in mainstream and employed for their transgressive appeal in arthouse or avant-garde film (The Quietus 2015). Taking a disabilities studies approach, this essay reads Fando y Lis, El Topo, Holy Mountain, and Santa Sangre, arguing that, like his visionary alter ego El Topo, Jodorowsky strives to dismantle the barriers erected by tradition (or perhaps “good taste”) between the camera and the bodies which have come to be excluded from mainstream cinema and the cultural, social, and public spaces which it both constructs and (re)presents. By parading extraordinary bodies before a piece of technology which voraciously consumes violence, sex, war, famine, but which turns its own and therefore society’s gaze from the actuality of both cognitive and somatic difference, Jodorowsky resituates the disabled body in a more brutal yet paradoxically more humanistic cinematic corpo-reality. Disability narratives often involve the search for a cure, one “which rehabilitates or fixes the deviance”; conversely, for Jodorowsky the disabled body acts as an agent for rather than subject of salvation (Mitchell and Snyder 2011: 53). Part of the strangeness of Jodorowsky’s worlds is that they are not recognizably our worlds, but ideational prototypes for micro-utopian spaces of radical inclusivity which prove, ultimately, to be unsustainable either within or beyond the film frame
Automated Models for the Classification of Magnetic Resonance Brain Tumour Images
Get PDFBrain tumours are the second largest cause of cancer
death in children under 15 and young adults until age 34. Also, among people over 65, these tumours are the second-fastest growing cause of cancer death. Computer-assisted tumour diagnosis is challenging, and efforts to increase the accuracy of tumour classification and generalisation are continually being made despite the plethora of studies conducted. This study of automated multi-class brain tumour classification utilising Magnetic Resonance Images aims to design and develop three automatic brain tumour classification approaches to categorise the brain tumours as glioma, meningioma, and pituitary tumours, which assist clinicians in making brain tumour diagnoses and developing further treatment plans to save patient’s life. This research proposes a transfer learning approach using ResNet 50, handcrafted features with machine learning classifiers, and a hybrid firefly-optimised multi-class classifier for tumour classification. The hybrid methodology yields the highest classification accuracy of 99% using the Figshare dataset. Furthermore, using the Figshare dataset, the hybrid technique yields the highest sensitivity (recall) of 99% for meningioma and pituitary tumours, the highest precision of 100% for pituitary tumours, and the highest F1- measure of 99% for pituitary tumours
Algebraic, Topological, and Geometric Driven Convolutional Neural Networks for Ultrasound Imaging Cancer Diagnosis
Get PDFDespite the astonishing successes of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) as a powerful deep learning tool for a variety of computer vision tasks, their deployments for ultrasound (US) tumour image analysis within clinical settings is challenging due to the difficulty of interpreting CNN decisions compounded by lack of availability of class labelled “good quality” US tumour image datasets that represent an i.i.d random sample of the unknown population. The use of CNN models pretrained on natural images in transfer learning (TL) mode for US image analysis are perceived to suffer from a lack of robustness to small changes and inability to generalisation to unseen data. This thesis aims to develop a strategy for designing efficient CNN architectures customised for US images that overcome or significantly reduce the above challenges while learning discriminating features resulting in highly accurate diagnostic predictions. We first uncover the significant differences in the statistical contents and spatial distribution of image texture landmarks (e.g. Local Binary Patterns) between US images and natural images. Therefore, we investigate the effects of convolution with random Gaussian filters (RGF) on US image content in terms of spatial and an innovative texture-based entropy, and the spatial distribution of texture landmarks. These effects are determined for US scan images of malignant and benign masses for breast, bladder, and liver tissues. We demonstrate that several pretrained CNN models retrained on US tumour scan images in TL mode achieve high diagnostic accuracy but suffer greatly from a lack of robustness against natural data perturbation and significantly low generalisation rates due to highly ill-conditioned convolutional layer filters. Thus,we investigate the behaviour of the CNN models during the training process in terms of three mathematically linked characterisation of the filters point clouds: (1) the distribution of their condition numbers, (2) their spatial distribution using persistent homology (PH) tools, and (3) their effects on tumour discriminating power of texture landmark PH scheme in convolved images. These results pave the way for a credible strategy to develop high-performing customised CNN architectures that are robust and generalise well to unseen US scans. We further develop a newapproach to ensure equal condition numbers across the different channel wise filters at initialisation, andwe highlight their impact on the PH profiles as point clouds. However, the condition number of filters continues to be unstable during training, therefore we introduce a simple novel matrix surgery procedure depending on singular value decomposition as a spectral regularisation. We illustrate that the PH of different point clouds of RGFs and their inverses are distinct (in terms of their birth/death of connected components and holes in dimensions 0 and 1) depending on variation in their condition number distributions. This behaviour changes as a result of applying SVD-surgery, so that the PH of point cloud of a filter set post SVD-surgery approaches the same shape and connectivity of a point cloud of orthogonal RGFs
The Theoretical Relevance of the Capabilities Approach in Discussing the Purpose of Education
Get PDFThis paper endeavours to use the Capabilities Approach (CA) to clarify the understanding of human dignity as the human right purpose of education and argue that access to education needs to be compulsory for all children in consonance with international human rights law (IHRL) and because of the significance of education in developing those capabilities needed to guarantee a life with dignity, which limits the discretion of states in accordance with the rules of IHRL. It argues that the CA is a relevant theoretical approach because it conceptualises valuable personal outcomes an individual could achieve through education i.e., the purpose education should achieve in the life of learners. This is an aspect that both IHRL scholars and the CA have not explored, i.e. investigating the purpose of education under IHRL and the insights and illuminations the propositions of the CA provide. As such, this paper contends that the CA emphasises human agency (what valuable things people can achieve) instead of markets and economic purposes. It endeavours to argue that the CA further accentuates the significance of access to schooling, which, in combination with the central function of human dignity in IHRL, allows the understanding of dignity as the fundamental purpose of education. This means that the CA contributes to a clearer and richer understanding of the use of human dignity in IHRL. It starts with the foundational work of Sen that is rooted in welfare economics, and more reliance is placed on Nussbaum’s philosophical work while discussing human dignity under the CA. This is because Nussbaum draws from moral and political philosophy in her version of the CA, which enhances our understanding of the theoretical conceptions of human dignity and its use under IHRL
Telling Tales: Intangible Cultural Heritage, UNESCO and Horse Cultural Heritage in the Twenty-First Century
Get PDFThis article challenges the popular notion that there has been an end to the relevance of the horse to the twenty-first-century society. But how and why do they remain relevant? Insight can be found through consideration of the variety horse-heritage elements which have been inscribed on UNESCO
lists of intangible cultural heritage. This examination of what horse-heritage elements are inscribed with UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage broadens and deepens critical understanding of the relevance of the horse in the present day
‘Ghostly Sisterhood: The Supernatural Fiction of Vernon Lee, Edith Wharton and May Sinclair in an Age of Transition (1886 – 1926)’
Get PDFThis thesis demonstrates that the supernatural short stories written by Vernon Lee, Edith Wharton and May Sinclair – a ghostly sisterhood - utilise the ghost story to shape narratives that reveal a proto-modernist consciousness, going beyond the representational to construct narratives which challenge and unsettle conventional realism. This ‘proto-modernity’ can be closely attributed to the ideas developed by Lee in relation to aesthetics, particularly her use of the term ‘empathy’ when structuring debates about feeling and art around psychological terminology. Equally important to this early modernist work was Freud’s 1919 essay on ‘The Uncanny’, which revealed a relationship between feeling, aesthetics, and the nature of the uncanny as experienced in art. Through this thesis I will investigate the interconnections between empathy and the uncanny as they relate to the work of Lee, Wharton, and Sinclair to demonstrate the extent by which writing supernatural fiction provided a means to radically explore the possibilities of women’s imaginative literature. In exploring women’s experiences on the very margins of realism with an interdisciplinary approach to fiction, these authors were able to branch out into areas of knowledge and experience beyond their art, ultimately rendering each as early examples of the intellectual women writers praised by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own (1929). Additionally, the aesthetic ideas discussed by Vernon Lee in ‘The Psychology of an Art Writer’ (1903), ‘Gallery Diaries’ (1905) and, with Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness (1912), are examined in relation to the body and physical experience. This thesis considers that Freud’s ideas of the uncanny are an extension of Lee’s psychological aesthetic ideas, with close readings of key representative stories taken from Lee’s Hauntings (1890), Wharton’s Ghosts (1937) and Sinclair’s Uncanny Stories (1923) making the case for that these writers pushed the boundaries of what was possible in contemporary literature, arguing that they should be taken seriously as developing, prot-modernist thinkers active in a period of transition
Ishiguro’s TV and Film Scripts
Get PDFThis chapter offers readings of Kazuo Ishiguro’s screenplays, paying particular attention to two films commissioned by Channel 4, A Profile of Arthur J. Mason (1984) and The Gourmet (1986), and to his collaboration with Merchant Ivory, The White Countess (2005). In these rarely discussed works, Ishiguro interrogates the form of film itself by drawing attention to ‘unfilmable’ aspects of experience such as memory and imagination, which also feature prominently in his novels and short stories. While often overlooked in critical examinations of his work, these films provide insights into Ishiguro’s creative process and the evolution of his recurrent themes more generally. Like his most renowned novels, the subjects of these screenplays are service, sacrifice, and self-deception