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The Military Challenges to the Boko Haram Insurgency Campaign Within Nigeria's Political, Economic, and Societal Contexts (2002-2020)
Get PDFThe Nigeria Boko Haram insurgency underscores the Hobbesian thesis of man's aggressiveness in the state of nature that requires the leviathan intervention. The Nigerian government's failure to provide public goods precipitated the emergence of the Boko Haram insurgency. As a result, the citizens contest their rights to life (in danger), withdrawing their loyalty and support from the government and the armed forces. The current praxis explains the power shift from the Nigerian government to the identified local group (Boko Haram). The change is accompanied by continuous violence between soldiers and the insurgents, resulting in mass civilian casualties, genocide, systemic rape, and unquantifiable property destruction fostering human insecurity. The literature construct argues the overlapping concept of the phenomenon under investigation: 'The military challenges to the Boko Haram insurgency campaign within Nigeria's political, economic, and societal contexts (2002–2020)'. The thesis explains the military's challenges in ending the Boko Haram insurgency within domestic factors of political consideration, economic dynamics, ethnicity, and the military. The Boko Haram unconventional war in nature is now twenty years old. The investigation employs a mixed research design that combines a survey and a subset of the stakeholders' qualitative interviews. The said approach is a compromised method that allows for overcoming access to the investigation (which is difficult in war matters). Combining a survey instrument accompanied by qualitative interviews checks causality by asking for explicit causal mechanisms descriptions and identifying influences that previous works may have overlooked. The thesis found political consideration and economic conditions more statistically significant than ethnicity and military factors as the main challenges of the military in the Boko Haram insurgency. The work questions the rationale for military deployment in matters that re-echo Nigeria generational grievances that domestic socialisation strategy should ordinarily resolve
The Life and Works of James Piers St Aubyn, Architect (1815-1895)
Get PDFJ. P. St Aubyn was a successful nineteenth century architect whose career spanned much of the nineteenth century. Much of his work was ecclesiastical, but he also designed a large number of other buildings ranging from country houses to a prison and including many edifices in the naval town of Devonport, Plymouth, which was developed by his aristocratic and land-owning family. Deemed to be a successful architect in his time (he designed nearly four hundred buildings and other structures), in the twentieth century he was vilified for adopting what was perceived to be a heavy-handed approach to the restoration and repair of historic churches. His most notable critic was Sir John Betjeman who particularly criticised St Aubyn’s large canon of work restoring churches in Cornwall, but others also criticised St Aubyn for a lack of originality. This thesis explores St Aubyn’s career and the development of his design abilities, analysing the nature of his work and the extent to which the extensive criticism can be justified. In so doing it provides an insight into the development of the architectural profession during the nineteenth century.
Despite strenuous efforts, including discussions with his family (the St Aubyns of St Michael’s Mount), St Aubyn’s practice records have not been found. The approach adopted was, therefore, to build as complete a catalogue as possible of St Aubyn’s work so as to be able to carry out an objective assessment of his output. The catalogue has been developed from archival and published sources and lists nearly four hundred designs. To assess St Aubyn’s work objectively, the extent to which it met his clients’ expectations and needs and how it was regarded by his contemporaries has been considered. His work has been assessed against contemporary statements of good design principles such as those produced for churches by The Ecclesiological Society or for domestic architecture by Robert Kerr in The Gentleman’s House and contemporaneous assessments have been extracted from published material of St Aubyn’s time. Many of his surviving buildings have been visited to enable an examination of the designs and an assessment of their impact. The conclusions reached are that St Aubyn has been harshly judged, that his architecture has considerable merit and that where his ecclesiastical restorations or repairs were rigorous or extensive, there were good reasons, including the wish of the church’s officers to return their churches to what they saw as a ‘true’ version of the compete mediaeval church or practical considerations such as severe fabric failure. Too much of the criticism that has been levelled at St Aubyn ignores the standards and design principles of the time. Much of the criticism also fails to take account of the repair and restoration methods and technology available to St Aubyn and his contemporaries, which was much more limited than techniques available today. St Aubyn’s work showed diversity and he was capable of originality, although budgets often limited the extent of variety that could be introduced.
St Aubyn’s apparent contemporary popularity has been decried by some modern writers on the grounds that he was successful largely because of connections of his aristocratic family. Whilst he did a lot of work for his family, particularly in the building of Devonport, there is little evidence that family connections or reputation generated much work for him. His work was spread throughout the south and midlands and was commissioned by a large number of clients, few of whom were connected to the St Aubyn family. A balanced assessment of St Aubyn’s life and work shows that, whilst not in the league of Pugin or Scott, he was an architect of merit and deserves to be better regarded and his work better valued
Insight: Developing Creative Thinkers with Ahas and Uh-Ohs?
Get PDFIdeas and knowledge that arrive through insight moments offer the promise of “added value” by being better remembered, seeing a new understanding unfold from the moment, and potentially providing motivation for students to seek out and persevere with future problem-solving. We could adapt some of the tasks and approaches that research psychologists have used to elicit insight in the laboratory – for example, word puzzles, tabletop games, and magic trick-solving. These may be useful to give low-stakes experiences that students can then apply and reflect on in solving opportunities afforded in class
Constructing the places of young people in public space: Conflict, belonging and identity
Get PDFBuilding on the growing discursive approach to people–place relations, we examine how young people negotiate people–place tensions and relations, and how they establish their everyday sense of place in contemporary public spaces. Facilitated by the use of Collaborative Spatial Mapping, analysis of focus group data from 51 young people focuses on three aspects of participants’ talk about the places that make up their everyday lives: appropriation of micro-geographical spaces, the construction of autobiographical insideness and the mobilization of shared socio-spatial histories. Our analysis illustrates young people's responses to a broader problematic of being ‘troublesome’ in public spaces, demonstrating how they construct a deep-rooted attachment to, and sense of themselves as located members within, such spaces. We argue that place appropriation and autobiographical insideness are important concepts for understanding the practice of citizenship by young people, and how such practice is embedded in wider political processes of spatial conflict and exclusion
‘If the Invader Comes’: An Evaluation of the Readiness of the British Army in the South-East of England to Repel a German Invasion between June and September 1940
Get PDFDespite the extensive historiography of all aspects of Great Britain’s military operations in 1940, the question as to how well prepared the Army was to resist an invasion in the late summer of that year remains under-explored. To rectify this omission, this study has assessed the fighting capability of the specific front-line formations of the Home Forces that would have been tasked with repelling an invasion of Kent and Sussex in September 1940. This has been
done through the lens of the modern British Army’s ‘Model of Fighting Power’. The Model’s framework has enabled an assessment of morale, leadership, manpower, training, equipment and fighting doctrine. This has been combined with an analysis of the capability of the Royal Air Force to provide adequate tactical air support over the countryside of the south-east of England – at a time when Fighter Command was fully occupied fighting The Battle of Britain.
The results show that the true fighting capability of these front-line Army formations in September 1940, be they the General Headquarters (GHQ) Reserve (positioned well back from the coastline) or the troops defending Kent and Sussex, was far lower than has previously been acknowledged. Morale within those formations was ‘mixed’ as the invasion crisis peaked, as was the overall quality of their senior commanders – few of whom had commanded formations
in battle. Furthermore, key weapons such as anti-tank guns remained in short supply, whilst transportation continued to be a challenge (given the losses in France) and tanks that could be described as ‘modern’ were still relatively thin on the ground. Furthermore, despite a major training effort in the summer of 1940, the ability of these forces to conduct the (relatively new) fighting doctrine of mobile combined arms warfare was less than it needed to be. In short, the GHQ Reserve would have struggled to conduct the type of
large-scale counter-attacks demanded by the Commander-in-Chief Home Forces, Lieutenant General Sir Alan Brooke. In addition, the ability of the Royal Air Force to provide the tactical air support such counter-attacks would have required is shown to have been extremely limited. In truth the Army was being asked to fight in a way it was not yet capable of doing - something that became all too apparent during the two major combined arms anti-invasion exercises that Brooke organised in 1941.
Finally, down in Kent and Sussex, Brooke’s edict that the linear defensive positions constructed by his predecessor, Lieutenant-General Sir Edmund Ironside, should be deprioritised, was only partially adhered to by the formations within XII Corps. Furthermore, his aim of freeing up local forces to counter-attack an invader risked being undermined by their limited mobility and by the construction of an extensive mosaic of new ‘all-round’ defensive
positions across the two counties, partly driven by local civilian defence authorities that would, have tied down front-line troops even more. The idea that these positions could have been defended by either the Local Defence Volunteers or ‘static’ troops is shown to have been
unrealistic at the time.
Thus, the view (often stated in the historiography) that Brooke was a significant upgrade on Ironside at the helm of the Home Forces as the invasion crisis reached its peak seems misplaced, even though he went on to be an outstanding Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Crucially, the notion (implied by the Government) that, in the event of an invasion, the Army would have repelled a significant German beachhead in September 1940 is shown to have been even more optimistic than many have hitherto thought. Sadly, the defects in the British Army that had been exposed so cruelly in Norway and then in France were a long way from being resolved by the time the invasion crisis peaked
Lewis, Lear, and The Four Loves
No full text“William Shakespeare is not generally thought of as a religious apologist,” so began the call for papers for this special issue, to which we might reply, C.S. Lewis is not generally thought of as a Shakespeare scholar. But “not generally” is where many of the most exciting research discoveries lie, and, if we can reorient our eyes, we find might discover things hiding in the works of both writers who are “not generally” viewed through these lenses. Besides, I always caution my students to be specific and avoid generalizations (inevitably using a generalization to make my point), so I suppose I ought to practice what I preach. This essay explores how Lewis uses King Lear in his discussion of affection in The Four Loves. My goal is both to describe how Lewis does so and what that reveals about Shakespeare’s apologetic capacity and potential.[1] Along the way, I hope to show, as well, how Lewis anticipates the contemporary swerve towards “affect studies,” especially in Shakespearean drama
The California Vaquero and the Texas Cowboy: Tracing the Legacy of Spanish Medieval Horsemanship
Get PDFThis article uses a lens of cultural history and cultural heritage and heritage to trace of the legacy of Spanish medieval horsemanship across time and space in the development of the California vaquero and Texas cowboy. The Texas cowboy has now become a highly recognizable icon in American national myths and narratives. But myths and narratives present idealized and factually inaccurate accounts of history. This article examines the development of equestrian practices in their historical context, alongside the conflation of history and horsemanship. It thus reveals the influence of geopolitical ambitions and rivalries, as well as practical necessity, on the development of two new equestrian cultures in the New World
On the ability of machine learning methods to discover novel scaffolds
Get PDFThe recent advances in the application of machine learning to drug discovery have made it a “hot topic” for research, with hundreds of academic groups and companies integrating machine learning into their drug discovery projects. Nevertheless, there remains great uncertainty regarding the most appropriate ways to evaluate the relative
performance of these powerful methods against more traditional cheminformatics approaches, and many pitfalls remain for the unwary. In 2020, researchers at MIT [Stokes, J.M., Yang, K., Swanson, K., Jin, W., Cubillos-Ruiz, A., Donghia, N.M., MacNair, C.R., French, S., Carfrae,
L.A., Bloom-Ackermann, Z., et al.: A deep learning approach to antibiotic discovery. Cell 180(4), 688–702(2020)] reported the discovery of a new compound with antibacterial activity, halicin, through the use of a neural network machine learning method. A robust ability to identify
new active chemotypes through computational methods would be very useful
Spatial-Temporal Autoencoder with Attention Network for Video Compression
Get PDFDeep learning-based approaches are now state of the art in
numerous tasks, including video compression, and are having a revolutionary
influence in video processing. Recently, learned video compression methods
exhibit a fast development trend with promising results. In this paper, taking
advantage of the powerful non-linear representation ability of neural networks,
we replace each standard component of video compression with a neural network.
We propose a spatial-temporal video compression network (STVC) using the
spatial-temporal priors with an attention module (STPA). On the one hand, joint
spatial-temporal priors are used for generating latent representations and
reconstructing compressed outputs because efficient temporal and spatial
information representation plays a crucial role in video coding. On the other hand,
we also added an efficient and effective Attention module such that the model
pays more effort on restoring the artifact-rich areas. Moreover, we formalize the
rate-distortion optimization into a single loss function, in which the network
learns to leverage the Spatial-temporal redundancy presented in the frames and
decreases the bit rate while maintaining visual quality in the decoded frames. The
experiment results show that our approach delivers the state-of-the-art learning
video compression performance in terms of MS-SSIM and PSNR