74 research outputs found
Albin F. Irzyk Oral History Interview
No full textAlbin F. Irzyk was the commander of the 8th Tank Battalion, 4th Armored Division, which liberated Ohrdruf on April 4, 1945. In this interview, he gives the highlights of the division\u27s arrival in Europe, experiences during the Battle of the Bulge, and progression through the Rhineland. En route to Dresden, Irzyk received orders to go to Ohrdruf and look for an underground complex which was thought to hold communications equipment. His division bivouacked outside the town for the night and started to hear reports of bodies. The next morning, Irzyk went into the camp to look around, finding over 300 corpses. He describes his reactions to the camp and how it affected him as a commanding officer. Irzyk retired from the army as a brigadier general and is the author of three books about the U.S. military
Unsung heroes, saving Saigon
No full textOn December 15, 1967, General William Westmoreland made a surprising decision. Because of the U.S. relationship with and the sensibilities of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), he turned over full responsibility for the defense of Saigon to the ARVN. That left Saigon with no American tactical troops and without a tactical headquarters. The only American Military Headquarters in the city was the United States Army Headquarters Area Command (USAHAC), a service command. Within its ranks were military policemen and service personnel, none of whom had any tactical training. HAC had thrust upon it a beyond-comprehension challenge which was totally unexpected, and for which it had never been trained. Because of its immediate, vigorous, heroic response, it performed the virtually impossible and saved Saigon
DEBORA: Developing an Interface to Support Collaboration in a Digital Library
No full textInterfaces to library systems have largely failed to represent the in-herently collaborative nature of information work. This paper describes how collaborative functionality is being implemented as part of the DEBORA project to provide access to digitised Renaissance documents. Work practices of users of Renaissance documents are described and the collaborative features of the client software are outlined. Functionalities discussed include annotation, the creation of virtual books and the inclusion of user-supplied metadata
Redefining the Self: Life Writing, Fairy Tale and Fantasy Fiction in Amélie Nothomb's Métaphysique des tubes.
No full textThis thesis primarily focuses on Amélie Nothomb’s Métaphysique des tubes (2000), an autobiographical rewriting of her earliest childhood in Japan. However, elements of other her novels are considered where relevant, in particular Le Sabotage amoureux (1993) and Biographie de la faim (2004). The work begins by analysing the literary genres of autobiography, ‘autofiction’ and the autobiographical novel, examining the blurred boundaries between these. I compare how various scholars, including but not limited to Laureline Amanieux, Mark Lee and Susan Bainbrigge, come to classify Nothomb’s Métaphysique des tubes as belonging to one of these above genres, before discussing why the novel evades a single definitive literary classification. Nothomb’s fractured sense of self, studied at length throughout this thesis, is mirrored into the foundational structure of the novel, as Nothomb combines fragments of each genre, mixing in fairy tale and fantasy fiction to secure her own idiosyncratic literary style. I proceed in the second chapter to compare Nothomb’s work with Beaumont’s version of La Belle et la Bête, highlighting echoes between characters in both tales and introducing the significant Nothombian themes of hyperbolic beauty, the presentation of the Beast in all its guised forms, as well as the central role of water. I also examine psychological devices of the fairy tale as explained by Bruno Bettelheim and Adam Phillips, how these aid childhood development, and potential reasons for their inclusion in Nothomb’s writing. In the third chapter I undertake a short comparative study of Métaphysique des tubes and Barrie’s Peter Pan to reveal that what appears to be an idyllic childhood is in fact tainted by loss and mourning. The lexis of adventure fuses with destruction as it becomes apparent that both Pan and Nothomb as protagonist have paradoxically lost their true childhood by attempting to remain eternally in it. In relation to this, I look at the salvational role of storytelling in both novels, and provide evidence to suggest that Nothomb as both author and protagonist come to find, understand and stabilise their identity through reading and writing literature. The conclusion begins by asking whether there are additional literary genres into which scholars have placed Nothomb’s autobiographical works, leading me to analyse briefly the possibility of postmodernist and feminist writing in relation to her work. Nothomb does not merely rediscover and redefine herself through literature, but she also questions modern society’s standards concerning physical appearance. Previously studied themes of hyperbolic beauty, ugliness and eating disorders come back into play when I re-examine these themes in connection with Nothomb’s challenging of the contemporary ideals of beauty. At this stage I consider similarities in Angela Carter’s postmodernist approach to literature and its significance to and similarities with Nothomb’s work. Furthermore, I provide additional examples of these themes relating to beauty by turning to Nothomb’s newer novel, Une forme de vie (2010), which grapples with obesity, depression and suicidal ideation, all of which appear, to varying degrees, in Métaphysique des tubes. My thesis intends to show that Nothomb intentionally writes Métaphysique des tubes so that it defies one clear-cut classification. Her work grows in richness and depth precisely through her playful de- and reconstruction of various literary genres, sub-genres and movements, as well as pastiching of fragments of fairy tales and fantasy fiction. Métaphysique des tubes becomes at once beautiful and beastly as she creatively redefines her own identity and successfully questions contemporary society and culture in a novel that all the while refuses to be tamed
Rural Thrill
No full textabstract: Rural Thrill is a broken fruit, an electric fence, and, at the end, the absence of body. It comes in three sections, with the first laying the foundation for the world in which the collection takes place—a small southern town, where there is obvious economic disparity and the supernatural is easily expected, believed, and in some cases, assumed. The second section focuses more closely on the main speaker of the collection who is growing into her own sexual desires against the backdrop of a murder which has swept through her town, complicating the speaker’s relationship to her body and the way she communicates desire. In the final section of the book, the poems come even closer as they explore the internal landscape of the speaker’s body and the many versions of the speaker that inhabit that place. The internal happenings of the third section of the book, reflect back on the external world mapped out in both the first and second sections. At the end, the energy of the body is all that remains with all boundaries of physicality erased, an example of how the body and mind negotiate safety in the face of risk and desire.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis English 201
Producción, precios e integración de los mercados regionales de grano en la España preindustrial
No full textEditada en la Fundación Empresa PúblicaEste trabajo aborda la integración de los distintos mercados regionales
de grano en España durante el Antiguo Régimen. Haciendo uso de series
de precios y de producción de diversa procedencia, el autor emplea técnicas
de estimación relativamente sencillas, desde correlaciones y desviaciones típicas
de series sin tendencia hasta modelos de retardos distribuidos. Estas técnicas
revelan la existencia de una covariación entre los precios de granos
en distintos mercados regionales, así como la existencia de efectos simultáneos
y retardados de la producción de granos sobre el precio de los mismos en
mercados locales y bastante más lejanos. El autor concluye que existía una
integración modesta pero en aumento de los distintos mercados en la Península,
sobre todo durante el siglo XVIII, y que las instituciones eran capaces
de amortiguar en parte los efectos de una cosecha fallida. El trabajo concluye
apuntando el calendario posible de la progresiva integración de los mercados
de grano ocurrida a lo largo de buena parte del siglo XIX en España.The present paper deals with regional grain market integration in Spain
during the Old Regime. Using mostly published price and production seríes,
the author employs straightforward statistical techniques, rangíng from correlations
and standard deviations of detrended series to distributed lag models.
These techniques show the existence of a clear covariation in the price of
grain on different regional markets, as well as both simultaneous and delayed
effects of grain production on prices both locally and at considerably greater
distances. The author concludes that regional grain markets on the peninsula
were modestly but increasingly integrated over the period, especially during
the eighteenth century, and that existing institutions were a partial buffer
for the immediate effects of harvest failures. The paper concludes by suggesting
the potential timing for the progressive intergration of grain markets taking
place throughout much of the nineteenth century in Spain.Publicad
Progress in the peripheries: improvement and national image in the fictions of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, 1780 - 1830
No full textThis thesis examines the relationship between improvement and national image in Irish, Scottish and Welsh novels published between 1780 and 1830. Given the social, economic, and physical impacts of the agricultural and industrial revolutions in this period, the project focuses on texts that illuminate the tension between engaging with popular portrayals of picturesque landscapes, rural tradition and Celtic primitivism, and advocating or accepting the need for economic modernization that may compromise those national images. Exploring the dialogical nature of the ‘national tale’, a genre whose parameters are extended here to include regional focuses within the relevant national settings, this study contextualizes literary representations of landscape and estate management by incorporating analysis of contemporaneous non-fiction accounts found in tours and agricultural surveys.
This thesis is presented in four sections. The introduction examines the usefulness of ‘national tale’ as a genre label in current scholarly debate and explores the influence of writers such as Daniel Defoe, William Marshall and Tobias Smollett on textual representations of landscape and tourism. Chapter one focuses on English-language Welsh novels from the 1780s and 1790s, highlighting the potential ideological disconnect between sustaining a public image of Wales as a picturesque idyll and acknowledging the signs of industrialization. Chapter two explores Maria Edgeworth’s approach to antiquarianism, tradition and the travelogue in her post-Union presentations of benevolent improvement in Ireland. Chapter three examines the way writers such as Christian Isobel Johnstone and Alexander Sutherland negotiate the popular image of the Romantic Highlands while exploring the sustainability and consequences of improvement
Reliability modeling, testing and optimization of systems with mixtures of one-shot units
No full textOne-shot units are usually produced and stored (or used as standby) in batches until retrieved. These units can be defined as a system which may experience degradations or sudden failures during its storage period. To assess the reliability performance of the units, reliability tests are repeatedly (in non-identical pattern) and randomly conducted across the lifetime of the units; where corresponding actions are taken afterwards. The continuous arrival of batches and conduct of tests induce the system contains a mixture of nonhomogeneous units, which is defined as a general “k-out-of-n: F system” with k and n nonhomogeneous and time-dependent. In this dissertation, we propose models to investigate the reliability metrics of the system under a variety of scenarios. Extensive simulation studies are performed to validate the models. Failure or degradation caused by thermal fatigue is a pervasive phenomenon during the one-shot units’ storage period. The Birnbaum-Saunders (BS) distribution is specifically developed for describing mechanical fatigue failures, but limited in describing a variety of hazard functions. Hence it is reasonable to investigate whether the generalized form of BS (GBS) distribution can be extended for modeling the plastic deformation induced by thermal cyclic stresses and providing reliability metrics of units subject to thermal fatigue. In this dissertation, we investigate system reliability metrics when subjecting to thermal fatigue failure by adopting the GBS accelerated model. The one-shot units might experience competing failure modes during its storage period. Specifically, repeated thermal cyclic tests (TCTs) are randomly conducted; at the end of an arbitrary TCT, the unit’s failure is observed either when any of its failure modes occurs suddenly or when any of its degradation modes reach its “failure threshold”. Under such circumstances, unit’s failure data cannot be described by a single failure time distribution; instead, a competing failure model which considers multiple failure modes is adopted to assess unit’s reliability metrics. The units’ potential failure modes as well as the reliability metrics of the system under competing failure modes are investigated in this dissertation. Due to the characteristics of one-shot units and recent advances in technology and materials, one-shot units are usually highly reliable and it is impractical to obtain one-shot units’ failure (degradation) data under operating conditions. Accelerated life testing (ALT) is an efficient approach to obtain failure/degradation observations in a much shorter time period and utilize the test data to predict reliability metrics under normal operating conditions. We develop physics-statistics-based models and obtain optimal sequential accelerated non-destructive test (NDT) plans under different scenarios. The efficiency of the NDT plans is validated by comparing the system reliability metrics obtained under accelerated and normal conditions. NDT assesses unit’s functionality without permanent damage in order to demonstrate the unit’s reliability. However, one cannot make decisions regarding system reliability by only depending on NDT results because NDT does not fully perform the unit’s functionality. In contrast, destructive testing (DT) fully tests the unit’s functionality but destroys the units. This intensifies the need to investigate hybrid reliability tests that include both NDT and DT. In this dissertation, an optimal sequential hybrid reliability testing plan is designed and the results of the tests are utilized to improve the accuracy of the system reliability metrics estimation. We validate that by conducting hybrid reliability test, the unit’s lifetime parameters approach their true values. As the reliability estimation converge, we decrease the number of units tested in DTs and eventually perform NDT only. There exists many situations that a specific number of one-units are used consecutively when put into operational use. Therefore, it becomes interesting and challenging to determine the characteristics and sequence of the one-shot units to be launched such that the operational use of the launched units is optimized. Defining the launched one-shot units as a system, we investigate the reliability metrics of the system to optimize the system’s operational use at arbitrary time by formulating an optimization problem which is applicable to a variety of objectives. We also provide the bounds of the system’s successful operational probability estimation.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Yao Chen
Agent-Based Computational Modeling And Macroeconomics
No full textAgent-based Computational Economics (ACE) is the computational study of economic processes modeled as dynamic systems of interacting agents. This essay discusses the potential use of ACE modeling tools for the study of macroeconomic systems. Points are illustrated using an ACE model of a two-sector decentralized market economy. Related work can be accessed here: http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/amulmark.htmagent-based computational economics
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