From apotheosis to damnation: Mussolini and the Fascist regime, 1936-45

This is an essay for a catalogue of the exhibition 'Against Mussolini: art and the fall of a dictator' held at the Estorick Collection, London, September - December 2010. The essay examines shifting attitudes towards Mussolini in the years immediately preceding his fall, and suggests that the development of 'anti-fascism' was less pronounced than often suggested.

A technique for delivering individualised formative problems and examples

Active learning plays a strong role in mathematics and statistics, and formative problems are vital for developing key problem-solving skills. To keep students engaged and help them master the fundamentals before challenging themselves further, we have developed a system for delivering problems tailored to a student‟s current level of understanding. Specifically, by adapting simple methodology from clinical trials, a framework for delivering existing problems and other illustrative material has been developed, making use of macros in Excel. The problems are assigned a level of difficulty (a „dose‟), and problems are presented to the student in an order depending on their ability, i.e. based on their performance so far on other problems. We demonstrate and discuss the application of the approach with formative examples developed for a first year course on plane coordinate geometry, and also for problems centred on the topic of chi-square tests.

Local-scale urban meteorological parameterization scheme (LUMPS): longwave radiation parameterization and seasonality-related developments

Recent developments to the Local-scale Urban Meteorological Parameterization Scheme (LUMPS), a simple model able to simulate the urban energy balance, are presented. The major development is the coupling of LUMPS to the Net All-Wave Radiation Parameterization (NARP). Other enhancements include that the model now accounts for the changing availability of water at the surface, seasonal variations of active vegetation, and the anthropogenic heat flux, while maintaining the need for only commonly available meteorological observations and basic surface characteristics. The incoming component of the longwave radiation (L↓) in NARP is improved through a simple relation derived using cloud cover observations from a ceilometer collected in central London, England. The new L↓ formulation is evaluated with two independent multiyear datasets (Łódź, Poland, and Baltimore, Maryland) and compared with alternatives that include the original NARP and a simpler one using the National Climatic Data Center cloud observation database as input. The performance for the surface energy balance fluxes is assessed using a 2-yr dataset (Łódź). Results have an overall RMSE < 34 W m−2 for all surface energy balance fluxes over the 2-yr period when

Dynamic game soundtrack generation in response to a continously varying emotional trajectory

Dynamic soundtracking presents various practical and aesthetic challenges to composers working with games. This paper presents an implementation of a system addressing some of these challenges with an affectively-driven music generation algorithm based on a second order Markov-model. The system can respond in real-time to emotional trajectories derived from 2-dimensions of affect on the circumplex model (arousal and valence), which are mapped to five musical parameters. A transition matrix is employed to vary the generated output in continuous response to the affective state intended by the gameplay.

The Italian Academies, 1525-1700: a themed collection database, London, British Library

A database of books published by Italian Academies between 1525 and 1700. The Italian Academies Themed Collection provides a detailed searchable database for locating printed material relating to the Italian learned Academies active in Avellino, Bari, Benevento, Bologna, Brindisi, Caltanissetta, Catania, Catanzaro, Enna, L’Aquila, Lecce, Mantua, Naples, Padua, Palermo, Rome, Salerno, Siena, Syracuse, Trapani, and Venice in the period 1525-1700 and now held in the collections of the British Library.