Tag archives for 2014 Top Ten
Top Ten Posts of 2014
I've been looking through the stats, and ignoring the home page, and the separate parts of a linked series of posts, these are the top ten posts of 2014 (not all of which are from 2014). I've also adjusted the order to allow for when in the year the post was published, but these are all originally in the top 12 posts). Some stats During 2014 I have written 112 posts. 241 posts (out of the 334 posts plus four pages available) have received at least one hit over the course of the year. The top ten (list below) account for over half of all traffic across the blog. There's a small gap in the stats too, I got hacked in late November and lost a couple of days worth of stats, I rolled back to a previous version and…
A215 On Reflective Commentaries
In finishing off TMA2 for the Open University A215 Creative Writing course I had a lightbulb moment. This was in response to some discussion on a student forum about how the marking didn't necessarily follow the quality of the submitted piece of writing. This was attributed to the subjectiveness of 'good' writing. Or rather, that it is hard to mark the qualitative aspects of stories, poetry etc on an absolute scale. Accepting that, and taking it from the university perspective. You need tutors to be consistent, and that leads to robust marking guidelines that are completely objective. This then avoids valid criticism and legal challenges that could be successful. Both of the last are a bad thing from an organisational perspective, especially a university. So what do you base these robustly objective marking guidelines on? The course materials. As a…
A Young Officer’s Guide to Fighting in Built Up Areas (FIBUA)
I promised that I would do a bit on Fighting In Built-Up Areas (FIBUA) because I thought that I would be able to add one or two bits of my experience to the pool. Because of laziness I thought that I would just provide the following extract from an Aide Memoire I acquired whilst an Officer Cadet. There is much more from where this comes. Also possible is the section on Counter-Revolutionary Warfare (CRW), the chapter on use of artillery and the ever-useful Close Quarters Battle ("Fix Bayonets!") chapter useful for those awkward occasions when you wake up to find that you've accidentally dug-in in the middle of an enemy position. Chapter 11 - Fighting in Built Up Areas (FIBUA) Following lessons learnt in the latter part of WWII where many young officers were killed, maimed, or lost the confidence…