A second edited volume of the creative writing journal. Featuring over fifty writers in non-fiction, poetry, fiction and drama. Ágnes Lehóczky is the poetry editor and Honor Gavin the fiction editor.

This paper investigates by an energetic approach possible new configurations of aircrafts, which can rival in low speed operations against helicopters. It starts from an effective energy balance of helicopters during fundamental operations: takeoff, horizontal flight, hovering, and landing. The energy state of a helicopter can be written as: E = ½ mV2 + mgh + ½ I ω2 (1) where m is mass of helicopter, I is total rotor inertia, ω is rotor rotational speed. By taking the partial derivative with respect to time of equation 1, the power is expressed as dE/dt = ΔP = mV dV/dt + mg dh/dt (2) By optimizing the energy balance of the helicopter a new aircraft configuration has been obtained that allow a very high lift even at very low speed, but drastically reducing the energy consumption during horizontal flight. The total power required is obtained by rotor power and overall efficiency factor (η) and HPreq total = η HPreq rotor. By equations (1) and (2) it has been produced a preliminary optimization in different operative conditions considering a speed range from 0.5 (hovering conditions) to 50 m/s. By an accurate balance of the results, it has been identified that the most disadvantageous situation for a helicopter is forward flight. A new powered wing architecture has been specifically studied for replicating the behaviour of helicopters. Preliminary it has been defined by starting from the energy equations the main characteristics of the propelled wing. From those numerical results it has been defined a new configuration of propelled wing and the new aircraft configuration which allow adequate performance against helicopter. Those wings take a large advantage of two not common features: symmetry with respect to a vertical axis and possibility of optimizing the shape for specific missions. It has been designed and optimized in different configurations by CFD. In particular, an accurate analysis of fluiddynamic of the system allows quantifying the different effects that allows realizing an extraordinary ratio between lift and thrust producing an effective vehicle that can rival against helicopter also at very low speeds with a morphing configuration that will be presented in the final paper because of patenting reasons. Results show that the proposed innovative aircraft configuration allows hovering and very low speed flight. In particular, the conditions and the design for this kind of operation are presented even if still in initial design stage. The presented aircraft architecture can also allow inverting the direction of motion just by inverting the direction of the thrust. In this case, it will allow overcoming completely the performances of helicopters. The energetic balance of flight has been evaluated and the advantages with respect to helicopters have been finally expressed with surprising results.

Volumetric displays enable electronically processed images to be depicted within a transparent volume, and so they are able to occupy three spatial dimensions. A broad range of depth cues are inherently associated with such images, including the parallax and oculomotor cues. Accommodation-convergence breakdown and depth cue conflict are avoided. Here we review aspects of this display modality, identify various key characteristics, and refer to a number of exemplar technologies. Brief consideration is given to the formation of opaque images and the implementation of an ethereal form of image space.

Purpose: The improvement of routing operations performance has been of great concern for organisations. This has led to the development of alternative lean-based methods, however the literature research on the applications of lean thinking in the transportation sector is still considered rather limited. Therefore, this paper presents a lean thinking and simulation-based approach to improve the efficiency of warehousing and routing operations. Design/Methodology/Approach: The paper reviews the existing literature in the area of lean transportation and then presents and applies a novel approach to improve the vehicle routing operations of a Mexican firm. The proposed approach suggests the classification of wastes into those relevant to transport operations, their identification through a Transportation Value Stream Mapping (TVSM) study, and the use of the Transportation Overall Vehicle Effectiveness (TOVE) index for the measure of the overall performance of the transport operations. Findings: The results obtained from the case study indicate that the proposed approach is an effective alternative for the improvement of vehicle routing operations as the number of routes decreased from 30 to 22 and the distance travelled by 32%. Similarly, the average number of clients served by each route increased by 23% as well as the TOVE index increased from 6.9% to 19.3%. The TOVE component measures of vehicle performance and operating availability efficiencies also increased significantly while quality issues, in the form of number of customers not served per route, were reduced from 6 to 0. Originality/value: The improvement of routing operations performance has been traditionally addressed through operations research and mathematical modelling approaches. This paper presents an alternative and novel lean thinking and simulation-based approach to improve the efficiency of routing operations.