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A newly independent country acquires its first heavy bomber from an Aircraft Graveyard and flies it for two decades! A young Flight Lieutenant flies a daring dawn attack on a heavily defended Pakistani Airfield in the 1965 War and returns safely. Only to perish in a crash a week later. Two wartime foes, one of whom shoots down the other in air combat, meet later as friends in life. These and other compelling human-interest stories form the backbone of Air Warriors, an anthology of untold stories from the Indian Air Force. From the fascinating story of the inception of the Thunderbolts to how fifty-seven people were flown out from Car Nicobar after the 2004 Tsunami in a single Avro rescue mission authorised to fly only twenty-five passengers, the book is told from the viewpoint of the actual protagonists against the backdrop of day-to-day life in the Indian Air Force.

Humour and Jokes is a collection of funny jokes popular in India that will make your day. It’s a real stress buster. Jokes are the best medicines to treat melancholy and hypertension and create a glue in social groups. These jokes are for everyone. The beauty of the jokes lies in their brevity.

Rabindranath Tagore’s Short Stories, Kshudito Pashan, Kabuliwala and Jibito O.Mrito, have been translated thrice in a span of around one hundred years from the original Bengali into English. Various authors have translated each of the stories in the pre-independence and post-independence era. Some of the translations remarkably vary from the original Bengali. This is a comparative study of it.

The frequency and severity of fluvial floods are expected to increase due to climate change. This paper investigates whether flood risk perception in the housing market changes across a country after the occurrence of a catastrophic fluvial flood. Using a comprehensive geocoded German house price data set and official flood risk maps, we exploit the July 2021 fluvial flood that was salient across Germany as an exogenous variation to causally measure the flood risk valuation update in a difference-in-differences setup. While we find that house prices decreased in the most inundated regions, no price changes occurred in flood risk regions that were not directly affected. This finding indicates that people did not update their risk perception after indirect exposure. With this paper, we contribute to the understanding of the impact of a salient flood on flood risk capitalization in places without direct exposure.

N this thesis we address some of the problems in the field of piecewise linear approximation of k-dimensional smooth submanifolds of Euclidean space R-d. The main goal of this thesis was to develop algorithms that solve these problems with theoretical guarantees, i. e. the output being homeomorphic to the submanifold, and also have intrinsic dimension sensitive complexity, i. e. time and space complexity depend exponentially on the intrinsic dimension k of the submanifold and linearly on the ambient Euclidean dimension d. The two standard questions in this field are the following : Manifold reconstruction. From a dense point ample P in R-d, from an unknown smooth k-dimensional submanifold M of Rd, we want to build a simplicial approximation of M with theoretical guarantees. Sampling and meshing manifolds. For a given parameter epsilon and a k-dimensional smooth submanifold, known through some standard oracle, we want to generate a dense sample P of M, according to the prescribed parameter epsilon, and built a simplicial approximation of M on top of the sample P with theoretical guarantees. In this thesis we try to chip away at both these problems with the following results : For a dense point sample P of a smooth submanifold M of R-d we give sufficient conditions under which the tangential Delaunay compex, built using the point sample P is homeomorphic and a close geometric approximation of M. We give an algorithm, whose complexity is intrinsic dimension sensitive, to reconstruct smooth k-dimensional manifolds of R-d from a dense point sample P using tangential Delaunay complexes. We show, using the above result, that the output is homeomorphic and a close geometric approximation of M. To the best of our outledge, this is the first certified algorithm for manifold reconstruction whose complexity is intrinsic dimension sensitive. We give an algorithm to sample and mesh a k-dimensional smooth submanifold M of Rd. According to the prescribed parameter epsilon €, the algorithm generates a dense sample of M and a mesh with theoretical guarantees. The algorithm uses only simple numerical operations. We provide a counterexample to the result announced by Lebon and Letscher. We show that density of the sample points on a manifold M alone cannot guarantee that the nerve of the intrinsic Voronoï diagram, i. e. the intrinsic Delaunay triangulation, is homeomorphic to the manifold M.