Sèvres Porcelain and the Articulation of Imperial Identity in Napoleonic France

Original article can be found at: http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/archive/ "Copyright 2007 The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited."From its inception in 1756, the Sèvres porcelain manufactory made elaborate, highly decorated dinner services for the exclusive use of the royal court. The objects used by the king were seen as extensions of his body and the act of decorating them became a means of royal veneration. While the French Revolution saw the decline of the manufacture, Napoléon recognized the enormous political value of Sèvres porcelain. Imperial power, however, was predicated not on the divinity of the Emperor, but on the clear demonstration of the material and cultural benefits brought about by his administration. This shift in the nature of executive power prompted a change in the design and decoration of Sèvres porcelain. Rococo decoration found in ancien régime porcelain was abandoned in favour of a highly didactic imagery that charted the triumphs and benefits of Napoleon's regime. This article sets out to examine this new repertoire of subjects and forms with specific reference to the Service de l'Empereur. Commissioned to be used at the wedding of Napoléon and his second wife Marie-Louise of Austria (daughter of the recently defeated Emperor of Austria), the service charts some of the events connected with French Imperial expansion, not least of which was the marriage itself.Peer reviewe

Quatremere de Quincy and the instrumentality of the museum

In this paper I want to explore some of the ways in which art lost the capacity to embody knowledge in late eighteenth century France with particular reference to the writings of the art critic, archaeologist and academician, Antoine Quatremère de Quincy. During the revolutionary wars of the late-1790s, prime examples of classical sculpture and renaissance painting were plundered by Napoléon Bonaparte and put on show in what is now the Musée du Louvre, then simply known as the 'Muséum'. During this period, France saw itself as the cradle of liberty and, on the basis that 'the fruits of genius are the patrimony of liberty', it claimed the right to plunder the best art that Europe had to offer. 1 The Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoon, the Belvedere Torso, Raphael's Transfiguration, Domenichino's Last Communion of St. Jerome and Caravaggio's Deposition - were all freed from what one critic described as the 'gaze of servitude'.Peer reviewe

Development of a client interface for a methodology independent object-oriented CASE tool : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science at Massey University

The overall aim of the research presented in this thesis is the development of a prototype CASE Tool user interface that supports the use of arbitrary methodology notations for the construction of small-scale diagrams. This research is part of the larger CASE Tool project, MOOT (Massey's Object Oriented Tool). MOOT is a meta-system with a client-server architecture that provides a framework within which the semantics and syntax of methodologies can be described. The CASE Tool user interface is implemented in Java so it is as portable as possible and has a consistent look and feel. It has been designed as a client to the rest of the MOOT system (which acts as a server). A communications protocol has been designed to support the interaction between the CASE Tool client and a MOOT server. The user interface design of MOOT must support all possible graphical notations. No assumptions about the types of notations that a software engineer may use can be made. MOOT therefore provides a specification language called NDL for the definition of a methodology's syntax. Hence, the MOOT CASE Tool client described in this thesis is a shell that is parameterised by NDL specifications. The flexibility provided by such a high level of abstraction presents significant challenges in terms of designing effective human-computer interaction mechanisms for the MOOT user interface. Functional and non-functional requirements of the client user interface have been identified and applied during the construction of the prototype. A notation specification that defines the syntax for Coad and Yourdon OOA/OOD has been written in NDL and used as a test case. The thesis includes the iterative evaluation and extension of NDL resulting from the prototype development. The prototype has shown that the current approach to NDL is efficacious, and that the syntax and semantics of a methodology description can successfully be separated. The developed prototype has shown that it is possible to build a simple, non-intrusive, and efficient, yet flexible, useable, and helpful interface for meta-CASE tools. The development of the CASE Tool client, through its generic, methodology independent design, has provided a pilot with which future ideas may be explored

The development of iHARP: a multiple instruction issue processor chip

This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.---- Copyright IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.During the last decade RISC ideas on processor architecture have become widely accepted. RISC architectures achieve significant performance advantages over CISC architectures by striving to execute one instruction per cycle. However, a traditional RISC architemre can never execute more than one instruction per cycle. Achieving further performance improvements beyond RISC depends on developing processors which fetch and execute more than one operation in each processor cycle.Final Accepted Versio

Contribution of Vegetation to the Microbial Composition of Nearby Outdoor Air.

UnlabelledGiven that epiphytic microbes are often found in large population sizes on plants, we tested the hypothesis that plants are quantitatively important local sources of airborne microorganisms. The abundance of microbial communities, determined by quantifying bacterial 16S RNA genes and the fungal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region, in air collected directly above vegetation was 2- to 10-fold higher than that in air collected simultaneously in an adjacent nonvegetated area 50 m upwind. Nonmetric multidimensional scaling revealed that the composition of airborne bacteria in upwind air samples grouped separately from that of downwind air samples, while communities on plants and downwind air could not be distinguished. In contrast, fungal taxa in air samples were more similar to each other than to the fungal epiphytes. A source-tracking algorithm revealed that up to 50% of airborne bacteria in downwind air samples were presumably of local plant origin. The difference in the proportional abundances of a given operational taxonomic unit (OTU) between downwind and upwind air when regressed against the proportional representation of this OTU on the plant yielded a positive slope for both bacteria and fungi, indicating that those taxa that were most abundant on plants proportionally contributed more to downwind air. Epiphytic fungi were less of a determinant of the microbiological distinctiveness of downwind air and upwind air than epiphytic bacteria. Emigration of epiphytic bacteria and, to a lesser extent, fungi, from plants can thus influence the microbial composition of nearby air, a finding that has important implications for surrounding ecosystems, including the built environment into which outdoor air can penetrate.ImportanceThis paper addresses the poorly understood role of bacterial and fungal epiphytes, the inhabitants of the aboveground plant parts, in the composition of airborne microbes in outdoor air. It is widely held that epiphytes contribute to atmospheric microbial assemblages, but much of what we know is limited to qualitative assessments. Elucidating the sources of microbes in outdoor air can inform basic biological processes seen in airborne communities (e.g., dispersal and biogeographical patterns). Furthermore, given the considerable contribution of outdoor air to microbial communities found within indoor environments, the understanding of plants as sources of airborne microbes in outdoor air might contribute to our understanding of indoor air quality. With an experimental design developed to minimize the likelihood of other-than-local plant sources contributing to the composition of airborne microbes, we provide direct evidence that plants are quantitatively important local sources of airborne microorganisms, with implications for the surrounding ecosystems

Why does low intensity, long-day lighting promote growth in Petunia, Impatiens, and tomato?

Numerous reports demonstrate that low intensity, long-day (LD) lighting treatments can promote growth. However, there are conflicting suggestions as to the mechanisms involved. This study examines the responses of Petunia, Impatiens, and tomato to LD lighting treatments and concludes that no single mechanism can explain the growth promotion observed in each case. Petunia showed the most dramatic response to photoperiod; up to a doubling in dry weight (DW) as a result of increasing daylength from 8 h d–1 to 16 h d–1.This could be explained by an increase in specific leaf area (SLA) comparable to that seen with shading. At low photosynthetic photon flux densities (PPFD), the increased leaf area more than compensated for any loss in photosynthetic capacity per unit leaf area. In Petunia, the response may, in part, have also been due to changes in growth habit. Impatiens and tomato showed less dramatic increases in DW as a result of LD lighting, but no consistent effects on SLA or growth habit were observed. In tomato, increased growth was accompanied by increased chlorophyll content, but this had no significant effect on photosynthesis. In both species, increased growth may have been due to a direct effect of LD lighting on photosynthesis. This is contrary to the generally held view that light of approx. 3 – 4 μmol m–2 s–1 is unlikely to have any significant impact on net photosynthesis. Nevertheless, we show that the relationship between PPFD and net photosynthesis is non-linear at low light levels, and therefore low intensity LD lighting can offset respiration very efficiently. Furthermore, a small increase in photosynthesis will have a greater impact when ambient light levels are low

Near-infrared Observations of Herbig Ae/Be Stars

One of the most open-ended philosophical questions a person can ask is ``Where did we come from? This question can be interpreted and approached from a multitude of angles. The work presented here will be investigating this question from the astronomical/physical perspective by studying the astronomical objects that are thought to be the immediate precursors to solar systems like our own. In order to determine how we came to be, we must first learn how our home was created. My research area focuses on the study of the circumstellar disks around intermediate mass (2 - 8 Mʘ) young stellar objects, known as Herbig Ae/Be stars. These stars have been observed to harbor large disks of gas and dust left over from their parent molecular cloud. It is within these disks where planet formation is believed to be on-going. Our current models of planet formation are unable to fully depict the process of creating planets from the dusty, gaseous disk. Therefore, in order to understand how these disks create the planetary systems we now know to be ubiquitous, we must first improve our understanding of the composition of and physical processes occurring within the circumstellar disk. Observing the molecular emission originating in the inner 10 au of these circumstellar disks allows us to understand the composition and physical environment where terrestrial planet formation is believed to occur. Molecular emission can provide a wealth of information on the inner disk. Observing multiple rovibrational transitions can give insight on the temperature of the gas. The emission line profile can also provide information on the location of the gas within the disk. The primary molecular species discussed in this research are OH, H2O, and CO. These are the three most abundant molecules present in the circumstellar disk behind H2, but all are more easily studied in the near-infrared wavelength regime. In this dissertation, I present my findings on HD~101412. This source presented the first direct detection of water vapor emission in the near-infrared. Previous observations of Herbig Ae/Be stars have yielded detections of OH, yet water has been more elusive. Due to the strong far-ultraviolet radiation fields produced by the A and B-type central star, it is believed that most of the water vapor within the disk is photodissociated. This would increase the amount of OH within the upper layers of the disk atmosphere that are irradiated most directly. HD~101412 is also unique in that we observe it nearly edge-on and the gas-to-dust ratio is high compared to other Herbig Ae/Be sources. These factors combine to allow us to observe a larger column of water vapor in the disk which allows the emission to be observable above the continuum. I also observed OH emission in the V380~Ori multiple star system to determine the variability of asymmetrical emission lines previously reported. The observation of multiple OH ν = 1 → 0 rovibrational transitions allow for the gas temperature to be determined. This, coupled with archival CO data, present information that point to a vertical temperature gradient within the V380~Ori circumstellar disk. Both the OH and CO emission line profiles show CO and OH to be co-spatially located, however, the OH gas appears to be hotter, thus higher in the disk atmosphere, than the CO emission. This is consistent with models that show OH should be more abundant in the upper atmosphere due to the irradiation from the far-ultraviolet radiation from the central star. Our observations are unable to reproduce the asymmetry previously reported in the OH emission. High-resolution CO emission also lacks the observed asymmetry. Due to the timescales on which these data were acquired, it can rule out the previously reported asymmetry being caused by an eccentric inner disk due to the presence of a stellar companion located within the molecular emission. A survey on OH and H2O emission in Herbig Ae/Be disks, expanding on previous studies, is also presented here. Two more detections of water vapor emission are presented, along with five more detections of OH P4.5 (1+,1−). This increases the sample of OH detections in Herbig Ae/Be disks to 15 out of 31 (48.4\%) of sources with observations in the near-infrared. The relative strength of the OH and water emission is compared to different stellar and disk parameters of Herbig Ae/Be and T Tauri sources. This provides insight as to what could be the cause of the lack of water vapor emission observed around Herbig Ae/Be stars. Finally, a survey of hydrogen recombination emission lines is presented in an effort to understand the physical origins within the Herbig Ae/Be system. Integral field spectroscopy is combined with spectro-astrometry to study the disk-star interface of Herbig Ae/Be stars. Two \ion{H}{I} emission lines are studied (Paβ and Brγ) to determine if they are produced directly by accretion onto the star, or if they originate from more extended regions of the system. Initially attempts are made to remove artifacts in the spectro-astrometric analysis via the use of models. Ultimately, it is concluded that these artifacts are not removed entirely. Later data is acquired such that artifacts can be removed organically via the combination of parallel and anti-parallel observing position angles. The emission lines observed in each observing run can provide some insights based on the overall line profile. Only the spectro-astrometric information from data acquired with parallel and anti-parallel observations can be relied upon to provide information on milliarcsecond scales

Metamorphosis of the Traditional Church: The Hybrid Church Model

For several decades, Church attendance in America has steadily declined. This observation is corroborated by extensive surveys and academic research analyzing church attrition. The national attendance phenomenon is evident is also evident at Livingwater Church of God. Using the Livingwater Church of God as the test lab, this project utilized and implemented the Hybrid Church Model, and evaluated its effectiveness for improvements. Substantiated by practical research surveys, interviews, and academic research, this thesis addresses attendance decline with a systematic implementation, evaluation, and modification of the Hybrid Model for the local church unique to the Western North Carolina area. This ministry project resulted in modest but encouraging gains in all targeted areas, with plans for potential improvement and implementation