The French Presence in Medieval Scotland: Le roi René and King Hart

Most authorities agree that King Hart diverges so much from René d'Anjou's Le Livre du Cuer d'amours espris that the French text ought not to be considered a source for, or analogue to, the one in Scots. It is true, Cuer presents itself as an allegorical quest romance of love in the tradition of the Roman de la Rose, and King Hart as a religious allegory of the life of man wherein carnal love proves wanting. However, King René's pseudo-autobiographical Livre du Cuer was so well known in the fifteenth century that a cultured audience listening to the tale whose hero is King Hart would have made the connection. King Hart spends his misspent erotic life in the castle of Plesance, his mistress, who leaves when he grows old. René's Cuer arrives at the castle of Plaisance where Amour dwells. Another of René's books, Le Mortifiement de Vaine Plaisance, is a moral allegory, similar to King Hart, in which Vaine Plaisance is purged from the protagonists — she leaves. This article argues that the author of King Hart knew both of René's texts, and that he took from them what he needed to compose his own intertextual book of the heart, which is both an anti-René and a super-René

C.S. Lewis, Literary Critic: A Reassessment

Addresses “Lewis’s accomplishments as a medieval and Renaissance scholar; his contributions to theory, and where he can be placed as a proto-theorist; and how well his work holds up today.

A Poet at the Fountain: Essays on the Narrative Verse of Guillaume de Machaut

This collection is the first full-length literary study on Machaut, France’s leading poet and musician of the 14th century. Machaut’s narrative poems, called dits, have only been lightly studied. Here, author William Calin examines the works for their intrinsic merit and for their historical importance in influencing many writers, most notably Chaucer. William Calin is professor of Romance Languages at the University of Oregon.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_french_and_francophone_literature/1002/thumbnail.jp

The dit amoureux and the Makars: An Essay on The Kingis Quair and The Testament of Cresseid

A number of major Scots texts in the later Middle Ages partake of a mode of high courtly narrative, Lewis’s allegory of love, what in French studies is now called the dit amoureux or ‘tale of love.’ The article discusses the first two tales of love in the grand manner — The Kingis Quair and The Testament of Cresseid — relating them to well known works by Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and, in Henryson’s case, Alain Chartier and the Belle Dame sans Mercy Cycle. The dit amoureux, with its wit, play, complexity, and ambiguity, proves to be one of the genres most congenial to the Makars. It can help situate Scots texts in their cultural milieu and also help account for their extraordinary complexity and maturity as works of art

A role for recurrent processing in object completion: neurophysiological, psychophysical and computational"evidence

Recognition of objects from partial information presents a significant challenge for theories of vision because it requires spatial integration and extrapolation from prior knowledge. We combined neurophysiological recordings in human cortex with psychophysical measurements and computational modeling to investigate the mechanisms involved in object completion. We recorded intracranial field potentials from 1,699 electrodes in 18 epilepsy patients to measure the timing and selectivity of responses along human visual cortex to whole and partial objects. Responses along the ventral visual stream remained selective despite showing only 9-25% of the object. However, these visually selective signals emerged ~100 ms later for partial versus whole objects. The processing delays were particularly pronounced in higher visual areas within the ventral stream, suggesting the involvement of additional recurrent processing. In separate psychophysics experiments, disrupting this recurrent computation with a backward mask at ~75ms significantly impaired recognition of partial, but not whole, objects. Additionally, computational modeling shows that the performance of a purely bottom-up architecture is impaired by heavy occlusion and that this effect can be partially rescued via the incorporation of top-down connections. These results provide spatiotemporal constraints on theories of object recognition that involve recurrent processing to recognize objects from partial information

NaK Variable Conductance Heat Pipe for Radioisotope Stirling Systems

In a Stirling radioisotope power system, heat must continually be removed from the General Purpose Heat Source (GPHS) modules to maintain the modules and surrounding insulation at acceptable temperatures. The Stirling convertor normally provides most of this cooling. If the Stirling convertor stops in the current system, the insulation is designed to spoil, preventing damage to the GPHS, but also ending use of that convertor for the mission. An alkali-metal Variable Conductance Heat Pipe (VCHP) was designed to allow multiple stops and restarts of the Stirling convertor. In the design of the VCHP for the Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator, the VCHP reservoir temperature can vary between 40 and 120 C. While sodium, potassium, or cesium could be used as the working fluid, their melting temperatures are above the minimum reservoir temperature, allowing working fluid to freeze in the reservoir. In contrast, the melting point of NaK is -12 C, so NaK can't freeze in the reservoir. One potential problem with NaK as a working fluid is that previous tests with NaK heat pipes have shown that NaK heat pipes can develop temperature non-uniformities in the evaporator due to NaK's binary composition. A NaK heat pipe was fabricated to measure the temperature non-uniformities in a scale model of the VCHP for the Stirling Radioisotope system. The temperature profiles in the evaporator and condenser were measured as a function of operating temperature and power. The largest delta T across the condenser was 2S C. However, the condenser delta T decreased to 16 C for the 775 C vapor temperature at the highest heat flux applied, 7.21 W/ square cm. This decrease with increasing heat flux was caused by the increased mixing of the sodium and potassium in the vapor. This temperature differential is similar to the temperature variation in this ASRG heat transfer interface without a heat pipe, so NaK can be used as the VCHP working fluid

High Temperature Variable Conductance Heat Pipes for Radioisotope Stirling Systems

In a Stirling radioisotope system, heat must continually be removed from the GPHS modules, to maintain the GPHS modules and surrounding insulation at acceptable temperatures. Normally, the Stirling convertor provides this cooling. If the Stirling convertor stops in the current system, the insulation is designed to spoil, preventing damage to the GPHS, but also ending the mission. An alkali-metal Variable Conductance Heat Pipe (VCHP) is under development to allow multiple stops and restarts of the Stirling convertor. The status of the ongoing effort in developing this technology is presented in this paper. An earlier, preliminary design had a radiator outside the Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator (ASRG) casing, used NaK as the working fluid, and had the reservoir located on the cold side adapter flange. The revised design has an internal radiator inside the casing, with the reservoir embedded inside the insulation. A large set of advantages are offered by this new design. In addition to reducing the overall size and mass of the VCHP, simplicity, compactness and easiness in assembling the VCHP with the ASRG are significantly enhanced. Also, the permanently elevated temperatures of the entire VCHP allows the change of the working fluid from a binary compound (NaK) to single compound (Na). The latter, by its properties, allows higher performance and further mass reduction of the system. Preliminary design and analysis shows an acceptable peak temperature of the ASRG case of 140 C while the heat losses caused by the addition of the VCHP are 1.8 W

Monte Carlo Approaches to Parameterized Poker Squares

The paper summarized a variety of Monte Carlo approaches employed in the top three performing entries to the Parameterized Poker Squares NSG Challenge competition. In all cases AI players benefited from real-time machine learning and various Monte Carlo game-tree search techniques