Theatre of the Mind: Hardy the Dynasts and the Question of Form

This essay analyzes Hardy’s rarely discussed epic-drama, The Dynasts, especially in relation to trends in the early twentieth-century drama. Hardy’s work is a hybrid of epic, drama, and lyric and was, at the time, thought to be unstageable

A valve concept for remote fluid flow control

Valve concept has been devised which offers lightweight, simplified mechanism capable of automatic control of large number of fluid flow ports. Valve control is achieved with valve stem which is bimetallic device activated by heating coil to open or close selected supply port. Number of controlled ports is limited only by desired physical size of system

The Return of the Poor Man: Jude the Obscure and Late Victorian Socialism

This essay examines Hardy\u27s decision at the end of his career as a novelist to return to the striking socialistic themes which had defined his first (unpublished) novel. Jude the Obscure is Hardy\u27s exploration of the spiritual and intellectual deprivation that attends the condition of the working-class poor. While the novel was reviled at the time as blatantly anti-marriage, its fiercest polemic is reserved for the soul-destroying economic and social systems which continued to keep the class structure rigidly intact. While Hardy was never a socialist himself, his final novel has much in common with the numerous socialist and radical movements that were emerging, merging, and dissolving during the final decades of Victoria\u27s reign

Trans-national approaches to locally situated concerns: exploring the meanings of post-socialist space

The need to examine critially existing understandings of processes of societal change in Russia and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has formed a key area of debate in recent years. Suggested means for furthering this debate include an examination of the meaning and usefulness of the post-socialist category, a critique of the conceptual and practical divides between East and West, attention to the various impacts of change at the local level, and an active engagement with a wide range of actors (academics, policymakers and practitioners) working both in the UK and in the regions in question

An assessment of the micrometeoritic component in the Martian soil

Particles in the mass range from 10 to the minus 7th power to 10 to the minus 3rd power grams contribute 80 percent of the total mass influx of meteoritic material in the 10 to the minus 13th power to 10 to the 6th power gram mass range at Earth (Hughes, 1978). On Earth atmospheric entry, all but the smallest particles in the 10 to the minus 7th power to 10 to the minus 3rd power gram mass range, about 60 to 1200 micrometers in diameter, are heated sufficiently to melt and vaporize. Mars, because of its lower escape velocity and larger atmospheric scale height, is a much more favorable site for unmelted survival of micrometeorites on atmospheric deceleration. Researchers calculate that a significant fraction of particles throughout the 60 to 1200 micrometer diameter range will survive atmospheric entry unmelted. Thus returned Mars soils may offer a resource for sampling micrometeorites in a size range uncollectable in unaltered form at Earth. The addition of meteoritic material to the Mars soils should perturb their chemical composition, as has been detected using the soils on the Moon (Anders, et al., 1973). Using measured mass influx at Earth and estimates of the Mars/Earth flux ratio, researchers estimate a mass influx at Mars of between 2,700 and 202,000 metric tons per year

Atmospheric entry heating of cosmic dust

A computer simulation of the atmospheric entry deceleration and heating for micrometeorites into a planetary atmosphere was developed. The results of this model were compared to an earlier model. The major difference between the extent of heating experienced in the two models results from an underestimation of the atmospheric density at altitudes above 130 km in the earlier model. Thus the earlier model systematically overestimates the peak temperature reached on atmospheric entry. The discrepancies are small for near vertical entry and/or high density particles, where little deceleration is experienced at high altitudes. For particles entering at grazing incidence and/or of low density the discrepancies are more pronounced. Gravitational enhancement, which is a function of geocentric velocity at the collection opportunity, was found to bias near Earth cosmic dust collections in favor of low velocity particles. The effect is to increase the proportion of low velocity dust, predominately from asteroids, in the stratospheric cosmic dust collections and on Earth orbiting spacecraft impact surfaces over its proportion in the interplanetary dust cloud

Suzanne Flynn, Associate Professor of English

In this new Next Page column, Suzanne Flynn, Associate Professor of English, confesses which of the “classics” she hasn’t read, shares which Victorian poets and novelists are among her favorites, and explains how her students connect with literature from the 19th century

Application of covering techniques to families of curves

Much success in finding rational points on curves has been obtained by using Chabauty's Theorem, which applies when the genus of a curve is greater than the rank of the Mordell-Weil group of the Jacobian. When Chabauty's Theorem does not directly apply to a curve C, a recent modification has been to cover the rational points on C by those on a covering collection of curves D$_i$, obtained by pullbacks along an isogeny to the Jacobian; one then hopes that Chabauty's Theorem applies to each D$_i$. So far, this latter technique has been applied to isolated examples. We apply, for the first time, certain covering techniques to infinite families of curves. We find an infinite family of curves to which Chabauty's Theorem is not applicable, but which can be solved using bielliptic covers, and other infinite families of curves which even resist solution by bielliptic covers. A fringe benefit is an infinite family of Abelian surfaces with non-trivial elements of the Tate-Shafarevich group killed by a bielliptic isogeny

Cycles of Covers.

We initially consider an example of Flynn and Redmond, which gives an infinite family of curves to which Chabauty's Theorem is not applicable, and which even resist solution by one application of a certain bielliptic covering technique. In this article, we shall consider a general context, of which this family is a special case, and in this general situation we shall prove that repeated application of bielliptic covers always results in a sequence of genus 2 curves which cycle after a finite number of repetitions. We shall also give an example which is resistant to repeated applications of the technique