The Charge Management System for LISA and LISA Pathfinder

The test masses at the heart of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) and LISA: Pathfinder experiments will experience charging caused by incident ionising radiation. This thesis describes work carried out in developing, testing and understanding the performance of the hardware used to characterise and counteract this test mass charging. Work will be presented that describes the simulation and testing of a radiation monitor to be flown on board Pathfinder. The Charge Management System will then be introduced and the results from testing at the Trento torsion pendulum facility discussed. Several measurements of individual properties that affect discharging are made and these are then incorporated into simulations of the discharging system as a whole. Finally, initial studies are conducted into the suitability of UV-LEDs as the discharging light source for LISA, with particular focus on their spectral stability

“Why do you write what isn’t true?”: Dostoevsky and the Fantastic Paradox

In this paper, my starting point will be Philip Roth’s famous essay “Writing American Fiction,” in which he complains about the difficulty of writing novels in a country “where the actuality is constantly outdoing our talents.” I shall contend that this perception is not a new one, nor does it apply to American reality alone, and trace it back through a series of writers commenting on the difficulty of writing novels in the face of contemporary reality to its origins in Byron’s Don Juan: “For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.” I shall argue that the aesthetics of “romantic realism,” as Donald Fanger labels it—the writing of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Gogol, etc—directly addresses this paradox, and that this partly accounts for the differences between it and “classic realism.” My contention is that we mistake the nature of such writing if we judge it by the criteria of “classic realism”—and find it wanting, as is often the case

OPPRESSION OF MINORITY SHAREHOLDERS- REFLECTIONS ON BLISSET v DANIEL

The leading modern case on the law relating to the rights of minority shareholders is the decision of the House of Lords in O’Neill v Phillips, in which Lord Hoffmann, giving the only speech, appeared to place heavy reliance upon the seminal speech of Lord Wilberforce in Re Westbourne Galleries Ltd.   The main purpose of this article is to compare and contrast the reasoning of Lord Hoffmann with that of Lord Wilberforce.  It is proposed to begin with a close look at the old case of Blisset v Daniel, and to analyse the use to which that authority was put by Lord Hoffmann and Lord Wilberforce.  It is proposed to conclude by considering the question whether the reasoning of Lord Hoffmann in O’Neill v Phillips is, or was indeed ever meant by him to be, of general or wide application

Characterising and Testing Deep UV LEDs for Use in Space Applications

Deep ultraviolet (DUV) light sources are used to neutralise isolated test masses in highly sensitive space-based gravitational experiments. An example is the LISA Pathfinder charge management system, which uses low-pressure mercury lamps. A future gravitational-wave observatory such as eLISA will use UV light-emitting diodes (UV LEDs), which offer numerous advantages over traditional discharge lamps. Such devices have limited space heritage but are are now available from a number of commercial suppliers. Here we report on a test campaign that was carried out to quantify the general properties of three types of commercially available UV LEDs and demonstrate their suitability for use in space. Testing included general electrical and UV output measurements, spectral stability, pulsed performance, temperature dependence as well as thermal vacuum, radiation and vibration survivability

Review of Imagining Italy: Victorian Writers and Travellers

Two of the essays in this volume take George Eliot\u27s Romola as their subject. Both reward attention, and they may be in danger of escaping deserved notice given the major concentration here on the life and writing of Dickens. This is the second of three publications projected by the organizers of a conference on \u27Dickens, Victorian Culture, Italy\u27, held in Genoa in 2007. The advance poster for the conference, still on the web, inadvertently does the book a slight disservice: \u27At present\u27, the organizers write, \u27we are considering any or all of 1) A volume of the very best papers [see The Victorians and Italy: Literature, Travel, Politics, and Art, ed. Alessandro Vescovi, Luisa Villa, Paul Vita (Polymetrica, 2008)]; 2) A volume of papers [the present one] that are about Victorian writers and Italy, Dickens yes but others as well; and 3) A concentrated section of a future Dickens Studies Annual Volume. The quality of the individual pieces in Imagining Italy is rather better than this implied scooping up of remains after volume one. Admittedly, balance of coverage has not been a priority - 11 out of the 14 essays are primarily on Dickens; just the two on Eliot; and there is one impressively informed consideration, by Christine Alexander, of Italy’s role in the verbal and visual imagination of the young Charlotte Bronte. There is little effort at cross comparison (and to that extent the editors might have taken a heavier hand) but the quality of the individual pieces is high, and the contributions on Eliot, from Richard Bonfiglio and Robert M. Polhemus, gain more than they lose by their insertion into this very Dickens-centred discussion of Victorian engagements with Italian politics, religion, art and society

Treatment of Group Theory in Spectroscopy

The most important thing to consider when applying group theory is finding the molecule’s point group or its particular symmetry operations. In order to identify a molecule’s symmetry operations, one must first find the molecule’s symmetry elements. In other words, the first stage in utilizing group theory with molecular properties is identifying a molecule’s symmetry elements. For most beginners without experience this has proven to be most difficult because it requires the individual to visually identify the elements of symmetry in a 3D object. However, once this is overcome, applying group theory to forefront point groups and symmetry operations becomes second nature

The Voice of Objects in The Old Curiosity Shop

Curiosities are objects on sale in an antique dealer’s - bric à brac, knick-knacks, souvenirs, mementos. So The Old Curiosity Shop is about what we can think of as commodities, objects on display and for sale. A fine new book by Catherine Waters, Commodity Culture in Household Words, offers plenty of material for a new focus on objects in Dickens which reinvigorates past, and some of it rather crude, Marxist criticism of Dickens’s works. Its focus is Dickens’s journalism, and that of the staff of the magazine he edited between 1850 and 1859, but its arguments can be used, as I do here, to provide an insight into the fiction. Even if the discussion of Dickens’s novel takes precedence here, and the consideration of its possible critical and theoretical underpinning is brief and largely confined to the end of the essay, my approach here is in fact an attempt to combine Waters’s work, both with an important but still little known essay on The Old Curiosity by the significant German philosopher and critic Theodor Adorno, and with some aspects of recent work by Bill Brown about what he calls ‘thing theory’

Exploring Music in a Globalized World

Beyond the simple fact that many people enjoy music, as a social act music is also related to a wide range of emotions, associations, politics, and identifications that draw people to making, playing, and listening to music. To explore the interactions between music and various social phenomena, we have invited a number authors and musicians to share their thoughts on music for this issue. They present us a variety of perspectives on and of music practices, how music is lived and experienced in a range of settings, and why music has such an important role in the lives of people and societies around the world

A novel three-colour fluorescence in situ hybridization approach for the detection of t(7;12)(q36;p13) in acute myeloid leukaemia reveals new cryptic three way translocation t(7;12;16)

© 2013 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).The t(7;12)(q36;p13) translocation is a recurrent chromosome abnormality that involves the ETV6 gene on chromosome 12 and has been identified in 20–30% of infant patients with acute myeloid leukaemia (AML). The detection of t(7;12) rearrangements relies on the use of fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) because this translocation is hardly visible by chromosome banding methods. Furthermore, a fusion transcript HLXB9-ETV6 is found in approximately 50% of t(7;12) cases, making the reverse transcription PCR approach not an ideal screening method. Considering the report of few cases of variant translocations harbouring a cryptic t(7;12) rearrangement, we believe that the actual incidence of this abnormality is higher than reported to date. The clinical outcome of t(7;12) patients is believed to be poor, therefore an early and accurate diagnosis is important in the clinical management and treatment. In this study, we have designed and tested a novel three-colour FISH approach that enabled us not only to confirm the presence of the t(7;12) in a number of patients studied previously, but also to identify a cryptic t(7;12) as part of a complex rearrangement. This new approach has proven to be an efficient and reliable method to be used in the diagnostic setting