Intimité et acadianité : le fonds Gérald Leblanc, un gisement à exploiter

Cet article met en valeur le potentiel de recherche du fonds Gérald Leblanc. Les manuscrits de Gérald Leblanc témoignent de l’ensemble de sa production littéraire et rendent compte de ses méthodes de travail, des mécanismes de production de ses écrits, des processus qui ont mené à l’émergence de son oeuvre. Son journal intime et sa correspondance constituent un corpus de choix pour plusieurs champs d’études littéraires, anthropologiques et historiques dont les études sur le genre autobiographique, sur la mise en scène du soi, ou les travaux portant sur l’histoire de la correspondance et les réseaux de sociabilité. Le fonds témoigne particulièrement du courant littéraire qui a émergé dans les années 70 en Acadie tout en rappelant le rôle de Leblanc dans l’évolution de la culture acadienne en milieu urbain.This article highlights the research potential of the Gérald Leblanc fonds. Gérald Leblanc’s papers provide evidence of his overall literary contribution and reveal his methods, the creative evolution of his writing, and the processes which led to the emergence of his oeuvre. His personal diary and correspondence are a rich source for many aspects of literary, anthropological and historical scholarship, including studies of autobiography, self-identity, as well as research on the history of correspondence and social networks. The fonds is particularly representative of the literary movement that emerged in the 70’s in Acadie, as well as recalling Leblanc’s role in the evolution of urban Acadian culture up until the end of the twentieth century

The Socio-Cultural, Relational Approach to Populism

The article presents the relational, socio-cultural approach to populism, also referred to by some as "performative". The approach claims phenomenological validity cross-regionally and is complex enough to provide a theory of populism and its subjective logic, while minimal enough to be used handily by other scholars. Populism is not a set of decontesting ideas or "ideology", but a way of being and acting in politics, embodying in discourse and praxis the culturally popular and "from here", in an antagonistic and mobilizational way against its opposite, together with personalism as a concrete mode of authority. Defined in the most synthetic way, populism is the flaunting of what I typologically call the "low". I also argue that civilizational projects of different kinds create a distasteful "unpresentable other"; populists then claim that this Other is nothing less than the true Self of the nation, its "authentic" people, disregarded in that process. Relatedly, the article introduces the general populist scheme of contending forces, present cross-regionally and in left as well as right populisms, with "the people" facing a three-way coalition: a nefarious minority Otherized; global forces strongly playing in favor of it; a government in line with that minority or alliance. Populism extolls the national pleb "as is" and promise to reconcile the nation with itself by making the plebs the whole. The cultural component of populism should be domesticated by political scientists, since it has deep roots in cleavage formation theory, the sociology of distinction, and updated Gramscian and Weberian sociopolitical analyses

La transformation du système de partis chilien et la stabilité politique dans la post-transition

La transformation de la configuration du système de partis chilien d’une dynamique compétitive entre trois blocs idéologiques le long d’un éventail gauche-droite étendu (1958-1973) à une compétition inégale entre deux grands blocs sur un espace gauche-droite plus réduit depuis la fin des années 1980 assure la stabilité politique de l’arène politique chilienne post-transition. Deux aspects sont déterminants ici : le lieu des frontières entre blocs politico-institutionnels et un nouvel ancrage du système de partis sur une portion étendue (le centre et le centre-gauche) de l’éventail politique. Les diverses stratégies de lutte contre la dictature de Pinochet donnèrent lieu à un remaniement substantiel de ces frontières et à un changement conséquent dans les rapports de force interblocs. Cette reconfiguration fut ensuite renforcée, mais non créée, par le système électoral binominal chilien.The configuration of the Chilean party system has changed significantly from before 1973 to the period since the mid-1980s, leading to an extremely stable political arena in the post-transition period. Chile’s party system was characterized by a competitive dynamic between three ideological blocs along a wide left-right spectrum in 1958-1973. The new pattern is one of unequal competition between two large blocs on a reduced left-right spectrum. Two aspects are decisive here : the location of the borders between political-institutional blocs and the system’s new anchoring in a wide, center and left-of-center, portion of the political spectrum. The different strategies of struggle against Pinochet’s rule gave rise to a major displacement of these borders, thus changing the relative strength of the system’s blocs. This reconfiguration was reinforced but not created by the new binominal electoral system

A free interactive matching program

For physicists and engineers involved in the design and analysis of beamlines (transfer lines or insertions) the lattice function matching problem is central and can be time-consuming because it involves constrained nonlinear optimization. For such problems convergence can be difficult to obtain in general without expert human intervention. Over the years, powerful codes have been developed to assist beamline designers. The canonical example is MAD (Methodical Accelerator Design) developed at CERN by Christophe Iselin. MAD, through a specialized command language, allows one to solve a wide variety of problems, including matching problems. Although in principle, the MAD command interpreter can be run interactively, in practice the solution of a matching problem involves a sequence of independent trial runs. Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly, there still exists relatively few tools exploiting the resources offered by modern environments to assist lattice designer with this routine and repetitive task. In this paper, we describe a fully interactive lattice matching program, written in C++ and assembled using freely available software components. An important feature of the code is that the evolution of the lattice functions during the nonlinear iterative process can be graphically monitored in real time; the user can dynamically interrupt the iterations at will to introduce new variables, freeze existing ones into their current state and/or modify constraints. The program runs under both UNIX and Windows NT

Experiment and Simulation of the Acoustic Signature of Fatigued-Cracked Gears in a Two-Stage Gearbox

This thesis focuses on the development of a health monitoring system for gearbox transmissions. This was accomplished by developing and understanding a two-stage gearbox computer model that emulates an actual gearbox test rig. The computer model contains actual gearbox geometry, flexible shafts, bearings, gear contact forces, input motor torque, output brake torque, and realistic gearbox imbalance. The gear contact force of each gear stage and the input bearing translational acceleration were the main outputs compared between a healthy gearbox and damaged gearbox computer model. The damage of focus was a fatigue crack on the input pinion gear. A sideband energy ratio comparison yielded the computer simulation accurately modeled the difference between a healthy and damaged gearbox. The next step in this study involved the development of a repeatable procedure to initiate and propagate a fatigue crack at the tooth root in an actual spur gear. A damaged spur gear allows for a future comparison of an actual healthy and damaged gearbox system in the lab. A custom fatigue fixture was designed and manufactured for a Martin S1224BS 1 spur gear. The fatigue crack was initiated by position control fatigue testing which deflects the gear tooth a set amplitude for a number of cycles. Over the length of the test, the load that the tooth can withstand in bending decreases as damage begins to occur. Once the max load on the gear has dropped by a significant percentage (5-15%) a crack has initiated and begun to propagate across the tooth face. The use of a scanning electron microscope confirmed the presence a fatigue crack