The concept of Latinite in the works of Louis Marie Emile Bertrand

Thesis (Pd.D.)—Boston UniversitySince World War II, the crisis in Algeria has intensified interest in French literature concerning North Africa. Attention has been refocused on Louis Bertrand (1866-1941), creator of the colon novel. Bertrand, born in Lorraine, graduated from the Ecole Normale. After teaching in Algiers (1891-1900), he abandoned pedagogy for writing and settled on the Riviera. He achieved membership in the Acad~mie FranQaise in 1926. Bertrand's extensive work includes twelve novels and over sixty nonfiction volumes. He contributed extensively to French journals. Critics early favored but later disparaged his contribution on personal as well as literar.y grounds. They have failed to interpret satisfactorily the unifying element in his work: latinite. By latinit-4 Bertrand referred ostensibly to the Latin peoples, to a core of their social and aesthetic ideals, and to the lands of lumiere in the western Mediterranean basin. He bade Latins rise to new preeminence by espousfug an authoritarian ideology based on class inequality of Roman Empire vintage. Bertrand determined that the latent unanimity of latinte might be animated by heightening the awareness of continuite from early Christian Rome to the present, with the Roman Catholic Church as proof extant of that link, and by appealing to the racial ego. [TRUNCATED

Preserving the palaeoenvironmental record in Drylands: Bioturbation and its significance for luminescence-derived chronologies

Luminescence (OSL) dating has revolutionised the understanding of Late Pleistocene dryland activity. However, one of the key assumptions for this sort of palaeoenvironmental work is that sedimentary sequences have been preserved intact, enabling their use as proxy indicators of past changes. This relies on stabilisation or burial soon after deposition and a mechanism to prevent any subsequent re-mobilisation. As well as a dating technique OSL, especially at the single grain level, can be used to gain an insight into post-depositional processes that may distort or invalidate the palaeoenvironmental record of geological sediment sequences. This paper explores the possible impact of bioturbation (the movement of sediment by flora and fauna) on luminescence derived chronologies from Quaternary sedimentary deposits in Texas and Florida (USA) which have both independent radiocarbon chronologies and archaeological evidence. These sites clearly illustrate the ability of bioturbation to rejuvenate ancient weathered sandy bedrock and/or to alter depositional stratigraphies through the processes of exhumation and sub-surface mixing of sediment. The use of multiple OSL replicate measurements is advocated as a strategy for checking for bioturbated sediment. Where significant OSL heterogeneity is found, caution should be taken with the derived OSL ages and further measurements at the single grain level are recommended. Observations from the linear dunes of the Kalahari show them to have no bedding structure and to have OSL heterogeneity similar to that shown from the bioturbated Texan and Florida sites. The Kalahari linear dunes could have therefore undergone hitherto undetected post-depositional sediment disturbance which would have implications for the established OSL chronology for the region

Strategic Planning for Environmental Stewardship at Eastern Kentucky University

The 2006-2010 Strategic Plan for Eastern Kentucky University, under Strategic Direction 5.4, mandates the formulation of a plan to guide the University toward greater environmental stewardship. The creation and implementation of that plan is the charge of the Eastern Committee on Responsible Environmental Stewardship (ECRES), which was formed in September of 2005. On October 27th, 2006, ECRES hosted a Strategic Planning Workshop. This workshop brought together a wide range of paticipants, including elected officials, college and university representatives, and interested citizens. The result was a broad consensus in the identification of environmental goals and objectives toward which EKU should strive

Disruption of Ant-Aphid Mutualism in Canopy Enhances the Abundance of Beetles on the Forest Floor

Ant-aphid mutualism is known to play a key role in the structure of the arthropod community in the tree canopy, but its possible ecological effects for the forest floor are unknown. We hypothesized that aphids in the canopy can increase the abundance of ants on the forest floor, thus intensifying the impacts of ants on other arthropods on the forest floor. We tested this hypothesis in a deciduous temperate forest in Beijing, China. We excluded the aphid-tending ants Lasius fuliginosus from the canopy using plots of varying sizes, and monitored the change in the abundance of ants and other arthropods on the forest floor in the treated and control plots. We also surveyed the abundance of ants and other arthropods on the forest floor to explore the relationships between ants and other arthropods in the field. Through a three-year experimental study, we found that the exclusion of ants from the canopy significantly decreased the abundance of ants on the forest floor, but increased the abundance of beetles, although the effect was only significant in the large ant-exclusion plot (80*60 m). The field survey showed that the abundance of both beetles and spiders was negatively related to the abundance of ants. These results suggest that aphids located in the tree canopy have indirect negative effects on beetles by enhancing the ant abundance on the forest floor. Considering that most of the beetles in our study are important predators, the ant-aphid mutualism can have further trophic cascading effects on the forest floor food web

Race and the Legacy of the First World War in French Anti-Colonial Politics of the 1920s

There has been relatively little historical research on the small number of African veterans who stayed on in France after the First World War and became militants in the radical anti-colonial movements created in the 1920s. From his entry onto the political stage in late 1924 until his early death three years later, the most celebrated and feared of these anti-colonial militants was Lamine Senghor, a decorated war veteran from Senegal. This chapter will chart Senghor’s brief career as an activist, focusing primarily on the ways in which he projected his identity as a veteran in his speeches and writings, as well as exploring, more generally, how France’s “blood debt” to its colonial subjects became a key theme of anti-colonial discourse in the interwar period

Small Platforms, High Return: The Need to Enhance Investment in Small Satellites for Focused Science, Career Development, and Improved Equity

In the next decade, there is an opportunity for very high return on investment of relatively small budgets by elevating the priority of smallsat funding in heliophysics. We've learned in the past decade that these missions perform exceptionally well by traditional metrics, e.g., papers/year/\$M (Spence et al. 2022 -- arXiv:2206.02968). It is also well established that there is a "leaky pipeline" resulting in too little diversity in leadership positions (see the National Academies Report at https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/increasing-diversity-in-the-leadership-of-competed-space-missions). Prioritizing smallsat funding would significantly increase the number of opportunities for new leaders to learn -- a crucial patch for the pipeline and an essential phase of career development. At present, however, there are far more proposers than the available funding can support, leading to selection ratios that can be as low as 6% -- in the bottom 0.5th percentile of selection ratios across the history of ROSES. Prioritizing SmallSat funding and substantially increasing that selection ratio are the fundamental recommendations being made by this white paper.Comment: White paper submitted to the Decadal Survey for Solar and Space Physics (Heliophysics) 2024-2033; 6 pages, 1 figur

Seven Sisters: a mission to study fundamental plasma physical processes in the solar wind and a pathfinder to advance space weather prediction

This paper summarizes the Seven Sisters solar wind mission concept and the outstanding science questions motivating the mission science objectives. The Seven Sisters mission includes seven individual spacecraft designed to uncover fundamental physical processes in the solar wind and provides up to ≈ 2 days of advanced space weather warnings for 550 Earth days during the mission. The mission will collect critical measurements of the thermal and suprathermal plasma and magnetic fields, utilizing, for the first time, Venus–Sun Lagrange points. The multi-spacecraft configuration makes it possible to distinguish between spatial and temporal changes, define gradients, and quantify cross-scale transport in solar wind structures. Seven Sisters will determine the 3-D structure of the solar wind and its transient phenomena and their evolution in the inner heliosphere. Data from the Seven Sisters mission will allow the identification of physical processes and the quantification of the relative contribution of different mechanisms responsible for suprathermal particle energization in the solar wind