From Zouaves Pontificaux to the volontaires de l'Ouest: Catholic volunteers and the French Nation, 1860-1910

This article examines the French papal zouaves, volunteers who fought for the defence of the temporal sovereignty of the Pope in the decade 1860-1870, and their successors, the irregular Volunteers of the West. The latter was a volunteer force formed around the returning zouaves in the context of the 1870-71 Franco- Prussian war. It explores Catholic discourse on the zouaves and the Volontaires between 1860 and 1910, comparing the defenders of Rome with the defenders of France. The concern is to understand how service in the Franco-Prussian war impacted upon Catholic interpretations of the zouaves. In particular, their heroic if suicidal charge in the battle of Loigny under the banner of the Sacred Heart aligned them with this devotion, that flourished in 1870-71 and would culminate in the Sacré-Coeur de Montmartre. The Volontaires also offered political arguments about the relationship between patriotism and Catholic convictions, deployed in the context of debates about French regeneration. Yet in terms of ideas of expiation, national history and counter-revolution the discourse on the Volontaires reflected the original discourse on the zouaves developed in the decade 1860-70. Ultimately they stood for a vision of French history and French identity diametrically opposed to the legacy of 1789, a challenge to the Republic's official vision

Rotating gravity currents: small-scale and large-scale laboratory experiments and a geostrophic model

Laboratory experiments simulating gravity-driven coastal surface currents produced by estuarine fresh-water discharges into the ocean are discussed. The currents are generated inside a rotating tank filled with salt water by the continuous release of buoyant fresh water from a small source at the fluid surface. The height, the width and the length of the currents are studied as a function of the background rotation rate, the volumetric discharge rate and the density difference at the source. Two complementary experimental data sets are discussed and compared with each other. One set of experiments was carried out in a tank of diameter 1 m on a small-scale rotating turntable. The second set of experiments was conducted at the large-scale Coriolis Facility (LEGI, Grenoble) which has a tank of diameter 13 m. A simple geostrophic model predicting the current height, width and propagation velocity is developed. The experiments and the model are compared with each other in terms of a set of non-dimensional parameters identified in the theoretical analysis of the problem. These parameters enable the corresponding data of the large-scale and the small-scale experiments to be collapsed onto a single line. Good agreement between the model and the experiments is found

Tagamajig: Image Recognition via Crowdsourcing

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) Library possesses thousands of unlabeled gray-scale photographs from the Smoky Mountains circa the 1920s - 1940s. Their current method of identifying and labeling attributes of the photographs is to do so manually. This is problematic both because of the scale of the collection as well as the reliance on an individual\u27s limited knowledge of the area\u27s numerous landmarks. In the past few years, similar dilemmas have been tackled via an approach known as crowd computing. Some examples include Floating Forests, in which users are asked to identify and mark kelp forests in satellite images, and Ancient Lives, which enlists users help in transcribing 2000-year-old manuscripts that Oxford University researchers had struggled to efficiently translate for over a century. For this particular problem, we propose releasing the image collections to the public through a web application. The application would target outdoor enthusiasts, conservationists, or professionals such as geologists, rangers, or historians who are familiar with the region and would find interest in helping to label the more recognizable photos. Users would tag landmarks using a hierarchically sorted data set of landmark names accessible via an incremental search. With sufficient participation, the image collection could be efficiently categorized and labeled beyond what is currently feasible using the librarys limited number of personnel. Furthermore, this application could easily be adapted to categorize other unlabeled image collections if provided with the proper data set for tagging