Rethinking the Literary Baroque

John Donne and Baroque Allegory by Hugh Grady. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Hardcover $105.00

An Institutional Framework for Heterogeneous Formal Development in UML

We present a framework for formal software development with UML. In contrast to previous approaches that equip UML with a formal semantics, we follow an institution based heterogeneous approach. This can express suitable formal semantics of the different UML diagram types directly, without the need to map everything to one specific formalism (let it be first-order logic or graph grammars). We show how different aspects of the formal development process can be coherently formalised, ranging from requirements over design and Hoare-style conditions on code to the implementation itself. The framework can be used to verify consistency of different UML diagrams both horizontally (e.g., consistency among various requirements) as well as vertically (e.g., correctness of design or implementation w.r.t. the requirements)

Departmental elections and the changing landscape of French politics

The departmental elections of March 2015 redrew the French political landscape, setting the new terms of electoral competition in advance of the regional elections of December 2015 and, more critically, the presidential election of April–May 2017. These elections saw the far-right National Front (FN) come top in both rounds only to be outmanoeuvred by the mainstream parties and prevented from winning a single department. As a case study in vote–seat distortion, the elections highlighted a voting system effective in keeping the FN out of executive power but deficient in terms of democratic representation and inadequate as a response to the new tripartite realities of France's changing political landscape

The high speed water tunnel at the California Institute of Technology

The high speed water tunnel was established at the California Institute of Technology to study the forces acting upon moving bodies immersed in a fluid. The working section of the tunnel is 14 inches in diameter and 6 feet long and velocities up to 72 feet per second are obtained in it. The model to be tested is mounted on the spindle of a three component balance which measures the drag force, the yaw or lateral force and the moment about the spindle support. The angle of inclination of the model to the flow direction can be adjusted easily. From these measurements are determined the magnitude and location of the resultant forces acting on the model. In order to study cavitation, the pressure in the tunnel is made adjustable and a transparent working section is provided for visual and photographic observations. For qualitative assistance in interpreting the results of the tunnel studies in terms of the effects of the body shapes on the flow pattern, an auxiliary flume is available. The flow is made visible by use of a new technique employing polarized light

Spectroscopy of Quasar Candidates from SDSS Commissioning Data

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has obtained images in five broad-band colors for several hundred square degrees. We present color-color diagrams for stellar objects, and demonstrate that quasars are easily distinguished from stars by their distinctive colors. Follow-up spectroscopy in less than ten nights of telescope time has yielded 22 new quasars, 9 of them at $z> 3.65$, and one with $z = 4.75$, the second highest-redshift quasar yet known. Roughly 80% of the high-redshift quasar candidates selected by color indeed turn out to be high-redshift quasars.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, to appear in the proceedings of "After the Dark Ages: When Galaxies were Young (the Universe at 2<z<5)", 9th Annual October Astrophysics Conference in Marylan

Winner loses all: The 2015 French regional elections

The French regional elections of 2015 presented two contrasting images of France: in the first round, a political landscape divided into three major blocs with the far-right Front National (FN) the dominant force; in the second round, a landscape as bipolarized between centre-right and centre-left as at any time under the Fifth Republic and with the FN a distant third. This article explores these two representations of political France and analyses the elections in relation to the wider French political context. It discusses the electoral dynamics that enabled the traditional parties to preserve their duopoly of regional power despite the increasingly intrusive challenge to their hegemony mounted by an ever more electorally potent FN

Glimpses of the Work of the Cooperative Hydraulics Laboratory

This booklet is presented with the compliments of the California Institute of Technology to those attending the meetings of the Soil Conservation Service held on the campus at Pasadena, February 14 to 19, 1944. Its purpose is two-fold : (i) To acquaint our guests with the Cooperative Hydraulics Laboratory and the work of its staff, and (2) to provide notes on the discussions presented by members of the staff at these meetings