Shell shock and the legacy of the Victorian past in the present: remembering WWI in Pat Barker’s <i>Another World</i>

In her 1998 novel Another World, Pat Barker draws from a topic on which she has written previously with great success&mdash;the First World War and the experiences of its combatants&mdash;and yet approaches that topic from a completely different perspective. The novel returns to the Great War to consider notions of &lsquo;shell shock&rsquo;, attitudes towards WWI veterans, and the problems surrounding remembering past violence, but what is perhaps surprising about Another World is that it uses a Victorian storyline to address these concerns, and presents the First World War through the means of references to nineteenth-century culture

174P/Echeclus: a strange case of outburst

Context. More than ten Centaurs are now known to have cometary activity at large heliocentric distance (i.e. $\simeq$ 5-13 AU). Among these objects, 174P/Echeclus which showed cometary activity at 13 AU from the Sun, is a unique case, because of: (i) the amplitude of its outburst, (ii) the source of cometary activity that appears distinct from Echeclus itself. Aims. This paper aims at investigating the physical conditions that have led to this unusual outburst. The purpose is also to quantify this phenomenon and to provide observational constraints for its modeling. Methods. We use observations from different telescopes, performed before, during, and after the outburst. We performed the main observations on March 23 and 30, 2006, with the 8.2-m ESO Very Large Telescope and FORS 1 instrument. They consist of visible images and spectra. Results. Our main results are: (i) a cometary source distinct from Echeclus itself that presents a brightness distribution compatible with a diffuse source; (ii) a total dust production rate Q_dust equal to about 86 kg.s^-1 and a parameter Afrho equal to 10,000cm; (iii) no emission lines (CN and C_2) can be detected in the visible range; (iv) the upper limits for the CN and C_2 production rates are about 3.8x10^25 and 10^26 molecules.s^-1 respectively; (v) we detected no Echeclus' satellite before the outburst up to M_R equal to about 26; (vi) the upper limit for the object generating the coma is about 8 km in diameter; (vii) and we detected no cometary activity one year later, in March 2007

Dust and gas jets: Evidence for a diffuse source in Halley's coma

The distribution of dust-scattered intensity in Halley's inner coma is measured with the Vega three-channel spectrometer at three selected wavelengths: 377, 482, and 607 nm. The variation along a cometo-centric radius may be described by a p(sup -s) law where p is the distance between nucleus and optical axis and s is an exponent which is equal to 1 except in an intermediate 3000 less than p less than 7000 km region where s = 1.5. The shape of the radial distribution may be explained with a model including solar radiation pressure effect and quantum scattering efficiencies calculated from Mie theory. Monochromatic images inside an angular sector having its apex at the nucleus show evidence of two dust jets which extend to 40,000 Km. The pixel-to-pixel ratio of two images of dust intensity at 377 and 482 nm shows that the scattered intensity presents an excess of blue coloration in a zone located around the jets between 10,000 and 25,000 km. This coloration is interpreted as being due to a population of sub-micronic grains which result of the fragmentation of dust particles transported in the jets. It is suggested that the diffuse source where an additional quantity of CO was detected might be connected with the presence of a dust jet. In the present scheme, grain particles with a size of several micron or 10 micron would be transported inside a dust jet to distances of several 10,000 km where they would suffer fragmentation and produce sub-micronic particles and a release of gas which would be at the origin of the diffuse source

Evolution of near UV Halley's spectrum in the inner coma

A direct way to observe the photodissociation of water vapor in a cometary coma is to detect the OH prompt emission. This emission is shifted of delta lambda = 4 nm with respect to the OH 309 nm fluorescence band. The extended data set obtained with the three-channel spectrometer on-board Vega 2 reveals at short distance of the nucleus (i.e., less than 600 km) an excess of emission on the right wing of the OH band which may be interpreted as being mainly due to prompt emission

A Next Generation Deep 2 micron Survey: Reconnoitering the Dark Ages

The next generation 2 micron sky survey should target nascent galaxies in the epoch of reionization for spectroscopic followup on large telescopes. A 2.5 metre telescope at a site on the antarctic plateau has advantages for this purpose and for southern hemisphere infrared surveys generally.Comment: SCAR AAA meeting July 2011 Sydney, to appear in PAS

HP-CERTI: Towards a high performance, high availability open source RTI for composable simulations (04F-SIW-014)

Composing simulations of complex systems from already existing simulation components remains a challenging issue. Motivations for composable simulation include generation of a given federation driven by operational requirements provided "on the fly". The High Level Architecture, initially developed for designing fully distributed simulations, can be considered as an interoperability standard for composing simulations from existing components. Requirements for constructing such complex simulations are quite different from those discussed for distributed simulations. Although interoperability and reusability remain essential, both high performance and availability have also to be considered to fulfill the requirements of the end user. ONERA is currently designing a High Performance / High Availability HLA Run-time Infrastructure from its open source implementation of HLA 1.3 specifications. HP-CERTI is a software package including two main components: the first one, SHM-CERTI, provides an optimized version of CERTI based on a shared memory communication scheme; the second one, Kerrighed-CERTI, allows the deployment of CERTI through the control of the Kerrighed Single System Image operating system for clusters, currently designed by IRISA. This paper describes the design of both high performance and availability Runtime Infrastructures, focusing on the architecture of SHM-CERTI. This work is carried out in the context of the COCA (High Performance Distributed Simulation and Models Reuse) Project, sponsored by the DGA/STTC (Délégation Générale pour l'Armement/Service des Stratégies Techniques et des Technologies Communes) of the French Ministry of Defense