Spiritual writings and religious instruction

As soon as a would-be writer picked up the pen in this period, he (or just occasionally she) had to make a far-reaching decision: whether to write in English, Anglo-Norman or Latin. The answer would emerge from the intersection of the text's genre and of the gender, social and religious status of both the writer and the planned audience. Until around 1300, Latin texts would be read almost exclusively by male clerics and vernacular texts by the laity of both sexes and by women religious, though Anglo-Norman texts might be aimed at a slightly higher social class than those in Middle English. But Latin texts might also function as scripts for oral transmission by priests to their parishioners in English, while male clerics did read, and own, texts in French and English as well as Latin. In the fourteenth century, however, `a new, more pragmatic view of the appropriate language' developed. The choice of French or English became `fundamentally a political decision - whether to address the rulers or the ruled. The writers themselves, nearly always clerics, are those with education who are for that reason part of the establishment of power. In composing in English they are addressing the unlearned, sometimes to edify, sometimes to entertain, always to instruct.

New Zealand designs law: The case for reform

This article is about New Zealand designs law, considered in an international and comparative context. It argues that New Zealand designs law is unsustainable and in need of reform. New Zealand is a small jurisdiction with a relatively small manufacturing industry, and New Zealand is a net importer of technology. Yet New Zealand operates a designs regime which is more protective of design than jurisdictions with proportionately much larger manufacturing and design based industries. Designs regimes in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom and Europe are all less protective and more conducive to competition and innovation than the existing New Zealand regime. New Zealand operates a designs law regime which is over-protective, which excessively interferes with healthy competition to the disadvantage of consumers, and which imposes excessive burdens on second-comers and follow-on innovation. New Zealand's designs regime also significantly disadvantages New Zealand designers as compared with non-resident designers, and creates obstacles to exporters. The article reviews the international law framework for designs protection, and the regimes in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom and Europe. It argues that reform of the New Zealand designs regime is now overdue, and reviews the reform proposals and processes that have been undertaken over the last two decades

High velocity clouds in the Galactic All Sky Survey I. Catalogue

We present a catalogue of high-velocity clouds (HVCs) from the Galactic All Sky Survey (GASS) of southern-sky neutral hydrogen, which has 57 mK sensitivity and 1 km/s velocity resolution and was obtained with the Parkes Telescope. Our catalogue has been derived from the stray-radiation corrected second release of GASS. We describe the data and our method of identifying HVCs and analyse the overall properties of the GASS population. We catalogue a total of 1693 HVCs at declinations < 0 deg, including 1111 positive velocity HVCs and 582 negative velocity HVCs. Our catalogue also includes 295 anomalous velocity clouds (AVCs). The cloud line-widths of our HVC population have a median FWHM of ~19 km/s, which is lower than found in previous surveys. The completeness of our catalogue is above 95% based on comparison with the HIPASS catalogue of HVCs, upon which we improve with an order of magnitude in spectral resolution. We find 758 new HVCs and AVCs with no HIPASS counterpart. The GASS catalogue will shed an unprecedented light on the distribution and kinematic structure of southern-sky HVCs, as well as delve further into the cloud populations that make up the anomalous velocity gas of the Milky Way.Comment: 21 pages, 14 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

Telescopes don't make catalogues!

Astronomical instruments make intensity measurements; any precise astronomical experiment ought to involve modeling those measurements. People make catalogues, but because a catalogue requires hard decisions about calibration and detection, no catalogue can contain all of the information in the raw pixels relevant to most scientific investigations. Here we advocate making catalogue-like data outputs that permit investigators to test hypotheses with almost the power of the original image pixels. The key is to provide users with approximations to likelihood tests against the raw image pixels. We advocate three options, in order of increasing difficulty: The first is to define catalogue entries and associated uncertainties such that the catalogue contains the parameters of an approximate description of the image-level likelihood function. The second is to produce a K-catalogue sampling in "catalogue space" that samples a posterior probability distribution of catalogues given the data. The third is to expose a web service or equivalent that can re-compute on demand the full image-level likelihood for any user-supplied catalogue.Comment: presented at ELSA 2010: Gaia, at the frontiers of astrometr

Proper identification of RR Lyrae Stars brighter than 12.5 mag

RR Lyrae stars are of great importance for investigations of Galactic structure. However, a complete compendium of all RR-Lyraes in the solar neighbourhood with accurate classifications and coordinates does not exist to this day. Here we present a catalogue of 561 local RR-Lyrae stars V_max less equal 12.5 mag according to the magnitudes given in the Combined General Catalogue of Variable Stars (GCVS) and 16 fainter ones. The Tycho2 catalogue contains about 100 RR Lyr stars. However, many objects have inaccurate coordinates in the GCVS, the primary source of variable star information, so that a reliable cross-identification is difficult. We identified RR Lyrae from both catalogues based on an intensive literature search. In dubious cases we carried out photometry of fields to identify the variable. Mennessier and Colome (2002) have published a paper with Tyc2-GCVS identifications, but we found that many of their identifications are wrong. Keywords: astrometry -- Stars: RR Lyrae stars -- Catalogues: Tycho-2 catalogue -- Catalogues: The HST Guide Star Catalogue, Version 1.2 -- Catalogues: Combined General Catalogue of Variable StarsComment: 5 pages with 2 figures; A and A accepted Online-Data are available under http://www.astro.uni-bonn.de/~gmaint

A new catalogue of ISM content of normal galaxies

We have compiled a catalogue of the gas content for a sample of 1916 galaxies, considered to be a fair representation of `normality'. The definition of 'normal' galaxy adopted in this work implies that we have purposely excluded from the catalogue galaxies having distorted morphology (such as interaction bridges, tails or lopsidedness) and/or any signature of peculiar kinematics (such as polar rings, counterrotating disks or other decoupled components). In contrast, we have included systems hosting active galactic nuclei (AGN) in the catalogue. This catalogue revises previous compendia on the ISM content of galaxies, and compiles data available in the literature from several small samples of galaxies. Masses for warm dust, atomic and molecular gas, as well as X-ray luminosities have been converted to a uniform distance scale taken from the Catalogue of Principal Galaxies (PGC). We have used two different normalization factors to explore the variation of the gas content along the Hubble sequence: the blue luminosity and the square of linear diameter. Our catalogue significantly improves the statistics of previous reference catalogues and can be used in future studies to define a template ISM content for 'normal' galaxies along the Hubble sequence. The catalogue can be accessed on-line at http://dipastro.pd.astro.it/galletta/ismcat/Comment: 12 pages. 4 figures, 6 tables - A&A accepte

Three editions of the Star Catalogue of Tycho Brahe

Tycho Brahe completed his catalogue with the positions and magnitudes of 1004 fixed stars in 1598. This catalogue circulated in manuscript form. Brahe edited a shorter version with 777 stars, printed in 1602, and Kepler edited the full catalogue of 1004 stars, printed in 1627. We provide machine-readable versions of the three versions of the catalogue, describe the differences between them and briefly discuss their accuracy on the basis of comparison with modern data from the Hipparcos Catalogue. We also compare our results with earlier analyses by Dreyer (1916) and Rawlins (1993), finding good overall agreement. The magnitudes given by Brahe correlate well with modern values, his longitudes and latitudes have error distributions with widths of about 2 arcmin, with excess numbers of stars with larger errors (as compared to Gaussian distributions), in particular for the faintest stars. Errors in positions larger than 10 arcmin, which comprise about 15 per cent of the entries, are likely due to computing or copying errors.Comment: Accepted by Astronomy and Astrophysics; 24 pages; 63 figures; 3 machine readable tables made available at CD

Multi-frequency VLBA observations of compact sources from the Peacock & Wall catalogue

VLBA observations are presented for 6 compact radio sources selected from the Peacock & Wall catalogue. From the new morphological and spectral information 2 objects that in the Peacock and Wall catalogue are flat spectrum (alpha < 0.5) sources, appear to be double sided objects with linear sizes of the order of one kpc. Three are core-jet sources and the last one is still an ``enigmatic'' object. These data complete the sample of small double compact sources in the Peacock & Wall catalogue and the complete list is given.Comment: 11 pages, 14 figures, aa.cls Accepted by A&

A catalogue of aphid parasitoids (Hymenoptera: Braconidae: Aphidiinae) from India

A catalogue of aphidiine parasitoids (Hymenoptera: Braconidae: Aphidiinae) associated with various aphids species occurring in India was compiled. The present catalogue with 125 species under 22 genera has been further reinforced with not only all the latest taxonomic changes but also host names, host plants, distribution in India etc