Book Review - An Architecture of Parts: Architects, Building Workers and Industrialisation in Britain 1940–1970 by Christine Wall and Architecture and the Welfare State, edited by Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel.

SATCOM Retrodirective Array

We present an in depth look at the challenges involved in using analogue retrodirective arrays for satellite communications. The main technical issues surrounding the development of a retrodirective (self-steering) Satellite Communications (SATCOM) system are given and techniques for mitigating these issues provided. Detailed results are given for a prototype high performance circularly polarized retrodirective array architecture suitable for mounting on an un-stabilized mobile platform. The paper concludes with practical retrodirective L-band array results with the array used to acquire actual broadband satellite data signals from a commercial L-band satellite system. Received satellite signals as low as -130dBm at the antenna elements are tracked. Accurate self-tracking occurs over the azimuth range of up to +/- 40 degrees.

De triomf van de tiran: Triumphi als kritiekmiddel in Romeinse literatuur

Of all the rituals of ancient Rome none was more spectacular than the triumph. Scholarly attention has long been devoted to the origins and circumstances of this ritual, but lately the role of the triumph in moral discourse has also come into focus. Emperors could gain great military prestige from celebrating a triumphus, yet this prestige could (posthumously) be undermined by hostile historians and biographers who used descriptions of triumphal processions to cast unpopular emperors in a negative light. Discussing in particular the ‘bad triumphs’ of Nero, Elagabalus, and Gallienus, but also considering many other cases, this article explores how triumphal descriptions could be employed as literary weapons. Ancient authors did not hesitate to emphasize, distort, or invent certain aspects of the ritual to suit their purposes. In fact, the triumphal idiom proved such a powerful tool for the delegitimation of emperors that it was even employed to situations which did not constitute triumphal celebrations at all. Hence the cultural elite sought to control the meaning of the ritual and to establish whether emperors counted as benign rulers or tyrants.