'The Arbitrarium' and 'The Universal Key' (short stories)

Short stories

Re-Visiting Sylvia Townsend Warner

Sylvia Townsend Warner was born in 1893 in Harrow and died in Dorset in 1978. Her writing career was both productive and diverse, spanning poems, short stories, novels, music reviews, a biography, translations of Proust, and a guide to Somerset. But this list, impressive as it is, does not do justice to the idiosyncrasy and heterogeneity of her work. While she is well known mostly for the seven novels she published, those works are all radically different in style and content. Indeed, Townsend Warner's singularity has, it could be argued, made it difficult to place her in the various fields and sub-fields of 20th-century literary studies. She shares as many similarities as differences with the high modernists who dominated the literary landscape of the interwar period. Likewise she fits, yet also resists, the more recent formulations of intermodernist and middlebrow scholarship that have attempted to interrogate and expand the horizons of mid-20th century literature.

The RMT method for many-electron atomic systems in intense short-pulse laser light

We describe a new ab initio method for solving the time-dependent Schrödinger equation for multi-electron atomic systems exposed to intense short-pulse laser light. We call the method the R-matrix with time-dependence (RMT) method. Our starting point is a finite-difference numerical integrator (HELIUM), which has proved successful at describing few-electron atoms and atomic ions in strong laser fields with high accuracy. By exploiting the R-matrix division-of-space concept, we bring together a numerical method most appropriate to the multi-electron finite inner region (R-matrix basis set) and a different numerical method most appropriate to the one-electron outer region (finite difference). In order to exploit massively parallel supercomputers efficiently, we time-propagate the wavefunction in both regions by employing Arnoldi methods, originally developed for HELIUM.

Unheard Voices: Stories from the Troubles

Produced in association with WAVE Trauma Centre, this short film records the experiences of six victims and survivors of the Northern Irish Troubles. Filmed and edited collaboratively, UV addresses issues of trauma, loss, justice and recovery. The story-tellers range from a police widow, to the brother of a sectarian victim, to a youth worker who lost is legs in an explosion. This film has been screened, with public discussions, between 2010 and 2012 by the Good Relations Departments of the following Borough and City Councils - Belfast, Derry/Londonderry, Lisburn, Ballymena, Coleraine, Moyle and Newtownabbey. It has also been screened at the Hallwells Contemporary Arts Centre, Buffalo, and at St Bonaventure University, NY (2012)

http://www.wavetraumacentre.org.uk/about-us/wave-projects/unheard-voices

Further Information:

This 30 minute documentary film was produced in collaboration with WAVE Trauma Centre, Belfast. Working closely with six survivors of the Troubles violence in Northern Ireland through all stages of production and exhibition, the film contributes to on-going discussions about dealing with the conflicted past in a contested present. The role of storytelling, identified by two government reports – the Bloomfield Report and the Eames-Bradley Report - as an important method of addressing the violent past, is one of the key research questions involved in the research. Public screenings and discussions have been organised by the Good Relations Departments of seven borough councils (Belfast, Lisburn, Derry, Ballymena, Newtownabbey, Coleraine and Moyle). The film has also been screened in New York State and London. One of the recurring themes brought up in these public discussions in the role and limits of storytelling alongside the legal issues of justice, prosecutions and reparations. An accompanying co-written article with PhD student, Jolene Mairs, 'Unheard Voices' in Mc Keogh, C. and O'Connel, D. (eds) (2012) Documentary in a Changing State,Cork University Press, is part of the portfolio presented for REF.

Designing Short Term Wave Traces to Assess Wave Power Devices

In recent years modern numerical methods have been employed in the design of Wave Energy Converters (WECs), however the high computational costs associated with their use makes it prohibitive to undertake simulations involving statistically relevant numbers of wave cycles. Experimental tests in wave tanks could also be performed more efficiently and economically if short time traces, consisting of only a few wave cycles, could be used to evaluate the hydrodynamic characteristics of a particular device or design modification. Ideally, accurate estimations of device performance could be made utilizing results obtained from investigations with a relatively small number of wave cycles. However the difficulty here is that many WECs, such as the Oscillating Wave Surge Converter (OWSC), exhibit significant non-linearity in their response. Thus it is challenging to make accurate predictions of annual energy yield for a given spectral sea state using short duration realisations of that sea. This is because the non-linear device response to particular phase couplings of sinusoidal components within those time traces might influence the estimate of mean power capture obtained. As a result it is generally accepted that the most appropriate estimate of mean power capture for a sea state be obtained over many hundreds (or thousands) of wave cycles. This ensures that the potential influence of phase locking is negligible in comparison to the predictions made. In this paper, potential methods of providing reasonable estimates of relative variations in device performance using short duration sea states are introduced. The aim of the work is to establish the shortness of sea state required to provide statistically significant estimations of the mean power capture of a particular type of Wave Energy Converter. The results show that carefully selected wave traces can be used to reliably assess variations in power output due to changes in the hydrodynamic design or wave climate.