The Bondi-Metzner-Sachs-van der Burg (BMS) group is the asymptotic symmetry group of radiating asymptotically flat spacetimes. It has recently received renewed interest in the context of the flat holography and the infrared structure of gravity. In this thesis, we investigate the consequences of considering extensions of the BMS group in four dimensions with superrotations. In particular, we apply the covariant phase space methods on a class of first order gauge theories that includes the Cartan formulation of general relativity and specify this analysis to gravity in asymptotically flat spacetime. Furthermore, we renormalize the symplectic structure at null infinity to obtain the generalized BMS charge algebra associated with smooth superrotations. We then study the vacuum structure of the gravitational field, which allows us to relate the so-called superboost transformations to the velocity kick/refraction memory effect. Afterward, we propose a new set of boundary conditions in asymptotically locally (A)dS spacetime that leads to a version of the BMS group in the presence of a non-vanishing cosmological constant, called the Λ-BMS asymptotic symmetry group. Using the holographic renormalization procedure and a diffeomorphism between Bondi and Fefferman-Graham gauges, we construct the phase space of Λ-BMS and show that it reduces to the one of the generalized BMS group in the flat limit. / Doctorat en Sciences / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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Kwok Sze-Ki. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 131-138). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / 摘要 --- p.iii / Acknowledgements --- p.v / Introduction The Genre of Detective Thriller --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter One --- The Figure in the Carpet: Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd --- p.33 / Chapter Chapter Two --- """Thrillers are like life´ؤmore like life than you are"": Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear" --- p.68 / Chapter Chapter Three --- "Cultural and Metaphysical Mysteries: Paul Bowles's ""The Eye"" and Jorge Luis Borges's ""The Garden of Forking Paths""" --- p.99 / Concluding Remarks --- p.127 / Bibliography --- p.131

The present research paper deals with the comparison of static and dynamic data structures: static array, dynamic array, pointers array - class TList (Delphi) and dynamic doubly linked list, created with the help of recursive record.To compare the above mentioned structures, sorting (Bubble) and convex hull creation algorithms (Graham, Endrew) are realized, with the time of their implementation analysed. The algorithm of sorting (Bubble) is realized by four ways: static array, dynamic array, pointers array (class TList) and a dynamic doubly linked list, created with the help of recursive record.The algorithms of convex hull creation (Graham, Endrew) is realized by three ways: static array, dynamic array and pointers array (TList).The research paper also describes the pointers array class TList (Delphi), its properties and methods. The sorting method Sort of this class is compared with the sorting method of a “Bubble”. Using class templates, a universal class MList (C++) was created for work with dynamic linear linked lists.

“‘Oh, Awful Power’: Energy and Modernity in African American Literature” analyzes the social and cultural meaning of energy through an examination of African American literature from the first half of the twentieth century—the era of both King Coal and Jim Crow. Situating African Americans as both makers and subjects of the history of modern energy, I argue that black writers from this period understood energy as a material substrate which moves continually across boundaries of body, space, machine, and state. Reconsidering the surface of metaphor which has masked the significant material presence of energy in African American literature--the ubiquity of the racialized descriptor of “coal-black” skin, to take one example—I show how black writers have theorized energy as a simultaneously material, social, and cultural web, at once a medium of control and a conduit for emancipation. African American literature emphasizes how intensely energy impacts not only those who come into contact with its material instantiation as fuel—convict miners, building superintendents—but also those at something of a physical remove, through the more ambient experiences of heat, landscape, and light. By attending to a variety of experiences of energy and the nuances of their literary depiction, “‘Oh, Awful Power’” shows how twentieth-century African American literature not only anticipates some of the later insights of the field now referred to as the Energy Humanities but also illustrates some ways of rethinking the limits of that discourse on interactions between energy, labor, and modernity, especially as they relate to problems of race. These insights are made especially visible, I argue, by way of experiments with literary form, particularly through play with the expectations, limitations, and affordances of genre. I identify three particular generic formations which prove vital to the African American theorization of modern energy: the picturesque, tragedy, and naturalism. In my first chapter, I examine a 1986 novel by West Virginia-born novelist and politician J. McHenry Jones, entitled Hearts of Gold, which features the rare portrayal of black life in a convict coal mine at its narrative core. The feverish episode in the mine stands out against the otherwise genteel narrative of light-skinned striving and respectability, which aligns closely with Washingtonian ideologies of progress and the aesthetic sensibilities of the picturesque. In this depiction of the convict mine, Jones both poses a challenge to the social and political ideologies which subtend the picturesque, and draws a novel link between the rise of coal and the persistence of slavery in the form of the convict lease system. Chapter two extends Jones’ critique of the racial politics of coal mining through an examination of Shirley Graham’s Dust to Earth, a play briefly produced in 1941 which depicts the interracial conflicts that arise after a deadly collapse at a coal mine in Illinois. I argue that the play represents the fulfillment of Graham’s earlier project of rewriting Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape for an all-black cast—a project that O’Neill himself swiftly vetoed. Examining Dust to Earth’s intertwined plots of descent and sabotage, I show how the play exploits the generic conventions of tragedy in order to reconfigure familiar narratives of racial domination to fit the distinctly modern space of the coal mine. My third chapter reads the presence of two relatively “minor” forms of energy—hydroelectricity and solar power—in two novels by George Schuyler and W.E.B. Du Bois, Dark Princess (1928) and Black Empire (193638). In each of these texts, energy is written into the narrative as a powerful force, capable of affecting social and political life on a global scale. I argue that Du Bois’ romance is better understood as an experiment in naturalism, and that through conceiving of the body as a “human motor” Du Bois is able to form a critique of progressive era hydroelectric projects as aspects of an international war for colonial control. For Schuyler, on the other hand, solar power is figured as a potentially revolutionary form of energy that, despite its roots in a recent history of imperial expansion, nonetheless carries some promise once wrested from the control of the nation-state. In my final chapter, I interpret Ann Petry’s 1946 naturalist novel The Street as a drama of thermal management—a narrative in which the cultural politics of energy are refracted primarily through various characters’ bodily experiences of temperature. I argue that the protagonist’s struggle to maintain homeostasis represents an embodied critique of the often-elided racial politics of domestic heat. Finally, with the literary history of the furnace room as a backdrop, I argue that Petry’s depiction of the space foregrounds its paradoxical status as both a crucible of atavistic degeneration and a fount of humanist inspiration.

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My paper examines how American authors of the South Asian Diaspora (Indian-American or South Asian American) can be read 1) as simply American and 2) without regard to ethnicity. I develop this argument using American authors Jhumpa Lahiri, a first generation American of Bengali-Indian descent, and Bharati Mukherjee, an American of Bengali-Indian origin. I borrow from Deepika Bahri's materialist aesthetics in postcolonialism (in turn borrowed from members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory) and include theoretical insights from Rey Chow, Graham Huggan, and R. Radhakrishnan regarding multiculturalism, identity politics, and diaspora studies. Huggan and Radhakrishnan's insights are especially useful because their work deals with the South Asian diaspora, in England and the United States, respectively. After setting up a theoretical framework, I critique reviews and essays that privilege hyphenated, "Indian," or "South Asian" identity, and the resultant reading paradigm that fixes these authors into an ethnic minority category. I then trace aesthetic and thematic content of short stories from both Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies and Mukherjee's The Middleman and Other Stories to demonstrate how these stories resist this ethno-cultural pigeonholing. My analysis exposes how ethnic and multicultural identity politics supplant aesthetic criticism and transform ethno-cultural identity into an aesthetic object, even if done as a celebration of hybridity or liminality as a putatively liberating space (hyphenated identity as embodying that space). Though my purpose is not to undermine the meaningful artwork and criticism instantiated in or about the "in-between" spaces of American culture, I demonstrate that an over-emphasis on ethnicity and culture (culture "other" than the majority culture in the U.S.) in fact stifles the opening of the American literary canon. Ethnicity and culture become ways of limiting the hermeneutics available to literary criticism because they become the only ways of reading, instead of one lens through which American literature is read.

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Over the last sixty years, voting patterns in the United States have changed dramatically, and this is especially true in the state of Florida. Though there is some literature in the field of political science that outlines the voting and election history of Florida and identifies some trends, this literature is extremely limited and is not comprehensive of the data that is available up to the present day. This study seeks to find Florida’s voting patterns and to explain how they can be understood by both the casual observer and the political scientist. To do so, unique methodology was applied that used the "relative margin" of both a county and a region in a particular election to give the Democratic nominee’s performance context both in the election in question and in history, by comparing the actual margin of victory or defeat of the Democratic nominee to the statewide margin of victory or defeat. This was an illuminating process that ultimately revealed some truths about the election history of Florida: the counties and regions most likely to vote for Democratic nominees in the 1950s and early 1960 are now among the least likely to do so, and the counties and regions most likely to vote for Republican nominees in the 1950s and early 1960s are now considered to be "swing" or "tossup" areas that are regularly and alternatively won by Democratic and Republican nominees. Additionally, the pattern of each region in how it voted in presidential elections was compared to forty seven other states in the country to provide further context as to how the election patterns can be understood in context.

From the first electric lights in London along Pall Mall, and in the Holborn Viaduct in 1878 to the nationalisation of National Grid in 1947, the narrative of the simple ascendency of a new technology over its outdated predecessor is essential to the way we have imagined electric light in London at the end of the nineteenth century. However, as this thesis will demonstrate, the interplay between gas and electric light - two co-existing and competing illuminary technologies - created a particular and peculiar landscape of light, a 'lightscape', setting London apart from its contemporaries throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, this narrative forms the basis of many assertions made in critical discussions of artificial illumination and technology in the late-twentieth century; however, this was not how electric light was understood at the time nor does it capture how electric light both captivated and eluded the imagination of contemporary Londoners. The influence of the electric light in the representations of London is certainly a literary question, as many of those writing during this period of electrification are particularly attentive to the city's rich and diverse lightscape. Though this has yet to be made explicit in existing scholarship, electric lights are the nexus of several important and ongoing discourses in the study of Victorian, Post-Victorian, Modernist, and twentieth-century literature. This thesis will address how the literary influence of the electric light and its relationship with its illuminary predecessors transcends the widespread electrification of London to engage with an imaginary London, providing not only a connection with our past experiences and conceptions of the city, modernity, and technology but also an understanding of what Frank Mort describes as the 'long cultural reach of the nineteenth century into the post-war period'.