Spinoza semble adopter une position pleinement nominaliste lorsqu'il discue des notions universelles dans YEthique, mais on y trouve aussi plusieurs arguments ou, semble-t-il, des universaux sont presupposes. La solution avance par plusieurs commentateurs, y compris Haserot, est que le systeme spinoziste est d'inspiration platoniste, et qu'il faut reinterpreter les passages d'apparence nominaliste pour les accorder avec le platonisme ou l'essentialisme. J'argumente qu'un tel procede n'est justify ni par le texte ni par la structure du systeme de Spinoza. L'interpretation du spinozisme que je propose le place dans le cadre logique du nominalisme contemporain, k l'instar du systeme de Nelson Goodman, par exemple.

The Taiwan-America Occultation Survey (TAOS) aims to determine the number of small icy bodies in the outer reach of the Solar System by means of stellar occultation. An array of 4 robotic small (D=0.5 m), wide-field (f/1.9) telescopes have been installed at Lulin Observatory in Taiwan to simultaneously monitor some thousand of stars for such rare occultation events. Because a typical occultation event by a TNO a few km across will last for only a fraction of a second, fast photometry is necessary. A special CCD readout scheme has been devised to allow for stellar photometry taken a few times per second. Effective analysis pipelines have been developed to process stellar light curves and to correlate any possible flux changes among all telescopes. A few billion photometric measurements have been collected since the routine survey began in early 2005. Our preliminary result of a very low detection rate suggests a deficit of small TNOs down to a few km size, consistent with the extrapolation of some recent studies of larger (30–100 km) TNOs.

Single crystals of R1Ba2Cu3O7–8, (R=Y, Eu and Gd), have been irradiated with 0.4–1.0 MeV electrons in directions near the c-axis. An incident threshold electron energy for producing flux pinning defects has been found. In-situ TME studies found no visible defects induced by electron irradiation. This means that point defects or small clusters ( ≤ 20 Å) are responsible for the extra pinning. A consistent interpretation of the data suggests that the most likely pinning defect is the displacement of a Cu atom from the CuO2 planes.