This report takes as its subject the Anglo-Saxon text of The Wonders of the East, a medieval liber monstrum which appears in three English manuscripts from the 11th and 12th centuries. It argues that Wonders is a uniquely English text, and that the use of the vernacular is an attempt to spread and validate English usage across various literary and scientific forms. The first section examines briefly the relationships between the three manuscripts, then turns to one in particular, British Library MS Cotton Tiberius B.v., for the remainder of the study. This first section will also detail the contents of each of the three manuscripts, and the various thematic and linguistic connections between them. The second section turns to the text and illustrations of Wonders, and will consider the use and significance of distinctly “English” vocabulary in describing foreign monsters. It will show that the use of vernacular neologisms to describe foreign spaces and monstrous creatures is an attempt to explore the potential uses of English, and was inspired by a political and cultural environment which encouraged the use of the vernacular in an attempt to grow a national identity. The third section examines a brief passage describing the wondrous creatures known as the donestre, and will show examine the anxieties revealed in the naming and renaming of these creatures. It then explores the relationship between the visual representation and textual description of the donestre, and the implications of the discrepancies therein, to our understanding of the text. The fourth section reads The Wonders of the East as a map. First, it unpacks the myriad potential meanings held within the medieval map; then, it examines the structural and thematic concerns of the text, and the ways in which those concerns work to literally map English onto the Eastern world. My final section considers the implications of my reading of Wonders. It shows that this reading, by acknowledging for the first time, the distinct “Englishness” of the text, opens up Wonders to further study from a number of theoretical and disciplinary viewpoint. / text

This thesis gives a functorial interpretation of the Naive Space of Maps Nd as a parametrizing space for a family of maps from certain rational curves to P¹. / text

Over the past six decades, hope has been identified by researchers and philosophers as a complex yet crucial element of health and well-being. Studies have investigated hope in various medical contexts as well as academic and sports settings, most commonly by measuring hopefulness of patients and athletes. Rarely has hope been investigated to understand participants’ lived experiences and perceptions of hope. In America, the healthcare and education industries are facing shortages and high turnover of nurses and teachers, two groups who are expected to nurture hope in others. If hope supports wellness in patients and performance in athletes, might it influence satisfaction in nurses and teachers? To examine this question and understand what hope means to nurses and teachers, Interactive Qualitative Analysis was utilized to produce grounded theories of hope and, hope and the workplace. Through focus groups with each constituency (nurses, teachers), the elements that compose hope were identified, then the elements that interact with hope in the workplace were identified. Interviews with nine nurses and ten teachers were conducted to determine how these elements relate in perceptual systems of cause-effect relationships. A systems representation of hope was developed through the creation and analysis of conceptual mind maps. The resulting theory indicates that hope is composed of faith, relationships, expressions of hope, optimism about the future, and realistic anticipation. Hope is much more than wishful thinking or having the ability to set and achieve goals. This research demonstrates that hope is a multidimensional construct, a system whose elements are perceived and ordered differently by individuals depending on their life experiences and context. A systems representation also was developed to illustrate hope and the workplace through creation and analysis of conceptual mind maps. The resulting theory indicates that eight elements interact with (influence and/or are influenced by) hope in the context of the workplace: spirituality, relationships, resources, organizational structure/system, attitude toward clients, actions for clients, client outcomes, and personal outcomes. This research demonstrates that hope does influence job satisfaction for nurses and teachers. / text

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Stickiness is a ubiquitous property of dynamical systems. However, recognizing whether an orbit is temporarily `stuck' (and therefore very nearly quasiperiodic) is hard to detect. Outlined in this thesis is an approach to quantifying stickiness in area-preserving maps based on a tool called recurrence plots that is not very commonly used. With the analyses presented herein it is shown that recurrence plot methods can give very close estimates to stickiness exponents that were previously calculated using Poincare recurrence and other methods. To capture the dynamics, RP methods require shorter data series than more conventional methods and are able to represent a more-global analysis of recurrence. A description of stickiness of the standard map for a wide array of parameter strengths is presented and a start at analyzing the standard nontwist map is presented. / text

We investigate the number of periodic points of certain discrete quadratic maps modulo prime numbers. We do so by first exploring previously known results for two particular quadratic maps, after which we explain why the methods used in these two cases are hard to adapt to a more general case. We then perform experiments and find striking patterns in the behaviour of these general cases which suggest that, apart from the two special cases, the number of periodic points of all quadratic maps of this type behave the same. Finally we formulate a conjecture to this effect.

In this work we focus on building local maps to enable wheeled mobile robots to navigate safely and autonomously in urban environments. Urban environments present a variety of hazards that mobile robots have to detect and represent in their maps to navigate safely. Examples of hazards include obstacles such as furniture, drop-offs such as at downward stairs, and inclined surfaces such as wheelchair ramps. We address two shortcomings perceived in the literature on mapping. The first is the extensive use of expensive laser-based sensors for mapping, and the second is the focus on only detecting obstacles when clearly other hazards such as drop-offs need to be detected to ensure safety. Therefore, in this work we develop algorithms for building maps using only relatively inexpensive stereo cameras, that allow safe local navigation by detecting and modeling hazards such as overhangs, drop-offs, and ramps in addition to static obstacles. The hazards are represented using 2D annotated grid maps called local safety maps. Each cell in the map is annotated with one of several labels: Level, Inclined, Non-ground, or, Unknown. Level cells are safe for travel whereas Inclined cells require caution. Non-ground cells are unsafe for travel and represent obstacles, overhangs, or regions lower than safe ground. Level and Inclined cells can be further annotated as being Drop-off Edges. The process of building safety maps consists of three main steps: (i) computing a stereo depth map; (ii) building a 3D model using the stereo depths; and, (iii) analyzing the 3D model for safety to construct the safety map. We make significant contributions to each of the three steps: we develop global stereo methods for computing disparity maps that use edge and color information; we introduce a probabilistic data association method for building 3D models using stereo range points; and we devise a novel method for segmenting and fitting planes to 3D models allowing for a precise safety analysis. In addition, we also develop a stand-alone method for detecting drop-offs in front of the robot that uses motion and occlusion cues and only relies on monocular images. We introduce an evaluation framework for evaluating (and comparing) our algorithms on real world data sets, collected by driving a robot in various environments. Accuracy is measured by comparing the constructed safety maps against ground truth safety maps and computing error rates. The ground truth maps are obtained by manually annotating maps built using laser data. As part of the framework we also estimate latencies introduced by our algorithms and the accuracy of the plane fitting process. We believe this framework can be used for comparing the performance of a variety of vision-based mapping systems and for this purpose we make our datasets, ground truth maps, and evaluation code publicly available. We also implement a real-time version of one of the safety map algorithms on a wheelchair robot and demonstrate it working in various environments. The constructed safety maps allow safe local motion planning and also support the extraction of local topological structures that can be used to build global maps. / text

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published_or_final_version / Computer Science and Information Systems / Master / Master of Philosophy

No description available.