The purpose of this essay is to explore how different means are used to create indeterminate meaning in Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw. It suggests that the indeterminacy creates gaps in the text which the reader is required to fill in during the reading process, and that this indeterminacy is achieved chiefly through the use of an unreliable narrator and of ambiguity in the way the narrator relates the events that take place. The reliability of the narrator is called into question by her personal qualities as well as by narrative factors. Personal qualities that undermine the narrator’s reliability are youth, inexperience, nervousness, excitability and vanity. Narrative factors that damage the narrator’s reliability concern the story as manuscript, the narrator’s role in the story she narrates, and her line of argumentation. The ambiguity in the way events are reported is produced by ambiguous words, dismissed propositions and omissions. The essay demonstrates how the unreliable narrator and the ambiguity combine to make the reader question the narrator’s account and supply his or her own interpretation of key elements in the story, that is, how they invite the reader to “co-author” the text.

In making the point that no story is complete, O'Hagan undermines to varying degrees several dominant and interconnected Western ideologies: idealism, Christianity, patriarchy, class and capitalism. He also shows how a borrowed indigenous myth can be adapted to immigrant needs in a way that will distinguish Canadian novels from others.

<p>Control systems utilizing wireless sensor and actuator networks can be severely affectedby the properties of the communication links. Radio fading and interferencemay cause communication losses and outages in situations when the radio environmentis noisy and low transmission power is desirable. This thesis proposes amethod to compensate for such unpredictable losses of data in the feedback controlloop by introducing a predictive outage compensator (POC). The POC is a filter tobe implemented at the receiver sides of networked control systems where it generatesartificial samples when data are lost. If the receiver node does not receive thedata, the POC suggests a command based on the history of past data. It is shownhow to design, tune and implement a POC. Theoretical bounds and simulationresults show that a POC can improve the closed-loop control performance undercommunication losses considerably. We provide a deterministic and a stochasticmethod to synthesize POCs. Worst-case performance bounds are given that relatethe closed-loop performance with the complexity of the compensator. We also showthat it is possible to achieve good performance with a low-order implementationbased on Hankel norm approximation. Tradeoffs between achievable performance,communication loss length, and POC order are discussed. The results are illustratedon a simulated example of a multiple-tank process. The thesis is concludedby an experimental validation of wireless control of a physical lab process. Herethe controller and the physical system are separated geographically and interfacedthrough a wireless medium. For the remote control we use a hybrid model predictivecontroller. The results reflect the difficulties in wireless control as well as theyhighlight the flexibility and possibilities one obtains by using wireless instead of awired communication medium.</p> / VR, SSF, VINNOVA via Networked Embedded Control Systems, EU Sixt Framework Program via HYCON and SOCRADES

<p>In a broader sense the main research objective of this thesis (and ongoing research work) is distributed knowledge management for mobile dynamic systems. But the primary focus and presented work focuses on communication/interoperability of heterogeneous entities in an infrastructure less paradigm, a distributed resource manipulation infrastructure and distributed learning in the absence of global knowledge. The research objectives achieved discover the design aspects of heterogeneous distributed knowledge systems towards establishing a seamless integration. This thesis doesn’t cover all aspects in this work; rather focuses on interoperability and distributed learning.</p><p>Firstly a discussion on the issues in knowledge management for swarm of heterogeneous entities is presented. This is done in a broader and rather abstract fashion to provide an insight of motivation for interoperability and distributed learning towards knowledge management. Moreover this will also serve the reader to understand the ongoing work and research activities in much broader perspective.</p><p>Primary focus of this thesis is communication/interoperability of heterogeneous entities in an infrastructure less paradigm, a distributed resource manipulation infrastructure and distributed learning in the absence of global knowledge. In dynamic environments for mobile autonomous systems such as robot swarms or mobile software agents there is a need for autonomic publishing and discovery of resources and just-in-time integration for on-the-fly service consumption without any a priori knowledge. SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) serves the purpose of resource reuse and sharing of services different entities. Web services (a SOA manifestation) achieves these objectives but its exploitation in dynamic environments, where the communication infrastructure is lacking, requires a considerable research. Generally Web services are exploited in stable client-server paradigms, which is a pressing assumption when dynamic distributed systems are considered. UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration) is the main pediment in the exploitation of Web services in distributed control and dynamic natured systems. UDDI can be considered as a directory for publication and discovery of categorized Web services but assumes a centralized registry; even if distributed registries and associated mechanism are employed problems of collaborative communication in infrastructure less paradigms are ignored.</p><p>Towards interoperability main contribution this thesis is a mediator-based distributed Web services discovery and invocation middleware, which provides a collaborative and decentralized services discovery and management middleware for infrastructure-less mobile dynamic systems with heterogeneous communication capabilities. Heterogeneity of communication capabilities is abstracted in middleware by a conceptual classification of computing entities on the basis of their communication capabilities and communication issues are resolved via conceptual overlay formation for query propagation in system.</p><p>The proposed and developed middleware has not only been evaluated extensively using Player Stage simulator but also been applied in physical robot swarms. Experimental validations analyze the results in different communication modes i. active and ii. passive mode of communication with and without shared resource conflict resolution. I analyze discoverable Web services with respect to time, services available in complete view of cluster and the impact and resultant improvements in distributed Web services discovery by using caching and semantics.</p><p>Second part of this thesis focuses on distributed learning in the absence of global information. This thesis takes the argument of defeasibility (common-sense inference) as the basis of intelligence in human-beings, in which conclusions/inferences are drawn and refuted at the same time as more information becomes available. The ability of common-sense reasoning to adapt to dynamic environments and reasoning with uncertainty in the absence of global information seems to be best fit for distributed learning for dynamic systems.</p><p>This thesis, thus, overviews epistemic cognition in human beings, which motivates the need of a similar epistemic cognitive solution in fabricated systems and considers formal concept analysis as a case for incremental and distributed learning of formal concepts. Thesis also presents a representational schema for underlying logic formalism and formal concepts. An algorithm for incremental learning and its use-case for robotic navigation, in which robots incrementally learn formal concepts and perform common-sense reasoning for their intelligent navigation, is also presented. Moreover elaboration of the logic formalism employed and details of implementation of developed defeasible reasoning engine is given in the latter half of this thesis.</p><p>In summary, the research results and achievements described in this thesis focus on interoperability and distributed learning for heterogeneous distributed knowledge systems which contributes towards establishing a seamless integration in mobile dynamic systems.</p> / QC 20100614 / ROBOSWARM EU FP6

In a confessional, first person narrative, the concept of truth and how it is constructed and perceived is important. Truth in fiction can be created and interpreted in a number of different ways, and when the narrative that portrays it in addition is unreliable and ambiguous, discerning truth becomes a decidedly complex process. This essay interprets the confessional testimony of the narrator in John Banville’s The Book of Evidence, in order to examine the function of these narrative devices and how they affect the understanding of what is true in Banville’s unreliably narrated novel. It does so by following literary theories regarding unreliable narration by Tamar Yacobi and others, as well as theories of truth in fiction as first presented by David Lewis and expanded upon by Ben Levinstein and others. The different types of ambiguity suggested by William Empson are also considered. The novel’s narrative is analyzed specifically in relation to the understanding of how the protagonist eludes to his feelings of guilt and shame. These emotions are chosen for their prevalence in conventional confessions. The essay claims that the narcissistic narrator harbors neither of these feelings pertaining to the crime he has committed, but rather that he admits to being guilty and is ashamed of being caught, and that this is portrayed through the structure of the narrative rather than its content.

We give an architecture of a storage system consisting of a storage medium made of unreliable memory elements and an error correction circuit made of a combination of noisy and noiseless logic gates that is capable of retaining the stored information with the lower probability of error than a storage system with a correction circuit made completely of noiseless logic gates. Our correction circuit is based on the iterative decoding of low-density parity check codes, and uses the positive effect of errors in logic gates to correct errors in memory elements. In the spirit of Marcus Tullius Cicero's Clavus clavo eicitur (one nail drives out another), the proposed storage system operates on the principle: error errore eicitur-one error drives out another. The randomness that is present in the logic gates makes these classes of decoders superior to their noiseless counterparts. Moreover, random perturbations do not require any additional computational resources as they are inherent to unreliable hardware itself. To utilize the benefits of logic gate failures, our correction circuit relies on two key novelties: a mixture of reliable and unreliable gates and decoder rewinding. We present a method based on absorbing Markov chains for the probability of error analysis, and explain how the randomness in the variable and check node update function helps a decoder to escape to local minima associated with trapping sets.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka om doktor Glas i Hjalmar Söderbergs roman med samma namn är en opålitlig berättare. Detta görs genom att undersöka varför, hur och vad han skriver. Metoden är att först definiera dagboksromanen, och sedan analysera pålitlighet genom användandet av främst James Phelans narratologi, i samband med Vera Nünning och Uri Margolin. Analysen visar att Glas rapporterar händelser korrekt och gör det han säger att han ska göra, men han är oärlig om sina tankar, känslor och motivationer. Glas opålitlighet som berättare visar sig främst i att hans tolkningar och utvärderingar av situationer och personer inte alltid är riktiga eller rimliga.

TITLE: Transfer of Germans from Broumov district AUTHOR: Jitka Bartošková DEPARTMENT: History and History Didactics Department SUPERVISOR: doc. Ph.Dr. Alena Míšková, Ph.D. ABSTRACT: The present work studies a displacement process of German inhabitans from a former district Broumov in East Bohemia. Until 1946 Germans predominated in this place and Czechs represented the largest national minority there. Attention is focused on transfer in 1945 and 1946. In 1945 it took place on Czechoslovakian representatives' initiative and it was accompanied by many acts of violence. In the next year it was organized in agreement with international conventions, it was effected in more orderly manner and it had larger character. The utter most of German inhabitants was displaced from district Broumov at that time. Transfer was carried out by local authorities of state administration and police together with soldiers of Czechoslovakian army. Therefore attention is focused on conditions in this institutions, too. Official dokuments and reports resulted of its activity are the main source of this work. KEYWORDS: Transfer, Displacement, Expulsion, Politically unreliable people,

In this thesis, we consider the trajectory planning of an autonomous vehicle to cross an intersection within a given time interval. The vehicle communicates its sensordata to a central coordinator which then computes the trajectory for the given time horizon and sends it back to the vehicle. We consider a realistic scenario in which the communication links are unreliable, the evolution of the state has noise (e.g., due to the model simplification and environmental disturbances), and the observationis noisy (e.g., due to noisy sensing and/or delayed information). The intersection crossing is modeled as a chance constraint problem and the stochastic noise evolution is restricted by a terminal constraint. The communication impairments are modeled as packet drop probabilities and Kalman estimation techniques are used for predicting the states in the presence of state and observation noises. A robust sub-optimalsolution is obtained using convex optimization methods which ensures that the intersection is crossed by the vehicle in the given time interval with very low chance of failure.

This paper presents a model and analysis of a synchronous tandem flow line that produces different part types on unreliable machines. The machines operate according to a static priority rule, operating on the highest priority part whenever possible, and operating on lower priority parts only when unable to produce those with higher priorities. We develop a new decomposition method to analyze the behavior of the manufacturing system by decomposing the long production line into small analytically tractable components. As a first step in modeling a production line with more than one part type, we restrict ourselves to the case where there are two part types. Detailed modeling and derivations are presented with a small two-part-type production line that consists of two processing machines and two demand machines. Then, a generalized longer flow line is analyzed. Furthermore, estimates for performance measures, such as average buffer levels and production rates, are presented and compared to extensive discrete event simulation. The quantitative behavior of the two-part type processing line under different demand scenarios is also provided. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)