Hierarchical World Research Articles

Becoming incrementally reactive: on-line learning of an evolving decision tree array for robot navigation

This paper proposes a novel hierarchical multi-layer decision tree for representing reactive robot navigation knowledge. In this representation, the perception space is decomposed into a hierarchical set of worlds reflecting environments which are homogeneous in nature and which vary in complexity in an ordered manner. Each world is used to produce a corresponding decision tree which is trained incrementally. The instantaneous perception of the robot is used to select an appropriate rule from the decision tree and a sequence of rule activations form the complete trajectory. The ability to keep the knowledge complexity manageable and under control is an important aspect of the technique.

A separate Canaan: the making of an Afro-Moravian world in North Carolina, 1763-1840

A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763-1840. By Jon F. Sensbach. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Pp. xxiii, 342. Illustrations. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $17.95.) In 1769, Moravians of Wachovia, North Carolina, struggled to make crucial decision that would forever change their history. Because of their growing need for labor, some of Brethren, as they were known, wanted to buy an African slave named Sam, but others worried that slavery would undermine their Christian communal ethic. Torn between their desire for economic success and their fear of religious decline, Moravians eventually relied on their standard method of determining God's will: lot. After drawing positive answer, they rejoiced that the Lord himself had given his blessing to slavery in Wachovia (65). By 1802, they owned 73 slaves, and by 1830, they owned 350 (117, 273). In this book, Jon F. Sensbach tells tragic story of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Moravians and Africans whom they enslaved. In beginning, according to Sensbach, Moravians treated their slaves relatively well, especially those who converted to Christian faith. For example, when Sam, their very first slave, joined Moravians' fellowship, they addressed him as Brother, seated him in same section with white men, and allowed him to participate in such intimate rituals as kiss of peace. Outside of church, they allowed him and other slaves to supervise white labor. Shaped by hierarchical world of eighteenth-century America, they never questioned justice of his enslavement, but they clearly recognized his humanity. Despite his race, they saw him as true Christian who deserved to be treated with dignity and respect. As Sensbach argues, however, this relatively egalitarian world collapsed in decades after Revolutionary War. Ironically, many Afro-Moravians hoped Revolution would lead to their liberation, but instead, they found their freedoms increasingly curtailed as white Americans defined limits as well as benefits of citizenship. According to Thomas Jefferson and other prominent leaders, republican ideology applied only to white men, not to ignorant slaves (185). Even more painfully, Afro-Moravians were also increasingly marginalized by their own religious community. As Sensbach argues, Moravians who came of age in early 1800s were so enthralled by their economic success that they forgot their parents' stern religious commitments. Unfortunately old ethic of fraternalism was undercut by rising individualism (188), an emerging capitalist order (191), and a growing secularization of Moravian society (252). In shocking reversal of their earlier history, nineteenth-century Moravians forced their black brothers and sisters to sit in segregated pews, refused to greet them with intimate kiss of peace, and even buried them in graveyards. Rather than admitting them into their own congregations, they eventually created black church for them-a church they actively tried to control. In this separate canaan, Afro-Moravians rejected racism of white Christianity, forging new, collective identity that set them apart from their white masters (270). Since there have been very few studies of either German immigrants or Moravians, many American historians will welcome this book. Built on rich documentary evidence, including ministers' diaries, church records, and personal memoirs, it offers fascinating glimpse of eighteenth- as well as nineteenth-century slavery. Few other books offer such comprehensive narrative of how slavery changed in hundred years before Civil War. Unfortunately, however, Sensbach does not always use his evidence as creatively as one might wish. …

Using a Flat Structure in a Hierarchical World: The Development of English Standards

n November 17, 1992, a few days after Bill Clinton was elected president, a pulse of great expectation and good will beat steadily among the leaders of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). That huge professional association had just elected a new Executive Committee (EC), which looked forward to the challenge of engaging in significant decision making over the two-year term that lay ahead. At the EC's first meeting, it was apparent that developing the Standards Project for English Language Arts would be the dominant task of their tenure. Both NCTE's executive director, Miles Myers, and its new president, Jesse Perry, seemed perfectly suited to provide the drive and direction that such an overwhelming task would require. Myers had been one of the original leaders of the National Writing Project, so he was a strong believer in action groups for teachers; he was also a man of endless energy and powerful vision. Perry, a person of great personal charm and strength and the first African American male leader of NCTE, wanted to accomplish something extraordinary. The views of most NCTE EC members at the time were well known. They held clear-cut biases against monolithic structures, bubble tests, and top-down operations; registered a strong demand for equity and access in standard settings; and feared being co-opted by educational enterprises that might overwhelm them or somehow dirty their hands. For the leadership of NCTE, however, work on this sizable project had an appeal that overcame those fears. The project was systemic and huge; it could shape the future of English teaching if done well; it was richly funded by the U. S. Department of Education. The question that hovered above the decision to go forward with the project was one of process as much as product. NCTE's leadership accusingly attributed the success of the math Standards to excellent PR work

The Image Directory, Electronic Publishing, and the Changing Socio-Economic Position of Art Museums

The opportunities afforded by the Internet and online commerce are molding a traditional union catalog project into a publication that, before they became widely available, could not have been conceived. The project, the Image Directory, is creating new alliances between the editorial, production, and marketing departments of Academic Press. It is encouraging image owners, who are providing data for the catalog, to enter into the electronic publishing medium either for the first time or beyond theft own Web pages or CD-ROM productions. Finally, it is also holding out the potential for scholarly benefits, not only to the image owners, but also to students, researchers, and professionals interested in arts images. Whilst the concept of creating a union catalog of information about arts images is not new, without the capabilities offered by electronic publishing the project could not come into existence. Electronic publishing has introduced two significant ingredients to the art museum community that are making this project work. The first is the potential that it offers for the management of image collections. In the era when information about images and art objects was recorded on cards, museums created idiosyncratic vocabularies and formats that were incompatible with those of other museums. Because collections differ and because museums are by nature competitive, vying with each other for unique objects, there were few incentives to combine data. Collections management software and the introduction of standardized vocabularies and controls, such as the Getty' s Art and Architecture Thesaurus, have provided the tools for significant inventory projects.The second is the fear of losing control of data that electronic publishing creates among curators and trustees. With the diminishment of grants and federal funding, museums are coming under increasing pressure to generate revenue. Looking for ways to generate revenue from their assets, they host block-buster exhibitions, sell coffee cups with paintings printed on them, and market themselves in ways that are succeeding in increasing attendance numbers. But electronic publishing and, in particular, the World Wide Web, offer pirates the opportunity to steal high resolution images, violating copyright rules and depriving museums of revenue that would naturally come through the sales of reproduction rights. Along with developments in image watermarking and the new envelope-locking technologies, museums need other ways to mark their assets as their own. The Image Directory directly addresses both of these aspects. The project is based on the information that image owners have already created for their collection management databases. Academic Press will add no new data to those records, but will standardize them so that idiosyncrasies among records are bridged but not erased. Scholars will be able to search the world for the location of and information about images and museums will have a central, definitive source in which to publicise their holdings and to list rights and reproductions information. The Image Directory will offer a leveling factor into the hierarchical world of museums, making records from the largest, best endowed museums equally accessible to those of small ones. And it will offer image owners the ability to sell images through the database architecture, potentially opening a new revenue stream for them. The Image Directory is an excellent example of an electronic publishing project crystallizing social and financial trends. There is every possibility that it will not only facilitate new scholarly discoveries, but it will increase the presence of different types of art in mainstream culture.

The divine Word (Kalima) in Shahrastānī's Majlis

This article describes the concept of the divine Word (Kalima) in the Majlis of Shahrastānī, one of the forerunners of the universal history of religions. Shahrastānī combines several elements of Fātimid Ismā'īlisin in his Majlis. With Hasan-i Sabbāh he is one of the first representatives of the Ismā'īlī Nizārī tradition. He brings new elements to this tradition which others will later develop in their philosophy. He exhibits an undeniable influence of Fātimid Ismā'īlī in his teaching on the divine Word. In the hierarchical world of spiritual ascent, there are several divine Words which reveal themselves at various levels. Each of these levels represents the completion of the one before. The divine Word helps the soul to overcome the obstacles to its spiritual journey and acts as a catalyst which speeds up the ascent to God.

Does Foreign Capital Harm Poor Nations? New Estimates Based on Dixon and Boswell's Measures of Capital Penetration

L'A. s'efforce de mesurer l'impact economique de la penetration du capital et de l'investissement etranger sur l'economie des pays en voie de developpement. Il examine et critique le mode d'evaluation de la production propose par W. J. Dixon et T. Boswell. Il estime qu'il convient de distinguer investissement local et investissement etranger. Il presente les differents types d'interpretation et etudie un certain nombre de donnees collectees concernant le Panama, la Jamaique, le Liberia, la Guinee et enfin Trinidad et Tobago. Il se demande, d'une part, si l'investissement local et preferable a l'investissement etranger et, d'autre part, si ce dernier appauvrit les pays en voie de developpement. Il s'interroge sur le bien-fonde de la theorie de la dependance

Mobile Robot Navigation in Indoor Environments Using Highways and Off-Roads

In this paper a hierarchical world model is derived that represents a building in terms of storeys, rooms, a set of places defined in each room, and connectors among these. Two types of tracks are defined, black tape lines laid out on the floor (highways), and virtual paths to be followed using dead reckoning (off-roads). A hierarchical path planning strategy is developed having a search time efficiency depending on the building layout.

Cutting Philomela's Tongue: The Cocktail Party's Cure for a Disorderly World

Although readers of T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party (1949) have long noted its connection to his 1940 tract The Idea of Christian Society, none have fully or critically explored the play's social agenda. Like Eliot's earlier treatise, The Cocktail Party presents a hierarchical world view that is alarming in its implications for both class and gender. Occasionally, the play's class implications have disturbed critics. For example, David Jones comments on the "Christian conspiracy" of the play's Guardians; this elite group, who as Jones points out "set themselves apart," manipulate rather than aid, dictate rather than discuss. However, the implications of the play 's violence against women have never been examined.

The meaning of alley housing in industrial towns: examples from late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Pennsylvania

During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, alley houses were an important feature in the housing landscape of many industrial cities and towns. In general, social reformers and politicians viewed this landscape negatively, but alley houses carried a different meaning for their inhabitants, and those who made income from them. An alley survey made of almost six hundred Pennsylvania communities and a more detailed analysis of the social-spatial structure of Mount Carmel, Vandergrift Borough and Vandergrift Heights suggest that alley houses were a private and small-scale housing response to rapid industrial expansion and population growth. Most likely to appear in atomised property markets where space was at a premium and larger property interests were slow to open up new residential housing tracts for immigrants and young families, alley houses represented labour's response to the demand for shelter. Alley housing thus hints of organic, informal answers to everyday problems in the midst of controlled and hierarchical worlds.

Self‐organization of/in hierarchically structured systems

AbstractScalar hierarchies represent the structure of the world of matter in motion, the overall extensive system. Subsystems within this undergo changes that can be dichotomized into development and evolution (individuation). At a higher scalar level these modes of change are united under the rubric ‘self‐organization’. Development finds a very general, indeed, lawful description in non‐equilibrium thermodynamics discourse. Subsystems in the scalar hierarchical world are all dissipative structures. In their development at least living dissipative structures traverse a specification hierarchy of increasingly intensive being. At a higher temporal scalar level, developing dissipative structures form ontogenetic trajectories, the seat of self‐organization. At these higher scalar levels ontogenetic trajectories multiply to fill space as the dissipative structures that make them up access more and more geographical coordinates in a thrust outward toward what can be called a virtual thermodynamic equilibrium.

The hierarchical expansion of sorting and selection: sorting and selection cannot be equated

In a nonhierarchical world, where selection on organisms regulated all nonrandom evolutionary change, the traditional equation of selection (a cause of sorting) with sorting itself (differential birth and death among varying organisms within a population) would rarely lead to error, even though the phenomena are logically distinct (for sorting is a simple description of differential “success,” and selection a causal process). But in a hierarchical world, with entities acting as evolutionary individuals (genes, organisms, and species among them) at several levels of ascending inclusion, sorting among entities at one level has a great range of potential causes. Direct selection upon entities themselves is but one possibility among many. This paper discusses why hierarchy demands that sorting and selection be disentangled. It then presents and illustrates an expanded taxonomy of sorting for a hierarchical world. For each of three levels (genes, organisms, and species), we show how sorting can arise from selection at the focal level itself, and as a consequence either of downward causation from processes acting on individuals at higher levels or upward causation from lower levels. We then discuss how hierarchy might illuminate a range of evolutionary questions based on both the logical structure of hierarchy and the historical pathways of its construction—for hierarchy is a property of nature, not only a conceptual scheme for organization.

A Georgian Richard III

Clown, whose role in the original Othello is so minimal that he is rarely noticed, appeared here both as a kind of link between the scenes and as a utility performer who briefly assumed the roles of Brabantio, the Duke, Roderigo, and Montano in skeletal scenes which were necessary for the progression of the plot. The result was like a chamber version of Othello, the orchestration gone and all the themes carried by individual instruments. The effect of this method was instructive. What emerged was a play which focuses solely on the sexual themes; its atmosphere was humid and intense, rather claustrophobic. Yet in a way the action-already precariously laden with improbability and intrigue in the original-became incredible. Without the panoply of state and miltary affairs as a context, Othello's stature, his authority and appeal, became tenuous; Iago's jealousy of Cassio's rank lacked relevance; and Cassio's disgrace lost its significance. A rather more subtle effect resulted from the fact that, with the Fool left aside, the women characters equaled the men in number. Here, with the focus as it was on the sexual relationships, the fact that all the women were savagely mistreated by their men became the emotional center of the play. Yet the women no longer appeared as a few powerless hostages in a world which was overwhelmingly masculine and patriarchal, as in Shakespeare's original; in Othello og Narren, it became incomprehensible that women should put up with the treatment they receive. This effect was reinforced by giving the roles of such authority figures as Brabantio and the Duke to the Fool, who was played by Leif Jacobsen with a characterization that seemed indebted to that of title characters in Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. An aging, epicene figure, the Fool was presented as frantic and largely ridiculous in his attempts to measure up to the various roles imposed upon him, generally at the directive of Iago. This presentation made ludicrous the heavily hierarchical and power-conscious world of Venice and the army as it was sketched in. Othello og Narren was something of a one-man show. Kjell Stormoen, who was at the time the managing director of the Trondelag Teater (in keeping with the usual Norwegian practice of having theatres managed by leading players who continue to perform and direct during their term of office), designed the decor and took the role of Othello. The direction, however, was turned over to the American-Swedish director and choreographer Donya Feuer. The production, designed to tour towns and villages in the provinces, used a minimum of scenery-one central slab serving as bed, bench, and platform. Some of the audience sat directly on the playing area, as did the prompter, whose services were unfortunately much in demand in the performance I saw.