Coordinated Exploration of unknown labyrinthine environments applied to the Pusruite-Evasion problem

International audienceThis paper introduces a multi-robot cooperation approach to solve the "pursuit evasion'' problem for mobile robots that have omni-directional vision sensors in unknown environments. The main characteristic of this approach is based on the robots cooperation by sharing knowledge and making them work as a team: a complete algorithm for computing robots motion strategy is presented as well as the deliberation protocol which distributes the exploration task among the team and takes the best possible outcome from the robots resources

Tax Havens of the British Empire : Development, Policy Responses, and Decolonization, 1961-1979

Despite the centrality of tax havens to the global political economy, up to this point historians have largely neglected in-depth research on the origin of the global phenomenon. Literature within an International Political Economy (IPE) tradition of the social sciences has placed the role of the British Empire at the centre of the formation of a British-based tax haven system within a broader offshore world of global reach. However, this literature does not fully explain how this British system came about with much historical detail. This thesis contributes with one historical assessment of the British administrative tax haven experience as the phenomenon unfolded in a formative stage during the 1960s and 1970s. The study brings together insights from IPE studies with historiographies relevant to the specific historical context and official records from British public archives to examine the central features of the role that the British administration played in tax haven formation in British dependencies. This study’s primary focus is how the British administration allowed tax haven developments to proliferate within British dependencies, a focus that will extend to the responses of sub-institutions of the British state in the context of decolonization. Institutions operating under the authority of the Treasury and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office headed the negotiation of a formal UK tax haven policy established in 1971. The central argument presented in this thesis is that the British tax haven system was not the result of a strategically deployed master plan designed to serve the interests of the metropolitan power as formerly suggested. Rather, it was the end result of a complex process involving ad hoc practices, incoherent management of official policy, and indecision as tax havens developed. This more unstable process reflects a negotiation between the conflicting interests of those working to financially sustain the political independence movements in British dependencies and those working to maintain UK domestic interests. This study re-affirms the importance of semi-sovereignty to tax haven formation as a factor that allowed for an expansion in influence from private interests.Til tross for at skatteparadiser står helt sentralt i global finans og internasjonalt eierskap finnes det lite historisk forskning på fenomenets opprinnelse. En internasjonal politisk økonomi (IPE) tradisjon innenfor samfunnsvitenskapen har plassert det britiske imperiet i sentrum for vekst og spredning av et globalt skatteparadis system. Likevel forklarer IPE-litteraturen i liten grad hvordan dette britiske systemet har blitt til med historiske detaljer. Denne avhandlingen bidrar med en historisk analyse av den britiske sentraladministrasjonens rolle i utvikling og spredning av skatteparadiser i territorier underlagt britisk kontroll. Studien bringer sammen innsikter fra IPE-studier og historiefaglig litteratur, og bygger på kilder fra offentlige britiske arkiver for å etablere mer kunnskap om skatteparadisenes utvikling i en formativ fase på 1960- og 1970-tallet. Studiens hovedfokus er på erfaringer underlagt ansvarsområdene til det britiske finansdepartementet og ansvarlige institusjoner for kolonier, tilknyttede territorier og bistand i en periode preget av avkolonisering og økt selvstyre. Det sentrale argumentet fremført i avhandlingen er at et britisk basert skatteparadis system ikke var et resultat av en strategisk styrt politikk for å sikre britiske økonomiske interesser som ofte fremsatt. Det var heller et resultat av en kompleks utvikling preget av pragmatiske løsninger på problemstillinger etterhvert som disse oppstod, lite samstemthet på tvers av administrative barrierer og manglende besluttsomhet og politisk retning. Denne mer ustabile prosessen reflekterer forhandlinger mellom motstridende interesser knyttet til ulike ansvarsområder i statsforvaltningen. Studien understreker særlig betydningen av den spesielle halv-suverene posisjonen små tidligere kolonier hadde på veien mot mer selvstendighet, og hvordan dette ble en faktor der private interesser fikk innflytelse og muligheter til å påvirke utviklingen av skatteparadiser.Doktorgradsavhandlin

Coordinated Exploration of Unknown Labyrinthine Environments Applied to the Pursuit-Evasion Problem

This paper introduces a multi-robot cooperation approach to solve the "pursuit evasion" problem for mobile robots that have omnidirectional vision sensors in unknown environments. The main characteristic of this approach is based on the robots cooperation by sharing knowledge and making them work as a team: a complete algorithm for computing robots motion strategy is presented as well as the deliberation protocol which distributes the exploration task among the team and takes the best possible outcome from the robots resources

Aerospace medicine and biology, an annotated bibliography. volume xi- 1962-1963 literature

Aerospace medicine and biology - annotated bibliography for 1962 and 196

Exceptional scale: metafiction and the maximalist tradition in contemporary American literary history

This dissertation reexamines the narrative practice of self-reflexivity through the lens of aesthetic size to advance a new approach to reading long-form novels of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Whereas previous scholarship on the maximalist tradition relies on the totalizing rhetorics of endlessness, exhaustion, encyclopedism, and excess, I interpret the form’s reflexive awareness of its own enlarged scale as a uniquely narrative “knowledge work” that mediates the reader’s experience of information-rich texts. Thus, my narrative and network theory-informed approach effectively challenges the analytical modes of prominent genre theories such as the Mega-Novel, encyclopedic narrative, the systems novel, and modern epic to propose a critical reading method that recovers the extra-literary discourses through which scalarity is framed. Following this logic, each chapter historicizes prior theories of literary scale in postwar U.S. fiction toward redefining cross-national differences that vary across the boundaries of class, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexuality. Chapter two addresses the scholarly discourse of encyclopedism surrounding the Mega-Novels of Thomas Pynchon and Joseph McElroy. Posing an ethical challenge to popular critiques of metafictional aesthetics, both authors, I argue, contest one of the critical orthodoxies of realist form—the “exceptionality thesis”—which rests on an assumed separation between an audience’s experience of fictional minds in a literary work and its understanding of actual minds in everyday life. In constructing a suitably massive networked platform on which to stage identity as a pluralistic work-in-progress, Gravity’s Rainbow and Women and Men, I contend, narrativize those operations of mind typically occluded from narrative discourse, and so make literal their authors’ meta-ethical visions of a “multiplying real” as much a part of our world as the novel’s own. Chapter three focuses on the mise en abyme as a discursive practice in the labyrinthine narratives of Samuel R. Delany and Mark Z. Danielewski. My analysis posits The Mad Man and House of Leaves as immersive case studies on the academic reading experience by interrogating the satirical strategy of “mock scholarship,” in which a textual object at plot’s center is gradually displaced by the intra-textual reception history that surrounds it. Subtly complicating an increasingly imperceptible line between fact and its fictional counterpart, Delany and Danielewski, I assert, propose new forms of knowledge production through a multiplicity of potential “research spaces” that micromanage the interpretive process while exceeding the structural contours that frame it. Chapter four considers the problem of literary canon formation in the polemical epics of Gayl Jones and Joshua Cohen. Across vast surveys of the stereotypes that mark their marginalization, Jones and Cohen transgress the metaphorical borders constructed between individual voice, collective identity, and the literary institutions that reify “ethnoracial diversity” as a belated form of cultural capital. Explicitly foregrounding the ideological gaps, errors, and omissions against which canonical classification is typically defined, Mosquito and Witz, I suggest, promote not so much a representative widening of the canon’s historically restrictive archive as a complete dissolution of the exclusionary practices it honors and preserves

Netmodern: Interventions in Digital Sociology

The techno-economic grid of the Internet looks set to fulfil its autopoietic potentials as a global and multi-dimensionally immersive knowledge and memory archival network. This research project moves through a series of Digital Sociology case studies that mimic the changes in paradigms of the WWW from 2005-2010 in the forms of Web 1.0 to 2.0 and beyond to augmented reality and the cloud. Netmodern social theory is an emergent and speculative product of the research findings of this thesis and the subjective experiences of the researcher in experiencing and explaining digital realities in the research. All of the case studies employ practice-based approaches of original investigation through digital interventions completely immersed in particular waves of innovation and change. The role of the researcher shifts from administrator to mediator and observer as the very fabric of the social web transforms and evolves. The suggestion of the research findings is that you need to actually look at everything differently in order to study the research objects of emergent social agency and forms in digital media. Existing forms of critical analysis and methodological frameworks, particularly those concerned with conceptual models of media literacy or collective intelligence are insufficient as explanatory methods. Studying media literacy is most concerned with ‘how’ we create and interact in online social life beyond issues of simple accessibility. The focus of collective intelligence research is ‘what’ knowledge is available for interaction and a canvas for relationships between agency and knowledge forms. All of the case studies in this research project speak to and critique the intersections and relationships of emergent social agency and forms prevalent in Digital Sociology. The collective case studies explore online academic communities (BlogScholar), agency and popularity in the Twitter social network (Twae) and a variety of representations of collective intelligence in action (Web 2.0 cases studies). The research results suggest that the Internet is not so much intersecting with as it is being culture, economy, and technology

Combating Fiscal Fraud and Empowering Regulators

This book showcases a multidisciplinary set of work on the impact of regulatory innovation on the scale and nature of tax evasion, tax avoidance, and money laundering. We consider the international tax environment an ecosystem undergoing a period of rapid change as shocks such as the financial crisis, new business forms, scandals and novel regulatory instruments impact upon it. This ecosystem evolves as jurisdictions, taxpayers, and experts react. Our analysis focuses mainly on Europe and five new regulations: Automatic Exchange of Information, which requires that accounts held by foreigners are reported to authorities in the account holder’s country of residence; the OECD’s Base Erosion and Profit Shifting initiative and Country by Country Reporting, which attempt to reduce the opportunity spaces in which corporations can limit tax payments and utilize low or no tax jurisdictions; the Legal Entity Identifier which provides a 20-digit identification code for all individual, corporate or government entities conducting financial transactions; and the Fourth and Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directives, that criminalize tax crimes and prescribe that the Ultimate Beneficial Owner of a company is registered. Working from accounting, economic, political science, and legal perspectives, the analysis in this book provides an assessment of the reforms and policy recommendations that will reinforce the international tax system. The collection also flags the dangers posed by emerging tax loopholes provided by new business models and in the form of freeports and golden passports. Our central message is that inequality can and has to be reduced substantially, and we can achieve this through an improved international tax system