(Dis)obedient wives: manifestations of collective female agency in early modern city comedies

In the three decades between 1596 and 1626, roughly sixty city comedies were composed by early modern playwrights: these plays—some of which are largely out of print while others are frequently printed, anthologized, and taught—create a composite image of how drama imagines the lives of ordinary London citizenry. Partly due to the growth of London’s marketplace economy, citizen wives and working women gain financial stability and visibility within early modern society during this period. City plays depict the female characters’ negotiation of issues of power and agency; theater imagines the possibilities that might give these characters the capacity to manipulate societal expectations to gain power and agency. In this study, I use exemplary city plays—including works by Dekker, Jonson, Middleton, and Shakespeare—from the aforementioned catalogue of city comedies to delineate and discuss three models of agency: defiant, subversive, and acquiescent. These models of agency are contingent on the subject’s continual negotiation and reassertion of her positionality. Defiant agency is made possible through the rejection or visible challenge of patriarchal forms of control. Subversive agency requires the female characters’ thorough understanding of modes of conduct to which they are supposed to conform; however, their obedient behavior ultimately ends with a subversion of societal expectations. The final model of agency I discuss is acquiescent agency. In this model, the female characters’ behavior is in keeping with the societal regulations, but this behavior enables the female characters to occupy the role of validating patriarchal forms of control. Additionally, female agency in early modern city plays often results from a communal negotiation of societal expectations of female behavior rather than an individual’s relationship with the ideological apparatus. This study highlights manifestations of female power that are largely under-examined, as well as reading and interpretive practices that make it possible for scholars of female agency to locate it in instances of obedience rather than only in defiance of societal expectations of conduct

Enough, Already-But Perhaps Not Yet: Liturgy, Church Unity, and Eschatology

(Excerpt) Enough, as we have been saying, ought to be enough. We\u27ve heard the crucial sentence from Article VII of the Augsburg Confession over and over these days, about what\u27s enough for the true unity of the church, namely the one and only gospel proclaimed and enacted in the assembly of believers. We have to suppose that the confessors that sunner day in 1530 meant precisely what they said about preserving and maintaining the genuine unity of the church-enough to have some prima facie acknowledgment that it is indeed the Christian gospel being said and done in this and that assembly of the faithful. Not that gospel plus some theological proposition or some canonical requirement, we\u27d want to say. For we\u27ve learned the lesson well: gospel plus anything is always less than gospel

A simple account of multiagent epistemic planning

International audienceA realistic model of multiagent planning must allow us to model notions which are absent in classical planning such as communication and knowledge. We investigate multiagent planning based on a simple logic of action and knowledge that is based on the visibility of propositional variables. Using such a formal logic allows us to deduce the validity of a plan from the validity of the individual actions which compose it. We present a coding of multiagent planning problems expressed in this logic into the classical planning language PDDL. Feeding the resulting problem into a PDDL planner provides a provably correct plan for the original multiagent planning problem. We use the gossip problem as a running example

Corruption in Russian Higher Education as Reflected in the Media

This paper considers corruption in higher education in Russia as reflected in the national media, including such aspects as corruption in admissions to higher education institutions and corruption in administering the newly introduced standardized test. The major focus is on the opinions of the leading figures of the education reform as related to corruption in education. The national media presents points of view of both supporters of the reform and those in opposition to the reform. Despite all the opposition that the standardized test faces among the leading educators and legislators, including The Chairman of The Council of Federation and numerous other Members of the Russian parliament and rectors of higher education institutions, the government continues implementation of the reform. Even though, as follows from the media reports and comments, the standardized test will not solve the problem of corruption in education, its full scale country-wide implementation at this point appears to be a question of time.corruption, higher education, media, reform, national test, Russia

Strider: a black-box, state-based approach to change and configuration management and support

AbstractWe describe a new approach, called Strider, to Change and Configuration Management and Support (CCMS). Strider is a black-box approach: without relying on specifications, it uses state differencing to identify potential causes of differing program behaviors, uses state tracing to identify actual, run-time state dependencies, and uses statistical behavior modeling for noise filtering. Strider is a state-based approach: instead of linking vague, high level descriptions and symptoms to relevant actions, it models management and support problems in terms of individual, named pieces of low level configuration state and provides precise mappings to user-friendly information through a computer genomics database. We use troubleshooting of configuration failures to demonstrate that the Strider approach reduces problem complexity by several orders of magnitude, making root-cause analysis possible

When Are Two Gossips the Same?

We provide an in-depth study of the knowledge-theoretic aspects of communication in so-called gossip protocols. Pairs of agents communicate by means of calls in order to spread information—so-called secrets—within the group. Depending on the nature of such calls knowledge spreads in different ways within the group. Systematizing existing literature, we identify 18 different types of communication, and model their epistemic effects through corresponding indisting

Verification of distributed epistemic gossip protocols

Gossip protocols aim at arriving, by means of point-to-point or group communications, at a situation in which all the agents know each other secrets. Distributed epistemic gossip protocols use as guards formulas from a simple epistemic logic and as statements calls between the agents. They are natural examples of knowledge based programs.We prove here that these protocols are implementable, that their partial correctness is decidable and that termination and two forms of fair termination of these protocols are decidable, as well. To establish these results we show that the definition of semantics and of truth of the underlying logic are decidable.</p

Federated Platooning: Insider Threats and Mitigations

Platoon formation is a freight organization system where a group of vehicles follows a predefined trajectory maintaining a desired spatial pattern. Benefits of platooning include fuel savings, reduction of carbon dioxide emissions, and efficient allocation of road capacity. While traditionally platooning has been an exclusive option limited to specific geographical areas managed by a single operator, recent technological developments and EU initiatives are directed at the creation of an international, federated market for platooning, i.e., a consortium of platoon operators that collaborate and coordinate their users to constitute freights covering international routes. In this paper, we look at federated platooning from an insiders\u27 perspective. In our development, first we outline the basic elements of platooning and federation of platooning operators. Then, we provide a comprehensive analysis to identify the possible insiders (employees, users, operators, and federated members) and the threats they pose. Finally, we propose two layered, composable technical solutions to mitigate those threats: \emph{a}) a decentralized overlay network that regulates the interactions among the stakeholders, useful to mitigate issues linked to data safety and trustworthiness and \emph{b}) a dynamic federation platform, needed to monitor and interrupt deviant behaviors of federated members

Managing continuity: dealing with the experience of being target in a take-over.

Based upon literature on innovation and strategy, the experience of being target in a take-over is studied from a process perspective at a local office of the acquired parent company. Through a case study the impact and importance of the management of continuity provided by the local management is illustrated.