Together, Is Anything Possible? A Look at Collective Commitments for Agents

In this research, commitments - specifically collective commitments - are looked at as a way to model connections between agents in groups. Using the concepts and ideas from action languages, we propose to model these commitments as actions along with the other basic actions that autonomous agents are capable of performing. The languages developed will be tested against different examples from various multi-agent system (MAS) areas and implemented to run in answer set programming

Review of The Men Who Lost America: British Command during the Revolutionary War and the Preservation of the Empire (2013)

Histor

The American Yawp

The American Yawp constructs a coherent and accessible narrative from all the best of recent historical scholarship. Without losing sight of politics and power, it incorporates transnational perspectives, integrates diverse voices, recovers narratives of resistance, and explores the complex process of cultural creation. It looks for America in crowded slave cabins, bustling markets, congested tenements, and marbled halls. It navigates between maternity wards, prisons, streets, bars, and boardrooms. Whitman’s America, like ours, cut across the narrow boundaries that strangle many narratives. Balancing academic rigor with popular readability, The American Yawp offers a multi-layered, democratic alternative to the American past

Suppression, denial, sublimation: Defending against the initial pains of very long life sentences

The central purpose of the article is to explore the psychic components of the early pains of imprisonment described by male and female prisoners serving very long mandatory life sentences for murder. While there is a strong tradition of documenting prisoners’ adaptations to ‘life inside’, little work in prisons sociology explores how life-sentenced prisoners, specifically those convicted of murder, reactively respond and adjust to the early years of these sentences. Having outlined prisoners’ descriptions of entry shock, temporal vertigo and intrusive recollections, we draw upon a Freudian terminology of ‘defence mechanisms of the ego’ to argue that suppression, denial and sublimation represent key ways of ‘defending against’ (rather than ‘adapting to’) these experiences. We suggest that the particular offence–time nexus of our sample—the specific offence of murder combined with a very long sentence—helps to explain these defensive patterns.We are grateful for the support of by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant: ES/J007935/1], and the Isaac Newton Trust