Experimental analysis of sample-based maps for long-term SLAM

This paper presents a system for long-term SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) by mobile service robots and its experimental evaluation in a real dynamic environment. To deal with the stability-plasticity dilemma (the trade-off between adaptation to new patterns and preservation of old patterns), the environment is represented at multiple timescales simultaneously (5 in our experiments). A sample-based representation is proposed, where older memories fade at different rates depending on the timescale, and robust statistics are used to interpret the samples. The dynamics of this representation are analysed in a five week experiment, measuring the relative influence of short- and long-term memories over time, and further demonstrating the robustness of the approach

Same time, across time: simultaneity clauses from late modern to present-day english

In this paper we offer a diachronic analysis of simultaneity subordinator as against the background of simultaneity subordinators while, whilst, when from 1650 to the end of the 20th century. The present survey makes use of data extracted from the British English component of ARCHER (version 3.1), focusing in particular on fiction, the register par excellence for the use of simultaneity subordinators. We analyse our data according to a selection of parameters (ordering, verb type, duration, tense and aspect, subject identity, simultaneity type) and show that, against a background of relatively stability, the major change is a dramatic increase in the frequency of simultaneity as-clauses from the first half of the 19th century onwards. Adapting the historical work on stylistic change by Biber and Finegan (1989, 1997), as well as theoretical and experimental accounts of the semantics of English simultaneity markers, we highlight an interesting parallelism between the spread of as-clauses in oral narrative from childhood to adulthood and the spread of as-clauses in modern fiction. In either case, the spread of as may be symptomatic of an evolution in narrative techniques, particularly in respect of the means by which complex events are typically represented

More inter- and transdisciplinary research needed in agroecology

Agroecology embraces a collection of different disciplinary fields, ranging from agriculture and ecology to political theory. A stronger recognition of agroecology in agricultural research, which often has a strong production focus, could help to achieve sustainable development if more holistic and transdisciplinary research approaches are adopted

The Permit Power Revisited: The Theory and Practice of Regulatory Permits in the Administrative State

Two decades ago, Professor Richard Epstein fired a shot at the administrative state that has gone largely unanswered in legal scholarship. His target was the permit power, under which legislatures prohibit a specified activity by statute and delegate to administrative agencies the discretionary power to authorize the activity under terms the agency mandates in a regulatory permit. Accurately describing the permit power as an enormous power in the state, Epstein bemoaned that it had received scant attention in the academic literature. He sought to fill that gap. Centered on the premise that the permit power represents a complete inversion of the proper distribution of power within a legal system, Epstein launched a scathing critique of regulatory permitting in operation, condemning it as a racket for administrative abuses and excesses. Epstein\u27s assessment of the permit power was and remains accurate in three respects: it is vast in scope, it is ripe for administrative abuse, and it has been largely ignored in legal scholarship. The problem is that, beyond what he got right about the permit power, most of Epstein\u27s critique was based on an incomplete caricature of permitting in theory and practice. This Article is the first to return comprehensively to the permit power since Epstein\u27s critique, offering a deep account of the theory and practice of regulatory permits in the administrative state. This Article opens by defining the various types of regulatory permits and describing the scope of permitting in the regulatory state. From there it compares different permit design approaches and explores the advantages of general permits, including their ability to mitigate many of the concerns Epstein advanced. This Article then applies a theoretical model to environmental degradation problems and concludes that if certain conditions are met, general permits can effectively respond to many of the complex policy problems of the future. Finally, this Article adds to the scholarship initiated by Epstein by proposing a set of default rules and exceptions for permit design and suggesting how they apply to complex policy problems

Register as a predictor of linguistic variation

Over the last two decades, corpus analysis has been used as the basis for several important reference grammars and dictionaries of English. While these reference works have made major contributions to our understanding of English lexis and grammar, most of them share a major limitation: the failure to consider register differences. Instead, most reference works describe lexico-grammatical patterns as if they applied generally to English. The main goal of the present paper is to challenge this practice and the underlying assumption that the patterns of lexical-grammatical use in English can be described in general/global terms. Specifically, I argue that descriptions of the average patterns of use in a general corpus do not accurately describe any register. Rather, the patterns of use in speech are dramatically different from the patterns in writing (especially academic writing), and so minimally an adequate description must recognize the two major poles in this continuum (i.e., conversation versus informational written prose). The paper begins by comparing two general corpus approaches to the study of language use: variationist and text-linguistic. Although both approaches can be used to investigate the use of words, grammatical features, and registers, the two approaches differ in their bases: the first gives primacy to each linguistic token, while the second gives primacy to each text. This difference has important consequences for the overall research design, the kinds of variables that can be measured, the statistical techniques that can be applied, and the particular research questions that can be asked. As a result, the importance of register has been more apparent in text linguistic studies than in studies of linguistic variation. The bulk of the paper, then, argues for the importance of register at all linguistic levels: lexical, grammatical, and lexico-grammatical. Analyses comparing conversation and academic writing are discussed for each level, showing how a general ‘average’ description includes some characteristics that are not applicable to one or the other register, while also omitting other important patterns of use found in particular registers

Exploring textual data (book review)

Book Review

In crime's archive: The cultural afterlife of criminal evidence

This article explores the cultural afterlife of criminal evidence. During the criminal trial, strict rules govern the collection, admission and interpretation of evidence at trial. However, after the conclusion of the trial, this material returns to a notional 'archive' and is sometimes used by artists, scholars, curators and others, but subject to no rules or standards. This article examines a range of instances in which criminal evidence has been used post-trial, and proposes a jurisprudence of sensitivity for responding to the harm that is sometimes done when criminal evidence leads a cultural afterlife. © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD). All rights reserved

How Silent is the Right to Silence?

A long-held and fundamental principle of our criminal justice system is that people accused of crimes have a right to silence, arising from the presumption of innocence. Rules of evidence try to protect this ‘right’ during trial, by ensuring that juries understand that adverse inferences cannot be drawn from the silence of the accused. Silence, in court, can mean nothing, and we are not to speculate about what might motivate an accused person to remain silent, or what they might have said had they spoken. However, an examination of the jurisprudence in this area shows that the law is often not dealing with actual silence; sometimes when the law refers to the ‘right to silence’, it seems to mean a ‘refusal to hear’. In other instances, there is actual silence, and yet the law refuses to subject that silence to any critical interpretation, insisting that we cannot infer anything from it. While we have learned, from theatre, music, linguistics, religion and psychology, to develop sophisticated means for interpreting silence, the law demands that we set aside these interpretive tools, hearing silence that isn’t there, and inferring nothing about something