The Hermetic Enigma of a Protean Poet: Gnosis and the Puritanical Error in Shakespeare\u27s Venus and Adonis

This thesis offers a study of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (and by extension Lucrece) that builds on Ted Hughes’s claim that they function as two halves of a binary whole.[1] Tracing a contrapuntal surface symmetry between the poems, Hughes argues that Venus and Adonis encodes the founding myth of Catholicism and Lucrece that of Puritanism; the poems together convey the great metaphysical war between these two oppositional forces that so haunted Elizabethan England.[2] Critics have dismissed Shakespeare’s mythological references as mere “poet’s argot,” yet I shall build on Hughes’s reading of this ‘argot’ as “a sacred symbolic language in itself” to show how Venus and Adonis embodies a coherent system of signification that encrypts the archetypal conflict, not ultimately between Protestantism and Catholicism, but rather between two diametrically opposed hermeneutical tendencies: on the side of Venus, that of the broadly ‘Gnostic’ (the highly syncretic, ever-allegorizing, esoteric knowledge-seeking) tradition; and on the side of Adonis, that of the broadly ‘Puritan’ (the rigidly dogmatic, Protestant Biblical literalist) tradition.[3] [1] Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (Faber, 1992), 82. [2] Hughes, 90. [3] Hughes, 57

The Play the Critics Could Not See: Djuna Barnes’s The Dove

Literary criticism on Djuna Barnes’s The Dove has hitherto been lacking, both in quantity and quality. At least, if an astute observation has been made of the play, it has hidden itself as deftly as has The Dove its meanings from the majority of critics. Partly to blame for this is the fact that few critics have even attempted to analyze it in any depth. But any critic who has read The Dove and dismissed it as a witty but nonsensical exercise in anarchistic sadomasochism, has, to put it kindly, not read it closely enough. While exemplary literary writing is contingent upon the art of ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling,’ and tends to respect a relative preference of elusive dramatization over lucid exposition, works of literature are not always justified in the degree to which they conceal their meanings. Barnes’s The Dove, however, is not enigmatic for the sake of being enigmatic. Rather, just as Vera and Amelia’s lesbianism is repressed from their consciousness, so too are the meanings of the play repressed from the surface, and thus only perceivable on a level of which not even the characters—apparently, not even the critics—themselves are cognizant. As evidenced by clues provided in the set’s artwork, the ribald paronomasia pervading the dialogue, and the ways in which Vera, Amelia, and The Dove are traited, the play’s three women are best understood as members of an inverted trinity whose antithesis to divinity is characterized by the repressed lesbianism of the sisters as contrasted with the paradoxically dangerous passivity of the bisexual Dove, the tension between which culminates in an absurd act of violence exacted upon a painting—the façade behind which their true selves are veiled

Saving Aristotle’s Dispositional Ethics from the Threat of Legalism

In this paper, I investigate the different commitments held by ethics and morality. All too often, we use moral language to talk about ethics. I argue that this is a mistake insofar as the aims of ethics are incredibly different from those of morality. Through an investigation of Books II, III, and VI of Aristotle\u27s Nicomachean Ethics, I make a case for the merits of the dispositional model of ethics over the legalistic model of morality

An efficient and versatile approach to trust and reputation using hierarchical Bayesian modelling

In many dynamic open systems, autonomous agents must interact with one another to achieve their goals. Such agents may be self-interested and, when trusted to perform an action, may betray that trust by not performing the action as required. Due to the scale and dynamism of these systems, agents will often need to interact with other agents with which they have little or no past experience. Each agent must therefore be capable of assessing and identifying reliable interaction partners, even if it has no personal experience with them. To this end, we present HABIT, a Hierarchical And Bayesian Inferred Trust model for assessing how much an agent should trust its peers based on direct and third party information. This model is robust in environments in which third party information is malicious, noisy, or otherwise inaccurate. Although existing approaches claim to achieve this, most rely on heuristics with little theoretical foundation. In contrast, HABIT is based exclusively on principled statistical techniques: it can cope with multiple discrete or continuous aspects of trustee behaviour; it does not restrict agents to using a single shared representation of behaviour; it can improve assessment by using any observed correlation between the behaviour of similar trustees or information sources; and it provides a pragmatic solution to the whitewasher problem (in which unreliable agents assume a new identity to avoid bad reputation). In this paper, we describe the theoretical aspects of HABIT, and present experimental results that demonstrate its ability to predict agent behaviour in both a simulated environment, and one based on data from a real-world webserver domain. In particular, these experiments show that HABIT can predict trustee performance based on multiple representations of behaviour, and is up to twice as accurate as BLADE, an existing state-of-the-art trust model that is both statistically principled and has been previously shown to outperform a number of other probabilistic trust models

A Hierarchical Bayesian Trust Model based on Reputation and Group Behaviour

In many systems, agents must rely on their peers to achieve their goals. However, when trusted to perform an action, an agent may betray that trust by not behaving as required. Agents must therefore estimate the behaviour of their peers, so that they may identify reliable interaction partners. To this end, we present a Bayesian trust model (HABIT) for assessing trust based on direct experience and (potentially unreliable) reputation. Although existing approaches claim to achieve this, most rely on heuristics with little theoretical foundation. In contrast, HABIT is based on principled statistical techniques; can be used with any representation of behaviour; and can assess trust based on observed similarities between groups of agents. In this paper, we describe the theoretical aspects of the model and present experimental results in which HABIT was shown to be up to twice as accurate at predicting trustee performance as an existing state-of-the-art trust model

Factored Monte-Carlo tree search for coordinating UAVs in disaster response

The coordination of multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to carry out surveys is a major challenge for emergency responders. In particular, UAVs have to fly over kilometre-scale areas while trying to discover casualties as quickly as possible. However, an increase in the availability of real-time data about a disaster from sources such as crowd reports or satellites presents a valuable source of information to drive the planning of UAV flight paths over a space in order to discover people who are in danger. Nevertheless challenges remain when planning over the very large action spaces that result. To this end, we introduce the survivor discovery problem and present as our solution, the first example of a factored coordinated Monte Carlo tree search algorithm to perform decentralised path planning for multiple coordinated UAVs. Our evaluation against standard benchmarks show that our algorithm, Co-MCTS, is able to find more casualties faster than standard approaches by 10% or more on simulations with real-world data from the 2010 Haiti earthquake

Planning search and rescue missions for UAV teams

The coordination of multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to carry out aerial surveys is a major challenge for emergency responders. In particular, UAVs have to fly over kilometre-scale areas while trying to discover casualties as quickly as possible. To aid in this process, it is desirable to exploit the increasing availability of data about a disaster from sources such as crowd reports, satellite remote sensing, or manned reconnaissance. In particular, such information can be a valuable resource to drive the planning of UAV flight paths over a space in order to discover people who are in danger. However challenges of computational tractability remain when planning over the very large action spaces that result. To overcome these, we introduce the survivor discovery problem and present as our solution, the first example of a continuous factored coordinated Monte Carlo tree search algorithm. Our evaluation against state of the art benchmarks show that our algorithm, Co-CMCTS, is able to localise more casualties faster than standard approaches by 7% or more on simulations with real-world data

The production of Necator americanus larvae for use in experimental human infection

Background: Although there is unprecedented interest in experimental human hookworm infection, details of hookworm manufacture and characterisation have been sparsely reported. In this report, we detail the production and characterisation of Necator americanus larvae for use in a recently published clinical trial. Methods: Faeces was obtained from an experimentally infected donor. Faecal hookworm DNA was determined by quantitative PCR. Paired samples were incubated in either sterile water or sterile water mixed with antimicrobials (amphotericin and gentamicin). Coproculture was performed by modified Harada-Mori method. The harvested larvae were then processed in either sterile water or antiseptic solution. Larval yield was then calculated (larvae per gram), larval viability was determined by thermally induced motility assay and microbial burden was determined at the day of harvest, at 48 h and at 7 days. Results: Twenty-eight faecal cultures were performed over 16 months. The faecal hookworm DNA content was variable over this time. There was no association of larval yield with faecal hookworm DNA content. Pre-treatment of faeces with antimicrobials did not influence larval yield. Larval motility was 85.3% (95% CI 79.3–91.3%). Incubation of larvae in antiseptics did not reduce viability at 14 days with a marginal mean of 68.6% (95% CI 59.1–78.1%) washed in water vs. 63.3% (95% CI 53.8 – 72.9%) when incubated in betadine (p = 0.38). Larvae washed in sterile water did not meet microbial bioburden criteria. Incubation in antiseptic resulted in acceptable microbial bioburden at 48 h but not at 7 days. Although the addition of gentamicin did reduce the microbial bio-burden acceptable levels, it was found to significantly lower larval motility at 7 days compared to incubation in sterile water and motility at 7 days 37.8% (95% CI 4.7–70.9%) vs. 67.3% (95% CI 35.2–99.3%, p < 0.001), respectively. Conclusions: Despite standardised culture methodologies and the use of a single donor, larval yield varied considerably between batches and had no association with faecal hookworm DNA. Larval viability decreases over time and the age of larvae at time of use are likely to be important. Microbial bioburden maybe temporarily reduced by incubation in antiseptics and has little effect on viability. Incubation of larvae in gentamicin is effective at reducing microbial bioburden but is deleterious to larval viability

Additive manufacturing of Ni-based superalloys:The outstanding issues

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