The Emotional Climate of Our Times

Hogg Foundation for Mental Healt

Concepts of time and space as organizing principles in Paradise Lost

In Paradise Lost Milton creates a world of time and space, and he also deals systematically with such ideas as pride, humility, reason, free will, and the Fall of Man. The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate by analysis some patterns of correspondence between the world of the poem and the ideas the poem treats. Chapter One defines the approach, suggesting that the richness and wholeness of Paradise Lost consists, in important ways, In concepts of time and space. Chapter Two explores the concept of vertical space, demonstrating by an analysis of vertical imagery in the Fall of Satan and the Fall of Man that vertical structures and movements reflect the Judeo-Chrlstian paradox that pride leads to abasement and humility leads to exaltation. Chapter Three explores the connection between cyclical movement and time. The thesis of this chapter is that the rhythms, cycles, and balanced opposites of Paradise as it is described in Book IV are in effect a supra-temporal level of time and that these ceaseless rhythms reflect both the larger cosmic order which governs the action of the poem and the cyclic shape of man's history in his Fall and Redemption. The thematic structure of the fortunate fall is thus reflected in the rhythms of the physical vorld in the poem. In Chapter Four I conclude that the asethetic "wholeness" of Paradise Lost consists, in part at least, in three patterns: the structure of paradox, especially as it derives from the Judeo-Christlan tradition; the principle of correspondence; and the identification of idea with object and movement

Reinforcement Learning in Robotic Task Domains with Deictic Descriptor Representation

In the field of reinforcement learning, robot task learning in a specific environment with a Markov decision process backdrop has seen much success. But, extending these results to learning a task for an environment domain has not been as fruitful, even for advanced methodologies such as relational reinforcement learning. In our research into robot learning in environment domains, we utilize a form of deictic representation for the robot’s description of the task environment. However, the non-Markovian nature of the deictic representation leads to perceptual aliasing and conflicting actions, invalidating standard reinforcement learning algorithms. To circumvent this difficulty, several past research studies have modified and extended the Q-learning algorithm to the deictic representation case with mixed results. Taking a different tact, we introduce a learning algorithm which searches deictic policy space directly, abandoning the indirect value based methods. We apply the policy learning algorithm to several different tasks in environment domains. The results compare favorably with value based learners and existing literature results

The life and works of D.H. Lawrence.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston UniversityD. H. Lawrence, who lived from 1885 to 1930, was during his lifetime known to the wide public only as a writer of supposedly indecent books which were from time to time suppressed. He wrote boldly--in novels, poems and essays--of sexual problems, because he felt that too much repression and intellectualization were destroying the instinctual part of man's nature. Lawrence stressed passion, not because he believed in passion exclusively, but because he felt that it should be brought into balance with intellect. This is his central message. [TRUNCATED

Don\u27t Scorn The Sailor

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