The imaginary puritan: literature, intellectual labor, and the origins of personal life

Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse challenge traditional accounts of the origins of modern Anglo-American culture by focusing on the emergence of print culture in England and the North American colonies. They postulate a modern middle class that consisted of authors and intellectuals who literally wrote a new culture into being.Milton's Paradise Lost marks the emergence of this new literacy. The authors show how Milton helped transform English culture into one of self-enclosed families made up of self-enclosed individuals. However, the authors point out that the popularity of Paradise Lost was matched by that of the Indian captivity narratives that flowed into England from the American colonies. Mary Rowlandson's account of her forcible separation from the culture of her origins stresses the ordinary person's ability to regain those lost origins, provided she remains truly English. In a colonial version of the Miltonic paradigm, Rowlandson sought to return to a family of individuals much like the one in Milton's depiction of the fallen world.Thus the origin both of modern English culture and of the English novel are located in North America. American captivity narratives formulated the ideal of personal life that would be reproduced in the communities depicted by Defoe, Richardson, and later domestic fiction

Proactive Middleware for Fault Detection and Advanced Conflict Handling in Sensor Fusion

Robots traditionally have a wide array of sensors that allow them to react to the environment and make appropriate decisions. These sensors can give incorrect or imprecise data due to malfunctioning or noise. Sensor fusion methods try to overcome some of these issues by using the data coming from different sensors and combining it. However, they often don’t take sensor malfunctioning and a priori knowledge about the sensors and the environment into account, which can produce conflicting information for the robot to work with. In this paper, we present an architecture and process in order to overcome some of these limitations based on a proactive rule-based system