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Selecting a best compromise direction for a powered wheelchair using PROMETHEE
Get PDFResearch is described that determines the direction that a powered wheelchair will take, using the preference ranking organization method for enrichment of evaluations II (PROMETHEE II). This is the first time that this sort of decision making has been used in this type of application. A user suggests a desired direction and speed, and the decision-making system suggests a safe direction for a wheelchair. The two are mixed, and the wheelchair then tends to avoid obstacles. The inputs come from a powered wheelchair joystick and two ultrasonic transducers fixed onto the wheelchair, and the final direction is a simulation of the desired direction and a direction that moves the wheelchair away from obstacles. The arrangement assists a disabled driver to steer their wheelchairs. It uses a systematic decision-making process, and this paper presents the process and a new way of selecting a best compromise direction. Sensitivity analysis is employed to explore potentially suitable directions as uncertainty and risk may be present. A suitable direction is selected that provides a robust solution. The user would be able to override the suggestions by the PROMETHEE II system by holding the joystick in a position
Emotions in a Crusading Context, 1095-1291
No full textEmotions in a Crusading Context is the first book-length study of the emotional rhetoric of crusading. It investigates the ways in which a number of emotions and affective displays - primarily fear, anger, and weeping - were understood, represented, and utilized in twelfth- and thirteenth-century western narratives of the crusades, making use of a broad range of comparative material to gauge the distinctiveness of those texts: crusader letters, papal encyclicals, model sermons, chansons de geste, lyrics, and an array of theological and philosophical treatises. In addition to charting continuities and changes over time in the emotional landscape of crusading, this study identifies the underlying influences which shaped how medieval authors represented and used emotions; analyzes the passions crusade participants were expected to embrace and reject; and assesses whether the idea of crusading created a profoundly new set of attitudes towards emotions.
Emotions in a Crusading Context calls on scholars of the crusades to reject the traditional methodological approach of taking the emotional descriptions embedded within historical narratives as straightforward reflections of protagonists' lived feelings, and in so doing challenges the long historiographical tradition of reconstructing participants' beliefs and experiences from these texts. Within the history of emotions, Stephen J. Spencer demonstrates that, despite the ongoing drive to develop new methodologies for studying the emotional standards of the past, typified by experiments in 'neurohistory', the social constructionist (or cultural-historical) approach still has much to offer the historian of medieval emotions
Feelings of Betrayal and Echoes of the First Crusade in Odo of Deuil's De Profectione Ludovici VII in Orientem
Get PDFThis article seeks to shed light on the literary agenda of Odo of Deuil, author of the most detailed Latin account of the Levantine branch of the Second Crusade. It calls for scholars to reinstate Odo’s vilification of the Byzantines as a primary, rather than secondary, objective and proposes a new explanation for his stringent anti‐Greek tone. It first extends our knowledge of Odo’s engagement with the historiographical tradition of the First Crusade, before drawing attention to a hitherto unappreciated layer in his vilification of the Byzantines: his use of emotional language
Review of The Siege of Acre, 1189–1191: Saladin, Richard the Lionheart, and the Battle that Decided the Third Crusade, by John D. Hosler
No full text‘Car le Français, comme la Mer, est perpétuellement en mouvement’: satires anglaises sur l’inconstance des Français'
Get PDFLa danse est devenu un motif dans la représentation satyrique britannique illustrant les Français. Elle permet de représenter de manière graphique les lieux communs rattachés à la légèreté (inconséquence, frivolité) et de construire de manière antinomique l’identité national anglaise. Cet article s’intéressera à la manière dont la satire graphique a construit cette representation, et comment celle-ci a dialogué avec les discours contemporains portant sur les identités nationales
Categorical colour geometry
Get PDFOrdinary language users group colours into categories that they refer to by a name e.g. pale green. Data on the colour categories of English speakers was collected using online crowd sourcing – 1,000 subjects produced 20,000 unconstrained names for 600 colour stimuli. From this data, using the framework of Information Geometry, a Riemannian metric was computed throughout the RGB cube. This is the first colour metric to have been computed from colour categorization data. In this categorical metric the distance between two close colours is determined by the difference in the distribution of names that the subject population applied to them. This contrasts with previous colour metrics which have been driven by stimulus discriminability, or acceptability of a colour match. The categorical metric is analysed and shown to be clearly different from discriminability-based metrics. Natural units of categorical length, area and volume are derived. These allow a count to be made of the number of categorically-distinct regions of categorically-similar colours that fit within colour space. Our analysis estimates that 27 such regions fit within the RGB cube, which agrees well with a previous estimate of 30 colours that can be identified by name by untrained subjects