666 research outputs found
An exploration of the outsider's role in selected works by Joseph Conrad, Malcolm Lowry, V.S. Naipaul.
No full textPhDThis thesis explores ways in which the outsider questions rather than confirms
dominant cultural values whilst avoiding the crudity of overt politicisation. I argue
that the outsider's preference for an observer's stance is not so much an act which
denies responsibility to the world of his day, but rather a means of reassessing its
priorities.
In Section One, I discuss Conrad's role as an outsider in the age of Empires. I
demonstrate the ways in which Conrad employs narrators, frequently using strategies
of irony which can be and have been read in very different ways. I argue that Conrad
uses irony as a tool for condemnation rather than condonement of imperialist practice,
if not its ideology.
In Section Two, I discuss Lowry as an emigre from England (so contrasting
him with Conrad, the immigrant from Europe), and examine his dissenting voice
which opposes bourgeois prejudice against the working class, a totalising ideology
like Fascism, and a Western rationalism which sees too rigid a distinction between
sanity and madness. I demonstrate how Lowry as an outsider reacts to the age of
twentieth century World Wars.
In Section Three, I discuss Naipaul's role as an outsider in the age of
decolonisation, when bogus liberals and false redeemers fail to rebuild the newly
independent post-colonial states. As in Conrad's case, I show how a failure to read
Naipaul's ironic tone of voice has given rise to radically divergent views as to what he
is about. I also link Conrad and Naipaul through their cultural negotiation between the
'centre' and its peripheries.
By looking at these three writers in chronological order and offering a
comparative perspective on their work, I highlight the outsider's disturbing, yet
illuminating role within a historical context. I also draw attention to creative tensions
between artistic concerns and a serious political purpose. I assess the outsider as
observer and man of conscience rather than as a` mere onlooker. I conclude that the
outsider also fulfils a social obligation by promoting critical awareness on the reader's
side by means of his defamiliarising perspective
Adaptive Smolyak Pseudospectral Approximations
No full textPolynomial approximations of computationally intensive models are central to uncertainty quantification. This paper describes an adaptive method for nonintrusive pseudospectral approximation, based on Smolyak's algorithm with generalized sparse grids. We rigorously analyze and extend the nonadaptive method proposed in [P. G. Constantine, M. S. Eldred, and E. T. Phipps, Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg., 229--232 (2012), pp. 1--12], and compare it to a common alternative approach for using sparse grids to construct polynomial approximations, direct quadrature. Analysis of direct quadrature shows that errors are an intrinsic property of some configurations of the method, as a consequence of internal aliasing. We provide precise conditions, based on the chosen polynomial basis and quadrature rules, under which this aliasing error occurs. We then establish theoretical results on the accuracy of Smolyak pseudospectral approximation, and show that the Smolyak approximation avoids internal aliasing and makes far more effective use of sparse function evaluations. These results are applicable to broad choices of quadrature rule and generalized sparse grids. Exploiting this flexibility, we introduce a greedy heuristic for adaptive refinement of the pseudospectral approximation. We numerically demonstrate convergence of the algorithm on the Genz test functions, and illustrate the accuracy and efficiency of the adaptive approach on a realistic chemical kinetics problem.American Society for Engineering Education. National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate FellowshipNational Science Foundation (U.S.). Graduate Research Fellowship Progra
Configurations of imperialism and their displacements in the novels of Joseph Conrad.
No full textPhDThis thesis examines certain configurations of imperialism
and their displacements in the novels of Joseph Conrad
beginning from the premise that imperialism is rationalised
through a dualistic model of self/"other" and functions as
a hierarchy of domination/subordination. In chapters one
and two it argues that both Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim
configure this model of imperialism as a split between
Europe/not-Europe. The third and fourth chapters consider
displacements of this model: onto a split within Europe and
an act of "internal" imperialism in Under Western Eyes and
onto unequal gender relations in the public and private
spheres in Chance.
Each chapter provides a reading of the selected novel
in relation to one or more contemporary (or near
contemporary) primary source and analyses these texts using
various strands of cultural theory. Chapter one, on Heart
of Darkness, investigates the historical background to
British imperialism by focusing on the textual production
of history in a variety of written forms which comprise the
diary, travel writing, government report, fiction. It
considers how versions of (imperial) history/knowledge are
constructed through the writing up of experience. In
chapter two, on Lord Jim, the hero figure is analysed as a
product of the imperial ideology and the protagonist's
failure is explored through the application of evolutionary
theory.
Chapters three and four, on Under Western Eyes and
Chance, investigate displacements of the imperial model:
the failure of an "enlightened" Western Europe to challenge
Russian imperialism in Poland forms the basis for reading
Under Western Eyes with Rousseau's writings and a
nineteenth-century history of the French Revolution. Chance
presents a further displacement of this model in its
relocation of imperialist imperatives in the sexual/gender
inequalities practised in the "mother" country
Fast Distributed Multi-agent Plan Execution with Dynamic Task Assignment and Scheduling
No full textAn essential quality of a good partner is her responsiveness to other team members. Recent work in dynamic plan execution exhibits elements of this quality through the ability to adapt to the temporal uncertainties of others agents and the environment. However, a good teammate also has the ability to adapt on-the-fly through task assignment. We generalize the framework of dynamic execution to perform plan execution with dynamic task assignment as well as scheduling. This paper introduces Chaski, a multi-agent executive for scheduling temporal plans with online task assignment. Chaski enables an agent to dynamically update its plan in response to disturbances in task assignment and the schedule of other agents. The agent then uses the updated plan to choose, schedule and execute actions that are guaranteed to be temporally consistent and logically valid within the multi-agent plan. Chaski is made efficient through an incremental algorithm that compactly encodes all scheduling policies for all possible task assignments. We apply Chaski to perform multi-manipulator coordination using two Barrett Arms within the authors' hardware testbed. We empirically demonstrate up to one order of magnitude improvements in execution latency and solution compactness compared to prior art
Flexible Execution of Plans with Choice
No full textDynamic plan execution strategies allow an autonomous
agent to respond to uncertainties while improving
robustness and reducing the need for an overly
conservative plan. Executives have improved this robustness
by expanding the types of choices made dynamically,
such as selecting alternate methods. However,
in methods to date, these additional choices introduce
substantial run-time latency. This paper presents a
novel system called Drake that makes steps towards executing
an expanded set of choices dynamically without
significant latency.
Drake frames a plan as a Disjunctive Temporal Problem
and executes it with a fast dynamic scheduling algorithm.
Prior work demonstrated an efficient technique
for dynamic execution of one special type of DTPs by
using an off-line compilation step to find the possible
consistent choices and compactly record the differences
between them. Drake extends this work to handle a
more general set of choices by recording the minimal
differences between the solutions which are required at
run-time. On randomly generated structured plans with
choice, we show a reduction in the size of the solution
set of over two orders of magnitude, compared to prior
art
Flexible execution of uncertain plans with choice
No full textThesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 139-140).Dynamic plan execution strategies allow an autonomous agent to respond to uncertainties, while improving robustness and reducing the need for an overly conservative plan. Executives have improved robustness by expanding the types of choices made dynamically, such as selecting alternate methods. However, in some approaches to date, these additional choices often induce significant storage requirements to make flexible execution possible. This paper presents a novel system called Drake, which is able to dramatically reduce the storage requirements in exchange for increased execution time for some computations. Drake frames a plan as a collection of related Simple Temporal Problems, and executes the plan with a fast dynamic scheduling algorithm. This scheduling algorithm leverages prior work in Assumption-based Truth Maintenance Systems to compactly record and reason over the family of Simple Temporal Problems. We also allow Drake to reason over temporal uncertainty and choices by using prior work in Simple Temporal Problems with Uncertainty, which can guarantee correct execution, regardless of the uncertain outcomes. On randomly generated structured plans with choice, framed as either Temporal Plan Networks or Disjunctive Temporal Problems, we show a reduction in the size of the solution set of around four orders of magnitude, compared to prior art.by Patrick Raymond Conrad.S.M
A priori testing of sparse adaptive polynomial chaos expansions using an ocean general circulation model database
No full textThis work explores the implementation of an adaptive strategy to design sparse ensembles of oceanic simulations suitable for constructing polynomial chaos surrogates. We use a recently developed pseudo-spectral algorithm that is based on a direct application of the Smolyak sparse grid formula and that allows the use of arbitrary admissible sparse grids. The adaptive algorithm is tested using an existing simulation database of the oceanic response to Hurricane Ivan in the Gulf of Mexico. The a priori tests demonstrate that sparse and adaptive pseudo-spectral constructions lead to substantial savings over isotropic sparse sampling in the present setting.United States. Office of Naval Research (award N00014-101-0498)United States. Dept. of Energy. Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (award numbers DE-SC0007020, DE-SC0008789, and DE-SC0007099)Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (contract numbers SA1207GOMRI005 (CARTHE) and SA12GOMRI008 (DEEP-C)
Accelerating Bayesian inference in computationally expensive computer models using local and global approximations
No full textThesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2014.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 129-138).Computational models of complex phenomena are an important resource for scientists and engineers. However, many state-of-the-art simulations of physical systems are computationally expensive to evaluate and are black box-meaning that they can be run, but their internal workings cannot be inspected or changed. Directly applying uncertainty quantification algorithms, such as those for forward uncertainty propagation or Bayesian inference, to these types of models is often intractable because the analyses use many evaluations of the model. Fortunately, many physical systems are well behaved, in the sense that they may be efficiently approximated with a modest number of carefully chosen samples. This thesis develops global and local approximation strategies that can be applied to black-box models to reduce the cost of forward uncertainty quantification and Bayesian inference. First, we develop an efficient strategy for constructing global approximations using an orthonormal polynomial basis. We rigorously construct a Smolyak pseudospectral algorithm, which uses sparse sample sets to efficiently extract information from loosely coupled functions. We provide a theoretical discussion of the behavior and accuracy of this algorithm, concluding that it has favorable convergence characteristics. We make this strategy efficient in practice by introducing a greedy heuristic that adaptively identifies and explores the important input dimensions, or combinations thereof. When the approximation is used within Bayesian inference, however, it is difficult to translate the theoretical behavior of the global approximations into practical controls on the error induced in the resulting posterior distribution. Thus, the second part of this thesis introduces a new framework for accelerating MCMC algorithms by constructing local surrogates of the computational model within the Metropolis-Hastings kernel, borrowing ideas from deterministic approximation theory, optimization, and experimental design. Exploiting useful convergence characteristics of local approximations, we prove the ergodicity of our approximate Markov chain and show that it samples asymptotically from the exact posterior distribution of interest. Our theoretical results reinforce the key observation underlying this work: when the likelihood has some local regularity, the number of model evaluations per MCMC step can be greatly reduced, without incurring significant bias in the Monte Carlo average. We illustrate that the inference framework is robust and extensible by describing variations that use different approximation families, MCMC kernels, and computational environments. Our numerical experiments demonstrate order-of-magnitude reductions in the number of forward model evaluations used in representative ODE or PDE inference problems, in both real and synthetic data examples. Finally, we demonstrate the local approximation algorithm by performing parameter inference for the ice-ocean coupling in Pine Island Glacier, Antarctica. This problem constitutes a challenging domain for inference and an important application in climate science. We perform simulated inference, comparing synthetic data to predictions from the MIT General Circulation Model, a state-of-the-art ocean simulation. The results reveal some information about parameter sensitivity, but we ultimately conclude that richer data is necessary to constrain the model parameters. In this example, applying our approximation techniques reduced the cost of the inference by a factor of five to ten, taking weeks instead of months, providing evidence that our techniques can make Bayesian inference on large-scale computational models more tractable.by Patrick Raymond Conrad.Ph. D
Adapting authoritarianism: institutions and co-optation in Egypt and Syria
No full textThis PhD thesis compares Egypt and Syria’s authoritarian political systems. While the tendency in social science political research treats Egypt and Syria as similarly authoritarian, this research emphasizes differences between the two systems with special reference to institutions and co-optation. Rather than reducibly understanding Egypt and Syria as sharing similar histories, institutional arrangements, or ascribing to the oft-repeated convention that “Syria is Egypt but 10 years behind,” this thesis focuses on how events and individual histories shaped each states current institutional strengthens and weaknesses. Specifically, it explains the how varying institutional politicization or de-politicization affects each state’s capabilities for co-opting elite and non-elite individuals.
Beginning with a theoretical framework that considers the limited utility of democratization and transition theoretical approaches, the work underscores the persistence and durability of authoritarianism. Chapter two details the politicized institutional divergence between Egypt and Syria that began in the 1970s. Chapter three and four examines how institutional politicization or de-politicization affects elite and non-elite individual co-optation in Egypt and Syria. Chapter five discusses the study’s general conclusions and theoretical implications.
This thesis’s argument is that Egypt and Syria co-opt elites and non-elites differently because of the varying degrees of institutional politicization in each governance system. Rather than view one country as more politically developed than the other, this work argues that Syria’s political institutions are more politicized than their Egyptian counterparts. Syria’s political arena is, thus, described as politicized-patrimonialism. Syria’s politicized-patrimonial arena produces uneven co-optation of elites and non-elites as they are diffused through competing institutions. Conversely, the Egyptian political arena remains highly personalized as weak institutions and individuals are manipulated and molded according to the president’s ruling clique. This is referred to as personalized-patrimonialism. As a consequence, Egypt’s political establishment demonstrates more flexibility in ad hoc altering and adapting its arena depending on the emergence of crises.
This study’s theoretical implications suggest that, contrary to modernization and democratization theory’s adage that institutions lead to a political development, politicized institutions within a patrimonial order actually hinder regime adaptation because consensus is harder to achieve and maintain. It is within this context that Egypt’s de-politicized institutional framework advantages its top political elite. In this reading of Egyptian and Syrian politics, Egypt’s personalized political arena is more adaptable than Syria’s. These conclusions do not indicate that political reform is a process underway in either state
H.G. Wells and the empire: the artist and the intellectual
No full text"H.G. Wells and the Empire: The Artist and the Intellectual" aims to reconstruct H.G. Wells’s (1866-1946) artistic engagement in relation to the power politics of imperialism. The thesis takes into account the vast fictional and non-fictional output of the author, averagely from the age of New Imperialism to the adjacent rise of the first totalitarian movement in Italy in the 1920s. The present work will reveal Wells’s ambivalent and revolutionary standing in the British Empire, while also exploring his anti-fascist crusade. Literary criticism, I contend, has long neglected this crucial intellectual aspect of Wells’s career. Since Bernard Bergonzi’s pioneering study "The Early H.G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances" (1961), critical focus has been extensively devoted to Wells’s evolutionary thinking, establishing a canon which largely obscures Wells’s magnitude in terms of political commitment. For decades, only the early corpus of the British writer has been taken into serious critical consideration (1890-1899); criticism, as consequence, has overlooked Wells’s artistic position in British culture of the past century. Only rapidly mentioned in Raymond Williams’s seminal "Culture and Society" (1958), Wells was probably the most famous and influential intellectual on the planet in the first half of the twentieth century; however, after his death, Wells has incurred a progressive critical oblivion. The emergence of post-colonial studies in the 1970s, equally, have paradoxically disregarded Wells’s artistic and intellectual prominence in European imperial culture. "H.G. Wells and the Empire" purports to fill this cultural gap, by historicizing the author’s public activity in the context of imperialism
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