A Reply to La Barre's "Retort Courteous"

The Retort Courteous

Mirrors, Cross-dressing and Narcissism in Choisy’s Histoire de Madame la Comtesse des Barres

The Abbé de Choisy was one of the most intriguing figures in Louis XIII’s entourage and, most notably, Louis XIV’s court. A prolific author, he composed the Sun King’s memoirs, his own personal memoirs, and in his old age wrote an ambitious twelve volume-work entitled Histoire de l’Eglise. Although he led a ecclesiastic career, his writing and intellectual interests reached well beyond the Chur...

Contracts: Courteous Logic Programs in Xml a Declarative Approach to Business Rules in Contracts: Courteous Logic Programs in Xml

We address why, and especially how, to represent business rules in e-commerce contracts. By contracts, we mean descriptions of goods and services offered or sought, including ancillary agreements detailmg tenris of a deal. We observe that rules are useful in contracts to represent conditional relationships, e.g., in terms & conditions, service provisions, and surrounding business processes, and...

Courteous Cars: Decentralized Multiagent Traffic Coordination

A major goal in robotics is to develop machines that perform useful tasks with minimal supervision. Instead of requiring each small detail to be specified, we would like to describe the task at a high level and have the system autonomously execute in a manner that satisfies that desired task. While the single robot case is difficult enough, moving to a multirobot behavior adds another layer of ...

Assessment of Control Strategy for 500W Retort

A retort is a steam operated “pressure cooker” which is used in the food industry for sterilization. The 500W retort is a lab-size unit donated to the California State University, Fresno Food Processing Laboratory by the FMC Corporation in the summer of 1998. This retort was developed two decades ago and intended for small batches and versatile food containers such as jars, pouches, cans, and b...