A device that transduces optical control signals to pneumatic control pressures was assembled and tested. This photofluidic interface uses no electronic components and requires no electrical power. The interface employs the photoacoustic effect and fluidic signal processing techniques. The pressure output from the interface can be controlled by modulating the input optical signal in any one of four different ways (amplitude modulation, frequency modulation, pulse width modulation, and gate width modulation). Results of performance tests are reported. There is also a discussion of the physical parameters involved in the conversion of optical signals to fluidic signals.

Presupposition is a pervasive feature of human language. It involves many interesting interactions between the utterances of a discourse and the context of the discourse. In this paper we focus on issues of logical form connected with the interaction of presupposition and discourse context, and illustrate our theory with some implementational work using the active logic framework. After reviewing some of the major issues in presupposition theory we turn to a largely successful unified approach of Heim. We show how the main principles of this theory can be implemented in active logic. But we also find two serious difficulties. These consist in (a) a straightforward counterexample and (b) a type of discourse that we call a garden-path discourse. We maintain that both the counterexample and the garden-path type of discourse can be handled by our active-logic version of Heim's theory. This requires us to reformulate and extend Heim's theorey. Although this work is largely theoretical, both Heim's theory and ours have important things to say about the incremental processing of the utterances that make up discourse. And we present our theory as a specification of a processing device that takes logical form of a sentence along with current discourse context as input and delivers an updated discourse context as output. As an experiment, we have implemented portions of this device.

There has been disagreement among historians about the nature of the local response to the Diggers in Surrey, and about the relative importance of popular hostility and gentry-led opposition in the defeat of the Digger movement. It is argued here that a distinction must be made between the Diggers' reception in Walton and their treatment in Cobham: popular opposition was much in evidence in Walton, where the Diggers were treated as outsiders, but the response of Cobham's inhabitants was more ambivalent: some of Winstanley's most active fellow Diggers were Cobham inhabitants, and in this parish it was the local gentry who took the lead in the campaign against them. It is argued that the existence of a degree of local support for Winstanley was in part a reflection of Cobham's long tradition of landlord/tenant conflict, of the absence of a settled minister during the 1640s, and of the hardships experienced in the area in the aftermath of civil war.

In the next section we describe the VR system that we are using as the platform for our NL research. Then, we will give some of the reasons for building a sophisticated natural language interface for the VR system.In this paper we discuss some aspects of our development of a natural language (NL) processing system to be used in a virtual reality ( V R ) environment. Our group is pursuing two lines of work: the Natural Language and Virtual Reality (NLVR) project and the natural language research program. The latter addresses basic research problems in NL processing and the former is an implementation project. The two are, in many ways, parallel and overlapping. The research generates hypotheses that we want t o test and the NLVR testbed provides new problems for research.

Ashley House in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey (Fig. 1), is best known to architectural historians for its detailed and informative building accounts, which date from the years 1602 to 1607. The house was demolished in 1925 without adequate record, and scholars have tended to assume that it was built to a quite unexceptional H-plan design and was, therefore, of no great architectural interest. A recently-discovered contemporary first-floor plan of Ashley House shows that it was in fact a building of considerable importance. The plan (Fig. 2) demonstrates that Ashley was remarkably similar in layout to both Charlton House and Somerhill in Kent, two Jacobean houses justly famous for their innovative, axially-placed halls (Figs 3 and 4). This architectural development, as is now generally recognized, represented a significant departure from the linear house-plans most often associated with traditional, hierarchical household arrangements.