Ben Butler: The South Called Him Beast!

Unemployment in South Africa: the nature of the beast

Unemployment in South Africa is so widespread that it demands an explanation. This paper examines two questions about South African unemployment. Firstly, why do the unemployed not enter the informal sector, as is common in other developing countries? Secondly, why do the unemployed not enter wage employment more readily? The findings provide little support for the idea that unemployed people c...

ButlerBot: The Robotic Butler

ButlerBot is a robotic butler created to cater to people’s questions at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2003 conference and to escort people to desired destinations. The three main areas of research focused on in ButlerBot, the Stony Brook Robot Design Team’s new robot created for the American Association of Artificial Intelligence's (AAAI) Robot Host compe...

The Butler problem revisited

On the surface, it seems plausible that the goodness or badness of an agent’s actions should be completely irrelevant to the question of whether she performed them intentionally, but there is growing evidence that ascriptions of intentional actions are affected by moral considerations. Joshua Knobe, for instance, has recently published a series of groundbreaking papers (2003a, 2003b, 2004) in w...

Beauty and the Beast

Is it really true that “All Scripture is inspired by God?” (2 Ti 3:16). Some feminist theologians argue that the Bible is nothing but male-centered works that are critically tainted with androcentrism. Nevertheless, the belief that the Bible was written completely by the revelation of God has legalized that the rights of women have been oppressed by the biased Christian doctrines. Today feminis...

Taming the Beast Within