What would it be like to walk into a real-life “Holodeck” or “Cerebro” and experience a stunning new world unlike anything seen before? Beyond this, what if we were able to experience hitherto unobservable aspects of nature, as environments into which the body cannot actually venture? In fact, these questions are on the minds of scientists and artists working together, right now, in the AlloSph...

To create a pose-invariant face recognizer, one strategy is the view-based approach, which uses a set of example views at di erent poses. But what if we only have one example view available, such as a scanned passport photo { can we still recognize faces under di erent poses? Given one example view at a known pose, it is still possible to use the view-based approach by exploiting prior knowledg...

In recent years physicists have started to express publicly their concerns that not everything has been quite fine with the advancement of physics in the last several decades [1]. Although not all agree with such concerns I think it is an undeniable fact that in this period there has been no revolutionary breakthrough in fundamental physics of the type of relativity and quantum physics. A conve...

1 Professor, Department of Civil Engineering & Engineering Mechanics, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85721 USA, Phone: 520-621-2145, Fax: 520621-2145: [email protected] & Guest Professor, Institute of Geotechnical Engineering, ETH Hönggerberg, Zurich. Abstract  This contribution deals with the application of modern technologies to develop virtual laboratories for civil engineering educat...

One of the most important resources we need today is electricity to carry out comfortably our day-to-day activities. While many nations in the world are abundantly enjoying this resource, more than 1.2 billion people do not have access to electricity. Most of these people are from developing nations typically from Africa and India. They happen to be poor and living in remote villages and mounta...

One of the most important resources we need today is electricity to carry out comfortably our day-to-day activities. While many nations in the world are abundantly enjoying this resource, more than 1.2 billion people do not have access to electricity. Most of these people are from developing nations typically from Africa and India. They happen to be poor and living in remote villages and mounta...

It is a well known fact that a common common causal explanation of the EPR scenario which consists in providing a local, non-conspiratorial common common cause system for a set of EPR correlations is excluded by various Bell inequalities. But what if we replace the assumption of a common common cause system by the requirement that each correlation of the set has a local, non-conspiratorial sepa...

Every week I hear people complain about meetings. Here’s something to consider: What would happen to your organization if it became difficult to have face-to-face meetings? Some organizations have taken steps in this direction by holding meetings in rooms without chairs, imposing short time limits, or limiting the size of the groups. But what if an organization went further and penalized people...

There are debates around the legitimacy of capital punishment, i.e., whether death could serve as a proper execution in our legal system or not. Different arguments have been raised. However, none of them seem able to provide a determined answer to the issue; this results in a lack of instruction in the legal practice. This article, therefore, devotes itself to the effort to find such an answer...

F several decades, researchers around the world have studied demographic disparities in mortality. It is hard to know exactly how much money has been spent on this research. But certainly the amounts have run into the hundreds of million dollars. And, by and large, the conclusions of that research have been the same: The disparities have been increasing. But what if all that research was simply...