Unexpectedness is a major factor controlling interest in narratives. Emotions, for instance, are felt intensely if they are associated with unexpected events. The problem with generating unexpected situations is that either characters, or the whole story, are at risk of being no longer believable. This issue is one of the main problems that make story design a hard task. Writers face it on a ca...

In this paper, we propose an underwater wireless sensor network (UWSN) named SOUNET where sensor nodes form and maintain a tree-topological network for data gathering in a self-organized manner. After network topology discovery via packet flooding, the sensor nodes consistently update their parent node to ensure the best connectivity by referring to the timevarying neighbor tables. Such a persi...

What is it for a sound or gesture to have a meaning, and how does it come to have one? In this paper, a range of simulations are used to extend the tradition of theories of meaning as use. The authors work throughout with large spatialized arrays of sessile individuals in an environment of wandering food sources and predators. Individuals gain points by feeding and lose points when they are hit...

Recently, it was announced that the Nobel Prize for chemistry was awarded to three West German scientists, Drs. Harmut Michel, Johann Deisenhofer, and Robert Huber, for their work on the x-ray crystallographic analysis of photosynthetic reaction centers from bacteria. This deserved award marks the third time in the past 2 decades that Nobel committees have recognized important plantrelated rese...

Recent research on perceptual grouping is described with particular emphasis on identifying the level(s) at which grouping factors operate. Contrary to the classical view of grouping as an early, two-dimensional, image-based process, recent experimental results show that it is strongly influenced by phenomena related to perceptual constancy, such as binocular depth perception, lightness constan...

In the year 2008 I was honoured and delighted to be invited to write an editorial in OBESITY FACTS on the occasion of International Federation for the Surgery of Obesity and Metabolic Disorders – European Chapter (IFSO-EC) members joining the Editorial Board of OBESITY FACTS , and therefore the journal becoming an affiliated journal of the IFSO-EC. The 2008 editorial was entitled ‘The Circle Is...

The concept of swarming has been invoked to describe both human military tactics and the behavior of simple biological systems. Most research on the underlying mechanisms of swarming is in the biological community, and it is often not clear how these can be implemented in military systems. This paper reviews several architectures that have shown promise for generating swarming behavior in milit...

DIGGING DEEPER: FOUR LEVELS OF MEANING Recounting the plot of a movie, telling what happens, is the simplest way to explain it to someone else. But this is neither a film review nor a film analysis. It’s merely a synopsis that anyone else who sees or has seen the movie will likely agree with. This level of content may be called the referential content, since it refers directly to things that ha...

As from about 1970, certain experiments have been interpreted by orthodox quantum theorists as showing that the predicted \non-local action" really does happen. I have studied the evidence and found that this interpretation is the result of ignoring some of the facts and of assuming quantum theory to be true in the rst place. If you take account of the real experimental conditions, referring to...