Some decision situations are so objectionable or repugnant that people refuse to make a choice. This paper seeks to better understand taboo responses, and to distinguish choices that are truly taboo from those that are merely difficult or confusing. Using 22 scenarios that describe potentially taboo issues, Experiment 1 explores reasons for disapproval of the scenarios. We measure a large numbe...

FPGAs have an important role to play in System-on-a-Chip (SoC) designs by providing programmable hardware resources within complex ASIC designs. However, because the FPGA logic is custom-fabricated with the overall SoC, we have an opportunity to optimize that logic to the SoC’s specific needs. This gave rise to the Totem Project, which automates the creation of domain-specific reconfigurable lo...

When two masked, to-be-attended targets are presented within approximately 500 msec of each other, accurate report of the second target (T2) suffers more than when targets are presented farther apart in time--an attentional blink (AB). In the present study, the AB was found to be larger when taboo words were presented as a first target (T1), as compared with the AB found when emotionally neutra...

The two English constructions exemplified in Let’s get the hell out of here (type G) and They beat the hell out of him (type B) differ both syntactically and semantically, but in both the taboo expression has the force of an intensifier. History (through a corpus investigation) reveals that the B-construction started as a literal exorcism (beat the devil out of someone), where the hell substitu...

Translators face a number of difficulties while translating. Not only translation of cultural elements is of utmost importance in translation studies, but also it is an arduous task for translators, especially in the case of interlingual translation. One of the biggest concerns of audiovisual translators is culture-specific items amongst which taboo expressions are included. This study aimed at...

For fault-tolerant real-time distributed systems, the probability that a message is not delivered within its real-time deadline must be small enough that it does not adversely aaect system reliability. We investigate the delivery of messages for the Totem Protocol, a reliable ordered broadcast protocol that we have developed for fault-tolerant distributed systems with physical broadcasts over a...