In the introduction to The Inhuman Lyotard formulates his central problem about ‘inhumanity’: “[W]hat if human beings . . . were in the process of, constrained into, becoming inhuman (that’s the first part)? And (the second part), what if what is ‘proper’ to humankind were to be inhabited by the inhuman?”1 The first part of his problem deals with ‘development’, ie with “advanced capitalism, wit...

In Australia, railway track maintenance costs comprise between 25-35 percent of total freight train operating costs. Track maintenance planning models have been shown to reduce maintenance costs by 5 to 10 percent though improved planning. This paper describes a model which has been developed to deal with the track maintenance planning function at the medium to long-term levels. This model simu...

System Approach Modelling Applied to the Eluxyl Process — The Eluxyl process achieves paraxylene separation to other xylenes and ethylbenzene. Eluxyl is a simulated moving bed process that requires a fine tuning to produce paraxylene at a very high level of purity, up to 99.90%. A numerical model has been developed in parallel with the process. Objectives are to help tuning, to help design of a...

Statistical methods for PP attachment fall into two classes according to the training material used: first, unsupervised methods trained on raw text corpora and second, supervised methods trained on manually disambiguated examples. Usually supervised methods win over unsupervised methods with regard to attachment accuracy. But what if only small sets of manually disambiguated material are avail...

Recall rock-paper-scissors (or roshambo). Two players simultaneously choose one of rock, paper, or scissors, with rock beating scissors, scissors beating paper, and paper beating rock. Here’s an idea: what if I made you go first? That’s obviously unfair — whatever you do, I can respond with the winning move. But what if I only forced you to commit to a probability distribution over rock, paper,...

“Good” science fiction, if one may be allowed to propose such a definition, is that which transports its readers out of the banal and ordinary, into the world of the what if? and the alien. Writers of good science fiction naturally differ in their implementation of this, but some have opted to employ the more sophisticated tools of linguistics, constructing exotic alien languages or fragments t...

The path to 1984-0 depended on computer communication technology being applied to grotesque purposes. A way to avoid treading the 1984 and the ICCC same path would be to have the alternatives along the way illuminated, assessed, compared and de-George Orwell wrote his famous social-science bated on as broad a basis as possible. That's what fiction novel in 1948, presumably determining the the I...

In situations of strategic interaction it is important for agents to consider not only what their rivals will do, but also what they know, what they know about what they know, and so on. Formal models of knowledge have been developed to help us keep track of these levels of knowledge. This paper provides a non-technical introduction to one of these models, and investigates its foundations. It i...

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...

Information is only valuable when it can be found. It is relatively easy to find information that we know exists; you just need to know what you want to find, where to look for it, and how to express yourself. It might require a little effort to find it, but this work is usually rewarded. But, what if you’re looking to acquire new knowledge or want to search for unusual findings? Normally you s...