In tracing world ecological degradation over a period of fi ve millennia, Sing Chew (2001) points out that “...the history of civilizations...and states is also the history of ecological degradation and crisis...[as such]...ecological relation is as primary as the economic relation in the self-expansionary processes of societal systems...” (pp. 1–2). Particularly over the last half of the twent...

Both western and eastern civilizations have linked moral teaching with theology followed by philosophy. New-knowledge-seekers about natural world, were called 'natural philosophers'. There was a paradigm shift during industrial revolution in western world which culminated in modern science. The word "scientist" was coined during the 19th century. The paper examines whether natural philosophers ...

Background: Extraterrestrial Encounter While humanity has not yet encountered an extraterrestrial civilization, this possibility cannot be ruled out. Some evidence suggests that an encounter may be likely. If an encounter occurs, it would be of profound significance for humanity. There thus has been much debate on the outcome of an encounter. Opinions are sharply divided on whether extraterrest...

The United Nations briefly considered the issue of extra-terrestrial intelligence at the 32nd session of the General Assembly in 1977. As a result, the Office of Outer Space Affairs was tasked to prepare a document on issues related to 'messages to extra-terrestrial civilizations', but this area has not been followed through in more recent times. This discussion paper describes the United Natio...

We utilize anthropic reasoning to demonstrate that we are typical observers of our reference class under a self-sampling assumption by investigating the definition of what a civilization is. With reference to the conflict between such reasoning and the observational lack of extra-terrestrial intelligent life, we conclude that a part of our theoretical understanding of the Universe will be at fa...

This research aims at building a preference-based player model of Civilization IV players. Our model incorporates attributes which are defined for AI players. We use a sequential minimal optimization (SMO) classifier to build the player model based on a training set with observations of a large number of games between six AI players. The model was validated on a test set of games between the sa...

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Forced vital capacity, forced expiratory volume in one second, functional residual capacity, residual volume, total lung capacity, and single breath diffusing capacity measurements (effective alveolar volume, carbon monoxide transfer factor, and transfer coefficient) were measured in 247 young healthy adults (130 male, 117 female) aged 15-40 years living in Madras. Subjects were of Dravidian st...