Much has been written—not least in this journal —about the potential, the benefits, and the risks of social robotics. Our paper is based on the social constructivist perspective that what a technology actually is can be decided only when it is applied. Using as an exemplar the robot baby seal PARO, which is deployed in Germany mainly as activation therapy for elderly people with dementia, we be...

____________________________________________________________________________ A quickening, if still somewhat quiet, shift in the balance of practical power from men to machines is now well underway. In more and more application areas, and more and more completely, decision authority is being removed from human functionaries and reassigned to computer-centered constructs. Such constructs will he...

Intensive livestock systems differ from most pasture-based systems in that managers exert much greater control over the production cycle and the quality of animals entering the system. Consequently, technical inefficiencies among animals tend to be much more easily eradicated. Nevertheless, a range of factors could still cause both technical inefficiency and variations in productivity between a...

What is nonlinear Fourier Analysis? Let us consider an example. Let Q be a domain in the plane bounded by a Jordan curve T that goes to oo. Let O be a Riemann mapping of the upper half-plane onto £2. How does O behave as a function of T? Is it continuous? smooth? realanalytic? Let's think of ourselves as calculus students; we are presented with this function, and we want to study its basic prop...

A wide variety of drawing packages is available for architectural design. However, most of these systems are oriented to the production of final technical drawings, and only few support the early phase of design. Here we introduce a new approach for a design system to support the early phase of design. The method is based on a theory from architecture on the meaning of drawings in 2D architectu...

When in 1867 botanists Carl Nageli and Simon Schwendener published their work on the microscope and its usage, they warned that using this optical device would never lead to a thorough comprehension of the observed the microscope could only present a corrupted picture of the object. Since the knowledge gained could never transcend the "received impression" of the beholder, there was "no truth f...

Drawing on recent, critical work dealing with culture theory, ethnicity, and multiculturalism, this essay seeks to address the nexus between conflict resolution theory and practice, and aims primarily to contribute to the work of practitioners functioning as third parties and intervenors in intercultural and interethnic conflicts and disputes. Two conceptions of culture are proposed and analyze...

In my paper " How much do people remember? Some estimates of the quantity of Learned Information in long-term memory, " I tried to measure the amount of knowledge that people acquire and retain through experience. These were described as " black box " measurements of " functional information contents, " explicitly defined in the paper as " the amount of information transmitted from input to out...

Drawing upon a body of research on the evolution of creativity, this paper proposes a theory of how, when, and why the forward-thinking story-telling abilities of humans evolved, culminating in the visionary abilities of science fiction writers. The ability to recursively chain thoughts together evolved approximately two million years ago. Language abilities, and the ability to shift between di...

Corresponding Author: Yulian A. Menyaev Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, AR, USA Email: [email protected] Abstract: Generators of uniformly distributed random numbers are broadly applied in simulations of stochastic processes that rely on normal and other distributions. In a point of fact, the uniform random numbers are activel...