Pontormo’s portrait of Alessandro de’ Medici ( c . 1534–35), showing the duke drawing a portrait of his beloved, cleverly engages with the history and fictive nature of art-making. Pliny’s tale about the invention of drawing forms one resonance, Castiglione’s praise of the noble art of drawing another, the theorization of disegno by Vasari and others yet a third. Poetic conventions about the pi...

In 2006 a consortium of twelve German partners -including some leading providers of industrial robotic technology components (RTCs)teamed up with some research institutes and universities to work on a joint publicly funded four year project called DESIRE. It is focused on service robots, which shall offer their services under unconstrained conditions in immediate proximity of users in everyday ...

INTRODUCTION Traditionally, sexual desire is understood to occur spontaneously, but more recent models propose that desire responds to sexual stimuli. AIMS To experimentally assess whether sexual stimuli increased sexual desire; to compare how sexual arousal and desire responded to three modalities of sexual stimuli: erotic story, unstructured fantasy, and the Imagined Social Situation Exerci...

Some defendants desire to be punished. Sometimes psychotic motivations underlie punishment-seeking behavior; sometimes they do not. The defendant's clinical status is relevant to his competency to stand trial and to waive other rights. These issues are illustrated by presentation of a case of a defendant who sought punishment. The importance of psychiatric assessments of these defendants is emp...

In our society adults who are guilty of having sex with prepubescent children often have a paedophile disposition. This paper first criticises the justifications that are given by paedophiles for having sex with children. Part of this criticism is a brief analysis of "sexual desire" and "erotic". Next, the question is raised whether paedophile activities can ever be morally permissible. Using t...

A case is described of a patient who has a compelling and persistent desire to become deaf. She often kept cotton wool moistened with oil in her ears and was learning sign language. Living without sound appeared to be a severe form of avoidance behavior from hyperacusis and misophonia. She had a borderline personality disorder that was associated with a poor sense of self. Her desire to be deaf...

Although many have proposed formal characterizations of belief structures as bases for rational action, the problem of characterizing rational desires has attracted little attention. AI relies heavily on goal conditions interpreted (apparently) as absolute expressions of desirability, but these cannot express varying degrees of goal satisfaction or preferences among alternative goals. Our previ...

If marketing is truly the “ultimate social practice of postmodern consumer culture” (Firat, 1993) then it carries the heavy burden of “determining the conditions and meanings of life for the future” (Firat and Venkatesh, 1993). Certainly, social theory is now focusing on consumption as playing a central role in the way the social world is constructed, and it can be argued that marketing is too ...

Lurking behavior is common in information-seeking oriented communities. Transferring users with lurking behavior to be contributors can assist virtual communities to obtain competitive advantages. Based on the ecological cognition framework, this study proposes a model to examine the antecedents of lurking behavior in information-seeking oriented virtual communities. This study argues desire fo...