The “ten-year rule” suggests that it takes about 10 years of preparation to reach “expert” status. How long does it take, however, for someone to reach a level of creative greatness? Through an analysis of 215 contemporary fiction writers, we found that these writers took an average of 10.6 years between their first publication and their best publication, although there was a high degree of var...

We describe the results of large scale perception experiments showing improvements in synthesising two distinct kinds of prominence: standard pitch-accent and strong emphatic accents. Previously prominence assignment has been mainly evaluated by computing accuracy on a prominence-labelled test set. By contrast we integrated an automatic pitch-accent classifier into the unit selection target cos...

This Science Fiction Prototype explores both the possibilities of Brain-Computer Interfaces with Artificial Intelligence and writing autobiographical Science Fiction. The paper proceeds in three parts. The context for the story is introduced in the first section, outlining the particularly personal circumstances from which the story has been written. In the second section the story is presented...

The Rock Cycle is a useful pedagogical device. Science-fiction novelist James G. Ballard published a colorful description of a nameless fictional world in 1957 that has an artificially closed Rock Cycle. Were such an anthropogenic cycle instigated for Earth, it would be consistent with James Hutton’s viewpoint on the Earth as a self-repairing machine without an endogenetic end to planetary Geol...

This paper describes the process of Science Fiction (SF) prototyping as a design tool. An overview of the SF prototyping process is given, followed by a brisk overview of the relationship between science fictiona dn science fact as see in fiction, movies and comic books. Finally we finish up by discussion a specific SF prototype, the research and writings that fed into the process and the outco...

since its advent in 1867,the arabic novel has been under the influence of two factors. one factor is longing for the past, the other one is infatuation with the west and submission to its hegemony. in early 20th century, some novels were written in response to public taste and arab culture. this novel is considered by critics of fiction to be a turning point in the path of arabic fiction. at th...