Adolf Hitler’s personality was investigated posthumously through the use of an informant version of the Coolidge Axis II Inventory (CATI), which is designed for the assessment of personality, clinical, and neuropsychological disorders. Five academic Hitler historians completed the CATI. The overall mean inter-rater correlation was moderately high for all 38 CATI scales’ T scores (median r = .72...

Much attention has been paid to ‘blunders’ and ‘policy disasters’. Some argue, on the one hand, that the UK’s political and administrative system is disproportionately prone to generating disasters, but offer no systematic evidence on the record of failures of policies and major public projects in other political systems. On the other hand, research on cognitive biases and other failures of col...

In this paper I argue that the evaluation of artificial creative systems in the direct form currently practiced is not in itself empirically well-grounded, hindering the potential for incremental development in the field. I propose an approach to evaluation that is grounded in thinking about interaction design, and inspired by an anthropological understanding of human creative behaviour. This r...

Conceptual blending is a cognitive phenomenon whose instances range from the humdrum to the pyrotechnical. Most remarkable of all is the ease with which humans regularly understand and produce complex blends. While this facility will doubtless elude our best efforts at computational modeling for some time to come, there are practical forms of conceptual blending that are amenable to computation...

Conceptual blending is a cognitive phenomenon whose instances range from the humdrum to the pyrotechnical. Most remarkable of all is the ease with which humans regularly understand and produce complex blends. While this facility will doubtless elude our best efforts at computational modeling for some time to come, there are practical forms of conceptual blending that are amenable to computation...

First paragraph: The history of literature and art offers no shortage of works created to offend or shock an audience, but few have been as incendiary as gangsta rap. Apologists cannot deny the problematic content of this form of rap—the misogynistic posturing, themes of intense violence, freewheeling and gratuitous obscenity—and some detractors hold that even the attempt to analyze the genre b...

This paper examines one of the less-discussed modes of anti-globalization, relocalization or local autonomy. It describes a range of autonomous movements, summarizes their political economic ideas, and discusses some common social critiques raised in regard to local autonomy. Apologists for the costly side effects of the globalization process argue that integration into the global economy bring...

Marriage is a focus of conflict today, from lamentations about divorce rates to legal contests over same-sex marriage. It was equally contested in Shakespeare’s England, even if the issues at stake were somewhat different. Recent scholarship on the history of marriage has unsettled many of the assumptions that once governed discussions of early modern marriage and its representation on the stag...

The ground-zero premise (so to speak) of the biological sciences is the assumption that survival and reproduction is the basic, continuing, inescapable problem for all living organisms; life is at bottom a “survival enterprise.” Whatever may be our perceptions, aspirations, or illusions, this tap-root assumption is applicable to the human species as well. Survival is the “paradigmatic problem” ...