South Africa, LGBT Issues in South Africa has undergone significant sociopolitical transformation in the last six decades, from the “legal” adoption of apartheid in 1948 to the first democratic election in 1994, and a new constitution two years later. The lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community in South Africa is at the forefront of constitutional and sociopolitical reform. Num...

Smart Antenna with RF beamforming capability can greatly improve the performance of the vehicle communication system by providing better link quality and high immunity to interference. Butler Matrix is a well-known beamforming network. It can be used for multibeam antennas. The Butler Matrix increases the system capacity and provides higher signal to interference ratio, consequently enhancing t...

ButlerBot is a robotic butler created to cater to people’s questions at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2003 conference and to escort people to desired destinations. The three main areas of research focused on in ButlerBot, the Stony Brook Robot Design Team’s new robot created for the American Association of Artificial Intelligence's (AAAI) Robot Host compe...

WILLIAM BuTLER, Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, was famous in his lifetime as a medical eccentric, whose practice could only with difficulty be classified under any school-theory. His papers, preserved in the Fellows' Library at Clare, confirm that he was humane and forthright, not tied to any philosophical system but with ideas pointing towards the testing of remedies by trials and of theo...

Previous research has identified the “butler lie”—a lie told through text message to explain why someone is, was, or will be unavailable for interaction (Hancock et al., 2009). The concept of butler lying was established by Hancock et al. (2009, p. 519) who coined the term in allusion “to the social buffering function that butlers provided for their employers” when lying to visitors about wheth...

As in the past, this year’s keynote was given by someone well versed in dealing with security issues. Butler Lampson opened his talk by comparing real-world security to computer security. Real-world security is not usually about locking things (or people) up but, rather, is about risk, locks, and deterrence. Risk management, Lampson argued, is important there, since the main issue often is how ...

On the surface, it seems plausible that the goodness or badness of an agent’s actions should be completely irrelevant to the question of whether she performed them intentionally, but there is growing evidence that ascriptions of intentional actions are affected by moral considerations. Joshua Knobe, for instance, has recently published a series of groundbreaking papers (2003a, 2003b, 2004) in w...