Dirty Hands, Speculative Minds, and Smart Machines

The Lawyer's Dirty Hands

Minds, machines and Searle

Searle's celebrated Chinese Room Argument has shaken the foundations of Artificial Intelligence. Many refutations have been attempted, but none seem convincing. This paper is an attempt to sort out explicitly the assumptions and the logical, methodological and empirical points of disagreement. Searle is shown to have underestimated some features of computer modeling, but the heart of the issue ...

Hands- and Minds-on Electricity and Magnetism

The paper describes several interesting school physics experiments from the area of electricity and magnetism found in foreign journals. These experiments may serve as an inspiration for development of similar school physics experiments or modified versions of experiments and for quantitative measurements on such experiments (which are often used just as qualitative experiments in our school pr...

Converging Hands or Converging Minds?

Interlocutors sometimes repeat each other’s representational hand gestures. We investigated if this is a case of direct mimicry of form, or whether perceiving a gesture gives rise to a semantic representation, which subsequently informs gesture production. For this we used an interactive route description task, in which a confederate’s gestures indicated the route in either the vertical or the ...

Dirty hands: bacteria of faecal origin on commuters' hands.

Although many studies have investigated bacteria on the hands of health-care workers and caregivers, few have looked at microbiological contamination on the hands of the general adult public. This study investigated faecal bacteria on the hands of commuters in five UK cities. Of the 404 people sampled 28% were found to have bacteria of faecal origin on their hands. A breakdown by city showed th...