In this note a simple cowboy wannabe is expressing his sincere but insufficientgratitude towards some of the people who has made his studies possible and fun.However, I have had so much help from so many people it would be impossible tothank them all in this thesis. Thus it is only the top of the ice berg that is properlyacknowledged on the following pages. For example many of m...

A. Cosmological proof of the Existence of God In the 3rd Meditation, Descartes attempts to prove that God (i) exists, (ii) is the cause of the essence of the meditator (i.e. the author of his nature as a thinking thing), and (iii) the cause of the meditator's existence (both as creator and conserver, i.e. the cause that keeps him in existence from one moment to the next). The proof that God exi...

Dean of the Graduate College iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to my Graduate Advisor, Dr. Venkatesh Sarangan, and wish to express my sincere gratitude for his constant support, understanding, patient guidance, and encouragement throughout my graduate program. I wish to express my sincere thanks to Dr. John Chandler and Dr. Nophil Park for serving on my Graduate Committee. I also express my si...

OBJECTIVE The present study examined mentalizing capacities as well as the relative implication of mentalizing in the comprehension of ironic and sincere assertions among 30 older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and 30 healthy control (HC) subjects. METHOD Subjects were administered a task evaluating mentalizing by means of short stories. A verbal irony comprehension task, in whic...

This study tested the hypothesis that in the minds of adult religious adherents, acquired beliefs about the extraordinary characteristics of God coexist with, rather than replace, an initial representation of God formed by co-option of the evolved person concept. In three experiments, Christian religious adherents were asked to evaluate a series of statements for which core intuitions about per...

Suppose we could build creatures with intelligence comparable to our own, who by design want to do tasks we find unpleasant. May we build such creatures? This is the central question I wish to examine. Before we turn to my answer and its defense, though, I’d like briefly to consider something philosophers typically do not stop to consider: namely, why we might ask the question in the first plac...

This is the third column in our series explaining the new OMG Portable Object Adapter. An Object Adapter is the CORBA component responsible for adapting CORBA’s concept of objects to a programming language’s concept of servants. As you’ll recall from previous columns [1, 2], CORBA objects are “abstract” entities defined by IDL interfaces. Likewise, servants are “concrete” implementations of COR...