Acknowledging the power of the id-drives, Freud held on to the authority of reason as the ego’s best tool to control instinctual desire. He thereby placed analytic reason at the foundation of his own ambivalent social theory, which, on the one hand, held utopian promise based upon psychoanalytic insight, and, on the other hand, despaired of reason’s capacity to control the self-destructive elem...

This paper, using science fiction as a heuristic support for exploring technical potentialities, is based on part of the works of Iain M. Banks, the novels of the “Culture series”, in order to examine the role of artificial intelligences and the effects they could have on the life of a community from a political point of view. This series of science fiction novels portrays a galactic civilizati...

We aimed at better understanding the brain mechanisms involved in the processing of alerting meaningful sounds during sleep, investigating alpha activity. During EEG acquisition, subjects were presented with a passive auditory oddball paradigm including rare complex sounds called Novels (the own first name - OWN, and an unfamiliar first name - OTHER) while they were watching a silent movie in t...

This paper proposes an examination of recent (published since the late 1960s) editions of nineteenth-century Brazilian and Spanish American novels with a considerable component of romanticism. It focuses upon the way in which editors, translators, preface-writers, and especially illustrators, seek to communicate to current-day readers the significance and worth of novels written under the sway ...

The Author and the Magi: Magic in the Ancient Novel and its Implications for Readership What argues most strongly for the recognition of the ancient " novel " as part of the novel genre in its proper sense is its familiarity. These texts, picaresque, romantic, concise and designed to thrill, offer no generic convention unfamiliar to us from the modern novels of western Europe—the improbable esc...

We propose the Multiple Join Path (MJP) framework for obtaining high quality information by linking fields across multiple databases, when the underlying databases have poor quality data, which are characterized by violations of integrity constraints like keys and functional dependencies within and across databases. MJP associates quality scores with candidate answers by first scoring individua...

Unexpectedly occurring task-irrelevant stimuli have been shown to impair performance. They capture attention away from the main task leaving fewer resources for target processing. However, the actual distraction effect depends on various variables; for example, only target-informative distractors have been shown to cause costs of attentional orienting. Furthermore, recent studies have shown tha...