In dialogue systems, speech recognition errors force the user to repeat information resulting in more turns, lower dialogue efficiency and maybe complete failure. Higher level information such as history, expectation, discourse knowledge and pragmatics can improve performance but are hard to quantify and effectively include in the recognition process. In this paper, dialogue expectation is used...

Cosmetics is as old as the history of human being. It has been present in human life since the times of the most ancient civilizations. Perfumery is one of the oldest branches of cosmetics. Valerian perfumes found from the Pharaohs’ pyramids, had maintained their aroma. Coriander, Mace oil, cardamom, cinnamon, and juniper were also the favorite materials used for perfumery in ancient Egyptian c...

Eternal inflation, black holes, and the future of civilizations. Abstract We discuss the large-scale structure of the universe in inflationary cosmology and the implications that it may have for the long-term future of civilizations. Although each civilization is doomed to perish, it may be possible to transmit its accumulated knowledge to future civilizations. We consider several scenarios of ...

The dynamics of ‘‘vicious,’’ continuously growing civilizations ~domains!, which engage in ‘‘war’’ whenever two domains meet, is investigated. In the war event, the smaller domain is annihilated, while the larger domain is reduced in size by a fraction e of the casualties of the loser. Here e quantifies the fairness of the war, with e51 corresponding to a fair war with equal casualties on both ...

Conflicts fueled by popular religious mobilization have rekindled the controversy surrounding Samuel Huntington's theory of changing international alignments in the Post-Cold War era. In The Clash of Civilizations, Huntington challenged Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis that liberal democracy had emerged victorious out of Post-war ideological and economic rivalries. Based on a top-down analysi...

International relations scholars have long suspected that popular support for war is structured in part by in-group reactions to out-group threats. Huntington’s (1993, 1996) “clash of civilizations” hypothesis is one of the most controversial and under-tested extensions of this perspective within international relations. Most of the studies to quantitatively test Huntington’s hypothesis have ex...

In his seminal book on the historical periods of Western attitudes toward death, Philippe Aries describes four consecutive periods through which these attitudes evolved and transformed. According to him, the historical attitudes of Western cultures have passed through four major parts described above: "Tamed Death," One's Own Death," "Thy Death," and "Forbidden Death." This paper, after explori...

The aim of this review is to highlight emerging trends about Chinese people and gambling addiction over the last 15 years, and to provide a discourse on the potential link between gambling and Chinese culture and history. The authors reported on the phenomenon of gambling among Chinese people using relevant research studies and reports and traditional Chinese literature. Chinese people have ele...

was killed on March 8, 2005, he also signaled his intention to have a dialogue with Vladimir Putin. Islamic fundamentalist terrorists or messianic terrorists like bin Laden and alZarqawi have a different agenda: to eliminate any political system that does not embrace Islam as the “only true religion . . . and [accept] that all other religions and civilizations [are] barbarian, evil, and animal-...