“We are what we are not only because we think (“cogito ergo sum”) but also because we can remember what we have thought about. Every thought we have, every word we speak, every action we engage in –indeed, our very sense of self and our sense of connectedness to otherswe owe to our memory, to the ability of our brains to record and to store our experiences. Memory is the glue that binds our men...

This article reviews the reasons scholars hold that driverless cars and many other AI equipped machines must be able to make ethical decisions, and the difficulties this approach faces. It then shows that cars have no moral agency, and that the term ‘autonomous’, commonly applied to these machines, is misleading, and leads to invalid conclusions about the ways these machines can be kept ethical...

The seeds of the formalization of thought were sown by the French philosopher René Descartes in the 17th century [2]. Descartes argued that thinking is reasoning, and that reason is a chain of simple ideas, linked by applying strict rules of logic. With his ‘cogito ergo sum’, Descartes was the first precursor of cognitive science (even if he was wrong about the dualism of mind and brain). Then,...

This paper evaluates the performance of energy policies in the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), a regional initiative consisting of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, but also considering Venezuela (full member since mid-2012) and Bolivia (full participation under negotiation since 2015). The methodology is based on a qualitative-quantitative approach. First, we provide a critical revie...

Unsolicited commercial email (UCE, spam), scam and phishing emails make up for more than 90% of all emails sent world-wide. Most antispam methods known rely on filtering emails. Meanwhile, browsers also check URLs against blacklists to avoid fraud. However, all those methods are reactive, ergo they are only able to deal with known attack patterns. Some methods are computing intensive, thus requ...

This paper introduces separation predicates, a technique to reuse some ideas from separation logic in the framework of program verification using a traditional first-order logic. The purpose is to benefit from existing specification languages, verification condition generators, and automated theorem provers. Separation predicates are automatically derived from user-defined inductive predicates....

The dominant scientific and philosophical view of the mind — according to which, put starkly, cognition is computation — is refuted herein, via specification and defense of the following new argument: Computation is reversible; cognition isn’t; ergo, cognition isn’t computation. After presenting a sustained dialectic arising from this defense, we conclude with a brief preview of the view we wou...

Abbreviations: DNA: Deoxyribonucleic Acid; RNA: Ribonucleic Acid; PNA: Peptide Nucleic Acid; WC: Watson-Crick; HG: Hoongsteen; NMM: N-Methyl Morpholine; DSC: Differential Scanning Calorimetry; RP-HPLC: Reverse Phase High Performance Liquid Chromatography; DsRed: Red Fluorescent Protein; SNPs: Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms; ACE: Affinity Capillary Electrophoresis; PNA-FISH: PNA Fluorescence In...

288 diff erent from that which is currently being perceived. Essentially, the imagination allows objects to be held in mind and thereby considered in the absence of their immediate presentation via perception. Th is capacity to hold in mind allows the consideration of relations among the objects of imagination and those of direct experience. Of course, the imagination allows the creation of nov...

Safety critical avionics software is a natural application area for formal verification. This is reflected in the formal method’s inclusion into the certification guideline DO-178C and its formal methods supplement DO-333. Airbus and Dassault-Aviation, for example, have conducted studies in using formal verification. A large German national research project, Verisoft XT, also examined the appli...