I wish to defend two claims in this paper. My first claim has two parts. First, I argue that there is a physical and social world out there which exists in a way that is independent of how we, as observers, represent it. In this sense, there is an objective reality. Following John Searle, I call this the claim of external realism. Note that this is an ontological claim. It says nothing about wh...

Java is receiving plenty of negative attention lately. Though barely a decade old, the world's most popular programming language is being called bloated, too complicated for the world of quickly written and deployed Web applications, and ripe for dethronement by scripting languages. Forum flames regarding choice of language or development environment are nothing new among developers and analyst...

When we look up into the sky, it is hard not to think about how vast the universe is. Our universe is estimated to contain around 100 billion galaxies with each galaxy having around 100 billion stars. And most of those stars are expected to harbor planets. That is a mind-boggling number of stars and possible planets. This leads inevitably to questions about whether there is life on planets orbi...

1 I n t r o d u c t i o n The problem we address in this paper is that of a machine vision system with two cameras, sometimes called a stereo rig, to which no thro~-dimensional metric information has been made available. The only information at hand is contained in the two images. We assume that this machine vision system is capable, by comparing these two images, of establishing correspondence...

As an introduction, I want to contrast two general traditions in semantics, one realistic and one cognitive. According to the realistic approach to semantics the meaning of an expression is something out there in the world. In technical terms, a semantics for a language is defined as a mapping from the syntactic structures to things in the world (or in several possible worlds). Often meanings a...

A literature review on cross-cultural personas reveals both, a trend in projects lacking accomplishment and personas reinforcing previous biases. We first suggest why failures or incompleteness may have ensued, while then we entice a thoughtful alteration of the design process by creating and validating personas together with those that they embody. Personas created in people’s own terms suppor...