Supersense

The majority of the world's population is religious or believes in supernatural phenomena. In the United States, nine out of every ten adults believe in God, and a recent Gallup poll found that about three out of four Americans believe in some form of telepathy, déjà vu, ghosts, or past lives. Where does such supernatural thinking come from? Are we indoctrinated by our parents, churches, and media, or do such beliefs originate somewhere else? In SuperSense, award-winning cognitive scientist Bruce M. Hood reveals the science behind our beliefs in the supernatural. Superstitions are common. Many of us cross our fingers, knock on wood, step around black cats, and avoid walking under ladders. John McEnroe refused to step on the white lines of a tennis court between points. Wade Boggs insisted on eating a chicken dinner before every Boston Red Sox game. President Barack Obama played a game of basketball the morning of his victory in the Iowa primary and continued the tradition on every subsequent election day. Supernatural thinking includes loftier beliefs as well, such as the sentimental value we place on photos of loved ones, wedding rings, and teddy bears. It also includes spiritual beliefs and the hope for an afterlife. But in this modern, scientific age, why do we hold on to these behaviors and beliefs? It turns out that belief in things beyond what is rational or natural is common to humans and appears very early in childhood. In fact, according to Hood, this "super sense" is something we're born with to develop and is essential to the way we learn to understand the world. We couldn't live without it! Our minds are designed from the very start to think there are unseen patterns, forces, and essences inhabiting the world, and it is unlikely that any effort to get rid of supernatural beliefs, or the superstitious behaviors that accompany them, will be successful. These common beliefs and sacred values are essential in binding us together as a society because they help us to see ourselves connected to each other at a deeper level.

"How could such a book speak so powerfully to our present moment? The short answer is that we, too, live in dark times, even if they are different and perhaps less dark, and "Origins" raises a set of fundamental questions about how tyranny can arise and the dangerous forms of inhumanity to which it can lead." Jeffrey C. Isaac, The Washington Post Hannah Arendt's definitive work on totalitarianism and an essential component of any study of twentieth-century political history The Origins of Totalitarianism begins with the rise of anti-Semitism in central and western Europe in the 1800s and continues with an examination of European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of World War I. Arendt explores the institutions and operations of totalitarian movements, focusing on the two genuine forms of totalitarian government in our time--Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia--which she adroitly recognizes were two sides of the same coin, rather than opposing philosophies of Right and Left. From this vantage point, she discusses the evolution of classes into masses, the role of propaganda in dealing with the nontotalitarian world, the use of terror, and the nature of isolation and loneliness as preconditions for total domination.

EVALITA (http://www.evalita.it/) is the reference evaluation campaign of both Natural Language Processing and Speech Technologies for the Italian language. The objective of the shared tasks proposed at EVALITA is to promote the development of language technologies for Italian, providing a common framework where different systems and approaches can be evaluated and compared in a consistent manner. This volume collects the final and extended contributions presented at EVALITA 2011, the third edition of the evaluation campaign. The 36 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 87 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections roughly corresponding to evaluation tasks: parsing - dependency parsing track, parsing - constituency parsing track, domain adaptation for dependency parsing, named entity recognition on transcribed broadcast news, cross-document coreference resolution of named person entities, anaphora resolution, supersense tagging, frame labeling over italian texts, lemmatisation, automatic speech recognition - large vocabulary transcription, forced alignment on spontaneous speech.

In the early 1930’s in a small alcove at City College in New York a group of young, passionate, and politically radical students argued for hours about the finer points of Marxist doctrine, the true nature of socialism, and whether or not Stalin or Trotsky was the true heir to Lenin. These young intellectuals went on to write for and found some of the most well known political and literary journals of the 20th century such as The Masses, Politics, Partisan Review, Encounter, Commentary, Dissent and The Public Interest. Figures such as Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Sidney Hook, Susan Sontag, Dwight MacDonald, and Seymour Lipset penned some of the most important books of social science in the mid-twentieth century. They believed, above all else, in the importance of argument and the power of the pen. They were a vibrant group of engaged political thinkers and writers, but most importantly they were public intellectuals committed to addressing the most important political, social and cultural questions of the day. Here, with helpful head notes and a comprehensive introduction by Neil Jumonville, The New York Intellectuals Reader brings the work of these thinkers back into conversation.

This two-volume set, consisting of LNCS 6608 and LNCS 6609, constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computer Linguistics and Intelligent Processing, held in Tokyo, Japan, in February 2011. The 74 full papers, presented together with 4 invited papers, were carefully reviewed and selected from 298 submissions. The contents have been ordered according to the following topical sections: lexical resources; syntax and parsing; part-of-speech tagging and morphology; word sense disambiguation; semantics and discourse; opinion mining and sentiment detection; text generation; machine translation and multilingualism; information extraction and information retrieval; text categorization and classification; summarization and recognizing textual entailment; authoring aid, error correction, and style analysis; and speech recognition and generation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Convergence and Hybrid Information Technology, ICHIT 2012, held in Daejeon, Korea, in August 2012. The 102 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 196 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on communications and networking; soft computing and intelligent systems; medical information and bioinformatics; security and safety systems; HCI and data mining; software and hardware engineering; image processing and pattern recognition; robotics and RFID technologies; convergence in information technology; workshop on advanced smart convergence (IWASC).

How society deals with the problem of evil in a post-9/11 world.

Perspectives on Ontology Learning brings together researchers and practitioners from different communities − natural language processing, machine learning, and the semantic web − in order to give an interdisciplinary overview of recent advances in ontology learning. Starting with a comprehensive introduction to the theoretical foundations of ontology learning methods, the edited volume presents the state-of-the-start in automated knowledge acquisition and maintenance. It outlines future challenges in this area with a special focus on technologies suitable for pushing the boundaries beyond the creation of simple taxonomical structures, as well as on problems specifically related to knowledge modeling and representation using the Web Ontology Language. Perspectives on Ontology Learning is designed for researchers in the field of semantic technologies and developers of knowledge-based applications. It covers various aspects of ontology learning including ontology quality, user interaction, scalability, knowledge acquisition from heterogeneous sources, as well as the integration with ontology engineering methodologies.