Abstract. An overview is given in section 1, of uncertain building blocks of present-day cosmologies. Thereafter, these edited lecture notes deal with the following four special problems: (1) They advertise Wiltshire’s result – making ‘dark energy ’ obsolete – that accelerated cosmic expansion may be an artefact, due to an incorrect evaluation of the cosmic timescale in a Universe whose bulk matter is inhomogeneously distributed. (2) They cast doubt on Hawking’s prediction of blackhole evaporation. (3) They point at various inconsistencies of the black-hole paradigm, in favour of nuclear-burning central engines of AGN. (4) They re-interpret (a best case of) ‘anomalous redshifts’ as non-cosmological, kinematic redshifts in strong jet sources.

Abstract not found

www.people.cornell.edu/pages/edo1/.

are characteristic of normal human thought. Moreover, these illusions appear to promote other criteria of mental health, including the ability to care about others, the ability to be happy or contented, and the ability to engage in productive and creative work. These strategies may succeed, in large part, because

This paper presents a forward mapping rendering algo-rithm to display regular volumetric grids that may not have the same spacings in the three grid directions. It takes advantage of the fact that convolution can be thought of as distributing energy from input samples into space. The renderer

At the end of a thoughtful article on the future of nuclear war, Wiesner and York (1) concluded that: “Both sides in the arms race are... confronted by the dilemma of steadily increasing military power and steadily de-creasing national security. It is our considered professional judgment

. This paper considers factoring integers and finding discrete logarithms, two problems which are generally thought to be hard on a classical computer and have been used as the basis of several proposed cryptosystems. Efficient randomized algorithms are given for these two problems on a hypothetical quantum

... This paper provides an up-to-date critical survey of still- and video-based face recognition research. There are two underlying motivations for us to write this survey paper: the first is to provide an up-to-date review of the existing literature, and the second is to offer some insights

in everyday men-tal life. Most of us recognize that we perform routine activities quickly and effortlessly, with little thought and conscious aware-ness--in short, automatically (James, 1890). As a result, we of-ten perform those activities on "automatic pilot " and turn our minds to other

in terms? One tradition in Western thought has viewed emotions as disorganized interruptions of mental activity, so potentially disruptive that they must be controlled. Writing in the first century B.C., Publilius Syrus stated, "Rule your feelings, lest your feelings rule you " [1}.