Embodiment and the inner life

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Punitha P. Swamy, Devanur S. Guru

ICMCCA 2012 is the first International Conference on Multimedia Processing, Communication and Computing Applications and the theme of the Conference is chosen as ‘Multimedia Processing and its Applications’. Multimedia processing has been an active research area contributing in many frontiers of today’s science and technology. This book presents peer-reviewed quality papers on multimedia processing, which covers a very broad area of science and technology. The prime objective of the book is to familiarize readers with the latest scientific developments that are taking place in various fields of multimedia processing and is widely used in many disciplines such as Medical Diagnosis, Digital Forensic, Object Recognition, Image and Video Analysis, Robotics, Military, Automotive Industries, Surveillance and Security, Quality Inspection, etc. The book will assist the research community to get the insight of the overlapping works which are being carried out across the globe at many medical hospitals and institutions, defense labs, forensic labs, academic institutions, IT companies, and security and surveillance domains. It also discusses latest state-of-the-art research problems and techniques and helps to encourage, motivate and introduce the budding researchers to a larger domain of multimedia.

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Susan A. Greenfield

How do our personalities and mental processes, our "states of consciousness," derive from a gray mass of tissue with the consistency of a soft-boiled egg? How can mere molecules constitute an idea or emotion? Some of the most important questions we can ask are about our own consciousness. Our personalities, our individuality, indeed our whole reason for living, lie in the brain and in the elusive phenomenon of consciousness it generates. Thinkers in many disciplines have long struggled with such questions, often in ways that have seemed incompatible, if not downright contradictory. Philosophers have meditated on the subjective experience of consciousness, with little attention to the physical realm, while scientists have sought to establish a causal relation between brain function and mind, often ignoring the qualitative aspects of experience. In Journey to the Centers of the Mind, neuroscientist Susan Greenfield offers an intriguing, unifying theory of consciousness that encompasses both phenomenological mental events and physical aspects of brain function. Using information gathered from clues in animal behavior, human brain damage, computer science, neurobiology, and philosophy, Greenfield offers a "concentric theory" of consciousness, and shows how certain events in the brain correspond to our qualitative experience of the world. Demonstrating the ways in which we can interpret the experience of consciousness in terms of interactions among neurons, she explores how much we can learn by continuing to find the links between our physical and mental inner worlds.

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Erik Olin Wright

Class Counts combines theoretical discussions of the concept of class with a wide range of comparative empirical investigations of class and its ramifications in developed capitalist societies. What unites the topics is not a preoccupation with a common object of explanation, but rather a common explanatory factor: class. Four broad themes are explored: class structure and its transformation; the permeability of class boundaries; class and gender; and class consciousness. The specific empirical studies include such diverse topics as the sexual division of labor in housework, gender differences in managerial authority, friendship networks in the class structure, the expansion of self-employment in the United States in the past two decades, and the class consciousness of state and private-sector employees. The results of these studies are then evaluated in terms of how they confirm certain expectations within the Marxist tradition of class analysis and how they pose challenging surprises.

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[edited by] Vincent Rotello, Sankaran Thayumanavan

Molecular Recognition and Polymers covers the fundamental aspects and applications of molecular recognition in the creation of novel polymeric materials for use in drug design and delivery, sensors, tissue engineering, and other areas. It provides examples of how supramolecular strategies can be used in the creation and self-assembly of polymers and covers state-of-the-art techniques for the design and characterization of non-covalent interactions in polymers in order to tailor the material's properties to various applications. This is a great reference for graduate students and researchers in.