Cuando uno sabe lo que quiere, pero no sabe cómo conseguirlo, tiene un problema cuya solución requiere el "pensamiento lateral", un pensamiento creativo que en el fondo es una manera diferente de usar el cerebro sin utilizar la lógica, aunque ello pueda parecer irracional. Pero las posibilidades del hombre no terminan ahí: ¡son tantos los que han pasado a la historia precisamente por usar otro tipo de pensamiento, otras categorías distintas! El pensamiento lógico, la lógica, es unidireccional, sigue el camino que ella misma se traza; el pensamiento lateral cuenta con infinitas maneras de llegar a una solución, porque llega a ella por caminos distintos a los del pensamiento lógico. El pensamiento lateral es un pensamiento creativo, es una forma de escapar de las ideas fijas que atan las alas de la creación. Sin comparar uno con otro estos dos pensamientos, sin decir cuál de ellos es el mejor, es necesario reconocer que ambos son igualmente necesarios: el pensamiento lateral, creativo, es para crear ideas; el pensamientológico es para desarrollarlas, seleccionarlas y usarlas.

En nuestra sociedad actual, es fundamental tomar en cuenta el factor de diferencia cultural o marginación social. El autor propone utilizar su experiencia personal así como sus conocimientos de filósofo para tratar esta cuestión en el ámbito de la educación.

Provides the most thorough examination of Internet technologies and applications for researchers in a variety of related fields. For the average Internet consumer, as well as for experts in the field of networking and Internet technologies.

This edited book discusses the exciting field of Digital Creativity. Through exploring the current state of the creative industries, the authors show how technologies are reshaping our creative processes and how they are affecting the innovative creation of new products. Readers will discover how creative production processes are dominated by digital data transmission which makes the connection between people, ideas and creative processes easy to achieve within collaborative and co-creative environments. Since we rely on our senses to understand our world, perhaps of more significance is that technologies through 3D printing are returning from the digital to the physical world. Written by an interdisciplinary group of researchers this thought provoking book will appeal to academics and students from a wide range of backgrounds working or interested in the technologies that are shaping our experiences of the future.

This text demonstrates how various soft computing tools can be applied to design and develop methodologies and systems with case based reasoning, that is, for real-life decision-making or recognition problems. Comprising contributions from experts, it introduces the basic concepts and theories, and includes many reports on real-life applications. This book is of interest to graduate students and researchers in computer science, electrical engineering and information technology, as well as researchers and practitioners from the fields of systems design, pattern recognition and data mining.

The Brazilian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence (SBIA) has been organized by the Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence of the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC) since 1984. In order to promote research in Artificial Intelligence and scientific interaction among Brazilian AI researchers and practitioners, and with their counterparts worldwide, it is being organized as an international forum since 1993. The SBIA proceedings have been published by Springer-Verlag as a part of the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series since 1995. The XIVth SBIA, held in 1998 at the PUCRS Campus in Porto Alegre, has maintained the international tradition and standards previously established: 61 papers were submitted and reviewed by an international program committee, from this number, 26 papers were accepted and are included in this volume. Of course, organizing an event such as SBIA demands a lot of group effort. We would like to thank and congratulate all the program committee members, and the many reviewers, for their work in reviewing and commenting on the submitted papers. We would also like to thank the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, host of the XIV SBIA, and the institutions which sponsored it - CNPq, CAPES, BANRISUL, among others. Last but not least, we want to thank all the kind people of the Local Organizing Committee, whose work made the event possible.