bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Last Law
Authors: Nernst Walther
Published: November 2023

According to a story current in Berlin in the early 1900s, God decided one day to create a superman. He worked first on the brain, fashioning a “most perfect and subtle mind.” But he had other business, and the job had to be put aside. The Archangel Gabriel saw this marvelous brain and could not resist the temptation to try to create the complete man. He overestimated his abilities, however, and succeeded only in creating a “rather unimpressive looking little man.” Discouraged by his failure, he left his creation inanimate. The devil came along, looked with satisfaction upon this unique, but lifeless, being and breathed life into it. “That was Walther Nernst.”
The Scientist as Critic
Authors: Pauli Wolfgang
Published: November 2023

The modern version of quantum theory—now known as “quantum mechanics”— was born and grew to maturity in just five years, between 1925 and 1930. More was accomplished during those five years than in the preceding twenty-five years, or, for that matter, in the seventy years that have followed. Progress before 1925 was constantly hampered by conceptual doubts. Paradoxes such as the wave-particle duality—the contradiction between the Einstein particle theory of light and the classical wave theory—were disturbing and limiting. But by 1925 these difficulties had, perhaps from familiarity, become less inhibiting. Theorists stopped worrying about the conceptual strangeness of the quantum realm, and began to make a new physics with the strangeness incorporated in it. Once the conceptual barriers were passed, progress was astonishingly rapid. For those who had the vision, it was as if a great fog had lifted. Suddenly it was possible to see in many directions with a clarity no one could have anticipated.
Opening Doors
Authors: Curie Marie
Published: November 2023

Her life was, in a word, heroic. Marie Curie was absolutely unstoppable in any task she undertook, no matter what the obstacles. “First principle: never let one’s self be beaten down by persons or by events,” she wrote in a letter to a friend when she was twenty-one. At the time, she was enduring life as a governess in a small town in Poland and dreaming of a university education in Paris. Student life at the Sorbonne eventually became a reality, and despite an erratic secondary education in Warsaw, she overcame the deficiencies, placed first in her licence e`s sciences examination (among 1,825 students, 23 of them women), and second in the licence e`s mathematiques examination. She chose as a topic for a doctoral thesis an immensely difficult study of the recently discovered phenomena of radioactivity.
On the Crest of a Wave
Authors: Rutherford Ernest
Published: November 2023

He was large and somewhat clumsy; he had a thundering voice, and piercing eyes that are startling even in old photographs. The conventional role of the intellectual did not appeal to him, so he played it his own way. Once, a distinguished stranger, amazed by his unscholarly accent and appearance, mistook him for an Australian farmer. (His New Zealand origins partly explain the impression.) A nonscientific academic colleague told him he was a “savage—a noble savage I admit—but still a savage!” (This response was not unprovoked. Rutherford had opened the conversation with: “Alexander, all that you have said and all that you have written during the last thirty years—what does it all amount to? Hot air! Hot air!”) He was not inclined toward modesty, if undeserved. After moving from McGill University in Montreal, where he did some of his earliest research, to the University of Manchester, which saw the middle period of his career, he reported to his friend and colleague Bertram Boltwood at Yale: “I find the students here regard a full professor as little short of Lord God Almighty. It is quite refreshing after the critical attitude of the Canadian students. It is always a good thing to feel that you are appreciated.”
Complete Physicist
Authors: Fermi Enrico
Published: November 2023

As a rule, scientists display their talents either as theorists or as experimentalists, but not both. Einstein, Maxwell, and Gibbs, for example, were great as theorists but not creative as experimentalists, while Faraday and Rutherford, great as experimentalists, were limited as theorists. Only Newton, in our company of physicists seen so far, displayed great talent as both an experimentalist and a theorist (and also as a mathematician). The subject of this chapter, Enrico Fermi, is another exception to the rule that physics is a bipartisan community. Fermi was, as his biographer and colleague, Emilio Segre, remarks, “from the first a complete physicist for whom theory and experiment possessed equal weight.”
Affliction, Fame, and Fortune
Authors: Hawking Stephen
Published: November 2023

Stephen Hawking, described accurately as “the most remarkable scientist of our time,” and inaccurately as a second Einstein (“perhaps an equal of Einstein,” according to Timemagazine in 1978), was born in Oxford on January 8, 1942. On January 8, 1642, three hundred years earlier, Galileo Galilei died, and in December of the year 1642 Isaac Newton was born.
Attitudes Toward Language, National Identity, and Cultural Pluralism
Authors: Schmid Carol L
Published: November 2023

Currently there is a political confrontation between “language rights” and “English Only;’ which is connected to a deeper debate over the meaning of American identity and the means of preserving it. Is speaking English a condition for full membership in the American community? How do most Americans judge the need for a common language? To what degree are there differences in opinion among Americans and immigrants about the need for an official language, bilingual education, and the desirability of maintaining one’s culture? How do different language and cultural groups see one another? To what degree are there major differences in the understanding of the American creed between Latinos, blacks, and whites? Do Latino citizens and those who have been naturalized share fundamentally similar orientations toward language and immigration issues with more recent immigrants? Are we on the way to a “Quebecification” in attitudes and behavior, as some English-Only proponents have suggested? These are important questions, which have received little analytical discussion in the academic and popular literature.
Conclusion
Authors: Schmid Carol L
Published: November 2023

A sense of shared experience is an important dimension of national identity (Anderson, 1991). This leads to an imagined construction of a shared past and a vision of the future to represent the nation. Shared identity in the United States has been imagined around a monolingual past. Multilingualism and bilingual education do not figure in the immigrant myth. The melting pot did not immediately turn non English speakers into accentless speakers of English. Myths, however, die hard. The melting pot mythology obscures the hardship that often lasted several generations and the diversity of cultures that have flourished in the United States despite aggressive efforts to eliminate them. Several events, policies, politics, and wars in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century forged an ideological link between political loyalty to the American “nation” and speaking accentless English to the detriment of other languages.
Romancing the Real
Authors: Walls Laura Dassow
Published: November 2023

Thoreau in our day would never be recognized as a “scientist”—indeed, use of the term would be anachronistic. Troulack of a word that might unify all the various workin the physical and natural sciences, William Whewell, the British polymath of science, coined it in 1834 by analogy with “artist.” The novel term caught on only slowly, however, and would not come into popular usage until much later in the century. So Thoreau wrote instead of “the man of science,” and in his early journal entries he envisions the “true man of science” as brave and vital, with “a deeper and finer experience” and possessed of “a more perfect Indian wisdom” (“Natural History,” 29)—someone who could unite earth and heaven under one higher law.
Bell labs takes the early lead
Authors: Hecht Jeff
Published: November 2023

THE SMART MONEY would have bet on Bell Telephone Laboratories as the laser race started. Townes and Schawlow’s work gave Bell a solid head start over everyone but Gould, who was still struggling for support. Bell was in its glory days, considered to be the world’s premier industrial research laboratory, and the driving force behind the steady advances of communications technology. In 1956 Bell bagged the Nobel Prize in Physics for the transistor, although by then only one of the three recipients—Walter Brattain—remained on the Bell payroll. Other companies tried to model their own research after Bell’s, even borrowing from the architecture of the sprawling suburban campus in Murray Hill, New Jersey.
Stimulating the emission of money
Authors: Hecht Jeff
Published: November 2023

TRG’S LIMITED RESOURCES kept Gould a few steps behind Bell Labs. TRG was a small military contractor; it didn’t have piles of money from one of the world’s largest corporations to invest in research. TRG’s research money came from military agencies, and finding the right agency to foot the bill was always a challenge.
A pause to compare notes
Authors: Hecht Jeff
Published: November 2023

EXCEPT FOR BELL LABS, all laser research through early 1959 was widely dispersed, performed by small groups or individuals in much larger organizations. The TRG contract was changing that, but in the spring the company’s newly funded laser project was still getting on its feet, shifting people from other projects, hiring new people, setting up experiments, and waiting for Gould’s clearance to come through. The little group at Columbia had some money, but others had no direct support for working on lasers, and some, like Maiman and Wieder, were being paid to work on microwave masers.
A crash program at “pipsqueak inc.”
Authors: Hecht Jeff
Published: November 2023

THE ONLY SERIOUS COMPETITION BELL SAW on its horizon was TRG. The two had some obvious similarities. Both had plenty of money to spend on laser research, Bell from the parent AT&T, and TRG from the Pentagon. Their staffs of bright young physicists were heavily laden with men who had gone through Columbia’s physics department. The two groups knew each other. TRG had hired Ben Senitzky and Ron Martin away from Bell, and Bennett had consulted for TRG. Yet there were also strong contrasts.
Runners-up cross the finish line
Authors: Hecht Jeff
Published: November 2023

RUBY PROVED A REMARKABLY USEFUL and versatile laser, and ruby lasers are still used today. However, no one thought ruby would be the ultimate laser. Maiman’s success broke conceptual logjams and spurred the quest for the original goal of a laser capable of continuous operation. The runners-up were still pressing for the finish line.
Analysis of Intracellular Ions in Embryos: pH and Calcium
Authors: Lane Michelle , Baltz Jay M , Gardner David K
Published: November 2023

To understand cell physiology and the regulation of development, it is essential to under- stand the role and control of intracellular ions. Ions such as calcium and protons (pH) are universal regulators of cell function. Temporal and spatial changes in the levels of these ions regulate and signal many cellular functions such as division, differentiation, metabolism, and secretion in response to stimuli such as growth factors. In reproduction, changes in intracellular calcium and pH are key factors in fertilization and in initiation of development of sea urchin and Xenopus eggs. Much of the work on these species was performed in the 1960s and 1970s using electron probes that could be inserted into the oocytes or cells of the embryo to take measurements. This was possible due to the large volume of the oocytes and embryos and further facilitated by the ability of the oocytes and embryos from these species to develop external to the body. Similar studies on mammalian oocytes and embryos had not been possible due to the small size of the cells and also due to an inability to maintain developmental competence external to the body for long periods of time.
Assessment of Ploidy, Telomere Length, and Telomerase Activity in Oocytes and Embryos
Authors: King W A , Betts D H , Bureau W , Basrur P K
Published: November 2023

Early cytogenetic investigation on plants and animals based on sections and squash preparations of proliferating tissues such as root tips, bone marrow, and the testis indicated that chromosomal imbalance was often the cause of semisterility and/or embryo loss. The advent of hypotonic pretreatment (1), postfixation air drying (2), and lymphocyte culture procedures (3, 4) provided the technical means for confirmation of these observations. With the use of these techniques, the number and morphology of chromosomes could be precisely delineated, which, in turn, led to the linking of chromosome abnormalities with specific postnatal malformations in humans (5) and with reproductive failure in cattle (6). These techniques were successfully applied to testicular material, yielding details on the process of meiosis in the male. However, the impact of abnormal chromosome contributions of the oocyte on subsequent embryo development could not be assessed until the 1960s and 1970s. Techniques for the preparation of chromosomes from oocytes and embryos, based on procedures for visualizing chromosomes of somatic cells, were described for the mouse (7), pig (8), human (9), and cattle (10). The groundbreaking study on human spontaneous abortions by Carr (11) confirmed that chromosome abnormalities are a significant cause of first trimester pregnancy failures.
Two-Dimensional Protein Gel Database Analysis of Embryos, Oocytes, and Oocyte-associated Granulosa Cells
Authors: Latham K E , Nourjanova G , Wigglesworth K , Eppig J J
Published: November 2023

A common objective of investigations of the mechanisms regulating early development is to characterize the effects of specific experimental or genetic manipulations on embryonic phenotype at the molecular level. In many circumstances, where molecular, cellular, or physiological mechanisms governing a process are well known, a marker gene approach can be adopted, in which the response of one or more specific genes to experimental manipulations is examined. In other circumstances, however, such marker gene approaches are of limited use, either because the nature of the biological response cannot be readily predicted or because the underlying biology of a given response is poorly understood, making the selection of the appropriate marker genes difficult.
Spermatogonial Transplantation
Authors: Nagano Makoto C
Published: November 2023

Spermatogenesis is a highly active and complex process that continuously produces male gametes, the spermatozoa. A technique has been developed in which germ cells derived from the testis of a fertile male are transferred to the testis of an infertile male and do- nor-derived spermatogenesis is reconstituted in recipient testes (1, 2). This technique, called “spermatogonial transplantation,” provides unique opportunities not only to understand the process of spermatogenesis but also to manipulate male germ cells for medical and agricultural applications. In this chapter I describe the general concept and applications of the transplantation technique and standard procedures using the mouse as a model species. An excellent technical review has been published that complements this chapter (3).
Cryobiology: Slow Freezing and Vitrification of Embryos
Authors: Mukaida Tetsunori , Kasai Magosaburo
Published: November 2023

To cryopreserve cells alive without decreasing survival with the duration of storage, they must be preserved at temperatures below the glass transition temperature, which is around –130°C. In practice, liquid nitrogen (–196°C) is used for maintaining such a temperature. To date, various methods for embryo cryopreservation have been developed, and embryos of more than 20 mammalian species have been successfully cryopreserved (1). Cryopreservation, coupled with embryo transfer, is used to preserve genetic variants in laboratory animals (mainly mice), for breeding and reproduction in farm animals (mainly cattle), and for treatment of infertility in humans. Furthermore, embryo cryopreservation is expected to be used for the conservation of wild species. Here we give a brief outline of embryo cryobiology and describe some reliable protocols for embryo cryopreservation.
Principles of Developmental Change in Infants’ Category Formation
Authors: Oakes Lisa M , Madole Kelly L
Published: November 2023

Categorization is one of the most fundamental of cognitive processes. The ability to categorize may be especially important in infancy, when an enormous amount of new information is encountered every day. By forming groups of similar objects, infants can effectively reduce the amount of information they must process, learn, and remember (for example, they can treat a new dog as a member of a familiar category), as well as make inferences from past experience to encounters with new objects (for example, categorizing an object as a dog allows infants to form expectations for what it will eat and whether it will bite if its tail is pulled).

Over the past 25 years, a great deal of research has focused on understanding the development of categorization abilities in infancy (see Hayne, 1996; Madole & Oakes, 1999; Quinn & Eimas, 1996, 1997, for recent reviews). Despite the growing body of literature in infants’ categorization (or perhaps because of it), there is considerable controversy over basic issues in the study of categorization. For example, there has been much debate over the relative importance of conceptual features (features that cannot be seen) and perceptual features (what objects look like) in infants’ formation of categories (e.g., Eimas, 1994; Jones & Smith, 1993; Madole & Oakes, 1999; Mandler, 1988, 1992; Rakison, chap. 7), an issue that has also has been discussed in the context of adult cognitive processes (e.g., Goldstone & Barsalou, 1998).
The Music of Everyday Speech
Authors: Wennerstrom Ann
Published: November 2023

Recently there has been a growing interest among discourse analysts in incorporating prosody into the analysis of spoken language. Wennerstrom considers the role of prosody in a variety of discourse genres and offers an over-all framework within which future analysis might continue.
Intonational Meaning
Authors: Wennerstrom Ann
Published: November 2023

Intonation is the pitch or “melody” of the voice during speech. In English, a language that makes extensive use of intonation, speakers can manipulate their pitch on particular words, phrases, or even topicsized constituents to convey meaning about relationships in discourse. Intonation is not derived automatically from the stress patterns or syntax of an utterance; instead, a speaker decides to associate particular intonation patterns with particular constituents, depending on the discourse context.

One immediate difficulty in consolidating the literature on intonation is the lack of aggreement on terminology. If I wish to talk about syntax, I can feel confident that most audiences will understand words such as “noun” and “verb.” However, with intonation, terms such as “stress,” “accent,” “tone,” and “emphasis” may mean different things to different people. Not only are the lay terms different from the linguists’ terms, but linguists themselves disagree on terminology. To make matters worse, there are even different schools of thought on what counts as a unit in an intonation analysis.
Prosody As A Discourse Marker
Authors: Wennerstrom Ann
Published: November 2023

The questions addressed in this chapter, as in the last, pertain to discourse coherence. However, this time, instead of looking at how prosody associates with information structure, I tum to questions of how prosody contributes to the organization of a text as a whole. In addition to the pitch accent, this chapter is concerned with the role of prosodic boundaries at higher levels—shifts in initial and final pitch range and pauses—in the segmentation of the discourse. Prosodic boundaries of this kind, or paratones, can be said to perform a function similar to that oflexical discourse markers, such as you know, anyway, so, and oh, for they bracket constituents of the text into organizational units.

Schiffrin (1987), who analyzed discourse markers in a large corpus of conversation, defines them as “sequentially dependent elements which bracket units of talk” (p. 31). According to Schiffrin, “sequentially dependent” means that the occurrence of a marker depends on the sequence of events at the level of the discourse, rather than at the local level of the clause.
Conclusion
Authors: Wennerstrom Ann
Published: November 2023

In Lecture 6 of the collection How to Do Things with Words, Austin refers to “tone of voice, cadence, emphasis” as among the “more primitive devices in speech” (1962, pp. 73–74) for which syntax and the lexicon provide more explicit alternatives. This view has unfortunately tended to dominate language-related fields throughout their history. Prosody has been considered the extra flourish, the nuance, not what is said but the way it is said, a side issue beyond the scope of mainstream analyses. In this volume I have tried to make the case that prosody deserves more central attention. Without variation in prosody, speech would not only be very flat and uninteresting but would lack large components of meaning.

In defending this position, my method has been to investigate many examples of natural discourse in which an aspect of prosody performs a function that would not be accomplished by virtue of the lexicogrammatical structure alone. In addition, I have brought together the writings of others whose experimental research shows the many contributions of prosody to discourse meaning and organization.
Introduction Reading Nostalgia
Authors: Dames Nicholas
Published: November 2023

Replacing Barthes’s hypostatized “Novel” with a historically defined set of “novels;’ we might say that transforming memories into useful acts—enabling, in fact, the death of memory within it—is preeminently the work of the Victorian novel.1 A surprising claim, given that we have come to perceive the novel itself, of whatever era, as a form shaped by the impulses and processes of memory; with the modernist novel of Joyce, Woolf, or Proust uppermost in our minds, we have come to understand the novel as an act of remembrance, and as a form with intimate ties to various lived pasts. Thinking of the act of novel writing, we imagine heroic acts of preservation, and as we conceptualize the act of reading novels, we envision a reader engaged in equally difficult acts of thematic and structural remembering.2
Expedition to Ovampoland
Authors: Gillham Nicholas Wright
Published: November 2023

With Jonker under control, Galton was ready to proceed in March 18512 . But first there were personnel problems to deal with. John Waggoner, whom Galton had fired at Barmen, was pretending he was Galton’s representative and inveigling cattle, horses, wagons, etc. from their unsuspecting owners. Galton pursued Waggoner in a strenuous 24-hour chase, failing to overtake him. Waggoner returned to Cape Town with his booty and conned a trader into advancing him a large sum of money with which he vanished. Gabriel also decamped for the Cape leaving a trail of insolence and violence while Abraham Wenzel, already caught for stealing once, got into another scrape so Galton fired him. Fortunately, the Nama chief Swartboy, with whom Galton was friendly, provided two Damaras. One, Onesimus, who spoke fluent Damara and Namaqua, had been captured by the Namaquas as a child and brought up by them. The other, Phillipus, had for­ gotten his native tongue, but could speak Namaqua and Dutch fluently.
Fame and Marriage
Authors: Gillham Nicholas Wright
Published: November 2023

On February 23, 1852, while Galton was sailing home, part one of the paper describing his expedition was read before the Royal Geographical Society. It began by tacitly acknowledging that it was the Society and African exploration that catalyzed his transformation from fun-loving idler to serious scientist. The reading was completed on April 26, shortly after he set foot in England. The paper was workmanlike, describing his journey, the places he visited, and the native peoples he met. Altitudes of mountains were given based on boiling point thermometer readings and there were two dense tables of data extracted from the masses of numbers accumulated in his notebooks. One gave latitudes for many of the towns and landmarks he had visited and the other longitudes for carefully selected locations across the en­ tire East to West transect he had covered. They were calculated by the lunar distance method of Neville Maskelyne, the Fifth Astronomer Royal, and by triangulation with respect to Walfisch Bay whose longitude was known. Gal­ ton’s presentation of precise data essential for accurate mapping stood in marked contrast to the other two papers on African geography in the same volume of the journal of the Royal Geographical Society. Henry Gassiott’s merely summarized a hunting trip to South Africa while that by David Livingstone and W. C. Oswell described their Central African explorations be­ yond Lake Ngami, but lacked any quantitative data.
Nature and Nurture
Authors: Gillham Nicholas Wright
Published: November 2023

In December 1872, Calton received a prepublication copy of Alphonse de Candolle’s Histoire des Sciences et des Savants depuis Deux Siecles. He had no prior contact with de Candolle, a highly regarded Swiss botanist, although he knew his family by reputation, having included it in Hereditary Genius. De Candolle was stimulated to publish his Histoire after reading Hereditary Genius. He was interested in the backgrounds of famous scientists, but his view of the relative importance of nature and nurture was the reverse of Galton’s. His sample consisted of over 300 foreign members or associates of the Royal Society and the French and German Academies of Science. Since election as a foreign member was a rare distinction, de Candolle was certain these men had high reputation. His central argument was that eminent scientists were not randomly scattered by national origin and that their geographical distribution changed dramatically over time. For instance, Switzerland had produced over ten percent of the great scientists with less than one percent of the population of Europe. Eminent British and French scientists were twice as abundant as population size would predict, but Portugal and Spain together had half the number of distinguished scientists expected.
Sweet Peas and Anthropometrics
Authors: Gillham Nicholas Wright
Published: November 2023

Following the publication of Hereditary Genius, Galton’s attack on the human body and mind became two-pronged. The first prong involved the accumulation of quantitative data on easily measurable human physical parameters such as height coupled with the development of methods for their statistical analysis based principally on the properties of the normal distribution. Ideally, this information would be gathered in pedigree form so heritability of these characteristics could be analyzed. The observations obtained would serve as surrogate indicators of mental fitness, for Galton’s Cambridge background had prompted him to believe that a healthy body means a healthy mind. The second prong of Galton’s attack was on human personality and behavior. He wanted to develop methods for characterizing and quantifying human behavior. His desire in this regard led him into explorations as diverse as composite photography, psychology, and fingerprinting.
Galton’s Disciples
Authors: Gillham Nicholas Wright
Published: November 2023

Galton had always worked largely alone. If he needed help he hired men like Serjeant Randall of the Anthropometric Laboratory or asked friends to aid him, as in the case of the sweet pea plantings. Since he had no professional position, academic or otherwise, he so far had no intellectual disciples. Edgeworth came closest as he was greatly influenced by Galton’s writings and corresponded with him extensively. However, with the publication of Natural Inheritance and his paper on correlation, Calton soon acquired two new acolytes who complemented each other perfectly (Table 19- 1). One was Galton’s devoted first biographer, Karl Pearson (Fig. 19-1), who added mathematical rigor to his intuitive and graphical approaches to statistical questions. The second was a zoologist, Raphael Weldon (Fig. 19-2), who applied Galton’s statistical methods to his extensive quantitative data on shrimps and crabs. Pearson and Weldon became good friends and intellectual collaborators while both held positions at University College, London. This chapter is the story of how this relationship came about.
The Triumph of the Pedigree Eugenics
Authors: Gillham Nicholas Wright
Published: November 2023

The opening decade of the twentieth century found the educated classes in England primed to welcome Calton’s eugenics. There were two main reasons for this. First, there was an overriding concern about biological degeneration in the country. Statistical data indicated that the birth rate in England was declining, with this process being far more pronounced in the upper and middle classes than among the lower classes. Second, the battle between the Church of England and the Darwinians was mostly over and evolution by natural selection had achieved widespread acceptance. Hence, it seemed logical to many that the quality of the British population as a whole could be improved by reducing the reproductive rate of those perceived as less fit while increasing the propagation of those of good stock. This notion soon became popular not only in England, but in much of Europe and the United States. It required only that men like Calton and Pearson popularize eugenics and justify their conclusions with apparently sound scientific arguments.
Langston Hughes, 1902-1967:A Brief Biography
Authors: Miller R Baxter
Published: November 2023

As a now somewhat legendary name for so many readers of varying persuasions (he was more popular and less revered in his own century), Langston Hughes was perhaps the most wide-ranging and persistent black American writer in the twentieth century. From the Harlem Renaissance of the early twenties, to the Black Arts reorientations of the sixties, his short stories, novels, dramas, translations, and seminal anthologies of the works of others at home and abroad helped unify peoples in the African Diaspora. He helped nurture, in other words, so profoundly the generations after him. His early writing was an innovative complement to the talent of his contemporaries, including the Keatsian verse of Countee Cullen, the avantgarde and even prophetic painting of Aaron Douglas, and the musical flamboyance of Josephine Baker. In his late twenties and early thirties, he helped inspire the writers Margaret Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks.
The Poet Speaks of Places:A Close Reading of Langston Hughes’s Literary Use of Place
Authors: Jongh James de
Published: November 2023

It has been the longstanding practice of African American verbal culture to transform literal spaces into topical spaces for rhetorical and figurative purposes. Like the broader culture of black Americans, our literature tempered the historic experience of dislocation, slavery, and discrimination by seeking terms with which to root itself in the African Diaspora. Over time, this discourse of spatial signing has evolved into a literary strategy of allusion to a diversity of symbolic and spiritual spaces in the figurative practice of black writers.1 Allusions to the Old Testament iconography of place by which enslaved blacks identified themselves with the enslaved Israelites in Egypt and Babylon in the geography of their song reverberate distinctively in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” the debut poem young Langston Hughes scribbled on an envelope as the train taking him to another summer in Mexico with his father crossed the Mississippi.
Genes, Categories, and Species
Authors: Hey Jody
Published: November 2023

In Genes, Categories and Species, Jody Hey provides an enlightening new solution to one of biology’s most ironic and perplexing puzzles. When Darwin showed that life evolves, and that it does so by natural selection, he transformed our understanding of living things. But the very question Darwin addressed-the nature of species-continues to pose an awkward conundrum for biologists. Despite enormous efforts by a great many scholars, biologists still cannot agree on how to identify species or even how to define the word “species.” Genes, Categories, and Species is not like other books on the species problem, for it does not begin by asking, “What is a species?” Instead, it focuses on the very fact that biologists are stumped by species and their curious behavior in coping with that uncertainty. Faced with a persistent conundrum-and no lack of data on the subject-biologists who ponder the species problem have ceased to ask the most essential of scientific questions: “What new information do we need to resolve the problem?” This is the question that motivates this book and leads to the discoveries it reveals. The answer to the species problem lies not with the processes and patterns of biological diversity, Hey contends, but rather in the way the human mind perceives and categorizes that diversity. The promise of this book is twofold. First, it allows biologists to understand the causes of the species problem and to use this knowledge to avoid the major confusions that arise over species. Second, with its explanation of the species problem, it gives scholars and students of human nature a humbling example of how ill-suited the human mind is for certain kinds of scientific questions.
The Mode of Ignorance
Authors: Hey Jody
Published: November 2023

In the previous chapter, I urged that we not suppose that we already know everything that we need to know to address the species problem. I said that if we are to get unstuck, we must look for something that is missing from our inquiries and from our knowledge base. But some would say that this is wrong, and that rather than continue to seek a solution to the species problem we must recognize that we are quite properly stuck and must remain so. This is a patently reasonable position, and some very reasonable biologists, like Levin and Endler, have said as much. The primary pieces of evidence in support of this contention are all those reasons why we are stuck. In many ways, we know why species are hard to identify and why species is hard to define. Our failures have taught as a great deal about how hard the problem is, even if they have not taught us how to solve it. Secondary evidence, in support of an “unsolvable” stance on the problem, is that our workaround for proceeding without a solution, the method of working definitions, is quite a productive one. It is far from true that no communication occurs among biologists, and the working-definition method somehow enables a great deal of research on biological diversity. Perhaps we are making the most of an insoluble conundrum. If so, then we should appreciate the species problem as another unpleasant fact of life, rather than as something that needs to be fixed.
Typological Thinking about Species
Authors: Hey Jody
Published: November 2023

Now we are at one of those moments in an investigation when a seemingly tangential thread ends up leading to a useful insight. Meanders that return home with some effect provide not only the direct benefit of that discovery, but also enlarge the repertoire of ways to pursue future investigations. The meander of the previous chapter, a deliberately detached perspective that ran from the philosophical debates over reality and categories, to the psychologist’s discoveries of prototype effects, is like this. The story, told so far, has reached only to the reality and the psychology of categories. It has not yet returned to the question of whether our language and thoughts are ill disposed for the understanding of species, but it is close. This short chapter lays the two remaining pieces of our wander, one that is historical and biological and another that is anthropological.
Evolutionary Biology
Authors: Hey Jody
Published: November 2023

A Part from systematics, there are other areas of the life sciences where practitioners regularly suffer the species problem. These areas are primarily those in which the research for one reason or another focuses on organisms as we find them in nature, and on the evolutionary processes that have caused them. There is no very good single name for all these efforts, though sometimes they are collected under evolutionary biology (a label I will use hereafter), or population biology. Certainly much of what is referred to with ecology falls in this domain. Systematics could be also be included, but that field tends to play out as a fairly distinct sub discipline of its own, and here I am making a distinction between systematics and an area of biology where the research focuses more explicitly on on going evolutionary processes. The distinction is a common one, and useful for the present purpose, but as we shall see, in the end all evolutionary biologists, systematists included, suffer the species problem in a similar way.
The Ambivalence of Power: North Africa in International Politics, 1942-1954
Authors: Connelly Matthew
Published: November 2023

Before dawn on November 8, 1942, three convoys consisting of more than five hundred American and British warships and transports closed on the coasts of Algeria and Morocco. Two Royal Navy destroyers carrying a mixed force of British and American commandos separated from the easternmost group and headed for the Bay of Algiers. Just after midnight, President Roosevelt’s personal representative, Robert Murphy, had warned the French commander, Alphonse Juin, that he faced overwhelming odds. The armada carried nearly 10,000 vehides and 100,000 allied servicemen, with another 150,000 on the way. But Murphy and General Dwight Eisenhower, the Allied supreme commander, assured the French that America had no designs on their North African possessions. “We come among you solely to defeat and rout your enemies,” Roosevelt had declared in a radio speech to the French people. “Have faith in our words. We do not want to cause you any harm.”3
A Multicultural Peace?
Authors: Connelly Matthew
Published: November 2023

If the Algerian War was, in part, ideological combat, peacemaking required ideological disarmament. Since the Algerians never achieved military victory, a description of how the French cast off their intellectual weapons, like an army in retreat, provides the best measure of who was winning, and by how much. It also shows how the Algerians picked up some of these ideas and wielded them to assert control of the field—above all the principle of undivided and unfettered sovereignty. Others became part of the landscape, half-buried, awaiting another war.
Elements of Psychophysical Theory
Authors: Falmagne Jean-Claude
Published: November 2023

This book presents the basic concepts of classical psychophysics, derived from Gustav Fechner, as seen from the perspective of modern measurement theory. The theoretical discussion is elucidated with examples and numerous problems, and solutions to one-quarter of the problems are provided in the text.
Preliminaries
Authors: Falmagne Jean-Claude
Published: November 2023

These questions prompted a program of research that originated with G. T. Fechner and was remarkably successful in generating a considerable array of useful data as well as a theoretical framework for these data. Over the years, however, Fechner’s methods and concepts have been criticized. Today, many consider classical (or Fechnerian) psychophysics outmoded, and of historical interest only. In standard textbooks, it is dispatched rather than expounded, the typical presentation reading like a summary of a treatise that could have been written at the end of the nineteenth century. Little effort is made to analyze the filiation between classical and modern concepts, and the progress realized.
Extensive Measurement
Authors: Falmagne Jean-Claude
Published: November 2023

Extensive measurement means the measurement of fundamental physical quantities such as mass or length, using some qualitative devices. For mass, a typical example of such a device is the two-pan, equal-arm balance. The case of length is discussed in detail below. Since Helmholtz (1887), this type of measurement is recognized to involve two specific kinds of empirical procedures.
Psychometric Functions
Authors: Falmagne Jean-Claude
Published: November 2023

For a fixed stimulus b, let p  b  (a) be the probability that stimulus a is judged as exceeding b from the viewpoint of some sensory attribute, such as loudness or brightness. (As in Chapters 4 and 5, both a and b are numbers denoting the intensities of the stimuli on some physical scale.) A typical experimental finding is that p  b  (a) increases continuously with the value of a. A somewhat idealized graph of a function p  b, which is consistent in its main features with many data, is shown in Figure 6.1.
A Model of Extraordinary Human Evil
Authors: Waller James
Published: November 2023

As we look at perpetrators of extraordinary evil, we need no longer ask who these people are. We know who they are. They are you and I.
Is There No Place Like Home? Ecological Bases of Female Dispersal and Philopatry and Their Consequences for the Formation of Kin Groups
Authors: Isbell Lynne A
Published: November 2023

In L. Frank Baum’s century-old tale The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy, a female primate, disperses with an ally from her natal home range and group to an unfamiliar area. While in this new area, she encounters unfamiliar plants, potential predators, and aggressive strangers, dangers she never faced at home. Dorothy succeeds by establishing relationships with new allies. Despite her successes in the new area, Dorothy has an over-whelming desire to return home. Baum did send Dorothy home eventually, and back to her kin group. Had she stayed in Oz, she would have left her home range as well as her kin group. Decisions about dispersal from the natal home range are important for understanding the evolution of kin groups, but they are not addressed in two widely recognized models that have been developed to explain the evolution of kin groups.
Relations with England
Authors: Bremer Francis J
Published: November 2023

The year is 1634. The brisk autumn winds were whipping over the Salem common as the men of the town ’ s trained band began to assemble. The colony ’ s enemies had been busy in England, and there were fears that the king might seek to revoke the charter and undo all that the colonists had worked for. Some of the men were talking about the latest rumor, that a governor-general might be appointed by the king and lead a military force to suppress the colony. The colony ’ s leaders were determined to resist any such attempt. John Endecott had worked longer than any of these men to establish a godly commonwealth and was determined that his work would not be dismantled. As he approached the troop his attention was drawn to the ensign whipping in the wind—the white English flag with the red cross of St. George in the upper left quarter. The cross in the ensign had long bothered Endecott.
On the Fringe
Authors: Bremer Francis J
Published: November 2023

After two years of apparent inactivity, John Humfry arrived in Massachusetts in 1634 representing “some persons of great quality and estate (and of special note for piety)” who intended to settle in the Bay. He also carried a letter from the Reverend John Livingstone, minister of a parish in County Down, Ireland, conveying the interest of Ulster Protestants in migrating, though the connection of these Ulstermen with Lords Saye and Brooke is not clear. As a further indication of the goodwill of those he represented, Humfry brought a good quantity of guns and powder, “much money,” and the promise of “yearly pensions.” It is likely that Humfry also conveyed proposals made by Lord Saye, Lord Brooke, and the other persons of quality who had purchased land from Warwick, setting out a model for the government of the colony they proposed to establish—which would come to be known as Saybrook—and seeking the advice of the more experienced Bay colonists.62 They wished to divide authority in their colony as in a parliament, between an upper house of “gentlemen of the country” and a lower house of representatives of the freemen. The governor would be chosen from the members of the upper house. In some respects this was similar to the practice of the Bay.
The Impact of Public Opinion on Public Policy: The State of the Debate
Authors: Manza Jeff , Cook Fay Lomax
Published: November 2023

At the center of scholarly interest in public opinion is its impact on public policy. In this chapter, we review current debates over the opinion-policy link in the rapidly growing body of research on polls, public opinion, and policymaking in contemporary American politics. Our discussion provides a point of departure for the chapters in the next two parts of this volume.
Politics and Policymaking in the Real World: Crafted Talk and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness
Authors: Jacobs Lawrence R , Shapiro robert Y
Published: November 2023

The public opinion polls that fill newspapers and the offices of government officials and election campaigns have fueled the nearly unquestioned assumption among observers of American politics that elected officials “pander” to public opinion. Politicians, they charge, tailor government policy to polls and other indicators of public opinion.
The Authority and Limitations of Polls
Authors: Miller Peter V
Published: November 2023

The first two parts of this book have examined how public opinion relates to public policy. The measurement of public opinion through polls or other means is crucial to understanding the relationship. This section explores a variety of issues in measuring public opinion, focusing mainly on aspects of polling methodology. The warrant for relying on public opinion polls in policymaking and evaluation rests largely on the claim that polling methods produce more accurate representations of public sentiment than do other sources of information. Scientific opinion polls (unlike other forms of expression that give voice to the most opinionated, the best organized, or the most readily accessible members of the public) involve statistical designs to represent the views of all segments of society. And, unlike other methods of understanding public opinion, scientific polls gather information in ways that permit replication and error measurement. Probability sampling methods, along with standardized opinion measurement procedures, are the foundation for polls’ special claim on knowledge of the public will.
Psychological Assessment in Primary Care
Authors: Linton John C
Published: November 2023

The roles that psychologists assume with primary care clinicians vary from setting to setting (Ben-dell-Estroff & Bernal, 2001). Psychologists can be integral members of the primary care practice with a full-time office on site, they can consult with primary care clinicians on a regular basis from an off-site office, or they can take referrals from pri-mary care settings for treatment in clinics or pri-vate offices. They bring a wide variety of profes-sional skills to the primary care setting in each of these roles, and one unique and important skill is psychological assessment (Rozensky, Sweet, & Tovian, 1997).
Syntactic Heads and Word Formation
Authors: Julien Marit
Published: November 2023

Marit Julien investigates the relation between morphology and syntax, or more specifically, the relation between the form of inflected verbs and the position of those verbs. She surveys 530 languages and shows that, with the exception of agreement markers, the positioning of verbal inflectional markers relative to verb stems is compatible with a syntactic approach to morphology.