bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Evolution of Human Altruism (1993)
Authors: Kitcher Philip
Published: November 2023

The problem of altruism has loomed large in evolutionary biology ever since Charles Darwin. How do tendencies to kindly, even self-sacrificial, behavior evolve in an unkind, Darwinian world? More exactly, conceiving altruistic behavior, as biologists do, as behavior that promotes the fitness of another organism at costs in fitness to the agent, how can propensities to engage in such behavior originate and be maintained under natural selection? There are, of course, two problems here: we must not only explain how altruistic tendencies are sustained once they are prevalent but also how they spread when they are rare.
Infectious Ideas Some Preliminary Explorations (2001)
Authors: Kitcher Philip
Published: November 2023

Efforts to use concepts from contemporary biology in understanding the dissemination of culture have been inspired by two main analogies. One of these supposes that there are cultural units-memes-that share important similarities with genes, and a number of authors have attempted to exploit this analogy to develop precise theories of cultural transmission. According to a second analogy, the spread of culture is like the infection of a population by a virus (or a bacterium or a parasite). Very often, the two analogies are developed in tandem: Dawkins’s introduction of the meme contains both his own assimilation of memes to genes and explicit approval of an elegant formulation of the view of memes as parasites by his then colleague Nicholas Humphrey; similarly, Daniel Dennett’s influential presentation of cultural transmission as the spread of memes appeals to one or other analogy indifferently as if they were equivalent. My aim in what follows is to take a hard look at the second analogy (culture as infection), treating it with a bit more precision than is customary. We’ll find that the formal details of transmission processes are by no means equivalent, and that even the kinematics is more complicated than seems to have been appreciated.
The Changing World Population
Authors: Segal Sheldon J
Published: November 2023

We see the world in terms of the human experience. It is always changing. Neither the quality nor the quantity of human life is a constant.

In the fourteenth century, when the world had about 450 million in-habitants, a quarter of the people of Europe were wiped out by the bubonic plague. The future must have seemed bleak to survivors. Two hundred years later, Elizabethan literature flourished, European explorers had discovered the New World, and population had inched up to 550 million. Until the advent of disease prevention, high death rates kept the population growth rate in check. Over the centuries, smallpox alone took hundreds of millions of lives, but by the eighteenth century, with the emergence of science during the Enlightment, medical advances such as Jenner’s vaccine and the germ theory of disease led to lower death rates and faster growth of population numbers.
The Pill and IUD Modernized Contraception
Authors: Segal Sheldon J
Published: November 2023

Human reproduction is regulated by a synchronized chain of events, each link dependent on the successful completion of the preceding one. We are constantly gaining a more detailed understanding of the process as scientists probe at more sophisticated levels of inquiry. A new generation of molecular biologists is unraveling the reproductive process, gene by gene, in order to improve diagnosis and treatment of reproductive disorders. Genes have been discovered that enable the egg to orchestrate the early events of sperm–egg interaction. Modern science has already improved the treatment of infertility, menopause-associated symptoms, and life-threatening diseases including breast cancer and osteoporosis. As we understand more about links in the reproductive chain of events, opportunities to advance contraceptive technology have also increased.
Globalization, Population, and the Changing Environment
Authors: Segal Sheldon J
Published: November 2023

Every species changes the environment in which it lives. That is part of nature. Tropical ants can build mounds of sand higher than a man. Burrowing ferrets can dig extensive underground tunnel systems, elephants can strip the bark off large trees or snap strong saplings, and the gentle panda can eat its weight in delicate bamboo shoots every day. A dominant species can destroy the very ecosystem on which its future depends. But only one species has found the power to change the environment of the entire earth and its atmosphere. I once heard Australian anthropologist Valerie Brown make this point in a Bellagio seminar by saying, “There’s no place on earth that has been left un-affected by man.” I thought she was exaggerating as I remembered pristine places I have seen all over the world. I recalled the beautiful golden sands of a hidden cove on a small Greek island that seemed as if no one had ever set eyes on it before. But as I listened, I realized that her point was more profound.
Conclusions and Recommendations
Authors: Segal Sheldon J
Published: November 2023

I have written this book in the hope of rekindling dialogue on scientific issues related to population. My odyssey through the world of population sciences has led me to key recommendations that I present here in abbreviated form and in greater detail throughout the preceding chapters.

The gap between rich and poor is widening. Economically privileged countries must increase their commitment and accelerate their efforts to achieve greater international equity in education, health, economic opportunity, and other conditions that influence people’s lives.

We have a responsibility to elevate the conditions of life for the world’s underprivileged people and to preserve the earth for future generations, leaving it in at least as good shape as we found it. For impoverished, powerless people in economically deprived countries, preserving the earth may be the least of their everyday worries.
Remarks on Absalom, Absalom!
Authors: Faulkner William
Published: November 2023

The following remarks by Faulkner came in response to questions from students at the University of Virginia in April 1957 and at Washington and Lee University in May 1958. They are included in Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia 1957–1958, ed. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1959). These remarks constitute the closest thing to an interview Faulkner ever gave concerning Absalom, Absalom! Q. Who is the central character of Absalom, Absalom!? It seems so obviously to be Sutpen, yet it’s been said that it’s also the story of Quentin, and I was wondering just who is the central character? A. The central character is Sutpen, yes. The story of a man who wanted a son and got too many, got so many that they destroyed him. It’s incidentally the story of Quentin Compson’s hatred of the bad qualities in the country he loves. But the central character is Sutpen, the story of a man who wanted sons.
Phototoxic And Irritant Plants
Authors: Crosby Donald G
Published: November 2023

Although many plant constituents are allergenic, others require sunlight for dermatotoxic action and so are said to be phototoxic (or photodynamic if visible light and oxygen are involved). When such substances contact skin that later is exposed to sunlight, the result can be anything from mild sunburn to large, painful blisters. Some phototoxic agents are absorbed into the blood stream, so eating a plant such as celery can produce the same result as skin contact. Although the effects usually last only a few days, some lesions may persist for years (Benezra et al., 1985). The disease is termed phytophotodermatitis (dermatitis due to plants and light).
Prometheus in the Pinelands
Authors: Rosenzweig Michael L
Published: November 2023

Before Prometheus gave fire to Homo sapiens, he had already given it to a very long list of other species. You see, fire destroys habitats, true. But it also creates them. A roaring fire transforms the land so completely that the survivors might as well be on another planet. Shade vanishes and light streams in. Nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium-the basic nutrients on which life depends-flood the landscape in abundance; the fire sets them free from their organic prisons in wood, in stems, and in leaves. Fire yields mass death, and mass death yields opportunity.
Clearing Hurdles
Authors: Rosenzweig Michael L
Published: November 2023

The science of the previous few chapters may make it seem that reconciliation ecology is inevitable. The examples of the first seven chapters may make it seem that reconciliation ecology has arrived. You may now believe that all a concerned citizen needs to do is applaud and participate. Not quite. Reconciliation ecology lacks recognition and organization. We must discover how to integrate it with other conservation efforts. And it needs far more support. One person, most certainly including yours truly, cannot alone supply the necessary support.
The Survival Signal
Authors: Black Ira B
Published: November 2023

Tuesday Morning Enoch Wallace found his way to the bathroom without event. He showered, shaved, dressed, and rushed to meet his driver, who navigated through granite canyons to the Wall Street area. Racing from conference room to boardroom to conference room, the parties parried, thrusted, stormed, and reconciliated through the human ritual of negotiation. By 10 P.M., the rough outlines of the corporate acquisition had taken shape, and the engagement broke for the day. The confusion of Monday morning was not even a distant memory, and Enoch was driven to his East Side apartment with the exhausted satisfaction that follows bloody skirmishes that precede victory.
How to Live in the Brain
Authors: Black Ira B
Published: November 2023

Enoch Wallace, in desperation, discovered the value of index cards and familiar surroundings. He now depends on cues and context. With index cards, he can retrieve a colleague’s name, delineate the parameters of a new merger, outline the keys to balance sheets, list cash flow, revenue, profit, debt, book value, receivables. Two years ago it was a trivial matter to carry it all in his head. Now he jokes about needing a “peripheral brain.” But, even with the cards, the facts simply do not flow as fluently. And certainly new facts, new balance sheets, new company structures are simply not assimilated, as before. Often, in a new situation, Enoch is momentarily confused. But he knows how to stall, ask questions, recover his bearings, and take notes on the cards. If only he could concentrate again. What with his mother’s fractured hip, his daughter’s impending wedding, and all the dinner parties, he doesn’t pay attention at briefings; his mind is elsewhere.
Brain Glue
Authors: Black Ira B
Published: November 2023

Enoch and Charlie Bachrach had been buddies since college, living in adjacent dormitory rooms, joining the same drama club, dating the same group of women, and, incidentally, majoring in economics and political science before the requisite tour of duty in law school. Since they both topped off at an even 6 feet with slim, if not willowy, frames, they could share shirts, trousers, belts, and ties, a convenient way to expand their wardrobe to enviable proportions.
The Brain Captures Time
Authors: Black Ira B
Published: November 2023

Enoch and Sally returned to the neurologist for a follow-up examination. At first Enoch could barely remember the initial interview and physical exam, but the office and its unique paraphernalia jogged his memory. The odd juxtaposition of reflex hammers, tuning forks, ophthalmoscopes, eye charts, visual field screens, pins for sensory testing, and brain models scattered about the office brought fragments of his experience back into consciousness. The memories were accompanied by a vague, attendant anxiety. Addressing Sally and Enoch, the doctor reported that the CAT scan and MRI were normal, though he did not seem to attach much significance to the results. Enoch carried his sense of unease into the examining room.
Admission Criteria
Authors: Wijdicks Eelco F M
Published: November 2023

By its nature, the NICU is utilized for medical and surgical management of critical neurologic disorders and postoperative care of neurosurgical patients, but it may also be used for patients with extensive spinal operations performed by orthopedic surgeons and neurosurgeons and for monitoring patients after epilepsy surgery. Characteristically, severe physiologic derangements, increased intracranial pressure, neuromuscular respiratory failure, refractory seizures, and any rapid neurologic deterioration without identified cause are admission criteria. Uniform criteria for admission are difficult to identify, and some ambiguity remains.
Intracranial Pressure
Authors: Wijdicks Eelco F M
Published: November 2023

The physiologic principles of increased intracranial pressure (ICP) in patients with acute brain injury are known, but many of the feedbacks and couplings remain unexplored. Studies have begun to clarify the ways in which modulating therapies act on ICP and cerebral perfusion pressure (CPP). With the introduction of fiber-optic probes (Chapter 10), the monitoring of ICP has improved technically. The availability of reliable ICP monitoring devices has facilitated management and often dictates therapies that may become potentially harmful if used indiscriminately and not directed by measurements.
Brain Abscess
Authors: Wijdicks Eelco F M
Published: November 2023

The number of patients with brain abscess in the NICU is not significant, and most of the time the diagnosis becomes apparent after elective biopsy for a solitary mass. Admission is mostly dictated by the complexity of management, such as fractionated drainage of the abscess, or by a complication, such as ventriculitis or cerebral edema. When a brain abscess is located in the brain stem, it may cause impaired swallowing, difficulty with clearing of secretions, and respiratory problems. In some instances, merely the anticipation of clinical deterioration in a patient with a moderate-sized brain abscess qualifies admission to the NICU.
Acute Spinal Cord Disorders
Authors: Wijdicks Eelco F M
Published: November 2023

The management of patients with a rapid development of quadriplegia or paraplegia is frustratingly complicated because the handicap may be permanent. The spectrum of causes is wide, and there are glaring regional differences in the cause of spinal cord injury in recently published series. In a study from France of 79 patients with acute myelopathy, the most common causes were multiple sclerosis, systemic disease such as cancer, and spinal cord infarction. In contrast, tuberculosis of the spine, acute transverse myelitis, and primary cord tumor were common in a series of patients with paraplegia from India.
Carotid Endarterectomy
Authors: Wijdicks Eelco F M
Published: November 2023

Carotid endarterectomy is an established procedure in patients with symptomatic carotid artery stenosis of more than 70%. Although it is considered the standard therapy, carotid endarterectomy will be compared with carotid stenting and angioplasty.16,36,40 Stenting is currently limited to patients in whom carotid endarterectomy would be a high-risk procedure.40 In keeping with many performance standards, patients who undergo carotid surgery for atherosclerotic carotid disease are briefly admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU). Depending on the surgeon, the patient is admitted to a neurologic intensive care unit (NICU) or a vascular intermediate unit.
Acid–Base Disorders and Sodium Handling
Authors: Wijdicks Eelco F M
Published: November 2023

Although frequent in medical and surgical intensive care units, life-threatening acid–base disorders are uncommon in patients with acute neurologic disorders. When they occur, they are often transient (e.g., metabolic acidosis in status epilepticus) or purposely induced (respiratory alkalosis to treat increased intracranial pressure). Consequently, a persistent acid– base disorder more often indicates a complicating major medical problem.
Chemical Practice and Solvent Usage
Authors: Nelson William M
Published: November 2023

Solvents are substances that are liquid during application and will dissolve other substances, which can be recovered unchanged on removal of the solvent. Importantly, the solvents and the solutions involving them must be applicable for some purpose. Solvent systems must be understood before any rationale chemical process can be developed. Solvents are widely used by chemists. Educators in the physical sciences, especially chemistry, employ solvents in discussions of physical phenomena and in laboratory experiments. Industries around the world utilize the benefits of solvents to accomplish their desired goals. Individuals in all societies use solvents. In the face of these facts, it is imperative that the solvents used result in a minimal impact upon the environment. I list five true premises (Anastas and Williamson, 1998): Chemistry and chemical products are the basis of the economy of virtually every industrialized nation. The manufacture, processing, use, and disposal of certain chemical substances has resulted in significant and measurable damage to human health and the environment. Over the past generation, more than a trillion dollars has been spent on environmental protection. Currently, chemists now have the knowledge to design chemicals and chemical manufacturing processes that pose little or no risk to human health and the environment.
Green Solvents for Industrial Chemistry
Authors: Nelson William M
Published: November 2023

Environmental concerns have raised public awareness of environmental issues and are driving forces for regulation; the impact of regulation on the cost of production is expected to become important in determining the international competitiveness of the U.S. chemical industry (Pereira, 1999). In response to cost pressures, industry has launched a number of initiatives aimed at improving efficiency and reducing environmental impact. Some of these environmental success stories are receiving increased national attention due to programs such as the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards program. In addition to traditional metrics for evaluating process performance, such as productivity, environmental considerations increasingly are important in process development. Chemical processes evolve through life-cycle phases, beginning with research, and then moving to process engineering, plant operation, and eventually, decommissioning (see fig. 7.1). The number of technology options available for reducing environmental impact are highest early on in the life cycle and then decrease drastically. In contrast, costs associated with resolving an environmental problem typically increase exponentially as the process matures and the scale of equipment gets larger. There is, therefore, a considerable incentive to address and resolve environmental issues early in the life cycle (Bollinger et al., 1996).
Sense
Authors: Katz Jerrold J
Published: November 2023

Two things have made Frege’s characterization of sense (1952: 57) irresistible to intensionalists. One is the thought that Frege’s puzzle about how ‘a = a’ and true ‘a = b’ statements can differ semantically, which he uses to motivate the introduction of his notion of sense, cannot be solved without Fregean senses. The problem with this thought is that Fregean senses are not necessary for a solution to the puzzle. It can be handled with any notion of sense, since any notion of sense permits us to assign different senses to the symbols ‘a’ and ‘b’. In particular, the puzzle can be solved with my non-Fregean notion of sense.
Censoring Ourselves
Authors: Nagel Robert F
Published: November 2023

The words censorship and vilification conjure up ominous historical associations. We think, for instance, of the wholesale effort to keep abolitionist materials out of the antebellum South or the ugly name-calling by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Efforts to prevent change by the suppression of destabilizing messages have often had a grave and systematic character. It is odd, then, that a prevalent reaction when these tactics are used to induce change is humor. The attempts of progressive censors to sanitize the minutiae of our public vocabulary are so targeted and detailed as to verge on the frivolous. Even the ever-lengthening list of words of opprobrium (ageist, Eurocentrist, logocentrist) seems to be too mechanical to convey real condemnation. Political correctness verges on self-parody. Its practitioners, although resolutely humorless while going about the endless task of improving the rest of us, are the source of considerable amounts of somewhat nervous comedy.
Pythagoras’s Search for the Common Denominator
Authors: Sorensen Roy
Published: November 2023

Anaximander set an example of how to frame a paradox and how to respond to it. His followers understood that solutions require disciplined reason-giving. But they had not yet developed the practices that constitute proof of a proposition. To some degree, astronomy and engineering gave the ancients a running start. But the strongest influence on proof practices came from mathematical lore.
Parmenides on What Is Not
Authors: Sorensen Roy
Published: November 2023

At about 515 B.C. Parmenides was born in Elea, a Greek colony on the southern coast of Italy. He discovered a paradox that was to make “Eleatic” denote a group of philosophers who believe reality is a changeless unity. “All is one” sounds positive. But Parmenides reaches this positive conclusion by relentless negative thinking. He revolutionized philosophy by turning attention from what is to what is not.
Eubulides and the Politics of the Liar
Authors: Sorensen Roy
Published: November 2023

The Greek paradoxes have reached us through a network of literature and oral tradition. Judging by how much nearly did not reach us and by the poor condition in which this material arrived, much must have been lost and much must molder in an unrecognized form on our library shelves. This chapter is about how paradoxes and our attitudes toward them have been shaped by their mode of transmission. Paradoxes have not been handed down through the generations solely by virtue of their intrinsic interest. Often they hitch a ride on some weightier matter. For instance, the liar paradox owes some of its currency to the fact that Paul unwittingly packed it into the Bible.
Chrysippus on People Parts
Authors: Sorensen Roy
Published: November 2023

This chapter is devoted to the paradoxes of material constitution. They form an emerging field of puzzles about objects and people. The character of this development is conveyed by Fig. 10.1. Fortunately, these riddles have been recently organized with a paradox template. We shall use the template to connect past confrontations with the paradoxes with contemporary solutions.
Aquinas: Can God Have a Biography?
Authors: Sorensen Roy
Published: November 2023

In God: A Biography, Jack Miles, a former Jesuit, cautiously situates his subject in literature: “I write here about the life of the Lord God as—and only as—the protagonist of a classic of world literature; namely, the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. I do not write about (though I certainly do not write against) the Lord God as the object of religious belief.” (1995, 10) Miles does not want to offend or to be perceived as a blasphemer. He resolves to discuss the character God rather than God.
Ockham and the Insolubilia
Authors: Sorensen Roy
Published: November 2023

Socrates thought that paradoxes are best approached through free inquiry. This is not an option if you adhere to a sacred text. These creeds channel inquiry. As a rule, the effect is stifling. This chapter reviews an exception to the rule. Nine years before William of Ockham (ca. 1285–1349) was born, a logician was elected pope. Peter of Spain, who became Pope John XXI, is the author of three logical treatises. A few scholars are not sure the logician Peter was the pope. But then it would be a miracle that Peter’s Summulae Logicales became the most popular logic text with 166 editions printed over the next three hundred years.
Hegel’s World of Contradictions
Authors: Sorensen Roy
Published: November 2023

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) accuses Immanuel Kant of contradicting himself. Kant opens by announcing that things in themselves (noumena) are unfathomable causes of appearances (phenomena). But Kant later says that we actually impose a causal scheme on phenomena. Experience must take place within a constructed arena of space and time.
Russell’s Set
Authors: Sorensen Roy
Published: November 2023

When the mathematics student Bertrand Russell (1872– 1970) entered Cambridge University, he subscribed to the empiricism of his godfather, John Stuart Mill. However, the younger generation of philosophers believed that Mill had been superseded by Hegel. A recent graduate of Cambridge, John McTaggart, told the young Russell that although he did not believe in God, he did believe in immortality and a harmony between human beings and the universe. McTaggart claimed that the unreality of space and time could be proved with mathematical rigor. This colorful mixture of logic and spirituality contrasted with the black-and-white calculating of mathematicians.
The Causal Potency of Qualia Its Nature and Its Source
Authors: Graham George , Valentine Elizabeth R
Published: November 2023

Qualia are the properties of an experience, such as a sensation, mental image, or emotional response, that we describe when we state what it is like or was like to have that experience. It has frequently been argued in recent years that qualia in this sense are causally impotent. That this cannot be so is shown by an argument I first deployed in my “Thirty years on-Is consciousness still a brain process?” (Place, 1988, p. 218)1, though I subsequently discovered that the same argument against epiphenomenalism had been used some twenty years earlier by Brian Medlin (1967, pp. 110-111). The argument takes as its premise the principle that for a report of an event to be a first-hand report of that event, there has to be a direct causal relation between the perception of the event by the observer and the report that the observer makes. Since such reports are our only evidence for believing in the existence of phenomenal experiences in the case of others, it follows that if epiphenomenalism were true, we would have no grounds whatever for believing in the existence of phenomenal experiences and their qualia. It may be argued that this does not affect my assurance that the qualia of my experiences correspond to the description I give of them. However, if epiphenomenalism were true, no one else would have grounds to believe me; and what use is a private conviction if no one else is convinced by it.
Introduction to Roman Family Law
Authors: Frier Bruce W , McGinn Thomas A J
Published: November 2023

Family law concerns legal aspects of the domestic relationships between persons who are grouped together within a household understood as a social, political, and economic unit. Usually these persons are close kin to one another: spouses, parents, children, siblings. Plainly the family is of great legal interest because of the decisive role it has historically played in the raising and socialization of children and in the mutual economic support of its members. But justification for the family has also frequently been located in the incentives to benevolence and in the psychological satisfaction that its intense intimacy produces in its members. In other words, the remarkable resilience of the family unit over the ages is not solely a matter of its instrumental role in promoting social welfare and demographic reproduction. Since at least the time of Aristotle, family life has been understood as essential to a complete human life; and family law, in turn, fosters this human good by reducing the uncertainties and inequities that are frequently associated with more unstructured conjugal relationships.
Basic Concepts
Authors: Frier Bruce W , McGinn Thomas A J
Published: November 2023

This brief chapter introduces some central legal concepts that underlie Roman family law. Most of them are related to the legal idea of “family” itself. As it turns out, the Latin word familia is usually better translated into English as “household” rather than “family”—and even this translation is none too accurate. It is easier, perhaps, to begin with the importance that Roman private law attached to the familia as the basic building block of the Roman state, since, metaphorically, the familia is often understood as the state in miniature. It has a form of governance that is theoretically vested in one person, a “head of the household” (pater familias, literally “father of the familia”). This person has extensive and virtually exclusive power over all property belonging to the household, including any slaves. But his power also extends to controlling the lives of those of his descendants related to him through males (sons and daughters, grandchildren through sons, and so on), that is, through what the Romans call an agnatic relationship; and in principle the power of the pater familias continues no matter how old these descendants are, unless the pater himself has released them from his power. Further, the power of the pater familias could be exercised over other free persons, including adopted children and also, in the archaic form of Roman marriage, his wife; but in the standard classical form of marriage the wife remained under the power of her own father (if he was still alive), and despite her marriage, she did not fall under her husband’s power. The Roman familia was thus, at least in legal theory, a little monarchy, with strict rules as to who was subject to the monarch’s power and who was not. This monarchy dissipated only on the death of a pater familias, to be replaced by new familiae governed by the father’s offspring.
Franz Schubert, “A Rich Possession”
Authors: Steinberg Michael , Rothe Larry
Published: November 2023

Franz Schubert’s first biographer was a Viennese jurist and civil servant by name of Heinrich Kreissle von Hellborn. In 1861, he published what he modestly and accurately called a biographical sketch; at the end of 1864, he came out with his full-length book. It appeared in English in 1869 as The Life of Franz Schubert, translated by Arthur Duke Coleridge. Kreissle, who loved what he had heard of Schubert’s music, was motivated to begin his work by his awareness that those who had known Schubert were growing old, that their fairly imminent departure from this life was something to be reckoned with, and that, once they were gone, the construction of a biography would become incalculably more difficult. He therefore set about tracking down those whom he called “the witnesses to Schubert’s external existence,” as well as whatever he was able to pull together by way of scattered documents relevant to Schubert’s life.
Encountering Brahms
Authors: Steinberg Michael , Rothe Larry
Published: November 2023

On a muggy August evening in 1966, shortly after my seventeenth birthday, I got on my bicycle and pedaled eight blocks across the Northwest Side of Chicago to the neighborhood shopping center. The charcoal clouds of a Midwest summer storm were building. From O’Hare, just minutes away across the subdivisions and parking lots, beyond an old farm acreage and a new hotel strip, the 707s lifted off and thundered against the low sky with Wagnerian grandeur. At Walgreen’s I sorted through the bargain record bin—any record bin at Walgreen’s was full of bargains. The fluorescent light above bounced back at me from the cellophane as I flipped through the titles. The Chipmunks Sing. 101 Strings Play the Soul of Italy. Florian Zabach Goes Gypsy. I stopped at an album whose cover bore a crude portrait of Johannes Brahms. It was a recording of the Third Symphony, with Erich Leinsdorf conducting an orchestra described on the front of the LP jacket as the Philharmonia and on the back as the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The recording cost ninety-nine cents. I bought it, biked home, and, as the rain began, put it on the turntable of the Grundig-Majestic console stereo in the living room of my parents’ house. I have never ascertained which ensemble was featured on this recording—or, for that matter, whether Leinsdorf was the conductor. But since that evening I’ve determined that the music I was hearing was indeed the Brahms Third. Until that moment I had never heard the Brahms Third, nor had I heard any Brahms but the Lullaby, nor was I more than vaguely aware that Brahms had written anything but the Lullaby.
Schoenberg, Brahms, and the Great Tradition
Authors: Steinberg Michael , Rothe Larry
Published: November 2023

In February 1931, Arnold Schoenberg, then fifty-six, wrote two essays on “National Music.” Neither was published until 1950, the year before his death, when they were included in his book Style and Idea. Both are characteristically contentious and characteristically interesting. The second is also important as a piece of intellectual and artistic autobiography and selfevaluation because in it, neither for the first nor for the last time, Schoenberg seeks to establish his place in The Great Tradition of German Music—and nothing less than capitals will do.
Sibelius and Mahler: What More Could There Be?
Authors: Steinberg Michael , Rothe Larry
Published: November 2023

Musicology doesn’t often lend itself to the “what if “ questions that haunt history and our personal chronicles. It’s compelling to imagine what the world would look like today if JFK had canceled his trip to Dallas, and we all have our own stories of roads taken or avoided, for better or worse. Music’s intrigues are confined to the music, but not always. So here is a question that can have as much or as little to do with music as you choose to make of it: When is a composer’s work complete? Take, for example, Gustav Mahler and Jean Sibelius.
What they Saw
Authors: Steinberg Michael , Rothe Larry
Published: November 2023

When Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony announced a June 2003 festival built on the theme of Wagner, Weill, and the Weimar Republic, I did not get it. What path could there be from Wagner to the composers who worked in Germany between the end of World War I and the power grab that put Hitler in charge of a nation too willing to nurse its grudges? The answer came from a source I could not have imagined: my father.
George Perle: Composing a Way of Life
Authors: Steinberg Michael , Rothe Larry
Published: November 2023

Had you been the kind of clairvoyant who utters pronouncements over children as they trade the womb for daylight, you could not have predicted that the child born in Bayonne, New Jersey, on 6 May 1915, and named George Perle, would grow up making music: making it in the most literal way, by putting notes down on paper, but also by discerning its inner grammar, the structural principles it demanded since the breakdown of the tonal language that Western composers had spoken for the last two hundred years. The deep currents of the music, the soul-piercing insights of the discoveries—they have been the adventure of a lifetime for this son of Russian immigrants, a man whose father was a housepainter and whose mother was a housewife; a man who could not, but for the kind of brain that makes its own destiny, be doing what he is doing today.
Three American Composers in Pursuit of the White Whale
Authors: Steinberg Michael , Rothe Larry
Published: November 2023

When we want to find out if a film or book that has caught our interest is worth seeing or reading, one of our first questions is “What is it about?” We don’t ask that of music we’ve never heard. We’ve been taught that music is abstract, and to ask what it means is as naïve as trying to figure out the point of a white-on-white canvas. But three important works that span the twentieth century and that take us into the twenty-first point in directions beyond the music itself—each is “about” something. Perhaps we could focus on other works as well, yet these deal with monumental issues that in their own ways touch us all. Charles Ives’s Fourth Symphony is a quest for nothing less than the meaning of life. John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1 is a tribute to those who have died of AIDS. John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls is a response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Perhaps it’s coincidental, but each of these works is by an American.
Making America Musical: A Salute to Theodore Thomas
Authors: Steinberg Michael , Rothe Larry
Published: November 2023

Bach’s Two-Violin Concerto, Brahms’s Hungarian Dances and Academic Festival Overture, the Hexameron by Liszt et al. and Liszt’s orchestration of Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, Mozart’s Symphony No. 34, the SaintSaëns Organ Symphony, the Sibelius Second, The Blue Danube, Till Eulenspiegel and Ein Heldenleben, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, the Prelude to Die Meistersinger: every one of those pieces was introduced in America by Theodore Thomas, a name you have seen often if you look at the performance histories you sometimes find in symphony orchestras’ program notes. A complete list of Thomas’s American premieres would include and be less than one-tenth exhausted by Beethoven’s Great Fugue; Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust, Harold in Italy, and Romeo and Juliet; Brahms’s Second Symphony and Haydn Variations; the Bruckner Seventh; The Sorcerer’s Apprentice; Grieg’s music for Ibsen’s Peer Gynt; Handel’s Royal Fireworks Music; Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony; the Nutcracker Suite; and the Prelude and Love-Death from Tristan. And this list does not even include all the famous pieces. Nor, remarkable though it is, does this catalogue by itself certify Theodore Thomas’s greatness, although it is symbolic of what made him the most important performer in the history of concert music in America.
Sigmund Spaeth, Someone You Should Know
Authors: Steinberg Michael , Rothe Larry
Published: November 2023

Sigmund Spaeth. The name hardly seems real. Yet it was real enough between the 1920s and the early 1960s, four decades during which he wrote thirty-two books—good sellers, most of them—and hundreds of articles in newspapers and such magazines as Esquire, The New Yorker, and The Saturday Evening Post. He was friendly with George Gershwin and recalled the afternoon when he dropped in on the composer just as he was writing the last notes of An American in Paris. He turned pages for Richard Strauss on the stage of Philadelphia’s Academy of Music while the great soprano Elisabeth Schumann sang the composer’s lieder. He was a dinner companion to Albert Einstein, played chess with the violinist Mischa Elman, and appeared at the White House, twice, at the request of Franklin Roosevelt. As “The Tune Detective,” he took to the stage at Radio City Music Hall. For years he was a regular on the Metropolitan Opera Quiz, the intermission feature of the Met’s radio broadcasts. On television he appeared with Jack Benny, Steve Allen, Art Linkletter, Mike Wallace. He died in 1965, a year that continues to recede, as bygone years will do; but figures from the past sometimes seem even larger to us than they did to those who encountered them every day—Gershwin, perhaps, or FDR. You can’t say that about Sigmund Spaeth. During his lifetime, he seemed to be everywhere you looked. Who knows him today? Yet Sigmund Spaeth’s life is more than an object lesson in the temporary nature of human glory.
Vienna Trilogy: Vignettes from the City of Music
Authors: Steinberg Michael , Rothe Larry
Published: November 2023

I had my first taste of Vienna attitude in the summer of 1996, when my family and I spent a few days there visiting our friends Luna and Richard. Luna, who has become a proper Viennese lady, picked up her name when she was a hippie and felt a special kinship with the moon. Her birth name is Gertrud, but even today only Richard calls her that. They pass their winters in an old high-ceilinged apartment in Vienna’s First District, near the Rathaus and University, a residence Richard found years ago and which is kept within their means by rent control. During the summer their home base is at the edge of the Vienna Woods, in Baden, a spa town where the Romans once diverted the hot springs into baths, where Constanze Mozart went to take the waters while Wolfgang was working on The Magic Flute and the Requiem, and where Beethoven composed parts of his Ninth Symphony. Midsummer temperatures in the resort are rarely as incapacitating as Vienna’s, which is one of Baden’s many attractions. So it was from here that we set out to explore the big city, boarding the blue tram called the Badener Bahn one morning for the hourlong ride that terminated near the busy intersection of Kärntnerstrasse and the Opern-Ring. When we disembarked, we found ourselves diagonally across from the Vienna State Opera, a grand temple of art that was bombed in World War II, restored to its original splendor, and today wears a cassock of Ringstrasse soot and the residue of pollutants unknown when it opened its doors in 1869.
Music, True or False
Authors: Steinberg Michael , Rothe Larry
Published: November 2023

I discovered concert music when I was sixteen, after watching a Wonderful World of Disney life of Beethoven, with the German actor Karl-Heinz Böhm portraying the composer. Beethoven’s rage against his deafness, his struggle to write a kind of music that would be the ultimate obscene gesture to a Fate that had dealt him a lousy hand of cards—all this appealed to my adolescent sense of injustice and isolation and defiance. The idea of Beethoven-as-hero was appealing. To me he seemed a role model, with a disdain of manners and social convention that could match any teenager’s, and with a moral and artistic superiority that set him apart and made him untouchable. Who would dare take on the composer of the Fifth Symphony for having a messy room? I discovered music, you see, through unmusical means. I saw it as a human being’s stance in relation to his life, something to be worn as a label that listed the ingredients of the soul. I came to music by identifying its beauties and dramas with a kind of ethical position. That sounds severe and Germanic and pompous but, when you come to think of it, is really the only way to approach music if you approach music through Beethoven, who is not pompous at all. Music, and what it could say and where it could lead: all this was a discovery like one of the many discoveries that teenagers continue to make, believing that certain facts about life have lain in hiding for centuries. And I suppose those facts actually do remain hidden, awaiting detection just as a volume of Keats or a recording of Bach sits dormant until a reader or a listener comes along.
How Do Species Survive?
Authors: Slobodkin Lawrence B
Published: November 2023

With the exception of some changes in the atmosphere and in water quality, most practical problems of ecology are on a relatively small scale. Particular ecosystems, watersheds, and very often particular kinds of organisms are our concern. Some broad generalities emerge from the facts of natural history. Some of these “laws” and “rules” are named after their proposers, for example, Bergmann’s rule, Allen’s rule, and Dollo’s law. Bergmann’s rule states that closely related animals tend to be larger in higher latitudes and sometimes at higher altitudes. This is perfectly plausible for birds and mammals given the dangers of heat loss in cold situations and the necessity for heat loss in excessively warm ones.
Introduction
Authors: Jen Erica
Published: November 2023

In a world of uncertainty, adversity, and rapid change, it might be thought that failure of systems, whether natural or designed, should prove the rule rather than the exception. And yet we are surrounded by examples of phenomena on all scales that we instinctively label as robust to failure, whether because of the agility with which they have responded to changing circumstances, or because of their resilience in the face of internal or external attack, or merely because they have proved so long-lived. Robustness is a term that captures our intuitive sense of one of the key determinants of long-term success or failure, but what do we mean by robustness, and what specific features of a phenomenon contribute to its robustness or fragility? In the past few years, the concept of robustness has been the subject of growing interest in the natural and engineering sciences.
Directing the Evolvable: Utilizing Robustness in Evolution
Authors: Voigt Christopher A , Mayo Stephen L , Wang Zhen-Gang , Arnold Frances
Published: November 2023

The use of directed evolution techniques has greatly accelerated the discovery of new and useful biological molecules and systems [10]. Through iterative cycles of diversity creation (e.g., mutation or recombination) and selection, proteins, antibodies, pathways, viruses, and organisms have been evolved to perform tasks optimized for pharmaceutical and industrial applications. Before directed evolution became established, it was unclear how successful such an approach would be. It was not obvious that randomized mutagenesis and selection would find improvements, due to a combinatorial explosion in the number of possible offspring and the observation that few of these are functional, much less have improvements in desired properties.
Assessment of Endocrine Function
Authors: Griffin James E , Auchus Richard J
Published: November 2023

The first step in the laboratory assessment of endocrine function is usually to determine if hormone production is within the normal range. The ability to measure hormone concentrations accurately in plasma, urine, and saliva has allowed us to define normal endocrine function and to diagnose abnormalities in hormone production. Perhaps the single most important advance in modern endocrinology has been the development of immunoassays to measure the small quantities of hormones that circulate in the blood. Static hormone measurements, however, may not provide conclusive evidence of dysfunction in a given endocrine system. Therefore, dynamic or provocative endocrine tests have been developed to stimulate or suppress production of a particular hormone. As our understanding of the role of receptors in mediating hormone action has grown, assays that assess target tissue responsiveness to hormones have been developed. Advances in chromatographic and analytical chemistry techniques have also allowed more precise measurements of some hormones for which good immunoassays have not yet been developed. This chapter describes the various methods for quantifying hormone concentrations and thus assessing endocrine function.
Female Reproductive Function
Authors: Ojeda Sergio R
Published: November 2023

The production of germ cells is essential for the continuation of a species. In the female this function is accomplished by the ovaries. In addition, the ovaries secrete steroidal and nonsteroidal hormones that not only regulate the secretion of anterior pituitary hormones but also act on various target organs including the ovaries themselves, the uterus, fallopian tubes, vagina, mammary gland, and bone.