The patient wished to receive an experimental drug that she was instrumental in developing. After her diagnosis, she had investigated treatments that might help her condition and discovered that a specific compound could be beneficial. To further the development of this potential drug, she obtained preclinical data, founded a company, and sought investment from venture capitalists. The company was about to begin phase I testing, but the clinical trial had not yet opened. In addition, she would not have been a (...) candidate for the study, as it excluded patients with advanced disease. To be able to administer this drug to her, the patient's team of oncologists was in the process of drafting an individual patient investigational new drug application, including the protocol for the drug's delivery, to the Food and Drug Administration. The company developing the drug had preliminarily agreed to provide it. This protocol was also under review by the institutional review board of the university, and the ethics committee was consulted to determine whether she should receive the drug. (shrink)

Macphail’s comparative approach to intelligence focused on associative processes, an orientation inconsistent with more multifaceted lay and scientific understandings of the term. His ultimate emphasis on associative processes indicated few differences in intelligence among vertebrates. We explore options more attuned to common definitions by considering intelligence in terms of richness of representations of the world, the interconnectivity of those representations, the ability to flexibly change those connections, knowledge, and individual differences. We focus on marine mammals, represented by the amphibious pinnipeds (...) and the aquatic cetaceans and sirenians, as animals that transitioned from a terrestrial existence to an aquatic one, experiencing major changes in ecological pressures. They adapted with morphological transformations related to streamlining the body, physiological changes in respiration and thermoregulation, and sensory/perceptual changes, including echolocation capabilities and diminished olfaction in many cetaceans, both in-air and underwater visual focus, and enhanced senses of touch in pinnipeds and sirenians. Having a terrestrial foundation on which aquatic capacities were overlaid likely affected their cognitive abilities. Vocal and behavioral observational learning capabilities in the wild and in laboratory experiments suggest versatility in group coordination. Empirical reports on aspects of intelligent behavior like problem-solving, spatial learning, and concept learning by various species of cetaceans and pinnipeds, suggest rich cognitive abilities. The high energy demands of the brain suggest brain-intelligence relationships might be fruitful areas for the study when specific hypotheses are considered, e.g., brain mapping indicates hypertrophy of specific sensory areas in marine mammals. Modern neuroimaging techniques provide ways to study neural connectivity, and the patterns of connections between sensory, motor, and other cortical regions provide a biological framework for exploring how animals represent and flexibly use information in navigating and learning about their environment. At this stage of marine mammal research, it would still be prudent to follow Macphail’s caution that it is premature to make strong comparative statements without more empirical evidence, but an approach that includes learning more about how animals flexibly link information across multiple representations could be a productive way of comparing species by allowing them to use their specific strengths within comparative tasks. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractCephalopods provide a unique model system to investigate how organismal novelties evolve. In article number 1900073, Elena A. Ritschard et al. discuss how co-evolutionary signatures among various genomic characters have contributed to cephalopod organismal novelties and can be used to dissect their functional organization. Cover illustration by Hannah Schmidbaur.

How genomic innovation translates into organismal organization remains largely unanswered. Possessing the largest invertebrate nervous system, in conjunction with many species‐specific organs, coleoid cephalopods (octopuses, squids, cuttlefishes) provide exciting model systems to investigate how organismal novelties evolve. However, dissecting these processes requires novel approaches that enable deeper interrogation of genome evolution. Here, the existence of specific sets of genomic co‐evolutionary signatures between expanded gene families, genome reorganization, and novel genes is posited. It is reasoned that their co‐evolution has contributed to (...) the complex organization of cephalopod nervous systems and the emergence of ecologically unique organs. In the course of reviewing this field, how the first cephalopod genomic studies have begun to shed light on the molecular underpinnings of morphological novelty is illustrated and their impact on directing future research is described. It is argued that the application and evolutionary profiling of evolutionary signatures from these studies will help identify and dissect the organismal principles of cephalopod innovations. By providing specific examples, the implications of this approach both within and beyond cephalopod biology are discussed. (shrink)

Providing efficient and clean power is a challenge for devices that range from the micro to macro in scale. Although there has been significant progress in the development of micro-, meso-, and macro-scale power supplies and technologies, realization of many devices is limited by the inability of power supplies to scale with the diminishing sizes of CMOS-based technology. Here, the authors provide an overview of piezoelectric energy harvesting technology along with a discussion of proof of concept devices, relevant governing equations, (...) and figures of merit. They present two case studies: (a) energy capture from the operation of a novel shear and elastic modulus indentation device subjected to applied voltage and (b) energy capture from vibrating commercial bimorph piezoelectric structures mounted on household appliances. Lastly, areas of development needed for realization of commercial energy harvesting devices are suggested. (shrink)

1 Evidence-based policy requires researchers to provide the answers to ecological questions that are of interest to policy makers. To find out what those questions are in the UK, representatives from 28 organizations involved in policy, together with scientists from 10 academic institutions, were asked to generate a list of questions from their organizations. 2 During a 2-day workshop the initial list of 1003 questions generated from consulting at least 654 policy makers and academics was used as a basis for (...) generating a short list of 100 questions of significant policy relevance. Short-listing was decided on the basis of the preferences of the representatives from the policy-led organizations. 3 The areas covered included most major issues of environmental concern in the UK, including agriculture, marine fisheries, climate change, ecosystem function and land management. 4 The most striking outcome was the preference for general questions rather than narrow ones. The reason is that policy is driven by broad issues rather than specific ones. In contrast, scientists are frequently best equipped to answer specific questions. This means that it may be necessary to extract the underpinning specific question before researchers can proceed. 5 Synthesis and applications. Greater communication between policy makers and scientists is required in order to ensure that applied ecologists are dealing with issues in a way that can feed into policy. It is particularly important that applied ecologists emphasize the generic value of their work wherever possible. (shrink)

Collaboration requires agents to coordinate their behavior on the fly, sometimes cooperating to solve a single task together and other times dividing it up into sub‐tasks to work on in parallel. Underlying the human ability to collaborate is theory‐of‐mind (ToM), the ability to infer the hidden mental states that drive others to act. Here, we develop Bayesian Delegation, a decentralized multi‐agent learning mechanism with these abilities. Bayesian Delegation enables agents to rapidly infer the hidden intentions of others by inverse planning. (...) We test Bayesian Delegation in a suite of multi‐agent Markov decision processes inspired by cooking problems. On these tasks, agents with Bayesian Delegation coordinate both their high‐level plans (e.g., what sub‐task they should work on) and their low‐level actions (e.g., avoiding getting in each other's way). When matched with partners that act using the same algorithm, Bayesian Delegation outperforms alternatives. Bayesian Delegation is also a capable ad hoc collaborator and successfully coordinates with other agent types even in the absence of prior experience. Finally, in a behavioral experiment, we show that Bayesian Delegation makes inferences similar to human observers about the intent of others. Together, these results argue for the centrality of ToM for successful decentralized multi‐agent collaboration. (shrink)

Often implicit in visual display design and development is a gold standard of photorealism. By approximating direct perception, photorealism appeals to users and designers by being both attractive and apparently effortless. The vexing result from numerous performance evaluations, though, is that increasing realism often impairs performance. Smallman and St. John (2005) labeled misplaced faith in realistic information display Naïve Realism and theorized it resulted from a triplet of folk fallacies about perception. Here, we illustrate issues associated with the wider trend (...) towards realism by focusing on a specific current trend for high-fidelity perspective view (3D) geospatial displays. In two experiments, we validated Naïve Realism for different terrain understanding tasks, explored whether certain individuals are particularly prone to Naïve Realism, and determined the ability of task feedback to mitigate Naïve Realism. Performance was measured for laying and judging a concealed route across realistic terrain shown in different display formats. Task feedback was either implicit, in Experiment 1, or explicit in Experiment 2. Prospective and retrospective intuitions about the best display formats for the tasks were recorded and then related to task performance and participant spatial ability. Participants generally intuited they would perform tasks better with more realism than they actually required. For example, counter to intuitions, lowering fidelity of the terrain display revealed the gross scene layout needed to lay a well-concealed route. Individuals of high spatial ability calibrated their intuitions with only implicit task feedback, whereas those of low spatial ability required salient, explicit feedback to calibrate their intuitions about display realism. Results are discussed in the wider context of applying perceptual science to display design, and combating folk fallacies. (shrink)

Addresses the implications of a document found in the Archivio di Stato di Siena which affirms a connection between Farinata degli Uberti, a Florentine conspicuously encountered by Dante the pilgrim in Inferno 10, and the Sienese Ghibellines with whom he and his fellow Florentine Ghibellines joined, in an alliance which produced the Sienese victory at the battle of Montaperti in 1260.

We begin with a prepositional languageLpcontaining conjunction (Λ), a class of sentence names {Sα}αϵA, and a falsity predicateF. We (only) allow unrestricted infinite conjunctions, i.e., given any non-empty class of sentence names {Sβ}βϵB,is a well-formed formula (we will useWFFto denote the set of well-formed formulae).The language, as it stands, is unproblematic. Whether various paradoxes are produced depends on which names are assigned to which sentences. What is needed is a denotation function:For example, theLPsentence “F(S1)” (i.e.,Λ{F(S1)}), combined with a denotation functionδsuch (...) thatδ(S1)“F(S1)”, provides the (or, in this context, a)Liar Paradox.To give a more interesting example,Yablo's Paradox[4] can be reconstructed within this framework.Yablo's Paradoxconsists of an ω-sequence of sentences {Sk}kϵωwhere, for eachnϵω:WithinLPan equivalent construction can be obtained using infinite conjunction in place of universal quantification - the sentence names are {Si}iϵωand the denotation function is given by:We can express this in more familiar terms as:etc. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On John Hollander’s “Owl”Eleanor CookSuppose we start with grammar, assuming we’ve glanced at the look of “Owl” on the page, as if through the eyes of May Swenson. Here is the way she began to read a poem: “I like to see the poem first as a shut box or package to be opened, within which is an invention whose particular working I hope to discover. Something can be (...) felt about it even before beginning to read: its profile on the page, its regular or irregular pattern of stanzas, length of lines, their symmetry, its wide or thin shape, its look of bulk or lightness.” 1 So here, we observe a one-word title: a noun, no article, and so more like Bishop’s “Sandpiper” than Frost’s “The Oven Bird.” Then quatrains, twenty-four of them, each shorter in its third and more in its fourth line; the pulse iambic and 5 5 4 3 (pentameter twice, tetrameter, trimeter), the rhyme a b a b. Each stanza, in little, looks and listens like an owl, narrowing down to its fourth line, listening to the sounds and silences both—the sounds of the full end-rhymes, assonance, midline rhyming, schematic echoes, and so on; and the silences resonating in the vacant space left by one fewer foot in the third line, then two in the fourth, an effect especially noticeable in the end-stopped lines. This stanza form is (I believe) John Hollander’s own, 2 and it teaches us how to listen better. Owls hunt with their ears as well as their eyes, and with only their ears if necessary.In starting with grammar, I am simply choosing one partner in the dance of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic that constitutes all writing. I shall touch on lexical questions and two senses of voice, before turning to the heart of the matter, the poem’s figuration and fable, then end [End Page 167] with some remarks on “Owl” as part of all Hollander’s work and also as a poem of our moment.The grammar, then, and first the syntactic variety of the sentences. T. S. Eliot wrote in 1918 that technique is not simply “what may be learned from a manual of prosody. This is making technique easy.... Technique is more volatile; it can only be learned, the more difficult part of it, by absorption. Try to put into a sequence of simple quatrains the continuous syntactic variety of Gautier or Blake....” 3 Something of Hollander’s distinctive voice in both poetry and prose lies in his great command of grammatical structures, including his syntactic variety. “Owl” is strongly predicative in style (note the complex syntax, and the remarkably high use of participles, past and present). The sentences give the effect of generating themselves, especially through their parallel grammatical constructions, where the last term in a double or triple set is likely to be modified by a clause or phrase—the whole sentence ramifying and exfoliating, as if we were watching a zoological or genealogical tree grow under our eyes. [See, for example, the parallel participles in the last line of stanza 4 and stanza 5: “Taking heed... you more than see.” Or consider how one participle leads to another in stanzas 15 through 17, beginning with “Trembling....”]Such syntactic energy gives a quick, vital rhythm to the sentence—a fast pace, given the richness of thought, hints, implications. A pace sometimes slightly nervous, curbing and steadying its own energies, partly through the regular beat of the simple rhyme scheme and quatrain. It seems to me that the forward propulsion of both the grammar and dialectic is steadied, directed, by the rhetorical schemes—that rhetoric here offers what I want to call something like a discipline of simplicity. This is a function we may not associate with rhetorical schemes, those “surface patterns of words” that “carry no meanings per se.” 4 In Roman Jakobson’s terms—and his discussion of parallelism was really the only thing that helped with what I was hearing—what I am hearing is the pull between a regular, simple parallelism of stanza form and a much-varied, complex parallelism of... (shrink)

If A then B: How the World Discovered Logic is a historically oriented introduction to the basic notions of logic. In particular, and in the words of the authors, it is focused on the idea that ‘lo...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On John Hollander’s “Owl”Eleanor CookSuppose we start with grammar, assuming we’ve glanced at the look of “Owl” on the page, as if through the eyes of May Swenson. Here is the way she began to read a poem: “I like to see the poem first as a shut box or package to be opened, within which is an invention whose particular working I hope to discover. Something can be (...) felt about it even before beginning to read: its profile on the page, its regular or irregular pattern of stanzas, length of lines, their symmetry, its wide or thin shape, its look of bulk or lightness.” 1 So here, we observe a one-word title: a noun, no article, and so more like Bishop’s “Sandpiper” than Frost’s “The Oven Bird.” Then quatrains, twenty-four of them, each shorter in its third and more in its fourth line; the pulse iambic and 5 5 4 3 (pentameter twice, tetrameter, trimeter), the rhyme a b a b. Each stanza, in little, looks and listens like an owl, narrowing down to its fourth line, listening to the sounds and silences both—the sounds of the full end-rhymes, assonance, midline rhyming, schematic echoes, and so on; and the silences resonating in the vacant space left by one fewer foot in the third line, then two in the fourth, an effect especially noticeable in the end-stopped lines. This stanza form is (I believe) John Hollander’s own, 2 and it teaches us how to listen better. Owls hunt with their ears as well as their eyes, and with only their ears if necessary.In starting with grammar, I am simply choosing one partner in the dance of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic that constitutes all writing. I shall touch on lexical questions and two senses of voice, before turning to the heart of the matter, the poem’s figuration and fable, then end [End Page 167] with some remarks on “Owl” as part of all Hollander’s work and also as a poem of our moment.The grammar, then, and first the syntactic variety of the sentences. T. S. Eliot wrote in 1918 that technique is not simply “what may be learned from a manual of prosody. This is making technique easy.... Technique is more volatile; it can only be learned, the more difficult part of it, by absorption. Try to put into a sequence of simple quatrains the continuous syntactic variety of Gautier or Blake....” 3 Something of Hollander’s distinctive voice in both poetry and prose lies in his great command of grammatical structures, including his syntactic variety. “Owl” is strongly predicative in style (note the complex syntax, and the remarkably high use of participles, past and present). The sentences give the effect of generating themselves, especially through their parallel grammatical constructions, where the last term in a double or triple set is likely to be modified by a clause or phrase—the whole sentence ramifying and exfoliating, as if we were watching a zoological or genealogical tree grow under our eyes. [See, for example, the parallel participles in the last line of stanza 4 and stanza 5: “Taking heed... you more than see.” Or consider how one participle leads to another in stanzas 15 through 17, beginning with “Trembling....”]Such syntactic energy gives a quick, vital rhythm to the sentence—a fast pace, given the richness of thought, hints, implications. A pace sometimes slightly nervous, curbing and steadying its own energies, partly through the regular beat of the simple rhyme scheme and quatrain. It seems to me that the forward propulsion of both the grammar and dialectic is steadied, directed, by the rhetorical schemes—that rhetoric here offers what I want to call something like a discipline of simplicity. This is a function we may not associate with rhetorical schemes, those “surface patterns of words” that “carry no meanings per se.” 4 In Roman Jakobson’s terms—and his discussion of parallelism was really the only thing that helped with what I was hearing—what I am hearing is the pull between a regular, simple parallelism of stanza form and a much-varied, complex parallelism of... (shrink)

H. Dohm has amply demonstrated how the cook of Plautus, Pseud. 790ff. exhibits characteristic features of the mageiros of Greek comedy. He has also argued, however, that this scene contains substantial Plautine expansion, comparable with that which has been recognised in the cook scene of the Aulularia. I wish to suggest that Dohm is largely right but that the Plautine expansion is even more extensive than he supposes. In 790–838 Plautus is probably for the most part following his (...) Greek model fairly closely. One can trace a logical sequence of ideas, as follows. Ballio: ‘I couldn't have found a worse cook’ . Cook: ‘Why did you hire me then?’ . Ballio: ‘You were the only one left. And why was that?’ . Cook: ‘I am expensive, but nowadays people look for cheap cooks, who produce only concoctions of seasoned vegetables. That is why men are so short-lived’ . Ballio: ‘You can make men live longer then?’ . Cook: ‘Certainly, for 200 years’ . The cook then proceeds to give a list of his fantastic sauces for fish and meat , until he is cut short by Ballio's ‘Damn your lies’ . We have here a typical comic mageiros: he is loquacious and boastful , claims magic powers , denigrates his rivals , reels off lists of foods, real and fictitious , and uses grandiose language . Within this essentially Greek section there are three short passages which look like Plautine additions. First, Dohm is surely right, following E. Fraenkel, to see 790f. as a Plautine addition. (shrink)

Cecropids, grammatically masculine in one case and feminine in the other, occur in each of these pieces of poetry. I believe that the second passage can shed some light on the meaning of the term as it is used in the fragment from the Antiope of Eubulus. The question of the significance of the Cecropids in Eubulus has previously been discussed by E. K. Borthwick. A. B. Cook, noting the similarity of κερκώπη to the name of Cecrops and seeing (...) their associations with dew as a link between the insects and the names of Cecrops' daughters, had posited a connection between the autochthonous Athenian family of Cecrops and the earth-born cicadas, those symbols of Athenian autochthony. Borthwick applied Cook's theory to the passage from Eubulus and concluded that when the poet mentions the Cecropids that feed on the breezes he is alluding to the musical cicadas, who were believed to subsist on dew and/or air. It was this latter feature of their diet, Borthwick proposed, that inspired the last line of the fragment. (shrink)

The proper translation of "unless" into intuitionistic formalisms is examined. After a brief examination of intuitionistic writings on "unless", and on translation in general, and a close examination of Dummett's use of "unless" in Elements of Intuitionism (1975b), I argue that the correct intuitionistic translation of "A unless B" is no stronger than "-B -> A". In particular, "unless" is demonstrably weaker than disjunction. I conclude with some observations regarding how this shows that one's choice of logic is methodologically prior (...) to translation from informal natural language to formal systems. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Minutes of the Annual General Meeting 2023Cornelis de Waal, Editor-in-Chief, Richard Kenneth Atkins, André De Tienne, Director and General Editor, and Elizabeth Cooke[as approved on January 17, 2024]The Annual General Meeting of the Charles S. Peirce Society was held in conjunction with the Eastern Division Meeting of the APA on January 5, 2023, at the Sheraton Le Centre, Montréal, Quebec. Rosa Maria Mayorga chaired the meeting and called it (...) to order at 12:38 p.m.1. Moment of SilenceThe annual meeting began with a moment of silence in memory of Peirce scholars who passed away in the last year.2. Approval of Minutes of the 2022 MeetingMinutes of the 2022 Annual General Meeting had been posted online. Copies were also distributed at the annual meeting. Rosa Maria Mayorga asked for a motion to approve the minutes. James Liszka so moved and Fabienne Forster seconded. The minutes were approved unanimously.3. Report from the Executive CommitteeRichard Kenneth Atkins submitted the following report.The Executive Committee Meeting was held virtually via email. All members of the Executive Committee were contacted and responded regarding the agenda and items.Agenda Items(A) Non-profit Status Update:On December 5, 2022, we received notification from the IRS that we have been legally approved as a public non-profit foundation.(B) Funding for Scholarship:Every year, we set aside a certain amount of funding for scholarship, usually 2/3rds of the year's income. This includes the $1,000 set aside for the Peirce Essay prize. Atkins reported that the income this past year was $6,597.06. 2/3rds of that is $4,400. Atkins requested that that amount of money be set aside for funding for scholarship, with which the committee unanimously agreed.(C) Next Year's AGM:Atkins proposed that we continue to hold our annual conference in conjunction with the E-APA in New York, NY, especially as this keeps us in line with the calendar year which is also our fiscal year as a nonprofit. The committee unanimously agreed. [End Page 118](D) Any Other Business:Cornelis de Waal suggested that we add to the agenda for the annual business meeting a moment of silence to commemorate Peirce scholars who passed this year. The Executive Committee unanimously agreed.4. Report from the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce SocietyCornelis de Waal submitted the following report on behalf of the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. Richard Kenneth Atkins read the report on his behalf.During the 2022 calendar year we produced four issues of the Transactions. We encountered some problems with the first issue, because the printer suffered a ransomware attack. This apparently wreaked havoc with their system and caused significant delay in the completion of the issue.Likely due to the (after) effects of the pandemic, quality submissions to the journal were down significantly, both in the Peirce segment and in the non-Peirce segment of the journal. In addition, there was a significant drop in book reviews. The latter led to the resignation of our long-term book review editor, Henrik Rydenfelt. For the last two months I have been taking over for him, and I'm first-hand experiencing some of the challenges, even including publishers simply not following through on requests for books. We did, though, publish a book symposium on James Liszka's Charles Peirce on Ethics, Esthetics and the Normative Sciences, and we have another book symposium forthcoming on Chris Voparil's Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists. Besides a number of excellent papers on Peirce, we published some very nice papers in American philosophy. The latter include an extensive portrait of Edwin Bissell Holt, a discussion of the use of the term pragmatism in 18th century Germany, the first English translation of two texts by Wilhelm Jerusalem, as well as work on George Santayana, Jonathan Edwards, and Emily Dickinson.With Henrik gone, the editorial team is now down to Robert Lane and me (hopefully briefly returning to the traditional Robin-Hare setup). I'll be attending the upcoming SAAP meeting in Denver, and Bob is planning to attend as well... (shrink)

On p. 118 I said that the injunction of Pythagoras παρà θνσíαν μxs22EF xs22EFννχíζον, quoted by Goettling with a false reference, might be illuminating in its context but that I suspected it of being a figment. My suspicions were unfounded. The reference, as Mr. A. B. Cook has kindly pointed out to me, is Iambl. Protrept. 364 K.; but Iamblichus's explanation—that ‘nails’ stands for one's remoter kinsfolk, οíον xs22EFνεψιáδαι xs22EF πατραδxs22EFλφων γαμβρονοτιδεîς xs22EF τοιοντοí τινες, with whom one should renew (...) relations on festal days—does not seem very helpful. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On John Hollander’s “Owl”Eleanor CookSuppose we start with grammar, assuming we’ve glanced at the look of “Owl” on the page, as if through the eyes of May Swenson. Here is the way she began to read a poem: “I like to see the poem first as a shut box or package to be opened, within which is an invention whose particular working I hope to discover. Something can be (...) felt about it even before beginning to read: its profile on the page, its regular or irregular pattern of stanzas, length of lines, their symmetry, its wide or thin shape, its look of bulk or lightness.” 1 So here, we observe a one-word title: a noun, no article, and so more like Bishop’s “Sandpiper” than Frost’s “The Oven Bird.” Then quatrains, twenty-four of them, each shorter in its third and more in its fourth line; the pulse iambic and 5 5 4 3 (pentameter twice, tetrameter, trimeter), the rhyme a b a b. Each stanza, in little, looks and listens like an owl, narrowing down to its fourth line, listening to the sounds and silences both—the sounds of the full end-rhymes, assonance, midline rhyming, schematic echoes, and so on; and the silences resonating in the vacant space left by one fewer foot in the third line, then two in the fourth, an effect especially noticeable in the end-stopped lines. This stanza form is (I believe) John Hollander’s own, 2 and it teaches us how to listen better. Owls hunt with their ears as well as their eyes, and with only their ears if necessary.In starting with grammar, I am simply choosing one partner in the dance of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic that constitutes all writing. I shall touch on lexical questions and two senses of voice, before turning to the heart of the matter, the poem’s figuration and fable, then end [End Page 167] with some remarks on “Owl” as part of all Hollander’s work and also as a poem of our moment.The grammar, then, and first the syntactic variety of the sentences. T. S. Eliot wrote in 1918 that technique is not simply “what may be learned from a manual of prosody. This is making technique easy.... Technique is more volatile; it can only be learned, the more difficult part of it, by absorption. Try to put into a sequence of simple quatrains the continuous syntactic variety of Gautier or Blake....” 3 Something of Hollander’s distinctive voice in both poetry and prose lies in his great command of grammatical structures, including his syntactic variety. “Owl” is strongly predicative in style (note the complex syntax, and the remarkably high use of participles, past and present). The sentences give the effect of generating themselves, especially through their parallel grammatical constructions, where the last term in a double or triple set is likely to be modified by a clause or phrase—the whole sentence ramifying and exfoliating, as if we were watching a zoological or genealogical tree grow under our eyes. [See, for example, the parallel participles in the last line of stanza 4 and stanza 5: “Taking heed... you more than see.” Or consider how one participle leads to another in stanzas 15 through 17, beginning with “Trembling....”]Such syntactic energy gives a quick, vital rhythm to the sentence—a fast pace, given the richness of thought, hints, implications. A pace sometimes slightly nervous, curbing and steadying its own energies, partly through the regular beat of the simple rhyme scheme and quatrain. It seems to me that the forward propulsion of both the grammar and dialectic is steadied, directed, by the rhetorical schemes—that rhetoric here offers what I want to call something like a discipline of simplicity. This is a function we may not associate with rhetorical schemes, those “surface patterns of words” that “carry no meanings per se.” 4 In Roman Jakobson’s terms—and his discussion of parallelism was really the only thing that helped with what I was hearing—what I am hearing is the pull between a regular, simple parallelism of stanza form and a much-varied, complex parallelism of... (shrink)

Probabilistic reasoning is traditionally represented by inferences of the following form (also called probabilistic explanations):where A and B are one-place predicates in a first order language, P(A | B) is the conditional probability of observing A among individuals having property B, and q is close to one.This argument is not logically valid, as the premises may be true while the conclusion is false. Moreover, as it stands, the premises do not even make the conclusion plausible. It may be the case (...) that 90% of the population dies before the age of 85, and that individual j is a member of the population, but this in itself does not make it plausible that individual j will die before the age of 85. (shrink)

ARCHAEOLOGYTHE Classical Spartans were noted for their austerity, which seemed already ancient to writers of the fifth century B.C. The early poetry and art of their country show a considerable aesthetic sense. This apparent contradiction has caused some students to conclude that the strict Lycurgan regimen was not introduced till the middle or even the end of the sixth century and that before that date Sparta had culturally been developing in much the same way as other important Greek states. The (...) argument is unsound. (shrink)

ARCHAEOLOGYTHE Classical Spartans were noted for their austerity, which seemed already ancient to writers of the fifth century B.C. The early poetry and art of their country show a considerable aesthetic sense. This apparent contradiction has caused some students to conclude that the strict Lycurgan regimen was not introduced till the middle or even the end of the sixth century and that before that date Sparta had culturally been developing in much the same way as other important Greek states. The (...) argument is unsound. (shrink)

Background: There are few standardized measures available to assess executive function in a naturalistic setting for children. The Children’s Cooking Task is a complex test that has been specifically developed to assess EF in a standardized open-ended environment. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the internal consistency, inter-rater reliability, sensitivity and specificity, and also convergent and divergent validity of the Norwegian version of CCT among children with pediatric Acquired Brain Injury and healthy controls.Methods: The present study has (...) a cross-sectional design, based on baseline data derived from a multicenter RCT. Seventy-five children with pABI from two university hospitals with parent-reported executive dysfunction and minimum of 12 months since injury/completed cancer therapy, as well as 59 HCs aged 10–17 years, were assessed with CCT using total errors as the main outcome measure. The pABI group completed tests assessing EF on the impairment level within the ICF framework, and on the participation level. In addition, they completed tests of intellectual ability, processing speed, attention, learning, and memory. Finally, overall functional outcome was evaluated for the children with pABI.Results: Acceptable internal consistency and good inter-rater reliability were found for the CCT. Children with pABI performed significantly worse on the CCT than the HCs. The CCT identified group membership, but the sensitivity and specificity were overall classified as poor. Convergent validity was demonstrated by associations between the CCT and performance-based tests assessing inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and working memory, as well as teacher-reported executive dysfunction. Divergent validity was supported by the lack of association with performance-based measures of learning and memory, attention, and verbal intellectual ability. However, there was a moderate association between the CCT and performance-based tests of processing speed. Lastly, better performance on the CCT was associated with a better functional outcome.Conclusion: Our study with a relatively large sample of children with pABI and HC’s demonstrated good psychometric properties of the CCT. CCT performance was associated with the overall level of disability and function, suggesting that CCT is related to the level of activity in everyday life and participation in society. Hence, our study suggests that the CCT has the potential to advance the assessment of EF by providing a valid analysis of real-world performance. Nevertheless, further research is needed on larger samples, focusing on predictors of task performance, and evaluating the ability of CCT to detect improvement in EF over time. The patterns of error and problem-solving strategies evaluated by the CCT could be used to inform neuropsychological rehabilitation treatmentand represent a more valid outcome measure of rehabilitation interventions. (shrink)

SummaryThe writings of the very popular American poet Robert Frost (1874–1963) reveal an unusually specific and detailed knowledge of science. This was particularly evident among the poems of his penultimate volume, Steeple Bush, of 1947. Several of these poems confronted with basic insights issues raised by the period's ‘new physics’. Among those, especially Frost's epigram ‘A Wish to Comply’ wittily confronted an important epistemological difficulty in particle physics. Such science must induce a belief in the fundamental importance of entities invisible (...) to any physical human senses except those aided by complex apparatus used in abstruse experiments. Recondite scientific issues are confronted in other poems published in Steeple Bush such as ‘Skeptic’ (which meditates on the ‘red shift’ evidence for an expanding universe), but these poems are clearly derived from popular theoretical expositions, not practical experience. ‘A Wish to Comply’, on the other hand, clearly records an actual experience of a failed Millikan ‘oil drop’ experiment. This event evidently led to the poet to fake a report of his own observation of an electrically charged oil droplet, for reasons of social pressure. In meditating on these circumstances the epigram opens questions relating to scientific ‘systematic error’, the suppression, ‘trimming’ or ‘cooking’ of experimental data, and a bias toward confirmation of highly respected opinions. Although Frost did not live to know it, two of these questions have been latterly opened in regard to Millikan's own reports of his original oil drop experimental data. (shrink)

ARCHAEOLOGYTHE Classical Spartans were noted for their austerity, which seemed already ancient to writers of the fifth century B.C. The early poetry and art of their country show a considerable aesthetic sense. This apparent contradiction has caused some students to conclude that the strict Lycurgan regimen was not introduced till the middle or even the end of the sixth century and that before that date Sparta had culturally been developing in much the same way as other important Greek states. The (...) argument is unsound. (shrink)

[Frank Ebersole is a philosopher] "whose contribution to philosophy... is the greatest of anyone this [the 20th] century, especially in the areas of philosophy of language, theory of knowledge, and perception." from Wittgenstein, Empiricism, and Language by John W. Cook (Oxford University Press, 1999). Language and Perception has nine chapters: seven that address philosophical problems about language and two (chapters 2 and 9) that are more metaphilosophical The metaphilosophical chapters discuss philosophical pictures and some of Frank Ebersole's basic ideas (...) about philosophy. The other seven essays let you participate in his unique struggles to come to terms with such questions as: What is the meaning of a word? Isn't Wittgenstein's idea that things called by the same name have family resemblances significantly flawed? Does language determine what we perceive? Does a thing's being red cause it to look red (the causal theory of perception)? Must the action of speaking be analyzed into simpler actions such as making sounds? Can a bodily movement be part of an action? Is fatalism implied by "what one might say" about the future? Are "natural-kind" words like proper names? are they rigid designators? This and its companion volume, Meaning and Saying, are not just other philosophy books about the philosophy of language. In both books Ebersole, by carefully using examples, convincingly shows that the problems are the products of philosophical pictures. The examples also make the pictures less compelling. How the Second Edition Differs from the First Edition This edition differs from the first edition (University Press of America, 1979) in several ways. Pictures: Material that was formerly part of a postscript to chapter 1 has been revised and is now its own chapter, chapter 2, "Pictures and Wittgenstein on Pictures." As a result the following chapters were renumbered. Essay removed: Chapter 7 in the first edition, "Truth and Fate: Future Actions," has been removed. Essay added: A new essay, entitled "Proper Names and Other Names," has been added to the volume. It's a revised version of an essay originally published in Philosophical Investigations, Oct., 1982, with the title "Stalking the Rigid Designator." Postscript: Material that was formerly part of the preface is now revised and placed as chapter 9 at the end, entitled "Postscript." Improved text: Throughout the book, Ebersole has made corrections, stylistic improvements, and changed the wording to remove ambiguities. Preface The book is concerned with questions about the "relations of language to reality": Does physical reality predetermine the form of our language? Does it determine the kinds of words in our simple, basic vocabulary? Does our language in basic ways determine the way we perceive reality? Does our language embody the outlines of a certain theory of perception? And does it incorporate a certain view of human actions and of the future? These questions are expressions of the problems in the philosophy of language that people inevitably get themselves into while dealing with other philosophical problems. And these are problems in the philosophy of language that have direct consequences for the way one deals with problems in other branches of philosophy. At. (shrink)

On p. 118 I said that the injunction of Pythagoras παρà θνσíαν μxs22EF xs22EFννχíζον, quoted by Goettling with a false reference, might be illuminating in its context but that I suspected it of being a figment. My suspicions were unfounded. The reference, as Mr. A. B. Cook has kindly pointed out to me, is Iambl. Protrept. 364 K.; but Iamblichus's explanation—that ‘nails’ stands for one's remoter kinsfolk, οíον xs22EFνεψιáδαι xs22EF πατραδxs22EFλφων γαμβρονοτιδεîς xs22EF τοιοντοí τινες, with whom one should renew (...) relations on festal days—does not seem very helpful. (shrink)