The title of the newest and fourteenth book by science writer Philip Ball leaves no doubt: this is a counter-attack on claims made by Steven Pinker in his publications The Language Instinct (1994) and How the Mind Works (1997). Pinker characterized music as ‘auditory cheesecake’ (1997: 534): a tasty bonus but, from an evolutionary point of view, no more than a by-product of much more important ...

The challenge of adequately assessing depth of anesthesia has been with us since the earliest days of our specialty. In 1847 John Snow wrote “The question may be asked whether the medical man can always determine in what degree of etherization the patient is, and by that means estimate correctly whether or not he is liable to pain. I am not sure that he always can, by the mere observation of th...

I show that Kant’s phrase Ding an sich denotes, not a type of thing, but a type of object: namely, an object which is per se a thing. My interpretation is based on the assumption that Kant follows the traditional use of the terms objectum and res. Kant’s distinction between phenomenon and noumenon is a distinction between types of object: a “distinction of all objects in general into phenomena ...

Certificate This is to certify that the work contained in the thesis entitled Classification of Ciphers, by Pooja Maheshwari, has been carried out under my supervision and that this work has not been submitted elsewhere for a degree. Abstract In cryptanalysis of an unknown cipher first step is to identify the cipher and then to break it. To identify the cipher we need to classify them. Classify...

Bewildered and intimidated by the apparently monolithic structure of the teenage sub-culture, many members of the older generation are failing to play the stabilising role traditionally allotted to them, says Anthony Lejeune in this article. Deploring this 'moral and aesthetic relativism', he believes that a backlash by the older generation could bring benefits all round. Anthony Lejeune is a j...

Among the brilliant contributors to the sciences of medicine, pharmacy, and chemstry during the Iranian era was one genius who seems to stand for his time- the Persian, Razi, (about 865-925 AD), called Rhazes by the western world. The most important authorship of Razi is the "contines" (Alhavi) that in fact, it is a medical encyclopedia and there is the describtion of all the illnesses, the way...

a busy outpatient clinic (he gives a horrifying example ofincompetent truth telling); it is an honesty which the patient has sought in the course of psychotherapeutically orientated discussion; it is an honesty which includes continuing support; and it is an honesty which, believes Dr Goldie, reduces unnecessary suffering and helps patients to survive it when it is inevitable. Such views, from ...

When an individual believes that peers are predominantly untruthful in a given situation, is he/she more likely to be untruthful in that situation? We study this question in deception experiments patterned after Gneezy (2005) and conducted in Arizona, California, and India. We find evidence that dishonesty is indeed contagious.