Brief course description This seminar deals with the linguistic and sociolinguistic sources of variation in speech and their formal treatment in theories of phonetics and phonology. Variation is here broadly construed to encompass both low-level phonetic variation (often referred to as gradience) and sociolinguistically-related variation (such as the existence of alternant forms). Similarly, “f...

BACKGROUND The UK General Medical Council recommends that medical students have the opportunity of shadowing the outgoing new doctor whose post they will soon undertake. At the University of Nottingham the two-week shadowing period was preceded by two weeks of lectures/seminars wherein students followed sessions on topics such as common medical/surgical emergencies, contracts, time management, ...

neuroimaging. I laid out the critical prediction derived from load theory, namely that visual cortex responses to distractor stimuli should depend on the level of load in the attended task, in the same manner as I had shown in my behavioural studies. About a year later, following a departmental seminar, Chris introduced me to his PhD student saying: “Geraint, this is Nilli: we will be testing t...

Various types of probabilistic proof systems have played a central role in the development of computer science in the last decade. In these notes, we concentrate on three such proof systems | interactive proofs, zero-knowledge proofs, and probabilistic checkable proofs. Remark: These are lecture notes in the strict sense of the word. Surveys of mine on this subject can be obtained from URL http...

Psychotherapeutic training in Germany is about to be changed soon: master’s graduates clinical psychology will able become state-licensed psychotherapists. It therefore mandatory teach basic psychotherapeutic skills at the universities. This article presents examples of application-oriented courses psychology, which have been tried and tested Philipps University Marburg for years. During practi...

It has been argued that Franz Boas contributed little to the emergence of the culture concept in anthropology and in fact hindered its growth. In the context of an earlier re-evaluation of the role of E. B. Tylor, it is argued here that in the work of Boas the concept was in fact provided with much of the basis of its modern anthropological meaning. In developing his argument against racial men...