Oskar Blumenthal (1852-1917) was Berlin’s most feared theatre critic in the early years of the new German Reich. He had the audacity of referring to Goethe as “an egghead” who had no understanding of what made plays effective for audiences, and in other critiques he ridiculed Kleist, Hebbel, and other “important” playwrights—prompting an adversary publicly to call him a “one-man lynch mob.” In ...

Many organizations have struggled over the past few decades with a blizzard of process improvement methodologies such as Total Quality Management (TQM), Kaizen, JIT Production, and Re-Engineering. These operations are understandably leery of adopting new methodologies given their past experience, especially with a focus on return on investments and leveraging existing practices. This article ex...

Rats respond to the emotions of others. A new study reveals how their central amygdala uses such social information selfishly trigger defences that adapt nature danger with all hallmarks true emotional contagion. Fear, a powerful state triggered by detection threat, is key adaptive response aids survival triggering flexible behaviours depend on imminence danger. We share this emotion many other...

Dennis B. Worthen, Lloyd Scholar at the Lloyd Library and Museum in Cincinnati, OH, has done our profession a service of great importance by initiating the series published in the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association, ‘‘Heroes of Pharmacy.’’ The first 28 profiles of pharmacy’s early heroes have also been compiled in a book by the same title published by the American Pharmacists Assoc...

For most people, their greatest intellectual feat is the acquisition of their native language. The virtual universality of individual success should not mask the awesome complexity of the task. Any five-year-old can tell the difference between “It rains, but it does not snow” and “It rains, but it does not matter”, instantly spotting the elusive words to which the impersonal pronouns refer. The...

ers of chaos theory as it generated pictures of ever increasing complexity using a deceptively minuscule recursive rule, one that can be reapplied to itself repeatedly. You can look at the set at smaller and smaller resolutions without “ever” reaching the limit; you will continue to see the recognizable shapes. The introduction of fractals was not initially welcomed by the mathematical establis...

Asthma management has changed so much in the last 25 years since I began my training pulmonary medicine and set out to be an “asthmatologist.” Back then, all we had were scheduled inhaled corticosteroids (ICSs) bronchodilators, primarily albuterol as a short-acting therapy 4 times per day. Patients often told take 12 puffs (!) of triamcinolone twice daily address inflammation, if things got bad...

ScriptEase is a publicly-available visual tool that enables game designers to easily create complex interactive stories for computer role-playing games (CRPGs), without programming. In particular, ScriptEase facilitates the automatic generation of scripting code for ambient behaviors of the numerous non-player characters (NPCs) that populate the CRPG world. ScriptEase generates this scripting c...

The characteristic mobility of highland populations in Southeast Asia relied to a large extent on their particular adaption an ecological environment: swidden cultivation tubers mountain slopes. This ecology corresponded cosmologies which potency was limitless, or at least had no fixed and delimited precinct (as did the rice paddies Buddhist realms valleys). Military state building, modern tran...

The paper presents a research on the multimodal communication of teachers in the classroom. The “musical score”, a procedure for the analysis of multimodal communication, is used to analyse aspects of the signals produced and of the meanings conveyed by teachers while interacting with their pupils, by focusing not only on affective and interactional aspects, but also on the cognitive effects of...