On both empirical and theoretical grounds we find that a particular form of social hierarchy, here characterized as ‘pathogenic’, can, from the earliest phases of life, exert a formal analog to evolutionary selection pressure, literally writing a permanent image of itself ∗Address correspondence to Rodrick Wallace, PISCS Inc., 549 W 123 St., Suite 16F, New York, NY, 10027. Telephone (212) 865-4...

The phenomenon of aspectual shift has been discussed by several people over the last ten years using an analogy with type coercion in programming languages. This paper tries to take the analogy literally and to spell out the details for an analysis of some common kinds of aspectual shift in English under the influence of some types of temporal modification. A model theoretic basis for this kind...

243 I magine practising medicine without access to blood transfusions. It was Karl Landsteiner, a 1930 Nobel laureate, who classified human blood into groups based on the presence of naturally occurring agglutinating antibodies, and whose findings eventually established safe transfusion procedures. Prior to his discovery, patients in need of blood received transfusions from animals such as shee...

The other day I met a little boy named Jeudi. Jeudi is a 3-year-old boy with a congenital heart defect—literally, a very small boy with a very big heart. And he needs surgery—soon. Unfortunately, Jeudi lives in Haiti, one of the lowest income countries in the world. Even before the earthquake in 2010, health care in Haiti was vastly inadequate. Many expensive, curative treatments for individual...

Intensive Care depends on sophisticated life support technology. Effective management of devicesupported patients is complex, involving the interpretation of many variables, comparative evaluation of numerous therapeutic options, and control of various patient-management parameters. Raw data, when taken literally, can lead to the wrong interpretation of the patient state. We propose a system wh...

Whole Word Morphologizer is a small computer implementation of word-based morphology. The program automatically identifies morphological relations in a small word-based lexicon, literally learning its morphology, and uses the knowledge it acquires to generate new words. It is based on a model of the mental lexicon in which all entries are whole, entire, fully fledged words and relies solely on ...

Designing the wing involved literally thousands of decisions that could add up to an invaluable asset, a proprietary store of knowledge. A competitor could look at the wing, measure it even, and make a good guess about its internal structure. But a wing has as many invisible tricks built into its shape as a Savile Row suit; you would need to tear it apart and study every strand to figure out it...

The letter of the law versus the spirit of the law is an idiomatic antithesis which suggests that in interpreting a law there are two choices. One can approach a law literally or one can instead focus on its intent. The relevance of this idiomatic opposition to the Employment Equity Act and its provision for affirmative action is interrogated through the presentation of two case studies demonst...

While the Latin phrases in vitro and in vivo are well understood in the medical literature, neither term accurately describes the science performed at the level of the population by epidemiologists and others. In particular, the effect of an exposure in a single organism can differ from those in a population, for reasons ranging from random error to herd immunity. We suggest that in populo (mea...

Cuba is the only country I know to erect a monument to the egg….and so it should. Located on Havana's Fifth Avenue, the simple sculpture pays homage to the salva vida-literally the life saver of many a Cuban family, particularly in the 1990s. Those were the worst years of what was euphemistically called the "Special Period," when the economy careened ever downward, reeling from the loss of 85% ...