Natural sounds are structured on many time-scales. A typical segment of speech, for example, contains features that span four orders of magnitude: Sentences (∼1 s); phonemes (∼10−1 s); glottal pulses (∼10−2 s); and formants (.10−3 s). The auditory system uses information from each of these time-scales to solve complicated tasks such as auditory scene analysis [1]. One route toward understanding...

About the author. . . . Frederick Engels (1820-1895), as the son of a German textile manufacturer who owned factories in England, became so concerned about fate of textile workers he published The Condition of the Working Classes in England. He saw the textile worker as a new societal force leading to a rational ordering of social life, superseding capitalism. In collaboration with Karl Marx, E...

Natural sounds are structured on many time-scales. A typical segment of speech, for example, contains features that span four orders of magnitude: Sentences (∼1 s); phonemes (∼10−1 s); glottal pulses (∼10−2 s); and formants (.10−3 s). The auditory system uses information from each of these time-scales to solve complicated tasks such as auditory scene analysis [1]. One route toward understanding...

Microbial processes are responsible for the formation, alteration, and destruction of some natural gas accumulations. Individual microbial gas accumulations may be significant (> 1 Tcf; trillion cubic feet or 28.3 billion cubic meters) and collectively account for more than 20% of the global gas resource-base, dominating in some individual basins. Often cited resource estimates do not effective...

Comprehension of natural language--stories, conversations, text--is very simple for those doing the comprehending and very complex for cognitive neuroscientists. It also presents a paradox: the advantage of the left hemisphere (LH) for most language tasks is one of the best-established facts about the brain; yet, when it comes to comprehending complex, natural language, the right hemisphere (RH...

To address complications involving ambiguity, presupposition and implicature, three processes underlying natural language interpretation are isolated: translation, entailment and attunement. A meta-language integrating these processes is outlined, elaborating on a proof-theoretic approach to presupposition. §