Before proceeding, let me put to one side one familiar answer to my question. Most people, if asked what distinguishes humans from animals, would probably answer—“language”. Now, I certainly do not want to deny that our uniquely human facility with language plays some part in differentiating us intellectually from other animals. But it seems to me that, on its own, “language” does not add up to...

To build a platform for (high, sustainable) use, we need to know what will thrill users. Finding the right concoction of technology, functionality and design to delight users takes a thousand decisions, pivots and changes. The JSTOR Labs team has been using Flash Builds – high-intensity, short-burst, user-driven development efforts – in order to prototype new ideas and get to a user saying “Wow...

Introduction: New Combat Technologies (NCTs) create unprecedented capabilities to control the delivery of military force. But dependence on them generates difficult moral challenges impacting the decision-making process, which are only beginning to be addressed. Method: Some welcome NCTs explicitly whereas others plea to abandon such technologies. In order to arrive at an informed opinion about...

I report on two years of participant observation of traditional musicians in Dublin, Ireland. In Irish traditional music, players from all walks of life gather at pub sessions to play tunes together. Due to the ethos of traditional music, the representation of tunes is a constant aesthetic concern. Drawing on the aesthetics of reception, I show how arriving at the proper ‘‘text’’ of a tune pose...

In broadcasting, information originally held in one node of a communication network (called the source) has to be transmitted to a11 other nodes. In a unit of time, every node which already got the source message can transmit it to one neighbor. In classical broadcasting, the choice of neighbors to be informed by a node and the order in which they are informed may depend on the source. Thus, no...

“We don’t need another consultant or business professor preaching to us that we need to develop our salespeople... Instead, we need to know what the best training methods are and why we should use them... So, if you cannot explain specifically to me what our sales managers need to do to improve their training efforts and why we should even invest the effort to change, then don’t waste your time...

For the next two weeks, I will discuss some of the concepts of random sample which we use very frequently. These are certainly not the central focus of this course, but it is extremely important for all of us to know these concepts. We have to use these ideas throughout this quarter. First we need to know what do we mean by a random sample. Definition: The random variables X1, ..., Xn together ...

Many aspects of language comprehension are dependent on the identification of a perspectival/point-of-view anchor, who provides the perspectival center for interpreting the content of an utterance. To fully interpret epithets (ex.1a), evaluative adjectives (ex.1b), predicates of personal taste (ex.1c), epistemic modals (ex.1d) and adverbials of possibility (ex.1e), we need to know whose opinion...