Barriers to empirical comparisons of architectures are myriad and daunting, especially for physical robots. Architectures are implemented on different platforms that are often incompatible. Replicability is difficult to produce, and the multiple trials required for statistical significance are simply impractical or infeasible. The design criteria may be quite different as well, leading to poten...

I was having coffee with a friend in a Greenwich Village café when he announced suddenly that we had to leave. " Why? " I asked. Because, he said, acid was dripping from the ceiling. I thought for a moment and took a chance. I asked whether he wanted me to take him to the VA hospital in Northport, about an hour's drive from Manhattan. His answer, " yes, " was a sur-prise—and a relief. The dripp...

This land is your land, this land is my land, from California to the New York Island . . . (1). When Woody Guthrie wrote and sang these lyrics in 1940, the song was more than a paean to a beautiful country. It was a call to recognize the inherent dignity of the common man. The song’s passion arose from Guthrie’s experiences during the Great Depression, when he traveled with other migrants from ...

This is a commentary on the article ‘The rise of post-truth populism in pluralist liberal democracies: challenges for health policy.’ It critically examines two of its key concepts: populism and ‘post truth.’ This commentary argues that there are different types of populism, with unclear links to impacts, and that in some ways, ‘post-truth’ has resonances with arguments advanced in the period a...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the relationship between partner well-being and outcomes of chronically diseased individuals participating in an employer sponsored well-being improvement program. METHODS Using the Actor Partner Interdependence Model, we evaluated whether prior partner well-being was associated with well-being change among 2025 couples. Logistic regression models were then used to explo...

In the mid 1950s the field of linguistics suddenly shot into the academic limelight. In the 19 and early 20 centuries it was a dusty corner of the humanities, entered by would-be scholars through a rite of passage that involved journeying to a far-flung corner of the known universe, locating an obscure and heretofore unknown language, conquering it, and returning with a detailed record of its c...