By using a vast number of examples in social and economical data including natural languages, George Zipf was able to show an amazingly robust functional form of the rank-frequency plots 11, f 1=r f for frequency, r for rank, now commonly called Zipf's curve or Zipf's law. George Miller, a renowned linguist, summarized this study in 1965: Faced with this massive statistical regularity, you have...

While openmindedness is often cited as a paradigmatic example of an intellectual virtue, the connection between openmindedness and truth is tenuous. Several strategies for reconciling this tension are considered, and each is shown to fail; it is thus claimed that openmindedness, when intellectually virtuous, bears no interesting essential connection to truth. In the final section, the implicati...

The term witch's milk, referring usually to the mammary secretion of newborn infants,t is an example of that small group of medical and biological words and phrases which had its origin in the popular vocabulary of past centuries. (Freemartin2' is a similar term.) Such expressions lack the classical dignity of Greek and Latin ancestry, but they have a flavor and interest of their own. What was ...

potent hematopoietic stem cell. In support of this notion, the PNH red cells of women heterozygous for two elec-*Permanent address: Division of Hematology trophoretically distinguishable alleles of the X-linked gene encoding glucose 6-phosphate dehydrogenase Federico II University Medical School Via S Pansini 5 were found all to express the same allele, indicating that they belonged to one clon...

I am going to attack the sacred edifice of the modern mother's castle, and what I am going to say to you is of such great importance to yourselves, your children, and those for whom you do social work that I trust you will forgive me if I am outspoken. Alexander Pope two hundred years ago wrote that the proper study of mankind is jnan; but I think if he lived to-day he would have written " the ...

John Snow's prescriptions were composed in a style that developed during the eighteenth century when advances in natural science and medicine encouraged a rationalization of the materia medica. In the second decade of the century a new edition of the Edinburgh Pharmacopoeia was cleansed of many of those "simples" or crude drugs which had been introduced by the credulity and superstition of form...

ADVANCES IN THE STUDY OF BEHAVIOR, VOL. 1. Edited by Daniel S. Lehrman, Robert A. Hinde, and Evelyn Shaw. New York and London, Academic Press, 1965. The first volume of this series sets a high standard which one hopes will be maintained. In it six topics, rather diverse in nature, are treated extensively. The unity of the volume comes primarily from the general orientation which is ethnological...

Chinese Scalp Acupuncture, though written primarily as a clinic manual for practitioners of acupuncture, would be very interesting reading for neurologists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, veterans hospital administrators, and any other specialists who work in any capacity with patients suffering from brain injuries, neurological diseases, chronic debilitating pain, or neuropsycho...

we might feasibly try. even before i hear what they have to say, though, i want to share some thoughts about my own recent run-ins with information technology. it’s a cautionary tale that starts with a recent visit to my cise-editor@ aip.org email account. as with many prior visits, i had delayed this one because i didn’t want to face the spam and well-intended but inappropriate technology anno...

At the dawn of the industrial age, the social philosopher and economist Adam Smith wanted to explain how some countries were able to create what he called the “opulence” that other countries lacked. Smith suggested that the foremost driver of wealth was the division of labor because it directly results in increased productivity. In his famous example, one worker might make 20 pins a day, but wh...