Chomsky, Noam, Aspects of a Theory of Syntax, M.I.T. Press Language: English ISBN-10: 0262530074 ISBN-13: 978-0262530071 1969 'Beginning in the mid-fifties and emanating largely form MIT, an approach was developed to linguistic theory and to the study of the structure of particular languages that diverges in many respects from modern linguistics. Although this approach is connected to the traditional study of languages, it differs enough in its specific conclusions about the structure and in its specific conclusions about the structure of language to warrant a name, "generative grammar." Various deficiencies have been discovered in the first attempts to formulate a theory of transformational generative grammar and in the descriptive analysis of particular languages that motivated these formulations. At the same time, it has become apparent that these formulations can be extended and deepened.The major purpose of this book is to review these developments and to propose a reformulation of the theory of transformational generative grammar that takes them into account. The emphasis in this study is syntax; semantic and phonological aspects of the language structure are discussed only insofar as they bear on syntactic theory.' 
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Deighton, Len, Winter: A Berlin Family 1899-1954, HarperCollins Publishers 1996 Amazon editorial review From Library Journal 'Brothers Peter and Paul Winter, separated by World War II, are reunited at the Nuremberg trials. Peter, a U.S. army colonel, is on the staff of prosecuting attorneys; Paul, a former influential Gestapo lawyer, may soon be on trial for his life. Through the Winter brothers, their influential financier father and American-born mother, their friends and colleagues, Deighton gives a recognizably human form to the shape of German history from 1900 through 1945 and makes comprehensible the awful appeal of Nazism to people of different persuasions. The somewhat contrived ending does not diminish the power of this fine novel, which again shows that Deighton's mastery is not limited to the spy story.' BOMC alternate. Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. 
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Friedenthal, Richard, Luther, Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1970 Jacket: At midday on 21 October 1517, Luther launched the Reformation by nailing his 'ninety-five theses' against Papal indulgences to the door of the Schlosskirche at Wittenberg. The world has yet to come to terms with the issues he raised. . . . In this new biography Richard Friedenthal portrays the living human figure behind the accretions of pious and hostile legend. . . . Interwoven with the story of Luther's life is an intricate picture of Europe as a whole undergoing the agony of the Reformation, with centuries old beliefs and customs being turned upside-down in a chaos of furious religious controversy, social upheaval and constant clashes between bishops and princelings, imperial troops and mercenaries. . . .' 
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Heyes, Cecilia, Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking, Belknap Press: Harvard University Press 2018 “Cecilia Heyes presents a new hypothesis to explain the one feature that distinguishes Homo sapiens from all other species: the mind. Through lucid, compelling writing, this masterly exegesis proposes that the key features of the human mind, termed ‘cognitive gadgets,’ are the products of cultural rather than genetic evolution. It will stimulate its readers to think deeply, as Heyes has done, about what it means to be human.”―Lord John Krebs, University of Oxford 
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John, and Alexander Jones (editor), in The Jerusalem Bible, Darton Longman and Todd 1966 Introduction to Saint John: '[This] gospel has a complex literary form: it is akin to the earliest Christian preaching, and yet at the same time it gives the final results of a quest ... for a deeper and more rewarding apprehension of the mystery of Jesus. Each of the evangelists has his own approach to Christ's person and mission. For St John, he is the Word made flesh, come to give life to men, 1:14,and this, the mystery of the Incarnation, dominates the whole of John's thought.' p 140.  
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Kahneman, Daniel, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2011 'Daniel Kahneman is among the most influential psychologists in history and certainly the most important psychologist alive today. He has a gift for uncovering remarkable features of the human mind, many of which have become textbook classics and part of the conventional wisdom. His work has reshaped social psychology, cognitive science, the study of reason and of happiness, and behavioral economics, a field that he and his collaborator Amos Tversky helped to launch. The appearance of Thinking, Fast and Slow is a major event.' —Steven Pinker 
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Lonergan, Bernard J F, Insight : A Study of Human Understanding (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan : Volume 3), University of Toronto Press 1992 '. . . Bernard Lonergan's masterwork. Its aim is nothing less than insight into insight itself, an understanding of understanding' 
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Luke, and Alexander Jones (editor), in The Jerusalem Bible, Darton Longman and Todd 1966 'The third gospel's distinguishing quality is due to the attractive personality of its author, which shines through all his work. Luke is at once a most gifted writer and a man of marked sensibility. ... The originality of Luke is not in his key ideas (they are identical with those of Mark and Matthew) but in his religious mentality which, apart from slight traces of Paul's influence, is ovewhelmingly distinctive of Luke's personal temperament. Luke, in Dante's phrase, is the 'scriba mansuetudinis Christi', the faithful; recorder of Christ's lovingkindness.'  
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Nielsen, Michael A, and Isaac L Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, Cambridge University Press 2000 Review: A rigorous, comprehensive text on quantum information is timely. The study of quantum information and computation represents a particularly direct route to understanding quantum mechanics. Unlike the traditional route to quantum mechanics via Schroedinger's equation and the hydrogen atom, the study of quantum information requires no calculus, merely a knowledge of complex numbers and matrix multiplication. In addition, quantum information processing gives direct access to the traditionally advanced topics of measurement of quantum systems and decoherence.' Seth Lloyd, Department of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT, Nature 6876: vol 416 page 19, 7 March 2002. 
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Peacock, John A, Cosmological Physics, Cambridge University Press 1999 Nature Book Review: 'The intermingling of observational detail and fundamental theory has made cosmology an exceptionally rich, exciting and controversial science. Students in the field — whether observers or particle theorists — are expected to be acquainted with matters ranging from the Supernova Ia distance scale, Big Bang nucleosynthesis theory, scale-free quantum fluctuations during inflation, the galaxy two-point correlation function, particle theory candidates for the dark matter, and the star formation history of the Universe. Several general science books, conference proceedings and specialized monographs have addressed these issues. Peacock's Cosmological Physics ambitiously fills the void for introducing students with a strong undergraduate background in physics to the entire world of current physical cosmology. The majestic sweep of his discussion of this vast terrain is awesome, and is bound to capture the imagination of most students.' Ray Carlberg, Nature 399:322 
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Veltman, Martinus, Diagrammatica: The Path to the Feynman Rules, Cambridge University Press 1994 Jacket: 'This book provides an easily accessible introduction to quantum field theory via Feynman rules and calculations in particle physics. The aim is to make clear what the physical foundations of present-day field theory are, to clarify the physical content of Feynman rules, and to outline their domain of applicability. ... The book includes valuable appendices that review some essential mathematics, including complex spaces, matrices, the CBH equation, traces and dimensional regularization. ...' 
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Wiener, Norbert, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, MIT Press 1996 The classic founding text of cybernetics. 
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Lovelock, James, "Gaia as seen through the atmosphere", Atmospheric Environment, 6, , 1972, page 579-580. 'The purpose of this letter is to suggest that life at an early stage of its evolution acquired the capacity to control the global environment to suit its needs, and that this capacity has persisted and is still in use. In this view the sum total of species is more than just a Catalogue, "The Biosphere", and like other associations in biology is an entity with properties greater than the simple sum of its parts. Such a large creature, even if only hypothetical, with the powerful capacity to homeostat the planetary environment needs a name: I am indebted to Mr William Golding for suggesting the use of the Greek personification of mother Earth, "Gaia".' . back

Adaptive immune system - Wikipedia, Adaptive immune system - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The system is highly adaptable because of somatic hypermutation (a process of accelerated somatic mutations), and V(D)J recombination (an irreversible genetic recombination of antigen receptor gene segments). This mechanism allows a small number of genes to generate a vast number of different antigen receptors, which are then uniquely expressed on each individual lymphocyte. Since the gene rearrangement leads to an irreversible change in the DNA of each cell, all progeny (offspring) of that cell inherit genes that encode the same receptor specificity, including the memory B cells and memory T cells that are the keys to long-lived specific immunity.' back

Amanda Meade, GetUp's Carla McGrath outsted from press soucnil after pressure from News Corp, ' After a year of pressure from News Corp the Australian Press Council has removed Carla McGrath from the council because she is the deputy chair of activist group GetUp. McGrath, the first Torres Strait Islander woman to be appointed to the media watchdog, declined to resign despite The Australian refusing to work with her and publishing a dozen articles in one month attacking her appointment. The editor-in-chief of the Australian Paul Whittaker said GetUp was “effectively another wing of the Labor party and the Greens” and could not be objective.' back

Clonal selection - Wikipedia, Clonal selection - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Clonal selection theory is a scientific theory in immunology that explains the functions of cells (lymphocytes) of the immune system in response to specific antigens invading the body. The concept was introduced by the Australian doctor Frank Macfarlane Burnet in 1957, in an attempt to explain the formation of a diversity of antibodies during initiation of the immune response. The theory has become a widely accepted model for how the immune system responds to infection and how certain types of B and T lymphocytes are selected for destruction of specific antigens.' back

Frank Macfarlane Burnet - Wikipedia, Frank Macfarlane Burnet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, OM AK KBE FRS FAA FRSNZ[1] (3 September 1899 – 31 August 1985[2]), usually known as Macfarlane or Mac Burnet, was an Australian virologist best known for his contributions to immunology. He won a Nobel Prize in 1960 for predicting acquired immune tolerance and was best known for developing the theory of clonal selection.' back

Histogram - Wikipedia, Histogram - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' A histogram is an accurate representation of the distribution of numerical data. It is an estimate of the probability distribution of a continuous variable (quantitative variable) and was first introduced by Karl Pearson. It differs from a bar graph, in the sense that a bar graph relates two variables, but a histogram relates only one. To construct a histogram, the first step is to "bin" (or "bucket") the range of values—that is, divide the entire range of values into a series of intervals—and then count how many values fall into each interval.' back

Immune network theory - Wikipedia, Immune network theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The immune network theory is a theory of how the adaptive immune system works, that has been developed since 1974 mainly by Niels Jerne and Geoffrey W. Hoffmann. The theory states that the immune system is an interacting network of lymphocytes and molecules that have variable (V) regions. These V regions bind not only to things that are foreign to the vertebrate, but also to other V regions within the system. The immune system is therefore seen as a network, with the components connected to each other by V-V interactions. It has been suggested that the phenomena that the theory describes in terms of networks are also explained by clonal selection theory.' back

Ivan Nechepurenko, In Russia a Top University Lacks Just One Thing: Students, ' European University at St. Petersburg, a private liberal arts college in the heart of Russia’s second-largest city, would normally be filling with students returning from summer break. . . . The European University has a world-class faculty, a generous endowment and an outstanding reputation as a research institution. What it has lacked since August of last year, when the authorities took away the university’s teaching license, is students.' back

Jason Horowitz, Vatican Power Struggle Bursts Into Open as Conservatives Pounce, ' ROME — Since the start of his papacy, Francis has infuriated Catholic traditionalists as he tries to nurture a more welcoming church and shift it away from culture war issues, whether abortion or homosexuality. “Who am I to judge?” the pope famously said, when asked about gay priests. Just how angry his political and doctrinal enemies are became clear this weekend, when a caustic letter published by the Vatican’s former top diplomat in the United States blamed a “homosexual current” in the Vatican hierarchy for sexual abuse.' back

Jason Horowitz, The Man Who Took On the Pope: The Story Behind the Vigano Letter, ' ROME — At 9:30 a.m. last Wednesday, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò showed up at the Rome apartment of a conservative Vatican reporter with a simple clerical collar, a Rocky Mountains baseball cap and an explosive story to tell. . . . The journalist, Marco Tosatti, said he had smoothed out the narrative. The enraged archbishop brought no evidence, he said, but he did supply the flair, condemning the homosexual networks inside the church that act “with the power of octopus tentacles” to “strangle innocent victims and priestly vocations.” ' back

Jeffrey Nicholls, Did God make the World?, 'Did God make the world? My answer is that God did make the world. But I identify God and the world. The world made itself. This hypothesis, I suggest, has deep epistemological consequences for both physics and theology. The world can create itself without inconsistency because as well as deterministic processes modelled by computing machines, it contains the indeterminate processes predicted by the theorems of Turing and Goedel.' back

Marija Kundakovic and Frances A Champagne, Early-life experience, epigenetics and the developing brain, 'Development is a dynamic process that involves interplay between genes and the environment. In mammals, the quality of the postnatal environment is shaped by parent–offspring interactions that promote growth and survival and can lead to divergent developmental trajectories with implications for later-life neurobiological and behavioral characteristics. Emerging evidence suggests that epigenetic factors (ie, DNA methylation, posttranslational histone modifications, and small noncoding RNAs) may have a critical role in these parental care effects. Although this evidence is drawn primarily from rodent studies, there is increasing support for these effects in humans. Through these molecular mechanisms, variation in risk of psychopathology may emerge, particularly as a consequence of early-life neglect and abuse. Here we will highlight evidence of dynamic epigenetic changes in the developing brain in response to variation in the quality of postnatal parent–offspring interactions. The recruitment of epigenetic pathways for the biological embedding of early-life experience may also have transgenerational consequences and we will describe and contrast two routes through which this transmission can occur: experience dependent vs germline inheritance. Finally, we will speculate regarding the future directions of epigenetic research and how it can help us gain a better understanding of the developmental origins of psychiatric dysfunction.' back

New York Times Editorial Board, "The Gravest Crimes Under International Law, 'It has taken a long time — too long — to fully acknowledge the terrible suffering of the Rohingya people at the hands of Myanmar’s military rulers, perhaps because of the world’s reluctance to jeopardize their tentative political opening. A newly released United Nations report should put an end to any hesitation about holding the generals, and their civilian enablers, to account for what they have done: genocide and crimes against humanity.' back

Oxytocin - Wikipedia, Oxytocin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Oxytocin is a peptide hormone and neuropeptide. Oxytocin is normally produced by the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus and released by the posterior pituitary. It plays a role in social bonding, sexual reproduction in both sexes, and during and after childbirth. Oxytocin is released into the bloodstream as a hormone in response to stretching of the cervix and uterus during labor and with stimulation of the nipples from breastfeeding. This helps with birth, bonding with the baby, and milk production. Oxytocin was discovered by Henry Dale in 1906.' back

Pāṇini - Wikipedia, Pāṇini - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Pāṇini is known for his Sanskrit grammar, particularly for his formulation of the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology, syntax and semantics in the grammar known as Aṣṭādhyāyī (meaning "eight chapters"), the foundational text of the grammatical branch of the Vedanga, the auxiliary scholarly disciplines of the historical Vedic religion. He can be considered as the father of linguistics.' back

Ruth Mace, Update to Holden and Mace’s “Phylogenetic Analysis of the Evolution of Lactose Digestion in Adults” (1997): Revisiting the Coevolution of Human Cultural and Biological Diversity, 'Abstract In most of the world's population the ability to digest lactose declines sharply after infancy. High lactose digestion capacity in adults is common only in populations of European and circum-Mediterranean origin and is thought to be an evolutionary adaptation to millennia of drinking milk from domestic livestock. Milk can also be consumed in a processed form, such as cheese or soured milk, which has a reduced lactose content. Two other selective pressures for drinking fresh milk with a high lactose content have been proposed: promotion of calcium uptake in high-latitude populations prone to vitamin-D deficiency and maintainance of water and electrolytes in the body in highly and environments. These three hypotheses are all supported by the geographic distribution of high lactose digestion capacity in adults. However, the relationships between environmental variables and adult lactose digestion capacity are highly confounded by the shared ancestry of many populations whose lactose digestion capacity has been tested. The three hypotheses for the evolution of high adult lactose digestion capacity are tested here using a comparative method of analysis that takes the problem of phylogenetic confounding into account. This analysis supports the hypothesis that high adult lactose digestion capacity is an adaptation to dairying but does not support the hypotheses that lactose digestion capacity is additionally selected for either at high latitudes or in highly arid environments. Furthermore, methods using maximum likelihood are used to show that the evolution of milking preceded the evolution of high lactose digestion.' back

Ryan Gallagher, World's Leading Human Rights Groups Tell Google to Cancel it's Censorship Plan, ' Leading human rights groups are calling on Google to cancel its plan to launch a censored version of its search engine in China, which they said would violate the freedom of expression and privacy rights of millions of internet users in the country. A coalition of 14 organizations — including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders, Access Now, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology, PEN International, and Human Rights in China — issued the demand Tuesday in an open letter addressed to the internet giant’s CEO, Sundar Pichai. The groups said the censored search engine represents “an alarming capitulation by Google on human rights” and could result in the company “directly contributing to, or [becoming] complicit in, human rights violations.” ' back