This is the first comprehensive translation of the expanded French version of E.F.F. Chladni's Traité d'Acoustique, using Chladni's 1802 Die Akustik for reference and clarification. Chladni's experiments and observations with sound and vibrations profoundly influenced the development of the field of Acoustics. The famous Chladni diagrams along with other observations are contained in Die Akustik, published in German in 1802 and Traité d'Acoustique, a greatly expanded version, published in French in 1809. The present translation was undertaken by Robert T. Beyer, (...) PhD (1920-2008), noted acoustician, Professor of Physics at Brown University, and Gold Medal recipient of the Acoustical Society of America. Along with many other projects completed over the course of his career, Dr. Beyer translated Von Neumann's seminal work, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics from the original German, spent 30 years translating Russian physics treatises and journals, served as editor of the English translation of the Soviet Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics, and also authored Sounds of our Times: Two Hundred Years of Acoustics. Represents the first comprehensive English translation of a seminal work in acoustics Translated by a prominent acoustician, and former Gold Medal recipient of the Acoustical Society of America In addition to the classic experiments with glass plates and violin bows, covers topics in music, architecture, and anatomy of human and animal hearing Appeals to a wide audience in physics, acoustics, and history of science. (shrink)

Doctors have been placed in an anomalous position by abortion laws which sanction the termination of a fetus while in a woman's womb, yet call it murder when a physician attempts to end the life of a fetus which has somehow survived such a procedure. This predicament, the doctors' dilemma, can be resolved by adopting a strategy which posits the right to ownership of one's own body for human beings. Such an approach will generate a consistent policy prescription, one that (...) sanctions the right of all pregnant women to abortions, yet grants the fetus, after it becomes viable as a potentially independent person, a right to its own body. The doctors' dilemma is surmounted, then, by requiring that abortions of viable fetuses be performed in a manner that will produce a live delivery. Hence, infanticide and termination of viable fetuses are proscribed. (shrink)

The first thing to note about Peirce’s semiotic aesthetics is that Peirce himself had very little to say about it. Two articles published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism are concerned with determining Pierce’s views on aesthetic theory. The first was by Max Oliver Hocutt, in 1962, called “The Logical Foundations of Peirce’s Aesthetics.” This article has something less than an auspicious start, however, since its first sentence reads, “There is a sense in which it might be said (...) that Charles Peirce had no aesthetics.” And since that sentence is followed in the next paragraph with one of the flattest—or, if you prefer, deadest of metaphors, to wit. (shrink)

This article is targeted at analyzing the advantages of using the case study method in the course of Business English at Scientific Research University - Higher School of Economics in Saint Petersburg. Cases offer a lot of opportunities for developing academic skills in reading, writing, listening and making presentations. Students get not only linguistic skills but also non-linguistic competences. Students are taught to work in teams, to analyze the data given in the task, to make decisions. Communicative and managerial skills (...) are obtained as well. Special attention is paid to making team presentations. It is vital to mention that analysis and case solving can be compared to a play where students are actors trying to come up with a solution of a problem using the information given. This approach stimulates students to be more creative, decisive, communicative and goal-oriented. This method helps to achieve better results in developing academic skills while studying Business English. In this article, the importance of Russian companies’ problems analyses is pushed forward. (shrink)

Mr. Ayer , in Language, Truth and Logic , says: “Sentences which simply express moral judgments do not say anything. They are pure expressions of feeling and as such do not come under the category of truth and falsehood.... Aesthetic terms are used in exactly the same way as ethical terms.".

The little boy who announced to a shocked court that the emperor was dressed in nothing but his birthday suit was no mean philosopher in the Wittgensteinian mode. Immune from bewitchment by language he followed blindly, figuratively speaking, the rule of ‘look and see’; any explanation being superfluous since everything lay exposed to view, he described what he saw in everyday words stripped of metaphysical gloss and used in a language-game they could happily call home. Such impeccable philosophical credentials and (...) his fearless pursuit of the truth encourage me to follow his example, though I feel a certain trepidation at the enormity of what I am about to suggest: To my ingenuous gaze the body corporate of Wittgensteinian scholarship displays some startlingly naughty bits that really ought to be decently covered. (shrink)

This book is the most comprehensive, integrated explanatory account yet published of the properties of question formations and their variation across languages. It makes an important contribution to the current debate over whether syntax should be understood derivationally, arguing that thebest model of language is one in which sentences are constructed in a series of operations that precede or follow each other in time. The central problem it addresses is the nature of the difference between (a) languages in which all (...) wh-words move overtly to a clause-initial position (exemplified byBulgarian); (b) languages in which one wh-phrase moves per clause but all others remain in situ (exemplified by English); and (c) languages in which there is no overt movement at all (exemplified by Japanese). Professor Richards focuses on the nature of syntactic movement in order to see what this reveals about the syntactic derivation. He considers the nature of interactions between movement operations and investigates the behaviour of multiple overt wh-movement, scrambling, cliticization, and objectshift. His general conclusions about the relationship between movement and multiple specifiers follow straightforwardly from basic principles of Shortest Move and Shortest Attract. He develops a PF-imposed well-formedness condition on movement chains (essentially, a requirement that a single memberof the chain be unambiguously identified as the copy to be pronounced), which allows for the development of theories of anti-agreement, the that-trace effect, and the conditions on participial agreement in Romance, among other phenomena. He defends the claim that well-formed dependencies can improvethe status of ill-formed dependencies created later in the derivation, illustrating the explanatory power, under certain structural conditions, of his Principle of Minimal Compliance. He uses data on the locality of wh-movement to argue that the Principle of Minimal Compliance is responsible for anumber of the apparent distinctions between overt and covert movement. This book will interest syntacticians at graduate level and above as well as linguistic theorists concerned with the syntax-semantics interface. (shrink)