Infinite Repertoire

Preface: name-finding -- Invitation: city of dance -- Aesthetic politics, magical resources. Why authority needs magic ; Privatizing ballet ; The discipline of becoming: ballet's pedagogy -- Delicious inventions. Female strong men and the future of resemblance ; Core steps and passport moves: how to inherit a repertoire ; When big is not big enough: on excess in Guinean Sabar -- Epilogue: embodied infrastructure and generative imperfection.

Essays and critical writing drawn from a wide-ranging fifty-year career in letters Drawn from a body of essays and reviews written over the course of nearly fifty years, Work to Be Done showcases both the depth and breadth of Bruce Whiteman’s critical work. Widely published across Canada and the United States, Whiteman is an accomplished poet, translator, and scholar, and his broad interests have never been limited to any one subject area. He moves between classical and contemporary literature, and music, book and literary history, shifting seamlessly from the close reading of a poem to the consideration of the life and oeuvre of an artist. In these thirty-four selected essays, Whiteman demonstrates the cohesion of his varied body of work, which ranges from essays on such poets as Sappho, Goethe, Samuel Beckett, P.K. Page, Leonard Cohen and Philip Larkin, to insightful readings of the biographers and translators of such great writers as Ezra Pound and Marcel Proust. Work to Be Done is an erudite and eclectic tour of Whiteman’s finest critical investigations.

This book is an intellectual history of the major theoretical problem in immunology and its resolution in the post-World War II period. In recent years immunology has been one of the most exciting--and successful--fields of biomedical research; this book provides essential background for understanding the conceptual conflicts occurring in the field.

An exploration of what research at the intersection of contemporary theoretical linguistics and the cognitive neurosciences can reveal about the constraints on the apparently chaotic variation in human languages. In The Boundaries of Babel, Andrea Moro tells the story of an encounter between two cultures: contemporary theoretical linguistics and the cognitive neurosciences. The study of language within a biological context has been ongoing for more than fifty years. The development of neuroimaging technology offers new opportunities to enrich the "biolinguistic perspective" and extend it beyond an abstract framework for inquiry. As a leading theoretical linguist in the generative tradition and also a cognitive scientist schooled in the new imaging technology, Moro is uniquely equipped to explore this. Moro examines what he calls the "hidden" revolution in contemporary science: the discovery that the number of possible grammars is not infinite and that their number is biologically limited. This radical but little-discussed change in the way we look at language, he claims, will require us to rethink not just the fundamentals of linguistics and neurosciences but also our view of the human mind. Moro searches for neurobiological correlates of "the boundaries of Babel"—the constraints on the apparent chaotic variation in human languages—by using an original experimental design based on artificial languages. He offers a critical overview of some of the fundamental results from linguistics over the last fifty years, in particular regarding syntax, then uses these essential aspects of language to examine two neuroimaging experiments in which he took part. He describes the two neuroimaging techniques used (positron emission topography, or PET, and functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI), but makes it clear that techniques and machines do not provide interesting data without a sound theoretical framework. Finally, he discusses some speculative aspects of modern research in biolinguistics regarding the impact of the linear structure of linguistics expression on grammar, and more generally, some core aspects of language acquisition, genetics, and evolution.

An introduction to natural language semantics that offers an overview of the empirical domain and an explanation of the mathematical concepts that underpin the discipline. This textbook offers a comprehensive introduction to the fundamentals of those approaches to natural language semantics that use the insights of logic. Many other texts on the subject focus on presenting a particular theory of natural language semantics. This text instead offers an overview of the empirical domain (drawn largely from standard descriptive grammars of English) as well as the mathematical tools that are applied to it. Readers are shown where the concepts of logic apply, where they fail to apply, and where they might apply, if suitably adjusted. The presentation of logic is completely self-contained, with concepts of logic used in the book presented in all the necessary detail. This includes propositional logic, first order predicate logic, generalized quantifier theory, and the Lambek and Lambda calculi. The chapters on logic are paired with chapters on English grammar. For example, the chapter on propositional logic is paired with a chapter on the grammar of coordination and subordination of English clauses; the chapter on predicate logic is paired with a chapter on the grammar of simple, independent English clauses; and so on. The book includes more than five hundred exercises, not only for the mathematical concepts introduced, but also for their application to the analysis of natural language. The latter exercises include some aimed at helping the reader to understand how to formulate and test hypotheses.

The Revolutionary Kant offers a new appreciation of Kant’s classic, arguing that Kant's reform of philosophy was far more radical than has been previously understood. The book examines his proposed revolutionary reform — to abandon traditional metaphysics and point philosophy in a new direction — and contends that critics have misrepresented conflicts between Kant and his predecessors. Kant, Bird argues, was not a flawed innovator but an advocate of a new philosophical project, one that began to be appreciated only in the twentieth century.

Understanding the functions and properties of molecules in living systems requires a detailed knowledge of their three-dimensional structures and the conformational variability that allows them to adopt multiple functional forms. Interpreting biological systems in the language of three-dimensional structures is of fundamental importance and innumerable research groups around the world are working in this area. This book is a compilation of articles describing attempts at understanding the intricacies of biological systems through the structures of and interactions between their constituent molecules. Contents:The Legacy of G N Ramachandran and the Development of Structural Biology in India (M Vijayan)The Open-Ended Intellectual Legacy of GNR (George Rose)The Ramachandran Plot and Protein Structure Validation (Roman A Laskowski, Nicholas Furnham and Janet M Thornton)Analysis of Dihedral Angle Variability in Related Protein Structures (Shekhar C Mande, Ashwani Kumar and Payel Ghosh)Multiprotein Assemblies: Modulating Cell Activity Through Targeting Protein-Protein Interfaces (Alicia P Higueruelo, Harry Jubb and Tom L Blundell)Computational Approaches for Understanding the Recognition Mechanism of Protein Complexes (M Michael Gromiha)Cold-Shock Domains — Versatile Molecular Modules for Single-Stranded RNA Binding and Remodeling (Florian Mayr and Udo Heinemann)Protein Disulfide Analysis and Design (Siddharth Patel, S Indu, C Ramakrishnan and Raghavan Varadarajan)Controlling Conformational Dynamics to Modulate Protein Function (Shahir S Rizk, Marcin Paduch and Anthony A Kossiakoff)Structural Bioinformatics Approaches for Deciphering Biosynthetic Code of Secondary Metabolites (Shradha Khater and Debasisa Mohanty)The Inherent Structure Landscape of Met–Enkephalin Determined by the MOLS Technique (N Balaji, L Ramya and N Gautham)and other papers Readership: Practicing researchers in academia and industry. Keywords:Three-Dimensional Structure;Protein Structures;Biopolymer Conformation;G N Ramachandran;Ramachandran Map Phi-Psi Plot;Nuclei Acid Structures;Macromolecular Interactions;Biomolecular Assemblies;Simulations of Biological Molecular StructuresKey Features:Authors are eminent scientists with well-cited research in structural and computational biologyThe book includes articles covering results obtained using the latest structural biology techniquesThe book covers important areas in the fields of protein folding, association, function and design

Understanding the functions and properties of molecules in living systems requires a detailed knowledge of their three-dimensional structures and the conformational variability that allows them to adopt multiple functional forms. Interpreting biological systems in the language of three-dimensional structures is of fundamental importance and innumerable research groups around the world are working in this area. This book is a compilation of articles describing attempts at understanding the intricacies of biological systems through the structures of and interactions between their constituent molecules.