The Variae

Cassiodorus—famed throughout history as one of the great Christian exegetes of antiquity—spent most of his life as a high-ranking public official under the Ostrogothic King Theoderic and his heirs. He produced the Variae, a unique letter collection that gave witness to the sixth-century Mediterranean, as late antiquity gave way to the early middle ages. The Variae represents thirty years of Cassiodorus’s work in civil, legal, and financial administration, revealing his interactions with emperors and kings, bishops and military commanders, private citizens, and even criminals. Thus, the Variae remains among the most important sources for the history of this pivotal period and is an indispensable resource for understanding political and diplomatic culture, economic and legal structure, intellectual heritage, urban landscapes, religious worldview, and the evolution of social relations at all levels of society during the twilight of the late-Roman state. This is the first full translation of this masterwork into English.

Cassiodorus (c.485–585), Roman senator and consul, served in various high offices from c.505 to c.538, under the kings of the Ostrogoths, who had inherited the imperial administration of Italy. For long periods the Goths' chief publicist, he compiled the state papers he had drafted, as their regime crumbled under Byzantine attack. This selection is the first translation to appear since 1886. " ... excellent and invaluable ..."—Classical Review

Philip K. Dick's 'The Variable Man' is a short science fiction story. This story was first published in the year 1952 in a magazine named the Planet Stories.

An excursion through solar science, science history and geoclimate with a husband and wife team who revealed some of our sun's most stubborn secrets.

This carefully edited time travel trilogy has been designed and formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. The Skull – A time-travelling assassin is sent to the past to kill a popular leader and to cause a different end to the ongoing political struggle... The Variable Man – A man from the pre-WW1 past is brought to the future and is expected to fix a powerful bomb to annihilate the entire civilization... Meddler – What happens when you meddle with the fabric of time and implant the first seeds of destruction of your own civilization with your time travel...

Driving home in the night, Hubert is surprised to see a mysterious light hovering over his car. Scared, he pulls up in his driveway and sees the light beaming down on his garden, irradiating it. Through this light the Prime Matter People direct Hubert to eat a midnight meal of collards cooked with greasy ham hocks whereby he is given supernatural powers enabling him to become invisible or the man or monster of choice, a black or white skeleton. Borrowing from an armored truck so he can fight crime from a Harlem town house, he applies his powers for good, mischievously.

Model building is typically based on the identification of a set of established facts in any given field of research, insofar as the model is then evaluated on how well it accounts for these facts. Psychology – and specifically visual word identification and reading – is no exception in this sense (e.g., Amenta & Crepaldi, 2012; Coltheart et al., 2001; Grainger & Jacobs, 1996). What counts as an established fact, however, was never discussed in great detail. It was typically considered, for example, that experimental effects need to replicate across, e.g., individuals, experimental settings, and languages if they are to be believed. The emphasis was on consistency, perhaps under a tacit assumption that the universal principles lying behind our cognitive structures determine our behaviour for the most part (or at least for that part that is relevant for model building). There are signs that a different approach is growing up in reading research. On a theoretical ground, Dennis Norris’ Bayesian reader (2006, 2009) has advanced the idea that models can dispense of static forms of representation (i.e., fixed architectures), and process information in a way that is dynamically constrained by context-specific requirements. Ram Frost (2012) has focused on language-specific constraints in the development of general theories of reading. On an empirical ground, the most notable recent advance in visual word identification concern the demonstration that some previously established (in the classic sense) effects depend heavily on language (Velan and Frost, 2011), task (e.g., Duñabeitia et al., 2011; Marelli et al., 2013; Kinoshita and Norris, 2009), or even individual differences (Andrews & Lo, 2012, 2013). Variability has become an intrinsic and informative aspect of cognitive processing, rather than a sign of experimental weakness. This Research Topic aims at moving forward in this new direction by providing an outlet for experimental and theoretical papers that: (i) explore more in depth the theoretical basis for considering variability as an intrinsic property of the human cognitive system; (ii) highlight new context-dependent experimental effects, in a way that is informative on the dynamics of the underlying cognitive processing; (iii) shed new light on known context-dependent experimental effects, again in a way that enhances their theoretical informativeness.