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Corning and Hines make a useful contribution to the study of politics by distinguishing sharply between "political development" and "political evolution." Their emphasis on the multidisciplinary dimensions of real life changes as they occur (and have occurred) throughout the world is also needed. We must, assuredly, go beyond political science, both to the other social sciences (including economics) and also, notably, to the life sciences.

A Top Quadrant report situates the Semantic Web within the current Innovation Wave of "Distributed Intelligence". This is one of the main innovation waves of the last centuries including textile, railway, auto, computer, distributed intelligence (1997-2061) and nanotechnology (2007-2081). The Distributed Intelligence wave started in the late nineties and is expected to peak between 2010 and 2020. The report estimates first return on investments in 2006-7, growing to a market of $40-60 billion in 2010. Funds are coming primary from governments, venture capitalists and industry commercialization. Over the next few years, this is expected to change in favour of industry commercialization.

This paper examines how the term 'colony' has been considered, by some historians who had analysed the incorporation of Patagonia into the Argentine State, as evidence of the 'colonial' character of the regime imposed on that region. Those studies reveal a strong influence of academic trends that conceive 'discourse' as the primordial aspect of every social phenomenon, which has led to dealing with historical documents as mere texts. The purpose of this article consists, on the one hand, in acknowledging the problems resulting from such an approach to historical sources and, on the other hand, in pointing out the benefits of an attentive view to conceptual change through time. It is proposed that the distinction of semantic strata deposited in concepts offers a defense against the perils of textualism, which leads to reducing the past to an ensemble of discursive articulations. ; En este artículo se analizan los modos en que el término 'colonia' ha sido contemplado, por ciertos historiadores que han estudiado el proceso de incorporación de la Patagonia al Estado argentino, como evidencia del carácter 'colonial' del régimen impuesto sobre dicha región. En tales estudios se comprueba una fuerte influencia de corrientes académicas que conciben al 'discurso' como la dimensión primordial de todo fenómeno social, lo que ha conducido a abordar las fuentes documentales como simples textos. El propósito de este artículo consiste, por un lado, en advertir los problemas resultantes de tal aproximación a las fuentes y, por el otro, en señalar los beneficios de una mirada atenta al cambio de los conceptos a través del tiempo. Se propone que la distinción de las capas semánticas depositadas en estos ofrece una barrera ante los peligros del textualismo, que lleva a reducir el pasado a un conjunto de articulaciones discursivas.

Two laboratory experiments tested the proposition that attention to television is the product of an interaction between message structure and content. Cuts (structure) were hypothesized to affect attention differently, depending on whether they linked related or unrelated content. Subjects viewed six semantically related and six semantically unrelated sequences of television. In Experiment 1, attention was measured using reaction times to a secondary task at one video frame, 1 second and 2 seconds following a cut. Unrelated sequences required more attention 1 second after the cut. Attention to related sequences decreased over the course of the entire sequence, whereas attention to unrelated sequences remained constant over time. Experiment 2 assessed attention during the first second after the cut. Related sequences produced longer reaction times immediately following the cut at 10 and 20 frames; unrelated sequences produced longer reaction times further from the cut, at 20 frames, and 1 second. This pattern of results is explained using a dual process model of attention to television.

AbstractIs conceptual engineering feasible? Answering that question requires a theory of semantic change, which is sometimes thought elusive. Fortunately, much is known about semantic change as it occurs in the wild. While usage is chaotic and complex, changes in a word's use can produce changes in its meaning. There are several under-appreciated empirical constraints on how meanings change that stem from the following observation: word use finely reflects equilibrium between various communicative pressures (just as, say, product sales do between various market pressures). Much of the relevant work in linguistics has employed the methods of empirical pragmatics and diachronic semantics. In this way, the study of meaning change can be brought to bear on the conceptual engineer's normative project. The picture that emerges tells against the sorts of engineering projects most likely to appeal to philosophers. Some may stand to succeed, but they have significantly different contours than the typical ones.

Experimental papers (`primary literature') in biology are generally considered as the key scientific texts that allow the construction of knowledge claims, whereas it is held that review papers (`secondary literature') play a role in `synthesizing' the knowledge claims made in experimental papers, rather than in making new claims. This paper analyzes the literary strategy used by a biologist in order to make a new knowledge claim. As a worker in the field of intermediary metabolism, he succeeded in making an unexpected observation meaningful to endocrinologists by using their language, instead of his own disciplinary language. More generally, the paper argues that review papers afford the best opportunity for constructing new knowledge claims, because they do not have to conform to a routinely standardized structure, and allow a wider semantic repertoire than do experimental reports.

Cognitive mapping has been a valuable tool in understanding how individuals view their external environment. It has been used successfully to investigate crisis decision making, juror decision making, and international negotiation, and may find further use as a support tool in negotiation and mediation. This article presents a method for enhanced cognitive mapping—WorldView, which uses the symbol-based formalism of semantic networks. WorldView provides important advantages over more traditional cognitive mapping and assists in the systematic study of belief system content and decision process. WorldView eliminates constraints on represented relationships and captures more information than previous content analysis systems for belief structures, provides aggregation over texts or subject responses, provides a synonym facility for collapsing similar concepts, incorporates structural and comparative measures for analysis, and constructs manipulable cognitive maps that provide a basis for process models of belief change and decision making.

The thrust of this paper lies on semantic changes associated with additive and substitutive borrowing in Bantu-speaking communities in Tanzania. Due to contact of languages, semantic differences of the terms related to architectural structures emanate. Apart from data from a few elderly native speakers, research was carried out with the help of undergraduate students of linguistics. Further linguistic materials analysed herein come from dictionaries and lexicons. Although retention of the proto- Bantu words are apparent, findings indicate that cases of additive borrowing are obvious for new concepts associated with new architectural structures. The additive Swahili names incorporated into Tanzanian Bantu tend to designate specific concepts associated with modern (contemporary) architectural senses such as mulango 'modern door' vs. luigi 'traditional entranceway'. Cases of substitutive borrowing are rare, as demonstrated by the Swahili word dirisha 'window' which replaces chitonono in Chimakonde, echihúru in Runyambo, ilituulo in Kinyakyusa etc.Keywords: Architectural Terms, Additive Borrowing, Onomastics, Semantic Changes, Substitutive Borrowing, Tanzanian Bantu

AbstractSleep is known to support the neocortical consolidation of declarative memory, including the acquisition of new language. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is often characterized by both sleep and language learning difficulties, but few studies have explored a potential connection between the two. Here, 54 children with and without ASD (matched on age, nonverbal ability and vocabulary) were taught nine rare animal names (e.g., pipa). Memory was assessed via definitions, naming and speeded semantic decision tasks immediately after learning (pre‐sleep), the next day (post‐sleep, with a night of polysomnography between pre‐ and post‐sleep tests) and roughly 1 month later (follow‐up). Both groups showed comparable performance at pre‐test and similar levels of overnight change on all tasks; but at follow‐up children with ASD showed significantly greater forgetting of the unique features of the new animals (e.g., pipa is a flat frog). Children with ASD had significantly lower central non‐rapid eye movement (NREM) sigma power. Associations between spindle properties and overnight changes in speeded semantic decisions differed by group. For the TD group, spindle duration predicted overnight changes in responses to novel animals but not familiar animals, reinforcing a role for sleep in the stabilization of new semantic knowledge. For the ASD group, sigma power and spindle duration were associated with improvements in responses to novel and particularly familiar animals, perhaps reflecting more general sleep‐associated improvements in task performance. Plausibly, microstructural sleep atypicalities in children with ASD and differences in how information is prioritized for consolidation may lead to cumulative consolidation difficulties, compromising the quality of newly formed semantic representations in long‐term memory.