Goethe as Biologist

Goethe for prosody

In this paper, we describe the way in which a recording of Goethe’s “Die Leiden des jungen Werther” published on a multimedia CDROM [7] was made accessible for prosody research. The recording is interesting for prosody research because of its prosodic richness as it displays a large variety of registers and speaking styles. Application areas are: development of prosody models for German TTS, un...

Philosophy of a Biologist *

A quarter century is, indeed, a rather brief period to allow for the development of a philosopher, and yet, though I make no claim to such a title, I choose to preface the little I have to say by stating that it might be termed the "philosophy of a biologist." Perhaps I should also add that I can hardly qualify as a biologist, since my activities throughout the period in question have been-conf...

Claude Shannon : Biologist :

Claude Shannon founded information theory in the 1940s. The theory has long been known to be closely related to thermodynamics and physics through the similarity of Shannon's uncertainty measure to the entropy function. Recent work using information theory to understand molecular biology has unearthed a curious fact: Shannon's channel capacity theorem only applies to living organisms and their ...

The Journey of a Biologist

Freud: biologist of the mind

Another example of the inadequate, indeed mistaken, discussion of a partly medical question ofpractical importance is that ofwitchcraft. The beliefthat most witches were women who suffered from melancholic delusions is central to Johann Wier's extremely influential De praestigiis daemonum, and Jean Bodin's refutation of it hinges on the denial that women are prone to melancholy. All this is omi...