It is said that there are 100,000 words in the English language, and before I read Philip Mirowski’s Machine Dreams (MD) I thought I knew 90,000 of them. Now, following this encounter, I feel that, at last, I have control of the whole English vocabulary! I start with this joke because it exemplifies in many ways the nature of this book. The way Mirowski shifts between different linguistic level...

The title of this piece refers to Newton’s only known modest remark: “If I have seen farther than other men, it was because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.” Since he himself was so much greater than his predecessors, he was in fact standing on the shoulders of dwarfs, a much less attractive metaphor. I intend no comparisons with Newton inwhat follows: NLP/CL has noNewtons and noNobel...

Firstly, I should make it clear that the use of the word "Baby", in the title of this paper, refers to mental, not chronological, age. In other words, I am not restricting myself only to a consideration of mentally subnormal children. Nevertheless, it has some meta-phorical meaning in so far as we are discussing a problem whose unpopular aspects are frequently apt to be bounced on to someone el...

Whose interests should count and how should various interests be balanced at the pediatric patient's bedside? The interests of the child patient clearly count. Recently, however, many authors have argued that the family's interests also count. But how should we think about the interests of others? What does it mean to talk about "the family" in this context? Does it really just mean the interes...

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We introduce and investigate a class of complex semi-infinite banded Toeplitz matrices satisfying the condition that the spectra of their principal submatrices accumulate onto a real interval when the size of the submatrix grows to ∞. We prove that a banded Toeplitz matrix belongs to this class if and only if its symbol has real values on a Jordan curve located in C\{0}. Surprisingly, it turns ...