“‘Noam chomsky’s prolific writings have made him one of the most-quoted educators in history-the only living writer on a most-cited list that includes plato, shakespeare, and freud. yet until now, no book has systematically offered chomsky’s influential writings on education. in chomsky on miseducation, noam chomsky builds a larger understanding of our educational needs, starting with the changing role of schools today, and then broadening our view toward new models of public education for citizenship. chomsky weaves global technological change and the primacy of responsible media with the democratic role of schools and higher education. a truly democratic society, he argues, cannot thrive in a rapidly changing world unless our approach to education- formal and otherwise- is dramatically reformed. chomsky’s critique of how our current educational system miseducates’ students- and his prescriptions for change- are essential reading for teachers, parents, school administrators, activists, and anyone concerned about the future.””

“We argue that an understanding of the faculty of language requires substantial interdisciplinary cooperation. we suggest how current developments in linguistics can be profitably wedded to work in evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience. we submit that a distinction should be made between the faculty of language in the broad sense (flb) and in the narrow sense (fln). flb includes a sensory-motor system, a conceptual-intentional system, and the computational mechanisms for recursion, providing the capacity to generate an infinite range of expressions from a finite set of elements. we hypothesize that fln only includes recursion and is the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language. we further argue that fln may have evolved for reasons other than language, hence comparative studies might look for evidence of such computations outside of the domain of communication (for example, number, navigation, and social relations).”

“The traditional conception of language is that it is, in aristotle’s phrase, sound with meaning. the sound-meaning correlation is, furthermore, unbounded, an elementary fact that came to be understood as of great significance in the 17th century scientific revolution. in contemporary terms, the internal language (i-language) of an individual consists, at the very least, of a generative process that yields an infinite array of structured expressions, each interpreted at two interfaces, the sensory-motor interface (sound, sign, or some other sensory modality) for externalization and the conceptual-intentional interface for thought and planning of action. the earliest efforts to address this problem, in the 1950s, postulated rich descriptive apparatus—in different terms, rich assumptions about the genetic component of the language faculty, what has been called ‘universal grammar’ (ug). that seemed necessary to provide for a modicum of descriptive adequacy. also, many puzzles were discovered that had passed u…”

“Explores the political life and times of the controversial author, linguist and radical philosopher, noam chomsky. highlighting his analysis of media, chomsky focuses on democratic societies where populations not disciplined by force are subject to more subtle forms of ideological control.”

“Remarks on nominalization. readings in english transformational grammar, ed. roderick jacobs and peter rosenbaum, 184–221. waltham, ma: blaisdell.”

“With the crystallization of the ‘ generative enterprise’ half a century ago, two concepts became salient: the initial state and final states of the language faculty, respectively, ug (the genetic component) and i-languages. since then inquiry has gained far greater scope and depth. it has also led to sharpening of fundamental principles of language. at first, descriptive adequacy appeared to require rich and complex assumptions about ug. a primary goal has always been to overcome this deficiency. core properties of concern have included compositionality, order, projection (labeling), and displacement. early work assigned the first three to phrase structure rules and the last to the transformational component. simplification of computational procedures suggests that compositionality and displacement (along with the ‘ copy theory’ ) fall together while order may be a reflex of sensorimotor externalization, conclusions that have far-reaching consequences. as for labeling, minimal computation restricts options to the few that have considerable empirical support. © 2012 elsevier b.v.”

“This article reviews, and rethinks, a few leading themes of the biolinguistic program since its inception in the early 1950s, at each stage influenced by developments in the biological sciences. the following also discusses how the questions now entering the research agenda develop in a natural way from some of the earliest concerns of these inquiries.”

“During early telencephalic development, the major portion of the ventral telencephalic (subpallial) region becomes subdivided into three regions, the lateral (lge), medial (mge), and caudal (cge) ganglionic eminences. in this study, we systematically recapitulated subpallial patterning in mouse embryonic stem cell (esc) cultures and investigated temporal and combinatory actions of patterning signals. in serum-free floating culture, the dorsal-ventral specification of esc-derived telencephalic neuroectoderm is dose-dependently directed by sonic hedgehog (shh) signaling. early shh treatment, even before the expression onset of foxg1 (also bf1; earliest marker of the telencephalic lineage), is critical for efficiently generating lge progenitors, and continuous shh signaling until day 9 is necessary to commit these cells to the lge lineage. when induced under these conditions and purified by fluorescence-activated cell sorter, telencephalic cells efficiently differentiated into nolz1(+)/ctip2(+) lge neuronal precursors and subsequently, both in culture and after in vivo grafting, into darpp32(+) medium-sized spiny neurons. purified telencephalic progenitors treated with high doses of the hedgehog (hh) agonist sag (smoothened agonist) differentiated into mge- and cge-like tissues. interestingly, in addition to strong hh signaling, the efficient specification of mge cells requires fgf8 signaling but is inhibited by treatment with fgf15/19. in contrast, cge differentiation is promoted by fgf15/19 but suppressed by fgf8, suggesting that specific fgf signals play different, critical roles in the positional specification of esc-derived ventral subpallial tissues. we discuss a model of the antagonistic fgf8 and fgf15/19 signaling in rostral-caudal subpallial patterning and compare it with the roles of these molecules in cortical patterning.”

“Everyone knows its the tv people who run the world crowd laugher. i just got orders that im supposed to be here, not there. well the last talk i gave at this forum was on a light pleasant topic. it was about how humans are an en- dangered species and given the nature of their institutions they are likely to destroy themselves in a fairly short time. so this time there is a little relief and we have a pleasant topic instead, the new war on terror. unfortunately, the world keeps coming up with things that make it more and more horrible as we proceed.”