Razor Thin Win: The 1972 Constitution Ballot, Campaign, Ratification & the Courts -- Mae Nan (Robinson) Ellingson & Mick McKeon “In the Crucible of Change”

Beyond the challenge of crafting a new state Constitution that empowered the people and modernized and opened up state and local government in Montana, the Constitutional Convention delegates, as they signed the final document, looked forward to the arduous task of getting it ratified by the electorate in a short ten week period between the end of the convention on March 24 and the ratification election of June 6, 1972. While all 100 delegates signed the draft Constitution, not all supported its adoption. But the planning about how to get it adopted went back to the actions of the Convention itself, which carefully crafted a ballot that kept “hot political issues” from potentially killing the entire document at the polls. As a result, three side issues were presented to the electorate on the ballot. People could vote for or against those side issues and still vote to ratify the entire document. Thus, the questions of legalizing gambling, having a unicameral legislature and retaining the death penalty were placed separately on the ballot (gambling passed, as did the retention of the death penalty, but the concept of a one-house legislature was defeated). Once the ballot structure was set, delegates who supported the new Constitution organized a grassroots, locally focused effort to secure ratification – thought hampered by a MT Supreme Court decision on April 28 that they could not expend $45,000 in public monies that they had set aside for voter education. They cobbled together about $10,000 of private money and did battle with the established political forces, led by the MT Farm Bureau, MT Stockgrowers’ Assn. and MT Contractors Assn., on the question of passage. Narrow passage of the main document led to an issue over certification and a Montana Supreme Court case challenging the ratification vote. After a 3-2 State Supreme Court victory, supporters of the Constitution then had to defend the election results again before the federal courts, also a successful effort. Montana finally had a new progressive State Constitution that empowered the people, but the path to it was not clear and simple and the win was razor thin. The story of that razor thin win is discussed in this chapter by the two youngest delegates to the 1972 Constitutional Convention, Mae Nan Ellingson of Missoula and Mick McKeon, then of Anaconda. Both recognized “Super Lawyers in their later professional practices were also significant players in the Constitutional Convention itself and actively participated in its campaign for ratification. As such, their recollections of the effort provide an insider’s perspective of the struggle to change Montana for the better through the creation and adoption of a new progressive state Constitution “In the Crucible of Change.” Mae Nan (Robinson) Ellingson was born Mae Nan Windham in Mineral Wells, TX and graduated from Mineral Wells High School in 1965 and Weatherford College in Weatherford, TX in 1967. Mae Nan was the youngest delegate at the 1972 Convention from Missoula. She moved to Missoula in 1967 and received her BA in Political Science with Honors from the University of MT in 1970. She was a young widow known by her late husband’s surname of Robinson while attending UM graduate school under the tutelage of noted Professor Ellis Waldron when he persuaded her to run for the Constitutional Convention. Coming in a surprising second in the delegate competition in Missoula County she was named one of the Convention’s “Ten Outstanding Constitutional Convention Delegates,” an impressive feat at such a young age. She was 24 at the time, the youngest person to serve at the ConCon, and one of 19 women out of 100 delegates. In the decade before the Convention, there were never more than three women Legislators in any session, usually one or two. She was a member of the American Association of University Women, a Pi Sigma Alpha political science honorary, and a Phi Alpha Theta historical honorary. At the Convention, she led proposals for the state's bill of rights, particularly related to equal rights for women. For years, Ellingson kept a copy of the preamble to the Constitution hanging in her office; while all the delegates had a chance to vote on the wording, she and delegate Bob Campbell are credited with the language in the preamble. During the convention, she had an opportunity that opened the door to her later career as an attorney. A convention delegate suggested to her that she should go to law school. Several offered to help, but at the time she couldn't go to school. Her mom had died in Texas, and she ended up with a younger brother and sister to raise in Missoula. She got a job teaching, but about a year later, intrigued with the idea of pursuing the law as a career, she called the man back to ask about the offer. Eventually another delegate, Dave Drum of Billings, sponsored her tuition at the UM School of Law. After receiving her JD with Honors (including the Law Review and Moot Court) from the UM Law School Ellingson worked for the Missoula city attorney's office for six years (1977-83), and she took on landmark projects. During her tenure, Missoula became the first city to issue open space bonds, a project that introduced her to Dorsey & Whitney. The city secured its first easement on Mount Sentinel, and it created the trail along the riverfront with a mix of playing fields and natural vegetation. She also helped develop a sign ordinance for the city of Missoula. She ended up working as bond counsel for Dorsey & Whitney, and she opened up the firm's full-fledged Missoula office after commuting a couple of years to its Great Falls office. She was a partner at Dorsey Whitney, working there from 1983 until her retirement in 2012. The area of law she practiced there is a narrow specialty - it requires knowledge of constitutional law, state and local government law, and a slice of federal tax law - but for Ellingson it meant working on great public projects – schools, sewer systems, libraries, swimming pools, ire trucks. At the state level, she helped form the Montana Municipal Insurance Authority, a pooled insurance group for cities. She's shaped MT’s tax increment law, and she was a fixture in the MT Legislature when they were debating equal rights. As a bond lawyer, though, Ellingson considers her most important work for the state to be setting up the Intercap Program that allowed local governments to borrow money from the state at a low interest rate. She has been a frequent speaker at the League of Cities and Towns, the Montana Association of Counties, and the Rural Water Users Association workshops on topics related to municipal finance, as well as workshops sponsored by the DNRC, the Water and Sewer Agencies Coordination Team, and the Montana State University Local Government Center. In 2002, she received an outstanding service award from the Montana Rural Water Users Association. In addition to being considered an expert on Montana state and constitutional law, local government law and local government finance, she is a frequent teacher at the National Association of Bond Lawyers (NABL) Fundamentals of Municipal Bond Law Seminar and the NABL Bond Attorney’s Workshop. For over 30 years Mae Nan has participated in the drafting of legislation in Montana for state and local finance matters. She has served on the Board of Directors of NABL, as Chairman of its Education Committee, was elected as an initial fellow in 1995 to the American College of Bond Counsel, and was recognized as a Super Lawyer in the Rocky Mountain West. Mae Nan was admitted to practice before the MT and US Supreme Courts, was named one of “America’s Leading Business Lawyers” by Chambers USA (Rank 1), a Mountain States Super Lawyer in 2007 and is listed in Best Lawyers in America; she is a member and former Board Member of NABL, a Fellow of the American College of Bond Counsel and a member of the Board of Visitors of the UM Law School. Mae Nan is also a philanthropist who serves on boards and applies her intelligence to many organizations, such as the Missoula Art Museum. [Much of this biography was drawn from a retirement story in the Missoulian and the Dorsey Whitney web site.] Mick McKeon, born in Anaconda in 1946, is a 4th generation Montanan whose family roots in this state go back to the 1870’s. In 1968 he graduated from Notre Dame with a BA in Communications and received a Juris Doctorate degree from the University of Montana Law School in 1971. Right after graduating from law school, Mick was persuaded by his father, longtime State Senator Luke McKeon, and his uncle, Phillips County Attorney Willis McKeon, to run for delegate to Montana’s Constitutional Convention and was elected to represent Deer Lodge, Philipsburg, Powell, and part of Missoula Counties. Along with a coalition of delegates from Butte and Anaconda, he fought through the new Constitution to eliminate the legal strangle hold, often called “the copper collar,” that corporate interests -- the Anaconda Company and its business & political allies -- had over state government for nearly 100 years. The New York Times called Montana’s Constitutional Convention a “prairie revolution.” After helping secure the ratification of the new Constitution, Mick began his practice of law in Anaconda where he engaged in general practice for nearly 20 years. Moving to Butte in 1991, Mick focused has practice in personal injury law, representing victims of negligence and corporate wrongdoing in both Montana district courts and federal court. As such, he participated in some of the largest cases in the history of the state. In 1992 he and his then law partner Rick Anderson obtained a federal court verdict of $11.5 million -- the largest verdict in MT for many years. Mick’s efforts on behalf of injured victims have been recognized by many legal organizations and societies. Recently, Mick was invited to become a member of the International Academy of Trial Lawyers - 600 of the top lawyers in the world. Rated as an American Super Lawyer, he has continuously been named one of the Best Lawyers in America, and an International Assn. of Trial Lawyers top 100 Trial Lawyer. In 2005, he was placed as one of Montana’s top 4 Plaintiff’s lawyers by Law Dragon. Mick is certified as a civil trial specialist by the National Board of Trial Advocacy and has the highest rating possible from Martindale-Hubble. Mick was awarded the Montana Trial Lawyers Public Service Award and provided pro bono assistance to needy clients for his entire career. Mick’s law practice, which he now shares with his son Michael, is limited to representing individuals who have been injured in accidents, concentrating on cases against insurance companies, corporations, medical providers and hospitals. Mick resides in Butte with his wife Carol, a Butte native. Mick, Carol, Michael and another son, Matthew, who graduated from Dartmouth College and was recently admitted to the Montana bar, enjoy as much of their time together in Butte and at their place on Flathead Lake.

Transactional Memory in a Dynamic Language

Concurrency control is mostly based on locks and is therefore notoriously difficult to use. Even though some programming languages provide high-level constructs, these add complexity and potentially hard-to-detect bugs to the application. Transactional memory is an attractive mechanism that does not have the drawbacks of locks, however the underlying implementation is often difficult to integrate into an existing language. In this paper we show how we have introduced transactional semantics into Smalltalk by using the reflective facilities of the language. Our approach is based on method annotations, incremental parse tree transformations and an optimistic commit protocol. The implementation does not depend on modifications to the virtual machine and therefore can be changed at the language level. We report on a practical case study, benchmarks and further and on-going work.

Notes on a Queer Brain: Can there be a Critical Research on Sex/Gender in Neuroscience?

Anelis Kaiser is associate researcher at the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Dr. Kaiser recently co-edited a special issue of the journal Neuroethics on gender and brain science. She is co-founder (with Isabelle Dussauge) of the interdisciplinary network NeuroGenderings, which brings together experts from the brain sciences, the humanities and science studies (STS) to critically study the sexed brain. She has published on sex and gender as constructed categories in science as well as on the topics of multilingualism and language processing in the brain. Co-sponsored with the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. - See more at: http://www.gc.cuny.edu/Page-Elements/Academics-Research-Centers-Initiatives/Centers-and-Institutes/Center-for-the-Study-of-Women-and-Society/Center-Events#sthash.bDeBg5fk.dpuf

What do we mean by Female and Male in Neurocognitive Experiments on Language?

For several years now, neuroscientific research has been striving towards fundamental answers to questions about the relevance of sex/gender to language processing in the brain. This research has been effected through the search for sex/gender differences in the neurobiology of language processing. Thus, the main aim has ever been to focus on the differentiation of the sexes/genders, failing to define what sex, what gender, what female or male is in neurolingustic research. In other words, although neuroscientific findings have provided key insights into the brain functioning of women and men, neuropsychology has rarely questioned the complexity of the sex/gender variable beyond biology. What does “female” or “male” mean in human neurocognition; how are operationalisations implemented along the axes of “femaleness” or “maleness”; or what biological evidence is used to register the variables sex and/or gender? In the neurosciences as well as in neurocognitive research, questions such as these have so far not been studied in detail, even if they are highly significant for the scientific process. Instead, the variable of sex/gender has always been thought as solely dichotomous (as either female or male), oppositional and exclusionary of each other. Here, this theoretical contribution sets in. Based on findings in neuroscience and concepts in gender theory, this poster is dedicated to the reflection about what sex/gender is in the neuroscience of language processing. Following this aim, two levels of interest will be addressed. First: How do we define sex/gender at the level of participants? And second: How do we define sex/gender at the level of the experimental task? For the first, a multifactorial registration (work in progress) of the variable sex/gender will be presented, i.e. a tool that records sex/gender in terms of biology and social issues as well as on a spectrum between femaleness and maleness. For the second, the compulsory dichotomy of a gendered task when neurolinguistically approaching our cognitions of sex/gender will be explored.

Contact, Mobility and Authenticity: Language Ideologies in Koineisation

New Zealand English first emerged at the beginning of the 19th century as a result of the dialect contact of British (51%), Scottish (27.3%) and Irish (22%) migrants (Hay and Gordon 2008:6). This variety has subsequently developed into an autonomous and legitimised national variety and enjoys a distinct socio-political status, recognition and codification. In fact, a number of dictionaries of New Zealand English have been published1 and the variety is routinely used as the official medium on TV, radio and other media. This however, has not always been the case, as for long only British standard norms were deemed suitable for media broadcasting. While there is some work already on lay commentary about New Zealand English (see for example Gordon 1983, 1994; Hundt 1998), there is much more to be done especially concerning more recent periods of the history of this variety and the ideologies underlying its development and legitimisation. Consequently, the current project aims at investigating the metalinguistic discourses during the period of transition from a British norm to a New Zealand norm in the media context, this will be done by focusing on debates about language in light of the advent of radio and television. The main purpose of this investigation is thus to examine the (language) ideologies that have shaped and underlain these discourses (e.g. discussions about the appropriateness of New Zealand English vis à vis external, British models of language) and their related practices in these media (e.g. broadcasting norms). The sociolinguistic and pragmatic effects of these ideologies will also be taken into account. Furthermore, a comparison will be carried out, at a later stage in the project, between New Zealand English and a more problematic and less legitimised variety: Estuary English. Despite plenty of evidence of media and other public discourses on Estuary English, in fact, there has been very little metalinguistic analysis of this evidence, nor examinations of the underlying ideologies in these discourses. The comparison will seek to discover whether similar themes emerge in the ideologies played out in publish discourses about these varieties, themes which serve to legitimise one variety, whilst denying such legitimacy to the other.

Gender-Fair language and professional self-reference: The case of female psychologists in Polish

The struggle to achieve gender equality is accompanied by efforts to introduce gender-fair language. In languages with grammatical gender this implies the use of gender-appropriate forms (feminine for women and masculine for males). In the present research, results of a mixed method approach—a corpus analysis, a survey, and an experiment—provide consistent evidence that in Polish, feminine forms are still infrequent in women’s self-reference and that women psychologists continue to use masculine titles. Moreover, a qualitative inquiry examines the reasons why women prefer masculine over feminine job titles. Integrating findings from the two-stage design, we are able to identify the obstacles to promoting social change with the help of language and to understand the reasons behind them.

Law and science: risk assessment and risk management in the WTO agreement on the application of sanitary and phytosanitary measures

Assessing and managing risks relating to the consumption of food stuffs for humans and to the environment has been one of the most complex legal issues in WTO law, ever since the Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures was adopted at the end of the Uruguay Round and entered into force in 1995. The problem was expounded in a number of cases. Panels and the Appellate Body adopted different philosophies in interpreting the agreement and the basic concept of risk assessment as defined in Annex A para. 4 of the Agreement. Risk assessment entails fundamental question on law and science. Different interpretations reflect different underlying perceptions of science and its relationship to the law. The present thesis supported by the Swiss National Research Foundation undertakes an in-depth analysis of these underlying perceptions. The author expounds the essence and differences of positivism and relativism in philosophy and natural sciences. He clarifies the relationship of fundamental concepts such as risk, hazards and probability. This investigation is a remarkable effort on the part of lawyer keen to learn more about the fundamentals based upon which the law – often unconsciously – is operated by the legal profession and the trade community. Based upon these insights, he turns to a critical assessment of jurisprudence both of panels and the Appellate Body. Extensively referring and discussing the literature, he deconstructs findings and decisions in light of implied and assumed underlying philosophies and perceptions as to the relationship of law and science, in particular in the field of food standards. Finding that both positivism and relativism does not provide adequate answers, the author turns critical rationalism and applies the methodologies of falsification developed by Karl R. Popper. Critical rationalism allows combining discourse in science and law and helps preparing the ground for a new approach to risk assessment and risk management. Linking the problem to the doctrine of multilevel governance the author develops a theory allocating risk assessment to international for a while leaving the matter of risk management to national and democratically accountable government. While the author throughout the thesis questions the possibility of separating risk assessment and risk management, the thesis offers new avenues which may assist in structuring a complex and difficult problem

Contact, Mobility and Authenticity: Language Ideologies in Koineisation and Creolisation

Part II - Christoph Neuenschwander: Language ideologies in the legitimisation of Tok Pisin as a lingua franca Pidgins and Creoles all over the world seem to share common aspects in the historical circumstances of their genesis and evolution. They all emerged in the context of colonialism, in which not only colonisers and colonised, but also the various groups of the colonised population spoke different languages. Pidgins and Creoles, quite simply, resulted from the need to communicate.¬¬ Yet, the degree to which they became accepted as a lingua franca or in fact even as a linguistic variety in its own right, strikingly differs from variety to variety. The current research project focuses on two Pacific Creoles: Tok Pisin, spoken on Papua New Guinea, and Hawai'i Creole English (HCE). Whereas Tok Pisin is a highly stabilised and legitimised variety, used as a lingua franca in one of the most linguistically diverse countries on Earth, HCE seems to be regarded as nothing more than broken English by a vast majority of the Hawai'ian population. The aim of this project is to examine the metalinguistic comments about both varieties and to analyse the public discourses, in which the status of Tok Pisin and HCE were and still are negotiated. More precisely, language ideologies shall be identified and compared in the two contexts. Ultimately, this might help us understand the mechanisms that underlie the processes of legitimisation or stigmatisation. As Laura Tresch will run a parallel research project on language ideologies on new dialects (New Zealand English and Estuary English), a comparison between the findings of both projects may produce even more insights into those mechanisms. The next months of the project will be dedicated to investigating the metalinguistic discourse in Papua New Guinea. In order to collect a wide range of manifestations of language ideologies, i.e. instances of (lay and academic) commentary on Tok Pisin, it makes sense to look at a relatively large period of time and to single out events that are likely to have stimulated such manifestations. In the history of Papua New Guinea - and in the history of Tok Pisin, in particular - several important social and political events concerning the use and the status of the language can be detected. One example might be public debates on education policy. The presentation at the CSLS Winter School 2014 will provide a brief introduction to the history of Tok Pisin and raise the methodological question of how to spot potential sites of language-ideological production.

Code-switching: a touchstone of models of bilingual language production

The goal of the present thesis was to investigate the production of code-switched utterances in bilinguals’ speech production. This study investigates the availability of grammatical-category information during bilingual language processing. The specific aim is to examine the processes involved in the production of Persian-English bilingual compound verbs (BCVs). A bilingual compound verb is formed when the nominal constituent of a compound verb is replaced by an item from the other language. In the present cases of BCVs the nominal constituents are replaced by a verb from the other language. The main question addressed is how a lexical element corresponding to a verb node can be placed in a slot that corresponds to a noun lemma. This study also investigates how the production of BCVs might be captured within a model of BCVs and how such a model may be integrated within incremental network models of speech production. In the present study, both naturalistic and experimental data were used to investigate the processes involved in the production of BCVs. In the first part of the present study, I collected 2298 minutes of a popular Iranian TV program and found 962 code-switched utterances. In 83 (8%) of the switched cases, insertions occurred within the Persian compound verb structure, hence, resulting in BCVs. As to the second part of my work, a picture-word interference experiment was conducted. This study addressed whether in the case of the production of Persian-English BCVs, English verbs compete with the corresponding Persian compound verbs as a whole, or whether English verbs compete with the nominal constituents of Persian compound verbs only. Persian-English bilinguals named pictures depicting actions in 4 conditions in Persian (L1). In condition 1, participants named pictures of action using the whole Persian compound verb in the context of its English equivalent distractor verb. In condition 2, only the nominal constituent was produced in the presence of the light verb of the target Persian compound verb and in the context of a semantically closely related English distractor verb. In condition 3, the whole Persian compound verb was produced in the context of a semantically unrelated English distractor verb. In condition 4, only the nominal constituent was produced in the presence of the light verb of the target Persian compound verb and in the context of a semantically unrelated English distractor verb. The main effect of linguistic unit was significant by participants and items. Naming latencies were longer in the nominal linguistic unit compared to the compound verb (CV) linguistic unit. That is, participants were slower to produce the nominal constituent of compound verbs in the context of a semantically closely related English distractor verb compared to producing the whole compound verbs in the context of a semantically closely related English distractor verb. The three-way interaction between version of the experiment (CV and nominal versions), linguistic unit (nominal and CV linguistic units), and relation (semantically related and unrelated distractor words) was significant by participants. In both versions, naming latencies were longer in the semantically related nominal linguistic unit compared to the response latencies in the semantically related CV linguistic unit. In both versions, naming latencies were longer in the semantically related nominal linguistic unit compared to response latencies in the semantically unrelated nominal linguistic unit. Both the analysis of the naturalistic data and the results of the experiment revealed that in the case of the production of the nominal constituent of BCVs, a verb from the other language may compete with a noun from the base language, suggesting that grammatical category does not necessarily provide a constraint on lexical access during the production of the nominal constituent of BCVs. There was a minimal context in condition 2 (the nominal linguistic unit) in which the nominal constituent was produced in the presence of its corresponding light verb. The results suggest that generating words within a context may not guarantee that the effect of grammatical class becomes available. A model is proposed in order to characterize the processes involved in the production of BCVs. Implications for models of bilingual language production are discussed.

Profile Effects in Early Bilingual Language and Literacy

Bilingual children's language and literacy is stronger in some domains than others. Reanalysis of data from a broad-scale study of monolingual English and bilingual Spanish-English learners in Miami provided a clear demonstration of "profile effects," where bilingual children perform at varying levels compared to monolinguals across different test types. The profile effects were strong and consistent across conditions of socioeconomic status, language in the home, and school setting (two way or English immersion). The profile effects indicated comparable performance of bilingual and monolingual children in basic reading tasks, but lower vocabulary scores for the bilinguals in both languages. Other test types showed intermediate scores in bilinguals, again with substantial consistency across groups. These profiles are interpreted as primarily due to the "distributed characteristic" of bilingual lexical knowledge, the tendency for bilingual individuals to know some words in one language but not the other and vice versa.

Reversible language extensions and their application in debugging

A range of methodologies and techniques are available to guide the design and implementation of language extensions and domainspecific languages. A simple yet powerful technique is based on source-tosource transformations interleaved across the compilation passes of a base language. Despite being a successful approach, it has the main drawback that the input source code is lost in the process. When considering the whole workflow of program development (warning and error reporting, debugging, or even program analysis), program translations are no more powerful than a glorified macro language. In this paper, we propose an augmented approach to language extensions for Prolog, where symbolic annotations are included in the target program. These annotations allow selectively reversing the translated code. We illustrate the approach by showing that coupling it with minimal extensions to a generic Prolog debugger allows us to provide users with a familiar, source-level view during the debugging of programs which use a variety of language extensions, such as functional notation, DCGs, or CLP{Q,R}.

Virtual Excursions: a new way to explore science in class

The educational platform Virtual Science Hub (ViSH) has been developed as part of the GLOBAL excursion European project. ViSH (http://vishub.org/) is a portal where teachers and scientist interact to create virtual excursions to science infrastructures. The main motivation behind the project was to connect teachers - and in consequence their students - to scientific institutions and their wide amount of infrastructures and resources they are working with. Thus the idea of a hub was born that would allow the two worlds of scientists and teachers to connect and to innovate science teaching. The core of the ViSH?s concept design is based on virtual excursions, which allow for a number of pedagogical models to be applied. According to our internal definition a virtual excursion is a tour through some digital context by teachers and pupils on a given topic that is attractive and has an educational purpose. Inquiry-based learning, project-based and problem-based learning are the most prominent approaches that a virtual excursion may serve. The domain specific resources and scientific infrastructures currently available on the ViSH are focusing on life sciences, nano-technology, biotechnology, grid and volunteer computing. The virtual excursion approach allows an easy combination of these resources into interdisciplinary teaching scenarios. In addition, social networking features support the users in collaborating and communicating in relation to these excursions and thus create a community of interest for innovative science teaching. The design and development phases were performed following a participatory design approach. An important aspect in this process was to create design partnerships amongst all actors involved, researchers, developers, infrastructure providers, teachers, social scientists, and pedagogical experts early in the project. A joint sense of ownership was created and important changes during the conceptual phase were implemented in the ViSH due to early user feedback. Technology-wise the ViSH is based on the latest web technologies in order to make it cross-platform compatible so that it works on several operative systems such as Windows, Mac or Linux and multi-device accessible, such as desktop, tablet and mobile devices. The platform has been developed in HTML5, the latest standard for web development, assuring that it can run on any modern browser. In addition to social networking features a core element on the ViSH is the virtual excursions editor. It is a web tool that allows teachers and scientists to create rich mash-ups of learning resources provided by the e-Infrastructures (i.e. remote laboratories and live webcams). These rich mash-ups can be presented in either slides or flashcards format. Taking advantage of the web architecture supported, additional powerful components have been integrated like a recommendation engine to provide personalized suggestions about educational content or interesting users and a videoconference tool to enhance real-time collaboration like MashMeTV (http://www.mashme.tv/).

Rocks are human beings: researching the humanizing metaphor in earth science scientific texts

This paper describes a corpus-based analysis of the humanizing metaphor and supports that constitutive metaphor in science and technology may be highly metaphorical and active. The study, grounded in Lakoff’s Theory of Metaphor and in Langacker’s relational networks, consists of two phases: firstly, Earth Science metaphorical terms were extracted from databases and dictionaries and, then, contextualized by means of the “Wordsmith” tool in a digitalized corpus created to establish their productivity. Secondly, the terms were classified to disclose the main conceptual metaphors underlying them; then, the mappings and the relational networks of the metaphor were described. Results confirm the systematicity and productivity of the metaphor in this field, show evidence that metaphoricity of scientific terms is gradable, and support that Earth Science metaphors are not only created in terms of their concrete salient properties and attributes, but also on abstract human anthropocentric projections.

The role of left prefrontal cortex in language and memory

This article reviews attempts to characterize the mental operations mediated by left inferior prefrontal cortex, especially the anterior and inferior portion of the gyrus, with the functional neuroimaging techniques of positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging. Activations in this region occur during semantic, relative to nonsemantic, tasks for the generation of words to semantic cues or the classification of words or pictures into semantic categories. This activation appears in the right prefrontal cortex of people known to be atypically right-hemisphere dominant for language. In this region, activations are associated with meaningful encoding that leads to superior explicit memory for stimuli and deactivations with implicit semantic memory (repetition priming) for words and pictures. New findings are reported showing that patients with global amnesia show deactivations in the same region associated with repetition priming, that activation in this region reflects selection of a response from among numerous relative to few alternatives, and that activations in a portion of this region are associated specifically with semantic relative to phonological processing. It is hypothesized that activations in left inferior prefrontal cortex reflect a domain-specific semantic working memory capacity that is invoked more for semantic than nonsemantic analyses regardless of stimulus modality, more for initial than for repeated semantic analysis of a word or picture, more when a response must be selected from among many than few legitimate alternatives, and that yields superior later explicit memory for experiences.