פרסומים

abstract A foundational text in the study of Tannaitic Midrash and Halakhah, Sifre Deuteronomy 122 is a list of places where Halakhah ʿ qpt scripture. This word, ʿ qpt, has long been understood to mean ‘circumvent’, ‘bypass’ or ‘belie’, and the pericope has been read as a list of places where ‘Halakhah} circumvents scripture’, and thus a testament to the power of the accepted tradition to override the words of the Torah. Based on documentary and linguistic evidence, this article questions the interpretation of the word ʿ qpt and suggests that it means not ‘circumvent’ but rather ‘multiply’. As it does so, it also suggests a new meaning for the list, as a declaration of the limits of the Midrashic method of the Tannaitic school of Rabbi Ishmael, committed both to accepted traditions and to its more restrictive and systematic method of reading scripture.

Most processes within organisms, and most interactions between organisms and their environment, have distinct time profiles. The temporal coordination of such processes is crucial across levels of biological organization, but diferent disciplines differ widely in their approaches to study timing. Such differences are accentuated between ecologists, who are centrally concerned with a holistic view of an organism in relation to its external environment, and chronobiologists, who emphasize internal timekeeping within an organism and the mechanisms of its adjustment to the environment. We argue that ecological and chronobiological perspectives are complementary, and that studies at the intersection will enable both fields to jointly overcome obstacles that currently hinder progress. However, to achieve this integration, we first have to cross some conceptual barriers, clarifying prohibitively inaccessible terminologies. We critically assess main assumptions and concepts in either field, as well as their common interests. Both approaches intersect in their need to understand the extent and regulation of temporal plasticity, and in the concept of ‘chronotype’, i.e. the characteristic temporal properties of individuals which are the targets of natural and sexual selection. We then highlight promising developments, point out open questions, acknowledge difficulties and propose directions for further integration of ecological and chronobiological perspectives through Wild Clock research.This article is part of the themed issue ‘Wild Clocks: integrating chronobiology and ecology to understand timekeeping in free-living animals’.

The construction of nano-sized, two-dimensionally ordered nanoparticle (NP) superstructures is important for various advanced applications such as photonics, sensing, catalysis, or nano-circuitry. Currently, such structures are fabricated using the templated organization approach, in which the templates are mainly created by photo-lithography or laser-lithography and other invasive top-down etching procedures. In this work, we present an alternative bottom-up preparation method for the controlled deposition of NPs into hierarchical structures. Lamellar polystyrene-block-poly(2-vinylpyridinium) thin films featuring alternating stripes of neutral PS and positively charged P2VP domains serve as templates, allowing for the selective adsorption of negatively charged gold NPs. Dense NP assembly is achieved by a simple immersion process, whereas two-dimensionally ordered arrays of NPs are realized by microcontact printing (mu CP), utilizing periodic polydimethylsiloxane wrinkle grooves loaded with gold NPs. This approach enables the facile construction of hierarchical NP arrays with variable geometries. Copyright (C) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

© 2017 Optical Society of America. Chip-scale high-precision measurements of physical quantities such as temperature, pressure, refractive index, and analytes have become common with nanophotonics and nanoplasmonics resonance cavities. Despite several important accomplishments, such optical sensors are still limited in their performances in the short and, in particular, long time regimes. Two major limitations are environmental fluctuations, which are imprinted on the measured signal, and the lack of miniaturized, scalable robust and precise methods of measuring optical frequencies directly. Here, by utilizing a frequency-locked loop combined with a reference resonator, we overcome these limitations and convert the measured signal from the optical domain to the radio-frequency domain. By doing so, we realize a highly precise on-chip sensing device with sensing precision approaching 10 −8 in effective refractive index units, and 90 $μ$K in temperature. Such an approach paves the way for single particle detection and high-precision chip-scale thermometry.

This article applies a media geneaology perspective to examine the operative logic of Google Translate. Tracing machine translation from post–World War II (WWII) rule-based methods to contemporary algorithmic statistical methods, we analyze the underlying power structure of algorithmic and human collaboration that Translate encompasses. Focusing on the relationship between technology, language, and speakers, we argue that the operative logic of Translate represents a new model of translation, which we call uniform multilingualism. In this model, the manifest lingual plurality on the user side is mediated by lingual uniformity on the system side in the form of an English language algorithm, which has recently given way to an artificial neural network interlingual algorithm. We conclude by considering the significance of this recent shift in Translate’s algorithm.