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The relationship between diachronic change and synchronic variation at the articulatory, auditory, acoustic and social level is one of the greatest puzzles in the study of language. Even though plentiful examples exist to suggest that dynamics of synchronic variation and diachronic change are tightly interconnected, a unified theory to account for language change in its relationship to all layers of synchronic variation remains a desideratum. This volume compiles new evidence from articulatory, acoustic, auditory, sociolinguistic, and phonological analyses of segmental and prosodic data and computational modelling, and offers a refreshing theoretical angle on the ongoing debates in language change. The volume is divided into three sections, each focusing on one aspect of speech dynamics – the historical, the emerging and the theoretical, each making a step toward a unified view of speech dynamics at the interface of synchronic variation and diachronic change. The large range of methodologies and theories represented in this book will appeal to scholars from a variety of linguistic fields with an interest in speech dynamics, including phoneticians, phonologists, sociolinguists, typologists, computational and historical linguists.

Beginning in the mid-19th century tremendous gains were made in the historical struggle with infectious diseases. The emergence of modern medicine and epidemiology, and the establishment of public health measures, helped urban populations overcome a historical death penalty. The conquest of infectious disease has created a human hubris. It is a collective self-delusion that infectious diseases, once exposed to the light of modern medicine, science, and public health would inevitably become eradicated.When these advances began in the mid-19th century the world's population was under two billion, mostly non-urbanized. At the dawn of the 21st century the world's population already surpassed seven billion. The world's once far flung urban populations have exponentially expanded in number, size, and connectivity.Infectious diseases have long benefited from the concentration of human population and their opportunistic abilities to take advantage of their interconnectedness. The struggle between humans and infectious diseases is one in which there is a waxing and waning advantage of one over the other. Human hubris has been challenged since the late 1970s with the prospect that infectious diseases are not eradicated. Concerns have increased since the latter third of the twentieth century that infectious diseases are gaining a new foothold. As pandemics from AIDS to Ebola have increased in frequency, there has also developed a sense that a global pandemic of a much greater magnitude is likely to happen. Tracing the historical record, this book examines the manners in which population concentrations have long been associated with the spread of pandemic disease. It also examines the struggle between human attempts to contain infectious diseases, and the microbial struggle to contain human population advancement.

86 short papers originating from the 13th International Symposium on Intracranial Pressure and Brain Monitoring held in July 2007 in San Francisco present experimental as well as clinical research data on invasive and non-invasive intracranial pressure and brain biochemistry monitoring. The papers have undergone a peer-reviewing and are organized in eight sections: brain injury: ICP management and cerebral physiology; hydrocephalus and cerebrospinal fluid dynamics; advanced neuromonitoring; biomedical informatics; imaging; ICP: brain compliance, biophysics, and biomechanics; stroke, subarachnoid hemorrhage, and intracerebral hematoma; and experimental studies and models. The papers address the increasing use of decompressive craniectomy for the treatment of brain edema as well after brain injury and the rapidly expanding field of advanced neuromonitoring and neuroimaging.