Surviving the bombing of pan am flight 103: The loss of innocence and a dear friend in an international tragedy

Abstract

On December 21, 1988, a terrorist bomb blew Pan Am Flight 103 out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, 54 minutes after it took off from London's Heathrow Airport. The explosion sent 259 passengers and crew members tumbling 6 miles to their deaths, killed 11 people on the ground, and created waves of shock and grief that continue to reverberate across the globe. My friend Miriam Wolfe, one of 35 students returning from a semester in London under the auspices of Syracuse University, was on that flight. Her death was the final, jarring event in a traumatic year that had brought me the accidental deaths of four other friends in an Easter plane crash and the breast cancer that would force my mother to endure a mastecotomy and painful years of chemotherapy and drug treatments. While it is tempting to canonize the victims of violent disaster, Miriam was different–and inarguably deserving of such hagiography. A tribute written for one of three memorial scholarships established in her honor calls her a rare and gifted young woman who lived life to the fullest; actively worked to change the world for the better; and gave a great deal of love, joy and wisdom to all who knew her!' Her death yanked me from the comfortable naivete of my youth and forced me to confront the pain and confusion of the adult world. It destroyed my faith in the inherent good of mankind but showed me how disaster can bring out the best in people. It gave me a nihilistic view of life but forced me to make the most of every moment I have. It made me appreciate the people around me but gave me little tolerance for anyone who wastes my time. And it instilled in me a knee-jerk animus toward religion and nearly all things Middle Eastern. Ultimately, though, Miriam's life and death taught me how to live and love and survive in ways I never thought necessary—or possible.     

A Meadian account of social understanding: Taking a non-mentalistic approach to infant and verbal false belief understanding

Performance on false belief tasks has long been considered a key indicator of the development of social understanding in young children. We consider the enabling conditions for performing non-verbal and verbal false belief tasks as well as a typical developmental path toward false belief understanding. We argue that, in early ontogenesis, children anticipate the coordination of activity with others rather than read, probe, or reflectively engage with the psychological states of others. As linguistically mediated reflective thought emerges, children gradually become able to parse and isolate the myriad of incipient somatic, affective, and intentional responses that arise in any given moment. With reflective thought, children also begin to develop distinct and temporally coherent understandings about the minds of self and other. We provide an account of how the reflective thought that facilitates false belief understanding emerges. Our account focuses on a gradually developing refinement of social coordination and the shared perspectival understandings inherent in social coordination.     

The irrelevant sound effect: What needs modelling, and a tentative model

This paper reviews the literature on the irrelevant sound effect and concludes that, contrary to some claims, the data consistently show that irrelevant sound and articulatory suppression are not functionally equivalent. We evaluate the contribution of Larsen and Baddeley (2003 in this issue) and briefly discuss additional data in support of their position. We perform an error analysis on data from their third experiment and simulate detailed aspects of those data using our primacy model of immediate serial recall. Our model is briefly related to a number of findings in the literature on irrelevant sound.