Presumed Behavior: Modification of the Ideal-Real Dichotomy

Anthropologists have long been aware of the difference between the ideal pattern in society (what people think should or should not be done) and real behavior (what actually is done). This article calls attention to the importance of a third element, presumed behavior, or what people think is being done in the society. Since people tend to act on the basis of what they think others are doing (which may not coincide at all with what people are actually doing, or with the ideal pattern) knowledge of the presumed behavior is highly significant in understanding and predicting social behavior.     

Coronaviruses: Important Emerging Human Pathogens

The identification of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in 2012 reaffirmed the importance of understanding how coronaviruses emerge, infect, and cause disease. By comparing what is known about severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) to what has recently been found for MERS-CoV, researchers are discovering similarities and differences that may be important for pathogenesis. Here we discuss what is known about each virus and what gaps remain in our understanding, especially concerning MERS-CoV.     

Thinking and Ways of Investigating It

The thought process, of course, breaks down into different elements. Thus, in problem solving, analysis articulates what is given (known) and what unknown; and analysis of information in accordance with the requirements of the particular problem leads to identification of the conditions constituting what is known and what is unknown. Each element of the thought process, viewed from the perspective of the result achieved, is a unitary act (a mental action, an operation). However, in studying thought we must not forget that what makes each element a unitary act is the objectively determined and explicit end result of the thought process. What is initial and primary are not these operations, but the integral thought process of which they are discrete constituents.     

What scatter-hoarding animals have taught us about small-scale navigation

Many animals use cues for small-scale navigation, including beacons, landmarks, compasses and geometric properties. Scatter-hoarding animals are a unique system to study small-scale navigation. They have to remember and relocate many individual spatial locations, be fairly accurate in their searching and have to remember these locations for long stretches of time. In this article, we review what is known about cue use in both scatter-hoarding birds and rodents. We discuss the importance of local versus global cues, the encoding of bearings and geometric rules, the use of external compasses such as the Sun and the influence of the shape of experimental enclosures in relocating caches or hidden food. Scatter-hoarding animals are highly flexible in how and what they encode. There also appear to be differences in what scatter-hoarding birds and rodents encode, as well as what scatter-hoarding animals in general encode compared with other animals. Areas for future research with scatter-hoarding animals are discussed in light of what is currently known.     

Source monitoring and memory distortion.

Memory distortion reflects failures to identify the sources of mental experience (reality monitoring failures or source misattributions). For example, people sometimes confuse what they inferred or imagined and what actually happened, what they saw and what was suggested to them, one person''s actions and another''s what they heard and what they previously knew, and fiction and fact. Source confusions arise because activated information is incomplete or ambiguous and the evaluative processes responsible for attributing information to sources are imperfect. Both accurate and inaccurate source attributions result from heuristic processes and more reflectively complex processes that evaluate a mental experience for various qualities such as amount and type of perceptual, contextual, affective, semantic and cognitive detail, that retrieve additional supporting or disconfirming evidence, and that evaluate plausibility and consistency given general knowledge, schemes, biases and goals. Experimental and clinical evidence regarding cognitive mechanisms and underlying brain structures of source monitoring are discussed.     

Doin' what comes natur'lly

Behavior affects evolution in many ways. Organisms are adapted for what they do, but they also do what they are adapted for.     

La biodiversité : au pays des aveugles le borgne est roi

Our media and policies for environment protection and sustainable development see “Biodiversity” only through what species do (their ecological roles, the “services” they can perform) and forget what species have. However the value we confer to a species cannot be ecologically based only. Rare organs, rare structures, rare character mosaics are valuable as unique products of a historical process even if the species exhibiting them are negligible in terms of ecosystem dynamics. Coelacanths, the platypus, can perfectly disappear from the surface of the planet without any significant ecological impact. The “ecological order” does not reflect the historical order. Systematics is the science of classification whose role is to exhibit this historical order in distribution of attributes among species through phylogenies, and then through classifications. Systematics is forgotten in almost all documents written by scientists to advice politicians on the best way to save biodiversity. Without systematics, we lose the historical dimension of what exists, and we simply lose the knowledge of what is what we are facing.     

Science and Practice in NRM: Insights from connectivity restoration in the south west slopes of NSW

Interactions between landholders, practitioners and research scientists have greatly influenced landscape restoration activities in South‐eastern Australia. Vegetation connectivity projects undertaken by Holbrook Landcare Network in the Slopes to Summit (S2S) region of South‐eastern Australia have benefitted from the input of both scientists and practitioners. This paper explores what factors support an evidence‐informed restoration outcome, what constrains this and what we can learn from this case.     

Bioethicists to the Barricades!

In this article I begin with an anecdote as a way of exploring just exactly what activism entails. Are we talking about the kind of activism every citizen ought to engage in? Should we confine our topic to activism in health care settings? Just what is activism anyway, and how much and what kind ought bioethicists to engage in? Finally, I consider the possibility that it’s perfectly permissible for bioethicists not to be activists of any kind.     

Future directions in disturbance research

The major questions identified for future research are: what determines patterns of human disturbance; how can we determine population-level responses to disturbance; are there general rules for predicting how important disturbance will be; how important are disturbance-derived ecological traps; what is the interaction between predation and disturbance; when does habituation occur; how do physiological responses to disturbance affect population size; what is the evidence for changes in access impacting upon populations; what are the positive consequences of access to the countryside; how important is habitat-specific disturbance; which measures reduce human impact and how can large-scale planning minimize the impact of disturbance?     

The Happy Hen on Your Supermarket Shelf

This paper investigates what “free-range” eggs are available for sale in supermarkets in Australia, what “free-range” means on product labelling, and what alternative “free-range” offers to cage production. The paper concludes that most of the “free-range” eggs currently available in supermarkets do not address animal welfare, environmental sustainability, and public health concerns but, rather, seek to drive down consumer expectations of what these issues mean by balancing them against commercial interests. This suits both supermarkets and egg producers because it does not challenge dominant industrial-scale egg production and the profits associated with it. A serious approach to free-range would confront these arrangements, and this means it may be impossible to truthfully label many of the “free-range” eggs currently available in the dominant supermarkets as free-range.     

Et si Janet était plus actuel que Freud ?

A return to the work of Pierre Janet is prompted by the desire to satisfy a need as yet unfulfilled by Freudian analysis, addressing such questions as: what triggers a feeling, what does that feeling mean to the consciousness, what behavior does it trigger and how does belief in the feeling’s legitimacy strengthen the momentum of the behavior until it enables an active effort (not to be confused with an impulse), while its disturbance, (which is in fact an impulse), shows how derivations and dissociations can overlap, resulting in immobility and escape behavior, or neurosis according to Janet. It would be extremely wise to rediscover the heuristic relevance of Janet’s analysis today. And this is exactly what is happening at the moment all over the world, particularly in Japan, Germany, Canada, Holland, Russia and the USA: not in France, however…     

Supplementary eye field: keeping an eye on eye movement

The supplementary eye field has the biggest say in choosing what we look at, but has long been an enigma. Recent studies are beginning to make more sense of what it actually does.     

What is a support vector machine?

Support vector machines (SVMs) are becoming popular in a wide variety of biological applications. But, what exactly are SVMs and how do they work? And what are their most promising applications in the life sciences?     

Morphometric analysis of the distributing vessels of the kidney

Branching angles and branch diameters of the distributing vessels in the renal networks of rats were measured and the results are compared with data reported previously from the coronary network of the same species. Comparison is also made with what is known to be optimum on theoretical grounds to determine to what extent the branching characteristics of the renal network are governed by considerations of optimality, and to what extent they are affected by other considerations, relating particularly to the role that the network plays in the blood processing function of the kidney.     

REFOCUSING THE RESPONSIVENESS REQUIREMENT

Many guidelines for international research require that studies be responsive to host community health needs or health priorities. Although responsiveness possesses great intuitive and rhetorical appeal, existing conceptions are confusing and difficult to apply. Not only are there few examples of what research the responsiveness requirement permits and what it rejects, but its application can lead to contradictory results. Because of the practical difficulties in applying responsiveness and the danger that misapplying responsiveness could harm the interests of developing countries, we argue that responsiveness should be refocused in three ways: in terms of (1) who enforces it, (2) under what standard, and (3) in what cases. We conclude that responsiveness should be applied by host country officials at the policy level with the exercise of judgment when externally funded research threatens to displace scarce local resources.     

Bird fleas (Insecta: Siphonaptera): taxonomic diversity, biogeographical distribution

If Mammals are the primary hosts of Siphonaptera, 6% of them have changed their trophic appetency for Birds. What are the reasons, what are the adaptations to be adopted by Fleas, what are the families or species groups of fleas concerned, and at last what are the host-families? As to this last question, it is clear that deviation was ecological but not phyletical.     

Paracrine Role of GABA in Adrenal Chromaffin Cells

The function of GABA in the adrenal medulla is still controversial. We will review experimental results in vivo and in vitro in adrenal chromaffin cells of various mammals to clarify what has been elucidated and what still remains to be settled.