FORENSIC METHODS FOR CHARACTERIZING WATERCRAFT FROM WATERCRAFT-INDUCED WOUNDS ON THE FLORIDA MANATEE (TRICHECHUS MANATUS LATIROSTRIS)

Watercraft-related mortality represents 1,253 (24.9%) of 5,033 Florida manatee ( Trichechus manatus latirostris ) deaths recorded between 1 January 1979 and 31 December 2004. Wound patterns generated by collisions with watercraft are diagnostic. Sets of cuts and scrapes that are roughly equidistant and perpendicular to the direction of vessel travel are consistent with lacerations made by propeller blades. From these lesions, estimates of propeller diameter, pitch, rotation, and direction of travel may be obtained. Considerable overlap of propeller sizes and pitches on different size vessels, common use of counter rotation propellers, and numerous other complicating factors may confound efforts to accurately predict vessel size and type from propeller wounds. Of the more than one million watercraft registered in Florida, 98% are ≤12.2 m (40 ft), yet watercraft 5.3–36.6 m (17.5–120 ft) are known to have killed manatees. Analysis of a 5-yr subset of mortality data suggests that a disproportionate number of propeller-caused watercraft-related mortalities could be attributed to propeller diameters ≥43.2 cm (17 in.), inferring that these were caused by watercraft ≥12.2 m (40 ft).     

SIMULATED VESSEL APPROACHES ELICIT DIFFERENTIAL RESPONSES FROM MANATEES

One of the most pressing concerns associated with conservation of the endangered Florida manatee is mortality and serious injury due to collisions with watercraft. Watercraft collisions are the leading identified cause of manatee mortality, averaging 25% and reaching 31% of deaths each year. The successful establishment and management of protected areas depend upon the acquisition of data assessing how manatees use different habitats, and identification of environmental characteristics influencing manatee behavior and habitat selection. Acoustic playback experiments were conducted to assess the behavioral responses of manatees to watercraft approaches. Playback stimuli made from prerecorded watercraft approaches were constructed to simulate a vessel approach to approximately 10 m in sea grass habitats. Stimulus categories were (1) silent control, (2) approach with outboard at idle speed, (3) vessel approach at planning speed, and (4) fast personal watercraft approach. Analyses of swim speed, changes in behavioral state, and respiration rate indicate that the animals responded differentially to the playback categories. The most pronounced responses, relative to the controls, were elicited by personal watercraft. Quantitative documentation of response during playbacks provides data that may be used as the basis for future models to predict the impact of specific human activities on manatees and other marine mammal populations.     

Patterns of maxillofacial injuries in powered watercraft collisions

Because of the widespread popularity of water sports, plastic and reconstructive surgeons can expect to manage an increasing number of injuries associated with these activities, particularly those related to powered watercraft vehicles. Although seat belts for motorists and helmets for motorcyclists may be efficacious, such devices currently do not serve a similar role in powered watercraft sports. In this study, a retrospective chart review of 194 consecutive patients who presented to the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Hospital (Level I trauma center) as a result of powered watercraft collisions is presented. The purpose of this investigation was to assess the incidence, cause, demographics, and available management options for head and neck injuries secondary to powered watercraft. Identified were 194 patients who presented because of watersports-related injuries during the period January 1, 1991, through December 31, 1996. From this group, 81 patients (41.8 percent) sustained injuries directly attributable to powered watercraft collisions, including 41 personal watercraft collisions (50.6 percent), 39 boat collisions (48.1 percent), and 1 airboat collision (1.2 percent). The patient population, as expected, tended to be young and male with an average age of 29 years (range, 8 to 64 years old). Interestingly, 41 of the patients (50.6 percent) who presented to this trauma center as a result of powered watercraft collisions also sustained associated head and neck trauma. Of 74 injuries 24 were facial fractures (32.4 percent), 18 were facial lacerations (24.3 percent), 14 were closed head injuries (18.9 percent), 8 were skull fractures (10.8 percent), 4 were scalp lacerations (5.4 percent), 4 were C-spine fractures (5.4 percent), 1 was an ear laceration (1.4 percent), and 1 was a fatality (1.4 percent). Le Fort fractures were the most commonly identified facial fracture in this series. The number of these injuries seen in hospital emergency rooms will most likely increase in the future as the popularity of water-related recreational activities becomes even more widespread. Based on these findings, it is strongly recommended that future efforts be directed toward the prevention of these injuries through patient education and the eventual development of efficacious and safe protective equipment.     

Focus: The Aging Brain: Social capital,health, and elderly driver status

Driving a car enables many people to engage in meaningful activities that, in turn, help develop and maintain personal social capital. Social capital, a combination of community participation and social cohesion, is important in maintaining well-being. This paper argues that social capital can provide a framework for investigating the general role of transportation and driving a car specifically to access activities that contribute to connectedness and well-being among older people. This paper proposes theoretically plausible and empirically testable hypotheses about the relationship between driver status, social capital, and well-being. A longitudinal study may provide a new way of understanding, and thus of addressing, the well-being challenges that occur when older people experience restrictions to, or loss of, their driver’s license.     

Rates of cultural change and patterns of cultural accumulation in stochastic models of social transmission

Cultural variation in a population is affected by the rate of occurrence of cultural innovations, whether such innovations are preferred or eschewed, how they are transmitted between individuals in the population, and the size of the population. An innovation, such as a modification in an attribute of a handaxe, may be lost or may become a property of all handaxes, which we call “fixation of the innovation.” Alternatively, several innovations may attain appreciable frequencies, in which case properties of the frequency distribution—for example, of handaxe measurements—is important. Here we apply the Moran model from the stochastic theory of population genetics to study the evolution of cultural innovations. We obtain the probability that an initially rare innovation becomes fixed, and the expected time this takes. When variation in cultural traits is due to recurrent innovation, copy error, and sampling from generation to generation, we describe properties of this variation, such as the level of heterogeneity expected in the population. For all of these, we determine the effect of the mode of social transmission: conformist, where there is a tendency for each naïve newborn to copy the most popular variant; pro-novelty bias, where the newborn prefers a specific variant if it exists among those it samples; one-to-many transmission, where the variant one individual carries is copied by all newborns while that individual remains alive. We compare our findings with those predicted by prevailing theories for rates of cultural change and the distribution of cultural variation.     

EFFECTS OF WATERCRAFT NOISE ON THE ACOUSTIC BEHAVIOR OF BOTTLENOSE DOLPHINS, TURSIOPS TRUNCATUS, IN SARASOTA BAY, FLORIDA

Watercraft may provide the greatest source of anthropogenic noise for bottlenose dolphins living in coastal waters. A resident community of about 140 individuals near Sarasota, Florida, are exposed to a vessel passing within 100 m approximately every six minutes during daylight hours. I investigated the circumstances under which watercraft traffic may impact the acoustic behavior of this community, specifically looking for short-term changes in whistle frequency range, duration, and rate of production. To analyze whistles and received watercraft noise levels, acoustic recordings were made using two hydrophones towed from an observation vessel during focal animal follows of 14 individual dolphins. The duration and frequency range of signature whistles did not change significantly relative to vessel approaches. However, dolphins whistled significantly more often at the onset of approaches compared to during and after vessel approaches. Whistle rate was also significantly greater at the onset of a vessel approach than when no vessels were present. Increased whistle repetition as watercraft approach may simply reflect heightened arousal, an increased motivation for animals to come closer together, with whistles functioning to promote reunions. It may also be an effective way to compensate for signal masking, maintaining communication in a noisy environment.     

Nonlinear acoustic complexity in a fish 'two-voice' system

Acoustic signals play essential roles in social communication and show a strong selection for novel morphologies leading to increased call complexity in many taxa. Among vertebrates, repeated innovations in the larynges of frogs and mammals and the syrinx of songbirds have enhanced the spectro-temporal content, and hence the diversity of vocalizations. This acoustic diversification includes nonlinear characteristics that expand frequency profiles beyond the traditional categorization of harmonic and broadband calls. Fishes have remained a notable exception to evidence for such acoustic innovations among vertebrates, despite their being the largest group of living vertebrates that also exhibit widespread evolution of sound production. Here, we combine rigorous acoustic and mathematical analyses with experimental silencing of the vocal motor system to show how a novel swim bladder mechanism in a toadfish enables it to generate calls exhibiting nonlinearities like those found among frogs, birds and mammals, including primates. By showing that fishes have evolved nonlinear acoustic signalling like all other major lineages of vocal vertebrates, these results suggest strong selection pressure favouring this mechanism to enrich the spectro-temporal content and complexity of vocal signals.     

Circular economy innovations,growth and employment at the firm level: Empirical evidence from Germany

Circular economy (CE) describes a concept that aims at saving resources by minimizing the use of material and energy over the entire life‐cycle of products, including production and repair, as well as reuse and recycling. CE innovations help to realize the goals of sustainable development by targeting environmental, economic, and social dimensions of sustainability. This paper looks at the economic and social dimensions by investigating whether firms with CE innovations perform better or worse in terms of sales growth and employment. Our econometric analysis uses data from two waves of the German part of the Community Innovation Survey. Quantile regressions show that CE innovations are positively linked to turnover and employment growth. While there is no statistically significant impact on labor productivity, at the same time, firms with CE innovations show a significantly better financial standing.     

A stochastic bio-economic pig farm model to assess the impact of innovations on farm performance

Recently developed innovations may improve the economic and environmental sustainability of pig production systems. Generic models are needed to assess the impact of innovations on farm performance. Here we developed a stochastic bio-economic farm model for a typical farrow-to-finish pig farm to assess the impact of innovations on private and social profits. The model accounts for emissions of greenhouse gases from feed production and manure by using the shadow price of CO₂, and for stochasticity of economic and biological parameters. The model was applied to assess the impact of using locally produced alternative feed sources (i.e. co-products) in the diets of finishing pigs on private and social profits of a typical Brazilian farrow-to-finish pig farm. Three cases were defined: a reference case (with a standard corn–soybean meal-based finishing diet), a macaúba case (with a macaúba kernel cake-based finishing diet) and a co-products case (with a co-products-based finishing diet). Pigs were assumed to be fed to equal net energy intakes in the three cases. Social profits are 34% to 38% lower than private profits in the three cases. Private and social profits are about 11% and 14% higher for the macaúba case than the reference case, whereas they are 3% and 7% lower for the co-products case, respectively. Environmental costs are higher under the alternative cases than the reference case suggesting that other benefits (e.g. costs and land use) should be considered to utilize co-products. The CV of farm profits is between 75% and 87% in the three cases following from the volatility of prices over time and variations in biological parameters between fattening pigs.     

Early hominid physical evolution

Hindrances against bipedalism evolution are localized in obstetrical constraints, maternal mortality rates, infant birth trauma and unsafe pregnancy. Analysis of infant survival probability shows that a shift to bipedalism could occur as a necessary consequence of the process of body fur reduction, in a balance between such hindrances and safe infant transportation. Fur reduction is proposed to correlate with cooling mechanism in intra-species physical fights. The triggering of a feed-back mechanism connecting reduction of body fur to canine reduction would be responsible for a passage from threat displays to actual physical fights. The proposed scenario for such changes is the transition from uni-male to multi-male social structures among Hominoidea. The implications of the approach adopted are discussed.     

Social behavioural epistemology and the scientific community

The progress of science is influenced substantially by social behaviour of and social interactions within the scientific community. Similar to innovations in primate groups, the social acceptance of an innovation depends not only upon the relevance of the innovation but also on the social dominance and connectedness of the innovator. There are a number of parallels between many well-known phenomena in behavioural evolution and various behavioural traits observed in the scientific community. It would be useful, therefore, to use principles of behavioural evolution as hypotheses to study the social behaviour of the scientific community. I argue in this paper that a systematic study of social behavioural epistemology is likely to boost the progress of science by addressing several prevalent biases and other problems in scientific communication and by facilitating appropriate acceptance/rejection of novel concepts.     

Adaptable individuals and innovative lineages

This paper suggests (i) that while work on animal innovation has made good progress in understanding some of the proximate mechanisms and selective regimes through which innovation emerges, it has somewhat neglected the role of the social environment of innovation; a neglect manifest in the fact that innovation counts are almost always counts of resource-acquisition innovations; the invention of social tools is rarely considered. The same is true of many experimental projects, as these typically impose food acquisition tasks on their experimental subjects. (ii) That neglect is important, because innovations often pose collective action problems; the hominin species were technically innovative because they were also socially adaptable. (iii) In part for this reason, there remains a disconnect between research on hominin innovation and research on animal innovation. (iv) Finally, the paper suggests that there is something of a disconnect between the theoretical work on innovation in hominin evolution (based on theories of cultural evolution) and the experimental tradition on human innovation. That disconnect is largely due to the theoretical work retreating from strong claims about the proximate mechanisms of human cultural accumulation.     

Humans copy rapidly increasing choices in a multiarmed bandit problem

Conformist social learning, the tendency to acquire the most common trait in a group, allows individuals to rapidly acquire established beneficial traits from a multitude of options. However, conformist strategies hinder acquisition of novel advantageous behavior patterns, because such innovations are by definition uncommon. This raises the possibility that proxy cues of the success of novel traits may be utilized to identify and acquire advantageous innovations and disregard failing options. We show that humans use changes in trait frequency over time as such a cue in an economic game. Participants played a three-alternative forced choice game (i.e., a multi-armed bandit), using social information to attempt to locate a high reward that could change location. Participants viewed temporal changes in how many players chose each option in two successive rounds. Participants supplemented conformist strategies with a “copy-increasing-traits” strategy. That is, regardless of the traits absolute population frequencies, participants' choices were guided by changes in trait frequencies. Thus, humans can detect advantageous innovations by monitoring how many individuals adopt these over time, adopting traits increasing in frequency, and abandoning traits decreasing in frequency. Copying rapidly increasing traits allows identification and acquisition of advantageous innovations, and is thus potentially key in facilitating their early diffusion and cultural evolution.     

Emancipation Through Interaction – How Eugenics and Statistics Converged and Diverged

The paper discusses the scope and influence of eugenics in defining the scientific programme of statistics and the impact of the evolution of biology on social scientists. It argues that eugenics was instrumental in providing a bridge between sciences, and therefore created both the impulse and the institutions necessary for the birth of modern statistics in its applications first to biology and then to the social sciences. Looking at the question from the point of view of the history of statistics and the social sciences, and mostly concentrating on evidence from the British debates, the paper discusses how these disciplines became emancipated from eugenics precisely because of the inspiration of biology. It also relates how social scientists were fascinated and perplexed by the innovations taking place in statistical theory and practice.     

An evaluation of the geographic method for recognizing innovations in nature,using zoo orangutans

Innovation and social learning are the raw materials for traditions and culture. Of these two, innovation has received far less scrutiny, largely because of difficulties assessing the innovation status of behaviors. A recent attempt proposes recognition of innovations in natural populations based on assessment of the behavior’s properties and its geographic and local prevalence. Here we examine the validity of this approach and the list of 43 potential innovations it generated for wild orangutans by extending the comparison to zoo orangutans. First, we created an inventory of the behavioral repertoire in the zoo population. Four of ten putative innovations recognized in the field and potentially present in captivity did not occur despite appropriate conditions, suggesting they are indeed innovations. Second, we experimentally produced relevant conditions to evaluate whether another five potential innovations could be elicited. Based on their continued absence or on their latencies relative to known behaviors, four of the potential innovations could be assessed as innovations and one as a modification. Because 53% of relevant innovations recognized in the field could be confirmed in this analysis, and another 27% assigned possible innovation status, we conclude that the geographic method for detecting innovation in the wild is valid. However, the experiments also yielded up to 13 additional innovations, suggesting that zoo orangutans are far more innovative than wild ones. We discuss the implications of this latter finding with regard to limiting factors for the expansion of cultural repertoires in wild orangutans.     

The rate and pattern of cladogenesis in microbes

Theories of macroevolution rarely have been extended to include microbes; however, because microbes represent the most ancient and diverse assemblage of organismal diversity, such oversight limits our understanding of evolutionary history. Our analysis of phylogenetic trees for microbes suggests that macroevolution may differ between prokaryotes and both micro- and macroeukaryotes (mainly plants and animals). Phylogenetic trees inferred for prokaryotes and some microbial eukaryotes conformed to expectations assuming a constant rate of cladogenesis over time and among lineages: nevertheless, microbial eukaryote trees exhibited more variation in rates of cladogenesis than prokaryote trees. We hypothesize that the contrast of macroevolutionary dynamics between prokaryotes and many eukaryotes is due, at least in part, to differences in the prevalence of lateral gene transfer (LGT) between the two groups. Inheritance is predominantly, if not wholly, vertical within eukaryotes, a feature that allows for the emergence and maintenance of heritable variation among lineages. By contrast, frequent LGT in prokaryotes may ameliorate heritable variation in rate of cladogenesis resulting from the emergence of key innovations; thus, the inferred difference in macroevolution might reflect exclusivity of key innovations in eukaryotes and their promiscuous nature in prokaryotes.     

Detecting social transmission in networks

In recent years researchers have drawn attention to a need for new methods with which to identify the spread of behavioural innovations through social transmission in animal populations. Network-based analyses seek to recognise diffusions mediated by social learning by detecting a correspondence between patterns of association and the flow of information through groups. Here we introduce a new order of acquisition diffusion analysis (OADA) and develop established time of acquisition diffusion analysis (TADA) methods further. Through simulation we compare the merits of these and other approaches, demonstrating that OADA and TADA have greater power and lower Type I error rates than available alternatives, and specifying when each approach should be deployed. We illustrate the new methods by applying them to reanalyse an established dataset corresponding to the diffusion of foraging innovations in starlings, where OADA and TADA detect social transmission that hitherto had been missed. The methods are potentially widely applicable by researchers wishing to detect social learning in natural and captive populations of animals, and to facilitate this we provide code to implement OADA and TADA in the statistical package R.     

出行即服务系统理论与实践：回顾与展望

交通是城市绿色低碳转型中最受关注的领域之一,也是数字化渗透及数字平台最为活跃的领域。出行即服务(Mobility as a Service, MaaS)系统是绿色交通的典型代表,是一种新型交通组织和供给方式,反映了当前出行需求的深刻变化和城市交通组织范式转变的耦合。全球范围内已出现了上百个大小规模不等和模式各异的MaaS实践创新,北京MaaS是中国持续至今、影响最大的MaaS实践。目前MaaS实践提出的理论和方法主要基于欧美发达国家,无法充分描述和分析中国实践。在文献研究的基础上,延伸纳入了中国经验,提出了具有全球普适性的一个MaaS系统分析框架,强调辨析全球范围内的MaaS异同均可以从三个维度展开,即嵌入的社会背景、发展目标和产生的社会经济环境影响;并应用此框架对国内外五个典型MaaS进行了比较研究,重点解码了北京MaaS的激励机制、商业模式和商业生态。本文旨在推动MaaS理论和研究方法的全球发展,重点提出了四个方面的关注:(1)MaaS系统的发展再次考验着城市交通如何回归其公共属性;(2)MaaS实践嵌入在城市社会背景中,具有明显的差异性。模式选择是对城市既有社会背景和交通格局的继承,但也可能就此发生转向。MaaS打开了一次城市交通转型的机会窗口;(3)MaaS系统的可持续运营依然面临挑战;(4)数字技术带来数据产权、数据隐私和安全等亟待解决的新问题。所有研究案例表明,数字技术的快速发展需要匹配治理模式创新,MaaS生态的协同进化至关重要。     

Necrosociality: isolated death and unclaimed cremains in Japan

Inquiring into concerns surrounding death and the afterlife in an underclass enclave in Japan, this article proposes that the politics of survival involves engaging with the enduring relationship between the living and the dead, referred to as ‘necrosociality’. Based on fieldwork carried out in Yokohama, it explores how ‘isolated death’ (kodokushi) and ‘disconnected spirits’ (muenbotoke) have become major concerns in homeless activism and support, giving rise to various necrosocial innovations and practices. The emergent necrosociality in Yokohama conjures up an alternative logic of care that connects people based on the general premise of inevitable decay and decline rather than familial ties and intimate memories. This article suggests that the concept of necrosociality provides a useful framework for analysing how social relations are negotiated, reaffirmed, or negated through bodily remains and graves, effectively shaping the modes of being and care among the living.