生态系统健康评价——概念构架与指标选择

在探讨生态系统健康概念构架的基础上,寻求对管理景观中的生态系统健康进行整体性评价的合适指标.健康的生态系统不仅在生态学意义上是健康的,并能维持健康的人类群体及有利于社会经济的发展.健康生态系统的一般特征是恢复力、多样性和生产力.建立生态系统健康评价指标的第一步是指标选择原则的确定,根据生态系统健康评价的目的和指标筛选的原则,把生态系统健康指标体系(Ecosystem Health Indicaror,EHI)分为生物物理指标、生态学指标和社会经济指标.     

Concept formation based on value relations evaluated with a matching-to-sample procedure

To study concept formation based on relations, adults were taught and tested on complex discriminations involving figures that varied in colors, forms, and orientations. In Experiment 1, participants learned to select figures with values A1 and B1 or values B1 and C1; thereafter, they consistently selected figures with values A1 and C1. Selections were based on the relations among the values, rather than on perceptual properties. Experiments 2 and 3 studied generalization with a matching-to-sample procedure: participants learned to select "yes" in the presence of the positive figures, such as A1B1, and "no" in the presence of the negative figures. Thereafter, all figures that resulted from combining three values of the three relevant dimensions were probed. Participants typically selected "yes" in the presence of the novel figures that had two or three values related to one another and selected "no" in the presence of the other figures. Finally, two participants learned a simple discrimination. They did not generalize responding to other figures with the same values; instead, their performance in the generalization test remained almost unaltered. Thus, the concept based on relations was not affected by the simple discrimination. These results showed some unique properties of the concept based on relations and challenge previous theories on concept formation.     

加速康复外科理念联合腹腔镜技术对穿孔性阑尾炎患儿肠道功能恢复及外周血WBC、CRP、IL-6的影响

目的:探讨腹腔镜技术联合加速康复外科理念(ERAS)对穿孔性阑尾炎患儿肠道功能恢复及外周血白细胞计数(WBC)、C反应蛋白(CRP)、白介素-6(IL-6)的影响。方法:选取2017年8月~2019年8月期间我院收治的行腹腔镜下阑尾切除术的患儿120例,上述患儿根据随机数字表法分为对照组(n=60)和研究组(n=60),两组均给予腹腔镜下阑尾切除术治疗,对照组给予常规围手术期处理,研究组给予ERAS,比较两组围术期指标、WBC、CRP、IL-6水平,比较两组术后疼痛状况及满意度情况,记录两组治疗期间并发症发生情况。结果:研究组住院时间、首次排气时间、下床活动时间、首次进食时间较对照组短,住院费用少于对照组(P<0.05)。研究组术后3 d、术后5 d血清WBC、CRP、IL-6水平呈先升高后降低趋势(P<0.05);研究组术后3 d、术后5 d血清WBC、CRP、IL-6水平低于对照组(P<0.05)。研究组视觉疼痛模拟评分(VAS)评分低于对照组,而满意率则高于对照组(P<0.05)。术后并发症总发生率研究组低于对照组(P<0.05)。结论:ERAS联合腹腔镜技术治疗穿孔性阑尾炎患儿安全有效,可减轻患儿疼痛及炎性应激,促进其术后肠道功能恢复,减轻患儿家庭经济负担。     

The species in primatology

Biologists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries all bandied about the term “species,” but very rarely actually said what they meant by it. Often, however, one can get inside their thinking by piecing together some of their remarks. One of the most nearly explicit‐appropriately, for the man who wrote a book called The Origin of Species – was Charles Darwin 1 : “Practically, when a naturalist can unite two forms together by others having intermediate characters, he treats the one as a variety of the other… He later translated this into evolutionary terms: “Hereafter, we shall be compelled to acknowledge that the only distinction between species and well‐marked varieties is, that the latter are known, or believed, to be connected at the present day by intermediate gradations, whereas species were formerly thus connected”^1:484‐5     

A darwinian species definition and its implications

A review of the vast literature on the epistemology and ontology of “species” is far beyond the capacity of both the writer and the length‐allotment of this essay, limiting it to a somewhat dogmatic presentation of personal opinions, few of them original. Also prohibited by the prescribed word limit is an account of species concepts considered but not adopted; in many cases, their omission does not do justice to their intellectual content.     

Relational diversity

In biology, the measurement of diversity traditionally focusses on reporting number of unambiguously distinguishable types, thus referring to qualitative (discontinuously varying) traits. Inclusion of frequencies or other weights has produced a large variety of diversity indices. Quantitative (continuously varying) traits do not readily fit into this perspective. In fact, in the context of quantitative traits, the concept of diversity is not always clearly distinguished from the (statistical) notion of dispersion. In many cases the ambiguity even extends to qualitative traits. This is at variance with the broad spectrum of diversity issues ranging, e.g., from ecological and genetic aspects of diversity to functional, structural, systematic, or evolutionary (including phylogenetic) aspects. In view of the urgent need for a more consistent perspective, it is called to attention that all of these aspects, whether of qualitative or quantitative nature, can be gathered under the common roof of binary relations (for qualitative traits two objects are related, for example, if they share the same trait state). A comprehensive concept of (relational) diversity can be developed in two steps: (1) determine the number of unrelated pairs of objects among all admissible pairs as a measure of implicit (relative) diversity, (2) invoke the concept of effective number to transform the implicit measure of diversity into an explicit (absolute) measure. The transformation operates by equating the observed implicit diversity to the implicit diversity obtained for the ideal model of an equivalence relation with classes of equal size. The number of these classes specifies the effective number as an explicit measure of diversity. The wealth of problems that can be treated from this unified perspective is briefly addressed by classifying and interpreting established diversity indices in the light of relational diversity. Desirable applications to the above-mentioned aspects are specified with the help of types of relations such as order, hierarchical, and tree relations. Corresponding biological issues including taxonomic community diversity, mating system, food web, sociological, cladistic and phylogenetic, or hypercycle diversity are suggested for future consideration.     

论婴儿类别形成的过程

文章简要回顾了婴儿类别形成中的知觉类别和概念类别之争,提出了婴儿类别形成阶段的假设：知觉类别与概念类别的形成是同一个过程。类别形成和概念形成是同时发生的两个不同阶段。婴儿类别的形成是建立诊断标准的过程,而概念形成是信息分析的过程,并且概念的形成影响类别的形成。     

Spontaneous categorization of vocal imitations in African grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus)

The ability to categorize elements of the environment is a fundamental aspect of information processing. Many experiments demonstrate the ability of birds and non-human primates to classify items according to their perceptual similarities. Few data are available regarding spontaneous classification of items according to a non-perceptual account in non-human animals. Here, we report unexpected results obtained with African grey parrots learning the referential use of French labels. Parrots did not learn the correct labels but they spontaneously produced more labels corresponding to food when a food item was presented to them and more labels corresponding to an object when shown an object item, although they were never rewarded for doing so. These results demonstrate a form of spontaneous categorization by using vocal imitation of the human language.     

Effects of stimulus size and spatial organization on pigeons’ conditional same-different discrimination

In two experiments, we explored the effects of varying the size and the spatial organization of the stimuli in multi-item arrays on pigeons’ same-different discrimination behavior. The birds had previously learned to discriminate a simultaneously presented array of 16 identical (Same) visual items from an array of 16 nonidentical (Different) visual items, when the correct choice was conditional on the presence of another cue: the color of the background (Castro et al., in press). In Experiment 1, we trained pigeons with 7-item arrays and then tested them with arrays containing the same item, but in a variety of sizes. In Experiment 2, we tested the birds with the items grouped in novel locations: the top, the bottom, the left, or the right portions of the display area, which generated different vertical and horizontal alignments. Accuracy scores revealed virtually perfect stimulus generalization across various item sizes and spatial organizations. Reaction times revealed that the birds perceived different sizes of a single icon as the same stimulus (Experiment 1) and that the birds processed vertical arrangements faster than horizontal arrangements (Experiment 2). These results suggest that the pigeons noticed both physical and spatial changes in the stimuli (as shown by their reaction times), but that these changes did not disrupt the birds’ discriminating the sameness or differentness of the multi-item arrays (as shown by their accuracy scores).     

Learning and coding of concepts in neural networks

Our environment consists of virtually an infinite number of scenarios in which we have to function. In order to respond properly to an incoming stimulus, the brain has first to analyze it, and to find out the basic familiar elements that are part of it. In other words, by using a library which contains a relatively small number of basic concepts, the brain analyzes the multitude of incoming events. Some of those basic concepts are innate, but many of them must be learned, in order to accommodate for the arbitrary environment around us. A classifying box is defined as the neural network that finds out the familiar concepts that are present in an incoming stimulus. Models for classifying boxes are introduced, and possible mechanisms by which they may establish their libraries of concepts are suggested, and then compared and evaluated by computer simulations.