Download or read book Animal Space Use Second Edition written by Arild O. Gautestad and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021-08-06 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animal space use is complex, from both the individual and population perspectives. Spatial memory leads to site fidelity, the emergence of home ranges, and multi-scaled use of the environment. Attraction to conspecifics—another memory-dependent property—contributes to population survival by counteracting decline in local abundance from unconstrained dispersal. However, memory effects, multi-scaled space use, and intra-specific cohesion present deep theoretical challenges for biophysical modelling. This book confronts these issues straight on, and presents a range of novel system descriptors, model designs, and simulations; intrinsic properties from memory and scaling are illustrated in detail, and classical models are scrutinized with respect to compliance with real data. The presentations of concepts are geared towards a broad audience of researchers and students with an interest in animal space use. The book advocates that an extension of the biophysical frame of reference may be needed to understand systems that express intrinsic complexity from the combined effects of scaling and memory. It boldly provides an overview and critical evaluation of existing concepts, and a wide range of theoretical proposals to resolve present challenges.

Download or read book Anomalous Transport Applications Mathematical Perspectives and Big Data written by Ralf Metzler and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2021-01-08 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Neo Frontier Spaces in Science Fiction Television written by Sebastian J. Müller and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2023-04-17 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of the frontier--once, the geographical borderline moving further and further West across the North American continent--has shaped American science fiction television since its beginnings. TV series have long adapted the frontier myth to outer space and have explored American Wests of the future. This book takes a deeper look at the futuristic frontiers within such series as Star Trek, Firefly, Terra Nova, Defiance and The 100, revealing how they rethink colonialism, the environment, spaces of risk and utopian/dystopian worlds. Harnessing forms of speculation and the post-apocalyptic imagination, these series engage with matters of the present, from the legacies of colonialism to climate change and the increasing integration of humans and technologies. In doing so, these series question in novel ways the very idea of borders and reshape cultural binaries such as Self/Other, wilderness/civilization, city/nature, human/non-human and utopia/dystopia.

Download or read book Cognitive Movement Ecology written by Eliezer Gurarie and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2024-02-09 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At least since Darwin argued that the difference in cognitive abilities between animals and humans is one of degree and not of kind, the study of animal cognition has been an active and dynamic subfield of behavioral sciences. It has, however, been based almost entirely on experimental studies of animals in captivity and belongs - as a field - more snugly in the realm of Psychology (or Ethology), with relatively little application to understanding the behavior of animals in the wild. Movement Ecology, in contrast, is a more recent branch of Ecology devoted almost entirely to the analysis of animal movements in the wild. Technological developments allow for animals to be tracked in the wild in ever-increasing numbers, precision, and duration. Movement ecology has, to some extent, “chased the data”, reflecting the practical need to analyze and interpret those data. Much of the most important developments of recent decades are devoted to dealing with the trickier aspects of the statistical analysis of movement data - which in their multidimensionality, autocorrelation, gappiness and measurement error, and behavioral complexity pose no shortage of hairy statistical problems.

Download or read book Beyond the Cognitive Map written by A. David Redish and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are currently two major theories about the role of the hippocampus, a distinctive structure in the back of the temporal lobe. One says that it stores a cognitive map, the other that it is a key locus for the temporary storage of episodic memories. A. David Redish takes the approach that understanding the role of the hippocampus in space will make it possible to address its role in less easily quantifiable areas such as memory. Basing his investigation on the study of rodent navigation--one of the primary domains for understanding information processing in the brain--he places the hippocampus in its anatomical context as part of a greater functional system. Redish draws on the extensive experimental and theoretical work of the last 100 years to paint a coherent picture of rodent navigation. His presentation encompasses multiple levels of analysis, from single-unit recording results to behavioral tasks to computational modeling. From this foundation, he proposes a novel understanding of the role of the hippocampus in rodents that can shed light on the role of the hippocampus in primates, explaining data from primate studies and human neurology. The book will be of interest not only to neuroscientists and psychologists, but also to researchers in computer science, robotics, artificial intelligence, and artificial life.

Download or read book Rhythms of the Brain written by G. Buzsáki and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies of mechanisms in the brain that allow complicated things to happen in a coordinated fashion have produced some of the most spectacular discoveries in neuroscience. This book provides eloquent support for the idea that spontaneous neuron activity, far from being mere noise, is actually the source of our cognitive abilities. It takes a fresh look at the coevolution of structure and function in the mammalian brain, illustrating how self-emerged oscillatory timing is the brain's fundamental organizer of neuronal information. The small-world-like connectivity of the cerebral cortex allows for global computation on multiple spatial and temporal scales. The perpetual interactions among the multiple network oscillators keep cortical systems in a highly sensitive "metastable" state and provide energy-efficient synchronizing mechanisms via weak links. In a sequence of "cycles," György Buzsáki guides the reader from the physics of oscillations through neuronal assembly organization to complex cognitive processing and memory storage. His clear, fluid writing-accessible to any reader with some scientific knowledge-is supplemented by extensive footnotes and references that make it just as gratifying and instructive a read for the specialist. The coherent view of a single author who has been at the forefront of research in this exciting field, this volume is essential reading for anyone interested in our rapidly evolving understanding of the brain.

Download or read book Complexity and Postmodernism written by Paul Cilliers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Complexity and Postmodernism, Paul Cilliers explores the idea of complexity in the light of contemporary perspectives from philosophy and science. Cilliers offers us a unique approach to understanding complexity and computational theory by integrating postmodern theory (like that of Derrida and Lyotard) into his discussion. Complexity and Postmodernism is an exciting and an original book that should be read by anyone interested in gaining a fresh understanding of complexity, postmodernism and connectionism.

Download or read book The Biopsychosocial Model of Health and Disease written by Derek Bolton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-03-28 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book is a systematic update of the philosophical and scientific foundations of the biopsychosocial model of health, disease and healthcare. First proposed by George Engel 40 years ago, the Biopsychosocial Model is much cited in healthcare settings worldwide, but has been increasingly criticised for being vague, lacking in content, and in need of reworking in the light of recent developments. The book confronts the rapid changes to psychological science, neuroscience, healthcare, and philosophy that have occurred since the model was first proposed and addresses key issues such as the model’s scientific basis, clinical utility, and philosophical coherence. The authors conceptualise biology and the psychosocial as in the same ontological space, interlinked by systems of communication-based regulatory control which constitute a new kind of causation. These are distinguished from physical and chemical laws, most clearly because they can break down, thus providing the basis for difference between health and disease. This work offers an urgent update to the model’s scientific and philosophical foundations, providing a new and coherent account of causal interactions between the biological, the psychological and social.

Download or read book Studies in Canadian English written by Adam Bednarek and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-10-02 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This publication focuses on vocabulary, which reflects unique Canadian traits; elements that share not only a Canadian origin but also reference to everyday contexts present on both the micro and macro stage. The conducted study aimed to show variation on the lexical level, which may result from a fluid sense of national identity. The Toronto region, due to its extensive multi-cultural and multi-ethnic background bears a sense of diversity both on the social and linguistic ground. The conducted study involved the distribution of questionnaires, which tested speakers’ knowledge of Canadian register, their ability of using them in the context of everyday discourse and the identification of items. Furthermore, the author had obtained two years worth of texts from the Toronto Sun, which enabled the observation of Canadianisms within the written medium of a media context. The resulting data formed a database labeled by the author as the LCTES (Lodz Corpus for Toronto English Study).

Download or read book Structured Population Models in Marine Terrestrial and Freshwater Systems written by Shripad Tuljapurkar and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the summer of 1993, twenty-six graduate and postdoctoral stu dents and fourteen lecturers converged on Cornell University for a summer school devoted to structured-population models. This school was one of a series to address concepts cutting across the traditional boundaries separating terrestrial, marine, and freshwa ter ecology. Earlier schools resulted in the books Patch Dynamics (S. A. Levin, T. M. Powell & J. H. Steele, eds., Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1993) and Ecological Time Series (T. M. Powell & J. H. Steele, eds., Chapman and Hall, New York, 1995); a book on food webs is in preparation. Models of population structure (differences among individuals due to age, size, developmental stage, spatial location, or genotype) have an important place in studies of all three kinds of ecosystem. In choosing the participants and lecturers for the school, we se lected for diversity-biologists who knew some mathematics and mathematicians who knew some biology, field biologists sobered by encounters with messy data and theoreticians intoxicated by the elegance of the underlying mathematics, people concerned with long-term evolutionary problems and people concerned with the acute crises of conservation biology. For four weeks, these perspec tives swirled in discussions that started in the lecture hall and carried on into the sweltering Ithaca night. Diversity mayor may not increase stability, but it surely makes things interesting.

Download or read book The Behavioral and Social Sciences written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1988-02-01 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the scientific frontiers and leading edges of research across the fields of anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, sociology, history, business, education, geography, law, and psychiatry, as well as the newer, more specialized areas of artificial intelligence, child development, cognitive science, communications, demography, linguistics, and management and decision science. It includes recommendations concerning new resources, facilities, and programs that may be needed over the next several years to ensure rapid progress and provide a high level of returns to basic research.

Download or read book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind written by Julian Jaynes and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2000-08-15 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

Download or read book Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance written by Mihail C. Roco and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: M. C. Roco and W.S. Bainbridge In the early decades of the 21st century, concentrated efforts can unify science based on the unity of nature, thereby advancing the combination of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and new technologies based in cognitive science. With proper attention to ethical issues and societal needs, converging in human abilities, societal technologies could achieve a tremendous improvement outcomes, the nation's productivity, and the quality of life. This is a broad, cross cutting, emerging and timely opportunity of interest to individuals, society and humanity in the long term. The phrase "convergent technologies" refers to the synergistic combination of four major "NBIC" (nano-bio-info-cogno) provinces of science and technology, each of which is currently progressing at a rapid rate: (a) nanoscience and nanotechnology; (b) biotechnology and biomedicine, including genetic engineering; (c) information technology, including advanced computing and communications; (d) cognitive science, including cognitive neuroscience. Timely and Broad Opportunity. Convergence of diverse technologies is based on material unity at the nanoscale and on technology integration from that scale.

Download or read book Heart Brain Interactions written by Giuseppe Di Pasquale and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last decade there has been a growing interest in the study of the interactions between the heart and the brain, especially in the field of cerebral ischemia. The interactions between cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases are of relevance not only for research investigation, but also for clinical implications in the daily clinical practice. i.e. A wealth of information has been gathered particularly on three topics, cardiovascular consequences of cerebral injuries, cardioembolic stroke, and association of carotid and coronary artery disease. The available information, however, is still sparse and fragmentary mainly because of the lack of commun ication between neurologists and cardiologists. With the aim of improving communication between several disciplines and technologies, we started to organize since 1987 in Bologna, Italy, an international Symposium on heart brain interactions to be held every 3 years. Our intention was to gather prominent clinicians and researchers from outstanding cardiologic and neuro logic institutions actively involved in the study of heart-brain interactions. The ambitious goal has been to fit different pieces of information like in a puzzle. This book originates from the contributions presented at the 2nd Sympo sium which was held in Bologna on November 30-December 1, 1990. The book is subdivided into three sections: I cardiovascular consequences of cerebral damage, II cardiogenic cerebral ischemia, III cerebrovascular and coronary artery disease.

Download or read book Ecosystems and Human Well being written by Joseph Alcamo and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecosystems and Human Well-Being is the first product of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a four-year international work program designed to meet the needs of decisionmakers for scientific information on the links between ecosystem change and human well-being. The book offers an overview of the project, describing the conceptual framework that is being used, defining its scope, and providing a baseline of understanding that all participants need to move forward. The Millennium Assessment focuses on how humans have altered ecosystems, and how changes in ecosystem services have affected human well-being, how ecosystem changes may affect people in future decades, and what types of responses can be adopted at local, national, or global scales to improve ecosystem management and thereby contribute to human well-being and poverty alleviation. The program was launched by United National Secretary-General Kofi Annan in June 2001, and the primary assessment reports will be released by Island Press in 2005. Leading scientists from more than 100 nations are conducting the assessment, which can aid countries, regions, or companies by: providing a clear, scientific picture of the current sta

Download or read book Radical Embodied Cognitive Science written by Anthony Chemero and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-08-19 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A proposal for a new way to do cognitive science argues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than computation and representation. While philosophers of mind have been arguing over the status of mental representations in cognitive science, cognitive scientists have been quietly engaged in studying perception, action, and cognition without explaining them in terms of mental representation. In this book, Anthony Chemero describes this nonrepresentational approach (which he terms radical embodied cognitive science), puts it in historical and conceptual context, and applies it to traditional problems in the philosophy of mind. Radical embodied cognitive science is a direct descendant of the American naturalist psychology of William James and John Dewey, and follows them in viewing perception and cognition to be understandable only in terms of action in the environment. Chemero argues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than in terms of computation and representation. After outlining this orientation to cognition, Chemero proposes a methodology: dynamical systems theory, which would explain things dynamically and without reference to representation. He also advances a background theory: Gibsonian ecological psychology, “shored up” and clarified. Chemero then looks at some traditional philosophical problems (reductionism, epistemological skepticism, metaphysical realism, consciousness) through the lens of radical embodied cognitive science and concludes that the comparative ease with which it resolves these problems, combined with its empirical promise, makes this approach to cognitive science a rewarding one. “Jerry Fodor is my favorite philosopher,” Chemero writes in his preface, adding, “I think that Jerry Fodor is wrong about nearly everything.” With this book, Chemero explains nonrepresentational, dynamical, ecological cognitive science as clearly and as rigorously as Jerry Fodor explained computational cognitive science in his classic work The Language of Thought.

Download or read book The Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate written by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-30 with total page 755 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the leading international body for assessing the science related to climate change. It provides policymakers with regular assessments of the scientific basis of human-induced climate change, its impacts and future risks, and options for adaptation and mitigation. This IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate is the most comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of the observed and projected changes to the ocean and cryosphere and their associated impacts and risks, with a focus on resilience, risk management response options, and adaptation measures, considering both their potential and limitations. It brings together knowledge on physical and biogeochemical changes, the interplay with ecosystem changes, and the implications for human communities. It serves policymakers, decision makers, stakeholders, and all interested parties with unbiased, up-to-date, policy-relevant information. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.