Although nonparametric statistical methods have a role to play in the analysis of data, often their virtues are overstated and their deficiencies overlooked. A recent Special Feature in Ecology advocated nonparametric methods because of an erroneously stated advantage that they require no assumptions regarding the distribution underlying the observations. The present paper points out some often...

The study describes people's reaction to environmental noise in Curitiba, a city of approximately 1.6 million inhabitants in Brazil. Data was collected using questionnaires randomly delivered to the city's residents. Out of 1,000 questionnaires, 860 (86%) were returned and assessed. The main noise sources found as disturbing were motor vehicle traffic (73%) and neighbors (38%), which were rated...

This paper investigates the causal relationships among scripts, schemata, and social norms. The authors examine how social norms are triggered by particular schemata and are grounded in scripts. Just as schemata are embedded in a network, so too are social norms, and they can be primed through spreading activation. Moreover, the expectations that allow a social norm‘s existence are inherently g...

Note to readers: This draft was prepared for a slightly different audience, so the arguments focusing on visual privacy do not appear in the text. Odd word errors may be due to speech misrecognition. Do not cite, quote, or distribute without express permission. Please refer to paragraph #s, not page #s in comments.

At a meeting on marine ecosystem modelling held in Barcelona in November 2010, a wide range of tools were introduced by their developers. An officer of the European Commission was invited to the meeting as a key client of these tools, and he severely criticized the tools presented as being useless. This criticism led to a strong reaction by the modellers and an interesting debate. In this paper...

1870. United Kingdom. Scenes from a divorce. Alfred Russel Wallace, the coinventor with Darwin of the theory of evolution through natural selection, completely captivated by the melodious song of the sirens hailing spiritualism landed definitively on the controversial shores of the treason. In effect, with his essay The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man, Wallace turned his back on t...

siren1 and siren2 are novel alcohol dehydrogenase (Adh)-derived chimeric genes in the Drosophila bipectinata complex. D. ananassae, however, harbors a single homolog of these genes. Like other Adh-derived chimeric genes, siren evolved adaptively shortly after it was formed. These changes likely shifted the catalytic activity of siren.