For 30 years, Greenwald and Shulman’s (1973) psychological refractory period (PRP) study has been cited as evidence for perfect timesharing with two ideomotor (IM) compatible tasks. Recently, Lien, Proctor, and Allen (2002) failed to replicate their results and concluded that the use of two IM compatible tasks is neither necessary nor sufficient to eliminate the PRP effect. Greenwald (2003) sug...

Understanding multi-dimensional mechanism design. 1 The Model Let M = {1, . . . , m} be a finite set of agents. Every agent has private information, which can be multi-dimensional. This is called his type. The space from which an agent draws his type is called his type space. Let Ti denote the type space of agent i ∈ M . We assume Ti ⊆ R n for some integer n ≥ 1. Let T m = ×mi=1Ti. Also, denote...

The notion of “incompatibility” of system variables arose with quantum mechanics; it is inconceivable in classical physics. Two expressions of incompatibility from the earliest days of quantum theory are the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg (measurement of one variable causes uncontrollable disturbance in other variables) and Bohr’s “complementarity” (not all variables have simultaneous “rea...

This paper addresses a number of problems relating to climatic change and human health. Following an introduction outlining the overarching issues, a short summary is given on climatic change and its anthropogenic causes. The rest of the paper then focuses on the direct and indirect impacts of global climatic change on health. Direct effects comprise changes in the hygrothermal stress response ...

Two factors that can lead to geographic structuring in conspecific populations are barriers to dispersal and climatic stability. Populations that occur in different physiographic regions may be restricted to those areas by physical and/or ecological barriers, which may facilitate the formation of phylogeographic clades. Long-term climatic stability can also promote genetic diversification, beca...

The adaptability of species' climatic niches can influence the dynamics of colonization and gene flow across climatic gradients, potentially increasing the likelihood of speciation or reducing extinction in the face of environmental change. However, previous comparative studies have tested these ideas using geographically, taxonomically and ecologically restricted samples, yielding mixed result...

Following over 20 years of research on the climatic effects on biodiversity we now have strong evidence that climate change affects phenology, fitness, and distribution ranges of different taxa, including birds. Bird phenology likely responds to changes in local weather. It is also affected by climatic year-to-year variations on larger scales. Although such scale-related effects are common in e...

The comprehensive assessment of climatic and hydrological droughts in terms of their temporal and spatial evolutions is very important for water resources management and social development in the basin scale. To study the spatial and temporal changes of climatic and hydrological droughts and the relationships between them, the SPEI and SDI are adopted to assess the changes and the correlations ...

A climatic regime shift is characterized by an abrupt transition from one quasi-steady climatic state to another. We attempted to explain the change of multifractal behavior of climate indices when a regime shift occurred. We used the wavelet transform method to analyze the multifractal behaviors of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) index (Niño3.4 index), Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)...