From July 1978 till the summer of 1980 Paul Vitányi and I shared an office at Mathematical Centre (former name of C.W.I.), located at Tweede Boerhaavestraat 49 in the Oosterpark-neighborhood of Amsterdam. A couple of weeks after I arrived, Paul and I moved together with Arie de Bruin to a freshly painted room which happened to be the half of a former class room, like many offices in that old sc...

You know a story must have some truly delicious ingredients in order for it to bubble along for well over a century. And this one has just about everything short of sex: dinosaurs and birds are the meat in the story; and the sauce is a scientific disagreement nearly bordering on a blood feud. Thomas Henry Huxley started it all shortly after 1861, when the feathered fossils of Archaeopteryx were...

which is still "sub-judice." Arguments for and against these latter theories are given, and Dr. Simpson finally gives his own opinion in such a manner that one cannot but respect his judgment. The book deals with all the recognised endocrine disorders, giving their etiology, pathology, diagnosis, and treatment, and in many cases a short historical note is added. Many illustrations make the text...

BACKGROUND Facilities for fattening pigs offer limited possibilities for exploration and wet feeding systems, where the pigs drink the food instead of eating it, have expanded on behalf of dry feeding systems. As little has been made to evaluate liquid feeding from the point of view of the pigs, the aims of this study were to compare behaviour in general and behaviour at feeding in particular o...

Preface These lecture notes grew out of several years of teaching a course on Advanced Microeconomics, first at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and subsequently at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. When we were students at graduate schools in US (during the mid 1980's), a typical first year graduate Microeconomics course, revolved around Hal Varian's classic on the su...

In 1917 Parker and van Heusen published their historic paper on the behavioural responses of the catfish, Amiurus nebulosus, to metallic and non-metallic rods. They found a blindfolded Amiurus to be remarkably sensitive to metallic rods, regularly responding to them even at a distance of some centimetres, whereas a glass rod did not elicit a reaction until it actually touched the skin of the an...

Grooming patterns among 65 common vampire bats in hollow tree day roosts were studied by behavioural sampling techniques during a 15-month period. Self-grooming occurred more than social grooming in response to ectoparasites since the proportion of time spent self-grooming and the amount of ectoparasite infestation covaried positively among tree roosts, while the time spent grooming others was ...

We have with great interest read the paper by Tuuminen et al. (1) published in the July 2014 issue of this journal where the pine weevil (Hylobius abietis) is incriminated as a vector of the potential human pathogen Capnocytophaga canimorsus. The authors base their conclusion on the fact that the man, who was infected by C. canimorsus, claimed that “he had been bitten by a large pine weevil on ...

Greater honeyguides (Indicator indicator) lead human honey-hunters to wild bees' nests, in a rare example of a mutualistic foraging partnership between humans and free-living wild animals. We show experimentally that a specialized vocal sound made by Mozambican honey-hunters seeking bees' nests elicits elevated cooperative behavior from honeyguides. The production of this sound increased the pr...

Increased diagnosis of disorders caused by abnormalities within reward circuitry, including addiction, illustrates the need to further define reward processing and enhance treatment. Focus has been placed on incentive salience or ‘wanting’, which dictates the value of a Pavlovian conditioned stimulus (CS) through associations with rewards (UCS), and converts a CS into a motivational magnet that...