The role of climate, habitat, and species co-occurrence as drivers of change in small mammal distributions over the past century

2011 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 696-708 ◽  
Author(s):  
EMILY M. RUBIDGE ◽  
WILLIAM B. MONAHAN ◽  
JUAN L. PARRA ◽  
SUSAN E. CAMERON ◽  
JUSTIN S. BRASHARES
2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 259-271
Author(s):  
Marina Radić-Šestić ◽  
Mia Šešum ◽  
Ljubica Isaković

Introduction. Music in the Deaf community is a socio-cultural phenomenon that depicts a specific identity and way of experiencing the world, which is just as diverse, rich and meaningful as that of members of any other culture. Objective. The aim of this paper was to point out the historical and socio-cultural frameworks, complexity, richness, specific elements, types and forms of musical expression of members of the Deaf community. Methods. The applied methods included comparative analysis, evaluation, and deduction and induction system. Results. Due to limitations or a lack of auditive component, the members of Deaf culture use different communication tools, such as speech, pantomime, facial expressions and sign language. Signed music, as a phenomenon, is the artistic form which does not have long history. However, since the nineties of the past century and with technological development, it has been gaining greater interest and acknowledgement within the Deaf community and among the hearing audience. Signed music uses specific visuo-spatial-kinaesthetic and auditive elements in expression, such as rhythm, dynamism, rhyme, expressiveness, iconicity, intensity of the musical perception and the combination of the role of the performer. Conclusion. Signed music as a phenomenon is an art form that incorporates sign poetic characteristics (lyrical contents), visual musical elements and dance.


2008 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
EVE ZYZIK ◽  
SUSAN GASS

The five papers in this issue cover a range of perspectives on the acquisition and use of the Spanish copulasserandestarin a variety of contexts, including language contact, bilingual language acquisition, and classroom second language learning. The fact that these papers cite work in this area as far back as the early part of the 20th century with each subsequent decade being represented suggests the continual importance and complexity of the distinction between the two copular forms and shows how this complexity is played out in acquisition and bilingual use. Over the past century different perspectives have been taken on this multifaceted issue with linguistic explanations and the role of the native language being primary. In this epilogue, we focus on some of these same issues, but expand our commentary to include the new dimensions represented in this collection of papers: (i) context of learning (input), (ii) prior knowledge as represented by other language(s) known, (iii) item-learning and lexical development, and (iv) innovations in methodology.


Author(s):  
Vanessa Lopes Lourenço Hanes

Given the massive changes that Brazil has undergone in the past century, particularly in distancing itself linguistically from its former colonizer, this study is an attempt to determine the role of translation in the country's cultural evolution. Translational approaches have developed along opposing poles: on the one hand, a strong resistance to incorporating orally-driven alterations in the written language, while on the other, a slow, halting movement toward convergence of the two, and both approaches are charged with political and ideological intentionality. Publishing houses, editors and translators are gatekeepers and agents whose activities provide a glimpse into the mechanism of national linguistic identity, either contributing to or resisting the myth of a homogenized Portuguese language.


1976 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Parsons

The exclusion of fire from the low-elevation foothills of the southern Sierra Nevada of California over the past century has resulted in large expanses of over-mature, senescent chaparral. The fuel buildup associated with this situation poses a threat, in that any fire which gets started has the potential of becoming a major holocaust.A detailed analysis is made of the vegetational succession following fire in four different-aged stands of Chamise chaparral in the southern Sierra Nevada. Progression from a diverse multi-species herb and shrub community towards a dense, structurally uniform, low-diversity stand dominated by a single woody species, Adenostoma fasciculatum (Chamise), is demonstrated. An increase in shrub cover and height along with the amount of dead material found laddered through the canopy, create optimal conditions for combustion within some 35 years following the last fire. The herbaceous vegetation shows a high diversity and cover in the first few years after burning, but rapidly decreases thereafter. Evidence is presented that frequent fires are required to maintain the chaparral community in a vigorous and healthy state. The need to institute progressive fuel-management programmes which recognize the natural role of fire in the evolution of the chaparral type wherever it is found, is discussed and advocated. Attempts are also made to relate these findings to the preservation of other fire-adapted vegetation types of the world.


2015 ◽  
Vol 112 (31) ◽  
pp. 9656-9661 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca C. Terry ◽  
Rebecca J. Rowe

Research on the ecological impacts of environmental change has primarily focused at the species level, leaving the responses of ecosystem-level properties like energy flow poorly understood. This is especially so over millennial timescales inaccessible to direct observation. Here we examine how energy flow within a Great Basin small mammal community responded to climate-driven environmental change during the past 12,800 y, and use this baseline to evaluate responses observed during the past century. Our analyses reveal marked stability in energy flow during rapid climatic warming at the terminal Pleistocene despite dramatic turnover in the distribution of mammalian body sizes and habitat-associated functional groups. Functional group turnover was strongly correlated with climate-driven changes in regional vegetation, with climate and vegetation change preceding energetic shifts in the small mammal community. In contrast, the past century has witnessed a substantial reduction in energy flow caused by an increase in energetic dominance of small-bodied species with an affinity for closed grass habitats. This suggests that modern changes in land cover caused by anthropogenic activities—particularly the spread of nonnative annual grasslands—has led to a breakdown in the compensatory dynamics of energy flow. Human activities are thus modifying the small mammal community in ways that differ from climate-driven expectations, resulting in an energetically novel ecosystem. Our study illustrates the need to integrate across ecological and temporal scales to provide robust insights for long-term conservation and management.


2015 ◽  
Vol 40 (02) ◽  
pp. 499-505 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Anne Case

This review essay of Hendrik Hartog's (2012) Someday All This Will Be Yours undertakes a brief overview of some of the massive changes in middle‐class planning for old age and inheritance in the United States over the course of the past century, focusing on the increased role of the state as a source of funding and regulation, the rise of the elder law bar, and the resulting new tools and motives for the transfer of property in exchange for care in the age of Medicaid.


2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-57
Author(s):  
Robert C. Christie ◽  

The evolution of scientism, relativism, and the resultant fragmentation of knowledge over the past century have led to a crisis in contemporary university education. John Henry Newman, a nineteenth-century philosopher of education, a major figure in educational theory and applied research, and author of the classic work on education, The Idea of a Univershy, faced similar problems in his time, and his work is valuable in addressing contemporary dilemmas. Newman's philosophy of mind and his vision of the unity of knowledge, which reflects an aesthetic dimension, and the resultant essential role of theology in education, are key elements for reimagining the university. An analysis of Newman's spirited Eighth Discourse anchors this retrospective and commends his work to higher education today by recalling an eariier ideal of the integration of all disciplines.


2021 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Anderson ◽  
Justin C. Hulbert

Over the past century, psychologists have discussed whether forgetting might arise from active mechanisms that promote memory loss to achieve various functions, such as minimizing errors, facilitating learning, or regulating one's emotional state. The past decade has witnessed a great expansion in knowledge about the brain mechanisms underlying active forgetting in its varying forms. A core discovery concerns the role of the prefrontal cortex in exerting top-down control over mnemonic activity in the hippocampus and other brain structures, often via inhibitory control. New findings reveal that such processes not only induce forgetting of specific memories but also can suppress the operation of mnemonic processes more broadly, triggering windows of anterograde and retrograde amnesia in healthy people. Recent work extends active forgetting to nonhuman animals, presaging the development of a multilevel mechanistic account that spans the cognitive, systems, network, and even cellular levels. This work reveals how organisms adapt their memories to their cognitive and emotional goals and has implications for understanding vulnerability to psychiatric disorders.


1971 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth B. Pyle

The study of nationalism, the most powerful political emotion in the modern world, has often become enmeshed in polemic and ideological combat. In Japan during the past century, evaluations of the historical role of nationalism have tended to oscillate between extremes. Some of its first serious students in the late nineteenth century, writers like Kuga Katsunan and Miyake Setsurei, opposing the prevalent Westernism, were convinced that nationalism was a necessary ingredient of Japanese survival; and they would have agreed with Tocqueville's aphorism that “the interests of the human race are better served by giving every man a particular fatherland than by trying to inflame his passions for the whole of humanity.” Since 1945, however, in a mood of national self-alienation, many Japanese writers have shared Veblen's turgid conclusion, “Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to lead human institutions to the service of dissension and distress. In its material effects it is altogether the most sinister as well as the most imbecile of all the institutional incumbrances that have come down out of the old order.” Once seen as necessary and beneficial, nationalism came in the post-war period to be villified or simply ignored amidst the scholars' preoccupation with their anti-establishment liberal heroes. With some notable exceptions, nationalism has been slow to receive in Japan the thoughtful, dispassionate study it needs.


2021 ◽  
Vol 71 (S1) ◽  
pp. 5-11

Abstract The recent pandemic has raised fundamental questions about the traditional role of government. That role has stressed the pursuit of national interests and identified the tools that governments should use in the pursuit of those interests. While over the past century the desirable role of the state was amended to include new objectives (such as equity and stabilization) the focus had remained national interests. This paper argues that this national focus has become increasingly anachronistic and damaging.


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