Ecology - As I See It

Dr. Jane Claire Dirks-Edmunds summarizes her research experiences on Saddleback Mountain in Oregon. Several handwritten corrections are included. Dirks-Edmunds began studying the area in 1933 with her advisor at Linfield College, Dr. James A. Macnab. In 1940, the research site was logged and her study switched from detailing an existing Douglas fir community to tracking its regrowth. Dr. Dirks-Edmunds graduated from Linfield College in 1937; she returned to teach in the Biology department at Linfield from 1941-1974

I see what you mean

The ability to understand and predict others' behavior is essential for successful interactions. When making predictions about what other humans will do, we treat them as intentional systems and adopt the intentional stance, i.e., refer to their mental states such as desires and intentions. In the present experiments, we investigated whether the mere belief that the observed agent is an intentional system influences basic social attention mechanisms. We presented pictures of a human and a robot face in a gaze cuing paradigm and manipulated the likelihood of adopting the intentional stance by instruction: in some conditions, participants were told that they were observing a human or a robot, in others, that they were observing a human-like mannequin or a robot whose eyes were controlled by a human. In conditions in which participants were made to believe they were observing human behavior (intentional stance likely) gaze cuing effects were significantly larger as compared to conditions when adopting the intentional stance was less likely. This effect was independent of whether a human or a robot face was presented. Therefore, we conclude that adopting the intentional stance when observing others' behavior fundamentally influences basic mechanisms of social attention. The present results provide striking evidence that high-level cognitive processes, such as beliefs, modulate bottom-up mechanisms of attentional selection in a top-down manner

I See You, \u27N Double You

When asked to spell his name, Will Wood would willfully respond with Double U - I - Double L, Double U - Double O - D . Imperturbable clerks would, with surprising accuracy, dutifully write down Will Wood. You wonder, however, about the decipherment of, say, a Mr. Ruud\u27s reply. Does his R - Double U - D exist in county records as Ruud or Rwd

Neutrino Yukawa textures within type-I see-saw

The arbitrariness of Yukawa couplings can be reduced by the imposition of some flavor symmetries and/or by the realization of texture zeros. We review neutrino Yukawa textures with zeros within the framework of the type-I seesaw with three heavy right chiral neutrinos and in the basis where the latter and the charged leptons are mass diagonal. An assumed non-vanishing mass of every ultralight neutrino and the observed non-decoupling of any neutrino generation allow a maximum of four zeros in the Yukawa coupling matrix $Y_\nu$ in family space. There are seventy two such textures. We show that the requirement of an exact $\mu\tau$ symmetry, coupled with the observational constraints, reduces these seventy two allowed textures to only four corresponding to just two different forms of the light neutrino mass matrix $M_{\nu A}/M_{\nu B}$, resulting in an inverted/normal mass ordering. The effect of each of these on measurable quantities can be described, apart from an overall factor of the neutrino mass scale, in terms of two real parameters and a phase angle all of which are within very constrained ranges. The masses and Majorana phases of ultralight neutrinos are predicted within definite ranges with $3\sigma$ laboratory and cosmological observational inputs. The rate for $0\nu\beta\beta$ decay, though generally below the reach of planned experiments, could approach it in some parameteric regions. Within the same framework, we also study Yukawa textures with a fewer number of zeros, but with exact $\mu\tau$ symmetry. We further formulate the detailed scheme of the explicit breaking of $\mu\tau$ symmetry in terms of three small parameters for allowed four zero textures. The observed sizable mixing between the first and third generations of neutrinos is shown to follow for a suitable choice of these symmetry breaking parameters.Comment: invited review article, to appear in a special issue on neutrinos in the journal Advances in High Energy Physics (AHEP