Proceedings of the Fifth European Workshop on Probabilistic Graphical Models

Peer reviewe

Indigenous ecological knowledge about the sustainability of tea gardens in the hill evergreen forest of Northern Thailand.

These studies on indigenous ecological knowledge were carried out as a case study of the sustainability of miang tea gardens in hill evergreen forest at a remote village setting in the highlands of northern Thailand. The study focused on the miang tea farmers' knowledge associated with decision making criteria in managing their gardens as an agroforestry system. Knowledge was investigated relating to how farmers presently manage their garden ecosystems and the underlying biodiversity of the plants and the interactions occurring between tea trees and biotic components. These were forest trees, ground flora and cattle in relation to microclimate and processes of water and nutrient cycling, soil erosion and plant succession. The knowledge acquired from key informants was evaluated in terms of its representativeness of the knowledge of the community as a whole and the extent to which it was complementary or contradictory to scientific knowledge. The extent to which indigenous and scientific knowledge could be usefully combined was investigated. The indigenous knowledge was collected from interviewing a small number of key informants who were representative of the target popUlation and who were people knowledgeable about the ecology of the gardens. The elicited information was recorded and accessed using knowledge-based system techniques. An indigenous knowledge base was created in terms of diagrams, hierarchies and text statements and stored in a durable, accessible and transparent form. The research demonstrated that the indigenous ecological knowledge collected from key informants was explanatory, predictive and of technical relevance. It was also representative of most of the farmers in the community. The combination of indigenous and scientific knowledge provided a more powerful resource for improving the sustainability of the tea garden ecosystem than using either knowledge system alone but required further quantification for solid management recommendations to be formulated. The knowledge elicited had a useful role to play in furthering scientific understanding about the ecosystem and suggested new lines of research that may be more appropriate for promoting incremental change to miang tea production systems than extending conventional technology packages involving tea monoculture

Aspects of Linguistic Variation

This volume brings together papers on linguistic variation. It takes a broad perspective, covering not only crosslinguistic and diachronic but also intralinguistic and interspeaker variation, and examines phenomena ranging from negation and TAM over connectives and the lexicon to definite articles and comparative concepts in well- and lesser-known languages. The collection thus contributes to our understanding of variation in general

Adaptive coloration in pied flycatchers (Ficedula hypoleuca)-The devil is in the detail

Understanding the origin and persistence of phenotypic variation within and among populations is a major goal in evolutionary biology. However, the eagerness to find unadulterated explanatory models in combination with difficulties in publishing replicated studies may lead to severe underestimations of the complexity of selection patterns acting in nature. One striking example is variation in plumage coloration in birds, where the default adaptive explanation often is that brightly colored individuals signal superior quality across environmental conditions and therefore always should be favored by directional mate choice. Here, we review studies on the proximate determination and adaptive function of coloration traits in male pied flycatchers (Ficedula hypoleuca). From numerous studies, we can conclude that the dark male color phenotype is adapted to a typical northern climate and functions as a dominance signal in male-male competition over nesting sites, and that the browner phenotypes are favored by relaxed intraspecific competition with more dominant male collared flycatchers (Ficedula albicollis) in areas where the two species co-occur. However, the role of avoidance of hybridization in driving character displacement in plumage between these two species may not be as important as initially thought. The direction of female choice on male coloration in pied flycatchers is not simply as opposite in direction in sympatry and allopatry as traditionally expected, but varies also in relation to additional contexts such as climate variation. While some of the heterogeneity in the observed relationships between coloration and fitness probably indicate type 1 errors, we strongly argue that environmental heterogeneity and context-dependent selection play important roles in explaining plumage color variation in this species, which probably also is the case in many other species studied in less detail.Peer reviewe

Aspects of Linguistic Variation

This volume brings together papers on linguistic variation. It takes a broad perspective, covering not only crosslinguistic and diachronic but also intralinguistic and interspeaker variation, and examines phenomena ranging from negation and TAM over connectives and the lexicon to definite articles and comparative concepts in well- and lesser-known languages. The collection thus contributes to our understanding of variation in general

Acquisition of tense and aspect by Arabic-speaking learners of English as a second language.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN029277 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

A grammar of Kalamang : The Papuan language of the Karas Islands

This thesis is a grammar of Kalamang, a Papuan language of western New Guinea in the east of Indonesia. It is spoken by around 130 people on the biggest of the Karas Islands. This grammar is based on 11 months of fieldwork. The primary source of data is a corpus of more than 15 hours of spoken Kalamang recorded and transcribed between 2015 and 2019. The grammar covers a wide range of topics beyond a phonological and morphosyntactic description, including prosody, narrative styles, and information structure. More than 1000 examples illustrate the analyses, and are where possible taken from naturalistic spoken Kalamang. The descriptive approach in this grammar is informed by current linguistic theory, but is not driven by any specific school of thought. Comparison to other eastern Indonesian languages is taken into account whenever it is deemed helpful. Kalamang has several typologically interesting features, such as unpredictable stress, minimalistic give-constructions consisting of just two pronouns, aspectual markers that follow the subject, and the NP and predicate – rather than the noun and verb – as important domains of attachment.This grammar is accompanied by a an openly accessible archive of linguistic and cultural material (http://hdl.handle.net/10050/00-0000-0000-0003-C3E8-1@view) and a dictionary (dictionaria.clld.org/contributions/kalamang), and serves as a document of one of the world’s many endangered languages