Applications of oceanography to navigation

Navigators, concerned with the task of maintaining safe and efficient sea communications and faced with everyday difficulties of wind and weather, have to maintain a more practical outlook than oceanographers, who want to understand everything that goes on in the oceans however long they are about it...

Discussions on the relationships between meteorology and oceanography

G. E. R. DEACON: There must be some of you who, like me, did most of their seagoing 20 to 30 years ago and find it difficult to keep pace with the present urgency of introducing more precise reasoning into oceanography. This afternoon\u27s session dealing mainly with such precise arguments has not been easy to follow, and it is clear that there is much serious hard work ahead...

In silico evolutionary developmental neurobiology and the origin of natural language

Abstract. It is justified to assume that part of our genetic endowment contributes to our language skills, yet it is impossible to tell at this moment exactly how genes affect the language faculty. We complement experimental biological studies by an in silico approach in that we simulate the evolution of neuronal networks under selection for language-related skills. At the heart of this project is the Evolutionary Neurogenetic Algorithm (ENGA) that is deliberately biomimetic. The design of the system was inspired by important biological phenomena such as brain ontogenesis, neuron morphologies, and indirect genetic encoding. Neuronal networks were selected and were allowed to reproduce as a function of their performance in the given task. The selected neuronal networks in all scenarios were able to solve the communication problem they had to face. The most striking feature of the model is that it works with highly indirect genetic encoding—just as brains do.