Why vocal production of atypical sounds in apes and its cerebral correlates have a lot to say about the origin of language

Ackermann et al. mentioned the "acquisition of species-atypical sounds" in apes without any discussions. In our commentary, we demonstrate that these atypical sounds in chimpanzees not only include laryngeal sounds but also have a major significance regarding the origins of language, if we consider looking at their context of use, their social properties, their relations with gestures, their lateralization and their neurofunctional correlates as well

Desugaring JML Method Specifications

JML, which stands for ``Java Modeling Language,\u27\u27 is a behavioral interface specification language (BISL) designed to specify Java modules. JML features a great deal of syntactic sugar that is designed to make method specifications more expressive. This paper presents a desugaring process that boils down all of the syntactic sugars in JML method specifications into a much simpler form. This desugaring will help one understand the meaning of these sugars, for example for use in program verification. It may also help manipulation of JML method specifications by tools

Flexible Invariants Through Semantic Collaboration

Modular reasoning about class invariants is challenging in the presence of dependencies among collaborating objects that need to maintain global consistency. This paper presents semantic collaboration: a novel methodology to specify and reason about class invariants of sequential object-oriented programs, which models dependencies between collaborating objects by semantic means. Combined with a simple ownership mechanism and useful default schemes, semantic collaboration achieves the flexibility necessary to reason about complicated inter-object dependencies but requires limited annotation burden when applied to standard specification patterns. The methodology is implemented in AutoProof, our program verifier for the Eiffel programming language (but it is applicable to any language supporting some form of representation invariants). An evaluation on several challenge problems proposed in the literature demonstrates that it can handle a variety of idiomatic collaboration patterns, and is more widely applicable than the existing invariant methodologies.Comment: 22 page

Review of Perspectives on Self and Comunity in George Eliot: Dorothea\u27s Window

This is a modest book, edited by three people who are so modest that they reveal nothing at all about their identities. It is possible to discover from a footnote on p.159 that it is a product of a conference on George Eliot although further details of that event remain undisclosed. Two of its contributors, however, are well known in George Eliot circles: Barbara Hardy and Felicia Bonaparte. Their essays are certainly worth reading while all the other contributions have something new to say about Eliot\u27s work even if they are by today\u27s standards under-theorized. One looks in vain in the index for any reference to Bakhtin, Barthes, or Hillis Miller, Eagleton, lameson or the French feminists (to cite but a few of the names one would normally expect to find). The book could almost have been written in the 1960s (it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that some of the essays were). But it is not without its merits. The essays by Barbara Hardy and Felicia Bonaparte which open and close the book are characteristically impressive performances. Hardy explores the oft-noted similes and metaphors associated with windows in the novel, paying careful attention to detail and coming down strongly on lesser critics who make the mistake of locating Dorothea\u27s vision of the \u27largeness of the world\u27 in the \u27pearly light\u27 of dawn in chapter 80 in the boudoir rather than the marital bedroom. Bonaparte maps the rivers of passion and time in The Mill on the Floss, charting the multiple worlds created by the complex musical and mythological allusions in the novel and teasing out the antagonism of valid claims which comprise the tragedy of this novel

Are chimpanzees really so poor at understanding imperative pointing? Some new data and an alternative view of canine and ape social cognition

There is considerable interest in comparative research on different species’ abilities to respond to human communicative cues such as gaze and pointing. It has been reported that some canines perform significantly better than monkeys and apes on tasks requiring the comprehension of either declarative or imperative pointing and these differences have been attributed to domestication in dogs. Here we tested a sample of chimpanzees on a task requiring comprehension of an imperative request and show that, though there are considerable individual differences, the performance by the apes rival those reported in pet dogs. We suggest that small differences in methodology can have a pronounced influence on performance on these types of tasks. We further suggest that basic differences in subject sampling, subject recruitment and rearing experiences have resulted in a skewed representation of canine abilities compared to those of monkeys and apes

Apes communicate about absent and displaced objects: methodology matters

Displaced reference is the ability to refer to an item that has been moved (displaced) in space and/or time, and has been called one of the true hallmarks of referential communication. Several studies suggest that nonhuman primates have this capability, but a recent experiment concluded that in a specific situation (absent entities) human infants display displaced reference but chimpanzees do not. Here we show that chimpanzees and bonobos of diverse rearing histories are capable of displaced reference to absent and displaced objects. It is likely that some of the conflicting findings from animal cognition studies are due to relatively minor methodological differences, but are compounded by interpretation errors. Comparative studies are of great importance in elucidating the evolution of human cognition, however, greater care must be taken with methodology and interpretation for these studies to accurately reflect species differences

The plight of the sense-making ape

This is a selective review of the published literature on object-choice tasks, where participants use directional cues to find hidden objects. This literature comprises the efforts of researchers to make sense of the sense-making capacities of our nearest living relatives. This chapter is written to highlight some nonsensical conclusions that frequently emerge from this research. The data suggest that when apes are given approximately the same sense-making opportunities as we provide our children, then they will easily make sense of our social signals. The ubiquity of nonsensical contemporary scientific claims to the effect that humans are essentially--or inherently--more capable than other great apes in the understanding of simple directional cues is, itself, a testament to the power of preconceived ideas on human perception

Possibility of the tunneling time determination

We show that it is impossible to determine the time a tunneling particle spends under the barrier. However, it is possible to determine the asymptotic time, i.e., the time the particle spends in a large area including the barrier. We propose a model of time measurements. The model provides a procedure for calculation of the asymptotic tunneling and reflection times. The model also demonstrates the impossibility of determination of the time the tunneling particle spends under the barrier. Examples for delta-form and rectangular barrier illustrate the obtained results.Comment: 8 figure

Time-of-arrival formalism for the relativistic particle

A suitable operator for the time-of-arrival at a detector is defined for the free relativistic particle in 3+1 dimensions. For each detector position, there exists a subspace of detected states in the Hilbert space of solutions to the Klein Gordon equation. Orthogonality and completeness of the eigenfunctions of the time-of-arrival operator apply inside this subspace, opening up a standard probabilistic interpretation.Comment: 16 pages, no figures, uses LaTeX. The section "Interpretation" has been completely rewritten and some errors correcte