21,359 research outputs found
Climate and Human Progress: Being Human: Putting People in an Evolutionary Perspective by Mary & John Gribbin, 1993, London: J.M. Dent. 292pp.
Honour subcultures and the reciprocal model
Tests of models of reciprocal interactions of testosterone and behaviour patterns in honour subcultures, if based on adult samples measured at a single point in time, would be aided by measures of behaviour in such samples that indirectly index basal testosterone levels at earlier developmental ages, for example, hand preference and other measures of cerebral dominance. Such models raise questions about the social preconditions of honour subcultures, and their indirect effects on health
Social Perspectives of Language Evolution: A review of The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Social Function and the Origins of Linguistic Form, edited by Chris Knight, Michael StuddertKennedy & James R. Hurford, 2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Can the Archaeology of Manual Specialization Tell Us Anything About Language Evolution? A Survey of the State of Play
In this review and position paper we explore the neural substrates for manual specialization and their possible connection with language and speech. We focus on two contrasting hypotheses of the origins of language and manual specialization: the language-first scenario and the tool-use-first scenario. Each one makes specific predictions about hand-use in non-human primates, as well as about the necessity of an association between speech adaptations and population-level right-handedness in the archaeological and fossil records. The concept of handedness is reformulated for archaeologists in terms of manual role specialization, using Guiard's model asymmetric bimanual coordination. This focuses our attention on skilled bimanual tasks in which both upper limbs play complementary roles. We review work eliciting non-human primate hand preferences in co-ordinated bimanual tasks, and relevant archaeological data for estimating the presence or absence of a population-level bias to the right hand as the manipulator in extinct hominin species and in the early prehistory of our own species
Water management subsystem specification for space flights of extended time periods. Life support system for space flights of extended time periods
Water management subsystem of life support system for manned space flight specification
A central limit theorem for temporally non-homogenous Markov chains with applications to dynamic programming
We prove a central limit theorem for a class of additive processes that arise
naturally in the theory of finite horizon Markov decision problems. The main
theorem generalizes a classic result of Dobrushin (1956) for temporally
non-homogeneous Markov chains, and the principal innovation is that here the
summands are permitted to depend on both the current state and a bounded number
of future states of the chain. We show through several examples that this added
flexibility gives one a direct path to asymptotic normality of the optimal
total reward of finite horizon Markov decision problems. The same examples also
explain why such results are not easily obtained by alternative Markovian
techniques such as enlargement of the state space.Comment: 27 pages, 1 figur
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