...Can you imagine animals starting a conversation with you, and understanding what you’re saying? People are teaching Bonobos to learn and use language with symbols. Kanzi, the Bonobo, is learning to combine symbols to make words. According to, Speaking Bonobo, it states “Kanzi combined up to 348 symbols to make words.”That’s Crazy! Though these symbols are familiar objects to Kanzi. Animals using symbols to form words is outrageous. However, many people say otherwise. In When Animals Communicate, They Are Not Using “Language” it states “Bonobos are very skilled animals, but they simply do not have the ability to learn or use language.So, can they really learn and use language? Also, Psychologists believe that Kanzi can understand about...
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...13 “IN SEARCH OF THE LOST CHORDATE” FINDING THE ANCESTOR OF VERTEBRATES (AND OURSELVES) 530 million years ago The Cambrian explosion created all the major phyla of animals that we have today. This includes the phyla Chordata (chordates). Primitive forms are creatures with evidence of a notochord, a structural rod of cartilage and neural tissue running down the long axis of the body. This notochord was the early precursor to the spine in vertebrates (animals with a true backbone, like fish), and modern examples of simple chordates include sea squirts and lancelets. Two Cambrian fossil localities are of key importance here: Chengjiang in Yunnan Province, southern China, and the Burgess Shales in the British Columbia Rockies of Canada. Both of these localities have produced fossils classified as chordates. The Chinese forms include the forms Myllokunmingia and Haikouichthys (it has even been suggested these could be primitive vertebrate jawless fish). The Canadian form (somewhat later in the Cambrian period) is Pikaia, which especially resembles the modern lancelet. Event 15 “GET OUT OF THE POOL” EARLY AMPHIBIANS 360 million years ago We are land-living animals with four limbs - so are most of the animals we know and love. But go back in time 400 million years or so, you would not see any such animals. Life was primarily in the sea, which teemed with invertebrates like trilobites (extinct relatives of spiders and crabs) and brachiopods as well as early fish. On land there...
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...Meaning & Nature of Language Introduction Language is the heart of our world. We create our concept of the world by thinking and naming things. Using words helps us communicate effectively in different situations. Without language, we would not be able to communicate at all. Verbal communication is one of life's naturally occurring communication systems. Communication is essential for human beings. Language is the primary way in which adults pass ways of thinking and conversing on to their children. Language is an accumulation of knowledge because we learned everything by somebody through language. Society would have to recreate itself every generation if it could not pass its knowledge on through language. Language is one of the most powerful tools in human communication. Words are meant to establish and maintain friendly contact. Through words, people shape their identities. People can express their feelings, attitudes, and experiences to each other through words. By speaking, information can be give to others about oneself and the world around him/her. In Christine Leong's essay Being A Chink, she describes the power of language. She said, "It gives us identity, personality, social status, and it also creates communities, defining both insiders and outsiders. Language has the ability to heal or to harm, to praise or belittle, to promote peace or even to glorify hate." I believe this is what language is all about. Language has two purposes. Depending...
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...million years ago, they spent much of their time in trees, like there close relatives the primates. Once the early hominids went on ground they stood and walk on two feet. That separated them and the primates. Homo sapiens evolved in Africa more than 150,000 years ago. To understand the history on how did human evolved and how they adapt to their setting. Scientist relies on evidence including fossils, artifacts, and DNA analysis. By understanding these clues and exploring the data it is clear how much we are evolved from one period to the next. In the exbiht Human Origins at the Natural History Museum fossils and DNA gave clues about the earliest members of the human family. Humans were thought to be most related to chimpanzees and bonobos. But the DNA of humans and chimpanzees is 98% the same and 2% different. Many scientists believed the 2% occurred when hominids evolved from living in trees to adapted living on the ground. DNA is considered the identifying mark of a living system such as the human evolution tree. The DNA code is complex in its basic structure. DNA is a double helix structure molecule. It’s like a long ladder and twisted into a spiral structure. DNA molecules are sugar and phosphate forms the sides of the ladder. DNA has four bases: adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine that makes up various sequences. Only one out of every thousand bits of DNA information differs between any two people. This information shapes the development and function of nearly...
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...Edited by Kristen Walker Painemilla, Anthony B. Rylands, Alisa Woofter and Cassie Hughes Edited by Kristen Walker Painemilla, Anthony B. Rylands, Alisa Woofter and Cassie Hughes Conservation International 2011 Crystal Drive, Suite 500 Arlington, VA 22202 USA Tel: +1 703-341-2400 www.conservation.org Editors : Kristen Walker Painemilla, Anthony B. Rylands, Alisa Woofter and Cassie Hughes Cover design Paula K. Rylands, Conservation International : Layout: Kim Meek, Washington, DC Maps [except where noted otherwise] Kellee Koenig, Conservation International : Conservation International is a private, non-profit organization exempt from federal income tax under section 501 c (3) of the Internal Revenue Code. ISBN 978-1-934151-39-6 © 2010 by Conservation International All rights reserved. The designations of geographical entities in this publication, and the presentation of the material, do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of Conservation International or its supporting organizations concerning the legal status of any country, territory, or area, or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. Any opinions expressed in this publication are those of the writers, and do not necessarily reflect those of Conservation International (CI). Suggested citation: Walker Painemilla, K., Rylands, A. B., Woofter, A. and Hughes, C. (eds.). 2010. Indigenous Peoples and Conservation: From Rights to Resource Management. Conservation...
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..."Why is Sex Fun? is the best book on the subject I've read. This lively exploration of our sexual heritage offers fascinating reading for anyone curious about why lovers do what they do." -Diane Ackerman, author of A Natural History of the Senses "I am so jealous of Jared Diamond, for he writes with such an elegant simplicity! Here, he takes a loot at the endlessly fascinating topic of human sexuality His convincing arguments should persuade xm that there are very special reasons why we evolved to use sex for recreation as well as for procreatim whereas most other mammals are denied that pleasure.... It is a great little book, by one of the worlds foremost biological philosophers." -ROGER Shohl Professor of Physiology Monash University Australia "Once again Jared Diamond provides us with answers to questions we may never have stopped to ask, but wish we had. In this long essay Diamond explains that recreational sex, while not unique to humans, is a rare behavior in the animal world. Above all, we learn, sexual activity divorced fron procreation is not only part of what it is to be human, but the very crux of our evolutionary success." -Bettyaxn Kevles. author of Naked to the Bonn Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Centnty The Science Masters Series is a global publishing vonture consisting of original science books written by leading scientists and published by a worldwide team of twenty-six publishers assembled by John Brockman. The series was conceived by Anthony Cheetham of Orion...
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...introducing the major concepts in language study – from how children learn language to why men and women speak differently, through all the key elements of language. This fourth edition has been revised and updated with twenty new sections, covering new accounts of language origins, the key properties of language, text messaging, kinship terms and more than twenty new word etymologies. To increase student engagement with the text, Yule has also included more than fifty new tasks, including thirty involving data analysis, enabling students to apply what they have learned. The online study guide offers students further resources when working on the tasks, while encouraging lively and proactive learning. This is the most fundamental and easy-to-use introduction to the study of language. George Yule has taught Linguistics at the Universities of Edinburgh, Hawai’i, Louisiana State and Minnesota. He is the author of a number of books, including Discourse Analysis (with Gillian Brown, 1983) and Pragmatics (1996). “A genuinely introductory linguistics text, well suited for undergraduates who have little prior experience thinking descriptively about language. Yule’s crisp and thought-provoking presentation of key issues works well for a wide range of students.” Elise Morse-Gagne, Tougaloo College “The Study of Language is one of the most accessible and entertaining introductions to linguistics available. Newly updated with a wealth of material for practice and discussion, it will continue...
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...vengeful return of positivism.” This essay first started as an answer to what I deemed very problematic, i.e. the disputation which I found in bad faith (un-authentic to use a philosophical term or an existentialist term), of the mediatic, dashing Harvard cognitivist/linguist, Steven Pinker, in his article “Neglected novelists, embattled English professors, tenure-less historians, and other struggling denizens of the Humanities, Science is not your Enemy—a plea for an intellectual truce,” (The New Republic--August 19). Then the counter-arguments against Steven Pinker’s conception of the “human animal” developed into an essay arguing that the New Positivism, not science, or technology per say, was the enemy of humanism and its avatars as such. The point is not to become a postmodern anti-scientific Luddite. Genomics are changing the world in ways we barely imagine yet and will re-define what it means to be human (a becoming already imagined by science fiction writers, social critics and critical thinkers such as the feminist Donna Haraway with her “Cyborg”). The point is also not to turn “anti-brainiac.” Without a brain we would become vegetative, a vegetal…, i.e. a purely “natural body,” a “zombie.” If we make use of this “computer” allegory which is an analog but not a homologue, and which is used ad nauseam used by psycho-biologists, without a hard-drive there is no software. But is this a reason to say that the software is but the direct emanation/product/reproduction or even...
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...once humankind spread throughout the world, why did different populations in different locations have such different histories? The modern world has been shaped by conquest, epidemics, and genocide, the ingredients of which arose first in Eurasia. The book’s premise is that those ingredients required the development of agriculture. Agriculture also arose first in Eurasia, not because Eurasians were superior in any way to people of other continents, but because of a unique combination of naturally occurring advantages, including more and more suitable wild crops and animals to domesticate, a larger land mass with fewer barriers to the spread of people, crops, and technology, and an east-west axis which meant that climate was similar across the region. The book is well written and contains not only information about the history of cultures around the world, but excellent descriptions of the scientific methodologies used to study them, from how archeologists study the origin of agriculture to how writing evolved to how linguistics can trace the movements of peoples across huge geographic areas. There are useful examples, maps and charts throughout, which make principles discussed in the body easy to visualize and compare. The appendix includes a chapter by chapter list of further readings on topics discussed. By the time of the beginning of Europe’s worldwide expansion (1500 AD), cultures on different continents showed huge differences in political and technological...
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...NOTE: This PDF document has a handy set of “bookmarks” for it, which are accessible by pressing the Bookmarks tab on the left side of this window. ***************************************************** We are the last. The last generation to be unaugmented. The last generation to be intellectually alone. The last generation to be limited by our bodies. We are the first. The first generation to be augmented. The first generation to be intellectually together. The first generation to be limited only by our imaginations. We stand both before and after, balancing on the razor edge of the Event Horizon of the Singularity. That this sublime juxtapositional tautology has gone unnoticed until now is itself remarkable. We're so exquisitely privileged to be living in this time, to be born right on the precipice of the greatest paradigm shift in human history, the only thing that approaches the importance of that reality is finding like minds that realize the same, and being able to make some connection with them. If these books have influenced you the same way that they have us, we invite your contact at the email addresses listed below. Enjoy, Michael Beight, piman_314@yahoo.com Steven Reddell, cronyx@gmail.com Here are some new links that we’ve found interesting: KurzweilAI.net News articles, essays, and discussion on the latest topics in technology and accelerating intelligence. SingInst.org The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence: think tank devoted to increasing...
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...Utah State University DigitalCommons@USU Family, Consumer, and Human Development Faculty Publications 12-1-1995 Family, Consumer, and Human Development, Department of Sexual Selection, Physical Attractiveness, and Facial Neoteny: Cross-cultural Evidence and Implications [and Comments and Reply] Doug Jones C. Loring Brace William Jankowiak Kevin N. Laland Lisa E. Musselman See next page for additional authors Recommended Citation Musselman, L. E., Langlois, J. H., & Roggman, L. A. (1996). Comment on: Sexual selection, physical attractiveness, and facial neoteny: Cross-cultural evidence and implications, by Doug Jones. Current Anthropology, 37, 739-740. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Family, Consumer, and Human Development, Department of at DigitalCommons@USU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Family, Consumer, and Human Development Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@USU. For more information, please contact digitalcommons@usu.edu. Authors Doug Jones, C. Loring Brace, William Jankowiak, Kevin N. Laland, Lisa E. Musselman, Judith H. Langlois, Lori A. Roggman, Daniel Pérusse, Barbara Schweder, and Donald Symons This article is available at DigitalCommons@USU: http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/fchd_facpub/602 Sexual Selection, Physical Attractiveness, and Facial Neoteny: Cross-cultural Evidence and Implications [and Comments and Reply] Author(s): Doug Jones, C. Loring Brace, William Jankowiak...
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...Customized for: Isaac (illin@mednet.ucla.edu) THE INTRODUCTION Vault Guide to Schmoozing Customized for: Isaac (illin@mednet.ucla.edu) 2 © 2009 Vault.com, Inc. Introduction What does schmoozing sound like to you? Maybe it sounds smug, unctuous, oily, slimy. It sounds, quite frankly, like 'oozing.' Schmoozing is far from slimy, but 'oozing' actually isn’t a bad description of what a schmoozer does. A schmoozer slides into opportunities where none are apparent, developing friendships from the slightest of acquaintances. Through formless, oozy, schmoozy action, a schmoozer moves slowly but inexorably towards his or her goals. What is schmoozing? Schmoozing is noticing people, connecting with them, keeping in touch with them — and benefiting from relationships with them. Schmoozing is about connecting with people in a mutually productive and pleasurable way — a skill that has taken on new importance in our fragmented, harried, fiber-optic-laced world. Schmoozing is the development of a support system, a web of people you know who you can call, and who can call you, for your mutual benefit and enjoyment. Schmoozing is the art of semi-purposeful conversation: half chatter, half exploration. Schmoozing is neither project nor process. It's a way of life. How does schmoozing differ from networking? Conventional networking is the clammy science of collecting business cards ad infinitum, of cold-calling near strangers to grill them about possible openings in their places...
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...The Power of Eye Contact Your Secret for Success in Business, Love, and Life Michael Ellsberg For Jena May I gaze into your eyes forever . . . los ojos . . . mudas lenguas de amorios. ( . . . the eyes, silent tongues of love.) —MIGUEL DE CERVANTES, from Don Quijote1 Contents Cover Title Page Epigraph A Note to Readers Introduction Chapter One - What Bill Clinton Knows About Eye Contact Chapter Two - How to Become a Master of Eye Chapter Three - Eye Flirting, Part I Chapter Four - Eye Flirting, Part II Chapter Five - The Eyes Are the Windows to the Sale Chapter Six - How to Wow a Crowd with Eye Contact Chapter Seven - If Looks Could Kill Chapter Eight - Truth and Eyes Chapter Nine - Eye Love You Chapter Ten - Gazing at the Divine Chapter Eleven - Going Deeper Epilogue Ralph Waldo Emerson on Eyes and Eye Contact Notes Works Cited Interviewees Free Bonus Material for Readers Acknowledgments About the Author Advance Praise for The Power of Eye Contact Copyright About the Publisher A Note to Readers I welcome your comments, questions, critiques, feedback, corrections, stories, experiences, and anecdotes. Please write to me at michael@powerofeyecontact.com. I won’t answer everything personally, but I will read it all and will answer the most interesting questions and queries. I may also post your questions, stories, or anecdotes on the book’s blog, www.powerofeyecontact.com/blog. So when you write, let me know if you’re OK with that, and if so, how you’d...
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