The Territorial Temptation: A Siren Song at Sea

Siren Song of Segmentation

Tangled ecosystem models: the temptation of siren songs and silence

At a meeting on marine ecosystem modelling held in Barcelona in November 2010, a wide range of tools were introduced by their developers. An officer of the European Commission was invited to the meeting as a key client of these tools, and he severely criticized the tools presented as being useless. This criticism led to a strong reaction by the modellers and an interesting debate. In this paper...

The siren song of implicit change detection.

Although change blindness could suggest that observers represent far less of their visual world than their conscious experience leads them to believe, they could fail to detect changes even if they fully represent all details. Reports of implicit change detection in the absence of awareness are consistent with the notion that observers' representations are more complete than previously thought....

The siren song of simple tools that predict mortality.

Hippocrates recognized that determining a patient’s prognosis is one of physicians’ most important responsibilities.1 Although research on prognosis has been outpaced by that on etiology and therapy, scientists have made great strides in characterizing the risk factors for death across all areas of medicine.2 However, this deeper understanding of prognosis comes at the expense of simplicity; in...

The siren song of vocal fundamental frequency for romantic relationships

A multitude of factors contribute to why and how romantic relationships are formed as well as whether they ultimately succeed or fail. Drawing on evolutionary models of attraction and speech production as well as integrative models of relationship functioning, this review argues that paralinguistic cues (more specifically the fundamental frequency of the voice) that are initially a strong sourc...