Examines the research of communication in the animal world, exploring how animals use voices to search for a mate, play, locate food, communicate when threatened, and more.

A worldwide journey through the mystery and science of animal communication. Calls Beyond Our Hearing is a fascinating exploration of animals, their voices, and their survival. Traveling from Panama to England, Africa to Puerto Rico, Quebec to America, Holly Menino learns from scientists, explorers, and cutting-edge studies about a wide variety of animal species as they feed, play, fight, mate, and communicate for survival. Voice by voice, researchers assemble the building blocks of animal communication, such as: --How tungara frogs distinguish one mate from thousands of suitors --The purposeful song duets of rare birds in a remote island wilderness --England's iconic red deer and the interloper that is diluting the species --How meerkats gather, warn or help each other, and reject outsiders with vocalizations --The communication of elephants in close groups and across great distances Calls Beyond Our Hearing will engage anyone interested in the musical world of creatures, and what animal communication can teach us about our own voices and songs.

Hearing loss doesn’t come with an operating manual—until now. If you have hearing loss, you already know that the conventional approach to treatment is focused on hearing-aid technology. Without a handbook to help you figure out how to actually live with it, you’ve likely been getting by on information pieced together from various sources—and yet, communication often seems incomplete and unsatisfying. What’s missing from this hearing care model is the big picture—a real-life illustration of how hearing loss, its emotions, and its barriers affect every corner of your life. Now, hearing-health advocates, consultants, and speakers Shari Eberts and Gael Hannan offer a new skills-based approach to hearing loss that is centered not on hearing better, but on communicating better. With honesty and humor, they share their own hearing loss journeys, and outline invaluable insights, strategies, and workarounds to help you engage with the world and be heard. You’ll gain tips for navigating all areas impacted by hearing loss, including relationships, work, technology; strategies for adopting a new, empowering mindset towards your hearing loss; and communication behaviors that can make almost any listening situation manageable. Informed by the lived experiences of thousands of people living with hearing loss, and corroborated by hearing science, technological advances, and modern hearing-care principles, Hear & Beyond offers a new way forward to greater connection and engagement—whether you’re new to hearing loss or have been living with it for a long time. Hearing loss is just one aspect of who you are, among many others. You may have hearing loss, but it doesn’t have to have you.

This book will take you on an exciting journey made up of texts and images. Spectacular, large-scale photographs printed on double pages and accompanied by explanatory texts will arouse the reader’s curiosity about evolution’s accomplishments in the world of flying: from the botanical air fleet (pollen grains, flying seeds...), over flying snakes and fish, to penguins flying underwater and humans rising into the air. Mathematician and passionate animal photographer Georg Glaser has joined forces with the experienced evolutionary biologist Hannes Paulus and the exercise physiologist and flight biophysicist Werner Nachtigall in order to approach this topic with words and pictures in a way that is both generally comprehensible and scientifically sound. Double-page by double-page, the book can be read in any order. Cross-references allow to jump easily from one double-page to another. Aside from the detailed introduction to each chapter, the text passages are usually independent from one another, and they discuss crucial moments in the evolutionary process. The double-pages provide additional information on bibliographical references and references to informative websites.

Millions of Americans experience some degree of hearing loss. The Social Security Administration (SSA) operates programs that provide cash disability benefits to people with permanent impairments like hearing loss, if they can show that their impairments meet stringent SSA criteria and their earnings are below an SSA threshold. The National Research Council convened an expert committee at the request of the SSA to study the issues related to disability determination for people with hearing loss. This volume is the product of that study. Hearing Loss: Determining Eligibility for Social Security Benefits reviews current knowledge about hearing loss and its measurement and treatment, and provides an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the current processes and criteria. It recommends changes to strengthen the disability determination process and ensure its reliability and fairness. The book addresses criteria for selection of pure tone and speech tests, guidelines for test administration, testing of hearing in noise, special issues related to testing children, and the difficulty of predicting work capacity from clinical hearing test results. It should be useful to audiologists, otolaryngologists, disability advocates, and others who are concerned with people who have hearing loss.

Intellectual struggles with the "animal question"-- how humans can rethink and reconfigure their relationships with other animals-- first began to take hold in the 1970s. Over the next forty years, scholars from a wide range of fields would make sweeping reevaluations of the relationship between humans and other animals. The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies brings these diverse evaluations together for the first time, paying special attention to the commodification of animals, the degradation of the natural world and a staggering loss of animal habitat and species extinction, and the increasing need for humans to coexist with other animals in urban, rural and natural contexts. Linda Kalof maps these themes into the five major categories that structure this volume: Animals in the Landscape of Law, Politics and Public Policy; Animal Intentionality, Agency and Reflexive Thinking; Animals as Objects in Science, Food, Spectacle and Sport; Animals in Cultural Representations; and Animals in Ecosystems. Written by international scholars with backgrounds in philosophy, law, history, English, art, sociology, geography, archaeology, environmental studies, cultural studies, and animal advocacy, the thirty chapters in this handbook investigate key issues and concepts central to understanding our current relationship with other animals and the potential for coexistence in an ecological community of living beings.

Contemporary psychology believes that there exists an entity, called the mind, whose task is to deliberately control the body. This entity is said to inhabit a dimension that's separate from the physical reality that's occupied by the brain. Were this to be true, then it might be possible for the mind to survive the death of its owner and be imported into another biological or mechanical body, or be elevated into some metaphysical plane. Topographic psychology dispenses with the concept of the mind. Instead, it asserts that the brain is a biological machine that uses an internal world model to transform sensation into movement. This idea renders superfluous the concept of mindedness, and enables human and animal behavior to be calibrated against evolution. A world model largely consists of topographic maps. Among these are a map of the proprietary territory of the brain’s owner and a map of the owner’s bones and muscles. Although the territory exists in the outside world, while the organs exist in the internal world of the body, to the brain, both maps represent pieces of the same reality. Inhabiting the model’s central axis is a neural artifact called the self object, which serves within the owner’s thinking as a proxy for the owner. A transition from sensing to moving is called a decision. Decisions that are made in the brain are facilitated by neural artifacts, which are derived from sensory input, that reside within the world model. There are two fundamental kinds of artifacts, objects and connections, from which larger neural structures are assembled. These include effectors, which represent unitary actions by one party; transactions, which represent reciprocal actions between two parties; polygon stacks, which represent analogies, inferences, and stories; a special polygon stack that represents the owner’s autobiography; pyramids, which represent referents in the outside world; and a special pyramid that represents the self object. In order to promote its owner’s survival, a world model reacts to events in the external world by cycling the body between three physiological states. There are three such states, violence, sex, and work, each of which reconfigures the body so that it can optimally respond to a threat or opportunity.