将高纬度地区生态系统的反馈与恢复力引入公司决策

本文讨论了在高纬度地区公司所起的作用,它被概念化为以社会和经济为媒介的生态系统,同时指出了商业环境里其他的一些重要的社会参与者.我们列举了高纬地区企业行为的三个案例并对其中各种共性进行了讨论.特别的,我们认为有必要对商业理论和实践进行革新,以使其不只是停留在社会与经济概念的组织恢复力上,而要把高纬地区的生态恢复力也包括到商业管理的目标之中.同时我们也认为区域生态系统的恢复力应该成为衡量企业可持续管理的一个有意义的指标,企业高层可以据此制定和修改企业的管理策略.最后,文章在结尾处呼吁对高纬地区内的跨国公司和国内公司的作用制定更为详细的研究议程.     

Practical environmental monitoring of major construction projects

Independent teams undertook environmental monitoring of particular concentrations of major construction projects forming part of Hong Kong’s U.S. $20 billion airport infrastructure programme located in dense urban areas. The team combination of environmental specialists with experienced civil engineers enabled pragmatic mitigation measures to be developed and accepted by the construction personnel with the result that potentially significant adverse impacts were averted. The authors discuss the mechanism and success of this innovative approach.     

Representation of complex visual stimuli in the brain

A method was developed to investigate transfer properties of neurons in the visual system using pictures of complex visual stimuli. The picture is moved over the receptive field of a neuron so that it can scan it along programmed lines. The activity of the neuron during the scanning procedure is presented in a two-dimensional dot display on scale with the original picture. By superposition of the stimulus and the transfer pattern, one can find out to which detail of a stimulus the neuron responds. Neurons in the first intracerebral relay of the visual system, the lateral geniculate body, reduce a complex stimulus, such as a photograph of a natural environment, to its contours. Cortical cells only respond to contours either of a limited or of a wider range of orientations (simple and complex cells, respectively). But the course of contours is only described by a continuous representation of these contours in the cortical map of the visual field. This is done by the simple cells, which have small receptive fields and thus a higher resolving power, whereas complex cells with their large receptive fields monitor the approximate location of a moving stimulus. The function of these two classes of neurons is discussed in terms of visual behavior, i.e., for fixation, hold, and binocular vergence movements (simple cells), and for detection of moving objects and motor command signals towards these objects (complex cells). These functions are an important condition for foveal vision which is the basis of perception in primates. An important function of orientation sensitivity of simple cells may be the binocular alignment of contours in binocular fusion and stereoscopic vision.