02322nas a2200193   4500008004100000022001300041245003900054210003800093260005900131300001400190490000700204520179800211653001702009653001602026653001202042653001502054100002102069856003802090       1999                        eng d  a0030129900aAre There General Laws in Ecology?0 aAre There General Laws in Ecology  bBlackwell Publishing on behalf of Nordic Society Oikos  a177–1920 v843 aThe dictionary definition of a law is: "Generalized formulation based on a series of events or processes observed to recur regularly under certain conditions; a widely observable tendency". I argue that ecology has numerous laws in this sense of the word, in the form of widespread, repeatable patterns in nature, but hardly any laws that are universally true. Typically, in other words, ecological patterns and the laws, rules and mechanisms that underpin them are contingent on the organisms involved, and their environment. This contingency is manageable at a relatively simple level of ecological organisation (for example the population dynamics of single and small numbers of species), and re-emerges also in a manageable form in large sets of species, over large spatial scales, or over long time periods, in the form of detail-free statistical patterns - recently called 'macroecology'. The contingency becomes overwhelmingly complicated at intermediate scales, characteristic of community ecology, where there are a large number of case histories, and very little other than weak, fuzzy generalisations. These arguments are illustrated by focusing on examples of typical studies in community ecology, and by way of contrast, on the macroecological relationship that emerges between local species richness and the size of the regional pool of species. The emergent pattern illustrated by local vs regional richness plots is extremely simple, despite the vast number of contingent processes and interactions involved in its generation. To discover general patterns, laws and rules in nature, ecology may need to pay less attention to the 'middle ground' of community ecology, relying less on reductionism and experimental manipulation, but increasing research efforts into macroecology.10abiodiversity10acommunities10aecology10asaturation1 aLawton, John, H.  uhttp://dx.doi.org/10.2307/354671202034nas a2200193   4500008004100000245006000041210005100101260001000152300001400162490000700176520151400183653000801697653001701705653001601722653001601738100001601754700001801770856005201788       1999                        eng d00aIs the sine-wave speech cocktail party worth attending?0 asinewave speech cocktail party worth attending  cApril  a159–1740 v273 aListeners are remarkably adept at recognising speech that has undergone extensive spectral reduction. Natural speech can be reproduced using as few as three time-varying sinusoids mimicking the corresponding speech formants. Untrained listeners are able to transcribe this &lsquo;sine-wave' speech with a high degree of reliability. Coherent phonetic percepts generated by sine-wave speech occur despite an apparent lack of those cues on which low level auditory grouping processes are believed to operate. Consequently, it has been proposed that speech perception is governed by processes operating independently of those described by auditory scene analysis. This paper re-examines the evidence provided by previous perceptual studies of sine-wave speech and presents new data, from perceptual studies employing stimuli constructed from simultaneous sine-wave wave speech sources. These new studies suggest that in conditions that are closer to those of everyday listening, grouping cues have an important role in the formation of coherent speech percepts. In conjunction with these perceptual studies, results from automatic segregation and recognition tasks suggest that sine-wave speech contains sufficient low level, non speech-specific, structure to allow partial descriptions of sine-wave sources to be recovered from two-source mixtures. It is argued that these partial descriptions may be sufficient to account for the limited intelligibility observed in two-source sine-wave speech listening tests.10aasr10abioacoustics10apartyeffect10arecognition1 aBarker, Jon1 aCooke, Martin  uhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0167-6393(98)00081-8