SUMMARY: A review of the theory and practice of the two‐stage triangle test for the sensory perception of small differences leads to the conclusion that its disadvantages usually outweigh its advantages. When the test is used its information content is difficult to assess; and a “least objectional” method, based on a scoring scheme and statistical significance procedures, is here proposed.

In experiments in which two groups of animals of different mean body weight are compared, individual organ weights of the animals can be expressed as absolute weights, as fractional weights, or as absolute weights statistically regressed onto constant body weights. The second, and commonest, mode of expression involves the assumption that the part is directly proportional to the whole, and this is shown to be unlikely for all organs except the muscle mass. Practical as well as theoretical justifications for the use of regressed weights (which utilize the actual slope of the line relating the organ weight to the whole) are given.The experimental data are from white rats kept for 4 weeks in a warm (30 °C.) or a cold (6 °C.) environment. It is shown that cold adaptation had no effect on brain, genitals, and lung weights, but that it reduced the growth of muscle, pelt, fat, skeleton, spleen, and thymus, and that it hypertrophied the liver, intestine, kidney, heart, and adrenals. Apparently cold acclimated rats are smaller than the controls mainly because they have a smaller muscle mass.

No abstract

Generalization of the ellipse tois credited to Gabriel Lamé, the 19th-century French physicist and the eponym of this family of curves. Lamé curves have recently been taken out of mathematical limbo due to their appeal to certain designers and architects. Particularly to be mentioned is Piet Hein, the contemporary Danish poet-designer-scientist (and inventor of mathematical games) who rediscovered the curves and has been using “superellipses” (Lamé curves with n > 2, and therefore oval) in objets d’art, furniture, pottery, fabric patterns, and so on. His major achievement to date is a sunken oval shopping plaza, promenade, and pool in the centre of Stockholm; its shape is a superellipse with and . Derivatively, Gerald Robinson, a Toronto architect, has incorporated a superelliptic parking garage into a shopping complex (called a Superblock) in downtown Peterborough, Ontario; the parameters are and n = 2.71828 … (the exponential coefficient). In such urban contexts the two-parameter super-ellipse is efficiently tailorable to the dimensions of the site. It is said to be very elegant.

No abstract