qns to be answered!

1. what is the main purpose behind this research? more important to me, who funded it? ;)

To me it seems like they are conducting some experiments on humpback whales. but can anyone write in the comments more about it if you know anything..

2. What does cognition mean?
While reading the above article I came across this word called cognition. Though I have a hunch about what cognition is, I wanted to find out what exactly the defintion of cognition is. here is what i found:

American Heritage Stedman's Medical Dictionary :
The mental faculty of knowing, which includes perceiving, recognizing, conceiving, judging, reasoning, and imagining.

American Heritage Dictionary
The mental process of knowing, including aspects such as awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment.

As always of course, there is a hell lot of information on wikipedia. The root of the word seems to be Latin: cognoscere, "to know". The same root gives rise to words like recognition. now, this recognition is re-knowing. This essentially means that we must have encountered that entity whichever we are "recognizing" earlier. I wonder then what that process of storing a new entity called. Can anyone tell what that word is? I believe registering is one thing. But there ought to be a better word.

3. When do we start recognizing the things around us?
I didnt do much research on this topic. But this is just a random question, when do we start recognizing things around us. Moreover, when do we start cognition process? another philosophical question is, when do we recognize ourselves? for eg., if a kid looks himself into the mirror, does he realize it is himself, or does he think it is someone else? when does he start recognizing that it is himself?

4. what is the rationale behind airline code shares?
huh! this topic came up when Aditya (San Diego) and I were discussing about miles and connecting flights. What are code shares, how does airlines benefit from code shares? As is my belief, for every such reasons, there got to be a economy related reason. So i ventured out to find out why this is so. guess what, wiki has an article on it. From airlines perspective it does make sense to have code sharing. Earlier only small airliners used to do that since major airlines must have thought that it is not necessary. this might be because they were already flying to many places. Even though code sharing is good for airlines and most of the times for a traveller, it might not be the best all the times for traveller. Here is an article on why it might be so.