Radically enactive high cognition

I advance the Radically Enactive Cognition (REC) program by developing Hutto & Satne’s (2015) and Hutto & Myin’s (2017) idea that contentful cognition emerges through sociocultural activities, which require a contentless form of intentionality. Proponents of REC then face a functional challenge: what is the function of higher cognitive skills, given the empirical findings that engaging in higher-cognitive activities is not correlated with cognitive amelioration (Kornblith, 2012)? I answer that functional challenge by arguing that higher cognition is an adaptive tool of the social systems we are embedded in, therefore, it is not necessarily aimed at achieving better cognitive states. In order to do so, I suggest interpreting key insights from autopoietic enactivism through REC lenses

A fine-grained approach to scene text script identification

This paper focuses on the problem of script identification in unconstrained scenarios. Script identification is an important prerequisite to recognition, and an indispensable condition for automatic text understanding systems designed for multi-language environments. Although widely studied for document images and handwritten documents, it remains an almost unexplored territory for scene text images. We detail a novel method for script identification in natural images that combines convolutional features and the Naive-Bayes Nearest Neighbor classifier. The proposed framework efficiently exploits the discriminative power of small stroke-parts, in a fine-grained classification framework. In addition, we propose a new public benchmark dataset for the evaluation of joint text detection and script identification in natural scenes. Experiments done in this new dataset demonstrate that the proposed method yields state of the art results, while it generalizes well to different datasets and variable number of scripts. The evidence provided shows that multi-lingual scene text recognition in the wild is a viable proposition. Source code of the proposed method is made available online

Affirmative Action Policies: An International Perspective

human development, culture

When For Better Is For Worse: Immigration Law’s Gendered Impact on Foreign Polygamous Marriage

The United States has banned polygamous immigrants since the late nineteenth century. Enacted amid isolationist fears that an influx of polygamists would cause moral deterioration, the polygamy bar remains a resolute, if often overlooked, feature of modern immigration law. The current immigration scheme continues this tradition, rendering immigrants who intend to practice polygamy in the United States categorically ineligible for legal-permanent-resident status. As a result, the immigration bar allows polygamous men to immigrate with a wife of their choosing and the children from each of their marriages. Their other wives, however, are deemed inadmissible to the United States. This Note explores the immigration bar’s disproportionate effect on the foreign wives of polygamous immigrants. In addition to precluding the other wives of polygamous immigrants from legal permanent-resident status, the current immigration bar also renders such women ineligible for humanitarian ingress. After offering a comparative analysis of how Canada and the United Kingdom reconcile their respective policies against polygamy with the burgeoning question of women’s rights, this Note proposes that Congress likewise treat foreign women in polygamous unions with a degree of equity