Frontal Eye Field Neurons Assess Visual Stability Across Saccades

The image on the retina may move because the eyes move, or because something in the visual scene moves. The brain is not fooled by this ambiguity. Even as we make saccades, we are able to detect whether visual objects remain stable or move. Here we test whether this ability to assess visual stability across saccades is present at the single-neuron level in the frontal eye field (FEF), an area that receives both visual input and information about imminent saccades. Our hypothesis was that neurons in the FEF report whether a visual stimulus remains stable or moves as a saccade is made. Monkeys made saccades in the presence of a visual stimulus outside of the receptive field. In some trials, the stimulus remained stable, but in other trials, it moved during the saccade. In every trial, the stimulus occupied the center of the receptive field after the saccade, thus evoking a reafferent visual response. We found that many FEF neurons signaled, in the strength and timing of their reafferent response, whether the stimulus had remained stable or moved. Reafferent responses were tuned for the amount of stimulus translation, and, in accordance with human psychophysics, tuning was better (more prevalent, stronger, and quicker) for stimuli that moved perpendicular, rather than parallel, to the saccade. Tuning was sometimes present as well for nonspatial transaccadic changes (in color, size, or both). Our results indicate that FEF neurons evaluate visual stability during saccades and may be general purpose detectors of transaccadic visual change

An examination of sectoral mobility in the UK labour force

Sectoral movements are more volatile than residential migration. Residential migrations, even those over a relatively short distance need considerable time for movers to analyze, weigh the costs and benefits, and then further time to plan and execute the move. Whereas sectoral labour movements can be undertaken quite quickly and are thus capable of responding with greater immediacy to economic pulses. This paper describes a comparison of residential and sectoral labour movement between 1989 and 2005 based upon UK Labour Force Survey data. The dataset extracted provides those labour counts which had moved residence within the past year and also those who had moved sector within the past year. The sectoral transfer data shows much greater volatility during the 1989- 1995 'Economic Shock'. An examination by correlation matrix reveals the unique degree to which the construction industry is connected (in terms of sectoral transfer) to the other industry sectors

What can happiness research tell us about altruism? Evidence from the German Socio-Economic Panel

Much progress has been made in recent years on developing and applying a direct measure of utility using survey questions on subjective well-being. In this paper we explore whether this new type of measurement can be fruitfully applied to the study of interdependent utility in general, and altruism between parents and adult children who moved away from home in particular. We introduce an appropriate econometric methodology and, using data from the German SocioEconomic Panel for the years 2000-2004, find that the parents’ self-reported happiness depends positively on the happiness of their adult children. A one standard deviation move in the child’s happiness has the same effect as a 45 percent move in household income.utility interdependence, sympathy, extended family, fixed effects

Three spatial conditions

The purpose of this thesis is to enable the viewer to participate in spatial conditions and to indicate space time. The influence of Will Insley during the fall of 1968, followed by a study of the writings of Mondrian, helped to clarify an earlier interest in environmental relationships and awareness of movement through space. Mr. Insley's reiteration of the nature and effect of scale and space enabled this student to gain use of these two elements, and to move, independently, into an understanding of space time. As space may be enclosed, segmented, compressed, and extended, so may time be "staked out," directed, speeded-up, and dissipated. Space and time were found to be interdependent and interchangeable. (Height and width could be reduced to space and/or time.) When space was compressed it seemed to become active, and to move vertically. As one moved in space one seemed to move in time; as one moved in time (physically or mentally) one seemed to be "thrown out" into space. Space and time united in a four-dimensional reality: space time

Controlling Individual Domain Walls in Ferromagnetic Nanowires for Memory and Sensor Applications

Controlled motion of 180o and 360o domain walls along planar nanowires is presented. Standard Landau – Lifshitz micromagnetic modeling has been used to simulate the response of the domain walls to the application of an external magnetic field. A 180o wall is quickly and easily moved with the application of an applied. field along the axis of the wire but a 360odomain wall is stationary in the same case. An oscillatory applied field can be used to continually move the wall along the wires axis. The speed at which the 360o domain wall is found to be several times slower than a similar 180o domain wall and is limited by interaction between the magnetization of the domain wall and the external field

Job and Housing Tenure and the Journey to Work

Tenure at jobs and houses, along with commuting patterns between home and work were studied for residents of metropolitan Washington. Two alternative potential outcomes were considered: (1) Because moving or switching jobs can be used as an opportunity to reduce commuting duration in an era of rising congestion, those who recently moved or changed jobs should have shorter than average commutes; and (2) Because most new residential construction is at the urban fringe, an area of longer commutes, those who recently moved to new homes should have longer commutes. Evaluation of the effect of commuting duration on job and housing tenure suggests that those who move on average maintain commute duration rather than having a major increase or decrease. This corroborates the idea that there are offsetting factors, where increases in commute lengths due to suburbanizing residences are counteracted by the correlated process of suburbanizing jobs. .

Efficient Multi-Robot Motion Planning for Unlabeled Discs in Simple Polygons

We consider the following motion-planning problem: we are given $m$ unit discs in a simple polygon with $n$ vertices, each at their own start position, and we want to move the discs to a given set of $m$ target positions. Contrary to the standard (labeled) version of the problem, each disc is allowed to be moved to any target position, as long as in the end every target position is occupied. We show that this unlabeled version of the problem can be solved in $O(n\log n+mn+m^2)$ time, assuming that the start and target positions are at least some minimal distance from each other. This is in sharp contrast to the standard (labeled) and more general multi-robot motion-planning problem for discs moving in a simple polygon, which is known to be strongly NP-hard

Cosmopolitan cities: the frontier in the twenty-first century?

abstract: People with independent (vs. interdependent) social orientation place greater priority on personal success, autonomy, and novel experiences over maintaining ties to their communities of origin. Accordingly, an independent orientation should be linked to a motivational proclivity to move to places that offer economic opportunities, freedom, and diversity. Such places are cities that can be called “cosmopolitan.” In support of this hypothesis, Study 1 found that independently oriented young adults showed a preference to move to cosmopolitan rather than noncosmopolitan cities. Study 2 used a priming manipulation and demonstrated a causal impact of independence on residential preferences for cosmopolitan cities. Study 3 established ecological validity by showing that students who actually moved to a cosmopolitan city were more independent than those who either moved to a noncosmopolitan city or never moved. Taken together, the findings illuminate the role of cosmopolitan settlement in the contemporary cultural change toward independence and have implications for urban development and economic growth.View the article as published at http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01459/ful

Self-organizing search lists using probabilistic back-pointers

A class of algorithms is given for maintaining self-organizing sequential search lists, where the only permutation applied is to move the accessed record of each search some distance towards the front of the list. During searches, these algorithms retain a back-pointer to a previously probed record in order to determine the destination of the accessed record's eventual move. The back-pointer does not traverse the list, but rather it is advanced occationally to point to the record just probed by the search algorithm. This avoids the cost of a second traversal through a significant portion of the list, which may be a significant savings when each record access may require a new page to be brought into primary memory. Probabilistic functions for deciding when to advance the pointer are presented and analyzed. These functions demonstrate average case complexities of measures such as asymptotic cost and convergence similar to some of the more common list update algorithms in the literature. In cases where the accessed record is moved forward a distance proportional to the distance to the front of the list, the use of these functions may save up to 50% of the time required for permuting the list