Baseline Update for US Agricultural Markets

This document serves as a mid-year update to the 2007 FAPRI baseline prepared in January 2007. It reflects market developments and incorporates estimate information available in early August 2007.This report examines the impacts of the commodity provisions of the legislation introduced by U.S. Representative Ron Kind entitled the “Food and Agriculture Risk Management for the 21st Century Act of 2007.”Agricultural and Food Policy,

Impacts of the Commodity Provisions of the Food and Agriculture Risk Management for the 21st Century Act of 2007 (FARM 21)

This report examines the impacts of the commodity provisions of the legislation introduced by U.S. Representative Ron Kind entitled the “Food and Agriculture Risk Management for the 21st Century Act of 2007.”Agricultural and Food Policy,

The Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008: Preliminary Analysis of Selected Provisions

This report provides preliminary analysis of impacts of selected Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008 (FCEA) provisions.Agricultural and Food Policy, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

An instinct for detection: psychological perspectives on CCTV surveillance

The aim of this article is to inform and stimulate a proactive, multidisciplinary approach to research and development in surveillance-based detective work. In this article we review some of the key psychological issues and phenomena that practitioners should be aware of. We look at how human performance can be explained with reference to our biological and evolutionary legacy. We show how critical viewing conditions can be in determining whether observers detect or overlook criminal activity in video material. We examine situations where performance can be surprisingly poor, and cover situations where, even once confronted with evidence of these detection deficits, observers still underestimate their susceptibility to them. Finally we explain why the emergence of these relatively recent research themes presents an opportunity for police and law enforcement agencies to set a new, multidisciplinary research agenda focused on relevant and pressing issues of national and international importance

Designing authentication with seniors in mind

Developers typically adopt perceived best practice, and in the case of authentication this means password security. However, given the wide range of technical solutions available and the diverse needs and limitations of older users, we suggest that the default adoption of electronic “username and password” authentication may not be 'best practice' or even good practice. This paper highlights some challenges faced by three seniors, each of whom has multiple age- related disabilities and concomitant life challenges. The result is that they cannot authenticate themselves when they need to access their devices and accounts. We conclude by suggesting a number of research directions calculated to address some of these challenges and promote inclusive design and allow for diverse user authentication

Detect the unexpected: a science for surveillance

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to outline a strategy for research development focused on addressing the neglected role of visual perception in real life tasks such as policing surveillance and command and control settings. Approach – The scale of surveillance task in modern control room is expanding as technology increases input capacity at an accelerating rate. The authors review recent literature highlighting the difficulties that apply to modern surveillance and give examples of how poor detection of the unexpected can be, and how surprising this deficit can be. Perceptual phenomena such as change blindness are linked to the perceptual processes undertaken by law-enforcement personnel. Findings – A scientific programme is outlined for how detection deficits can best be addressed in the context of a multidisciplinary collaborative agenda between researchers and practitioners. The development of a cognitive research field specifically examining the occurrence of perceptual “failures” provides an opportunity for policing agencies to relate laboratory findings in psychology to their own fields of day-to-day enquiry. Originality/value – The paper shows, with examples, where interdisciplinary research may best be focussed on evaluating practical solutions and on generating useable guidelines on procedure and practice. It also argues that these processes should be investigated in real and simulated context-specific studies to confirm the validity of the findings in these new applied scenarios

Depth perception not found in human observers for static or dynamic anti-correlated random dot stereograms

One of the greatest challenges in visual neuroscience is that of linking neural activity with perceptual experience. In the case of binocular depth perception, important insights have been achieved through comparing neural responses and the perception of depth, for carefully selected stimuli. One of the most important types of stimulus that has been used here is the anti-correlated random dot stereogram (ACRDS). In these stimuli, the contrast polarity of one half of a stereoscopic image is reversed. While neurons in cortical area V1 respond reliably to the binocular disparities in ACRDS, they do not create a sensation of depth. This discrepancy has been used to argue that depth perception must rely on neural activity elsewhere in the brain. Currently, the psychophysical results on which this argument rests are not clear-cut. While it is generally assumed that ACRDS do not support the perception of depth, some studies have reported that some people, some of the time, perceive depth in some types of these stimuli. Given the importance of these results for understanding the neural correlates of stereopsis, we studied depth perception in ACRDS using a large number of observers, in order to provide an unambiguous conclusion about the extent to which these stimuli support the perception of depth. We presented observers with random dot stereograms in which correlated dots were presented in a surrounding annulus and correlated or anti-correlated dots were presented in a central circular region. While observers could reliably report the depth of the central region for correlated stimuli, we found no evidence for depth perception in static or dynamic anti-correlated stimuli. Confidence ratings for stereoscopic perception were uniformly low for anti-correlated stimuli, but showed normal variation with disparity for correlated stimuli. These results establish that the inability of observers to perceive depth in ACRDS is a robust phenomenon

Behavioral biases when viewing multiplexed scenes:scene structure and frames of reference for inspection

Where people look when viewing a scene has been a much explored avenue of vision research (e.g., see Tatler, 2009). Current understanding of eye guidance suggests that a combination of high and low-level factors influence fixation selection (e.g., Torralba et al., 2006), but that there are also strong biases toward the center of an image (Tatler, 2007). However, situations where we view multiplexed scenes are becoming increasingly common, and it is unclear how visual inspection might be arranged when content lacks normal semantic or spatial structure. Here we use the central bias to examine how gaze behavior is organized in scenes that are presented in their normal format, or disrupted by scrambling the quadrants and separating them by space. In Experiment 1, scrambling scenes had the strongest influence on gaze allocation. Observers were highly biased by the quadrant center, although physical space did not enhance this bias. However, the center of the display still contributed to fixation selection above chance, and was most influential early in scene viewing. When the top left quadrant was held constant across all conditions in Experiment 2, fixation behavior was significantly influenced by the overall arrangement of the display, with fixations being biased toward the quadrant center when the other three quadrants were scrambled (despite the visual information in this quadrant being identical in all conditions). When scenes are scrambled into four quadrants and semantic contiguity is disrupted, observers no longer appear to view the content as a single scene (despite it consisting of the same visual information overall), but rather anchor visual inspection around the four separate “sub-scenes.” Moreover, the frame of reference that observers use when viewing the multiplex seems to change across viewing time: from an early bias toward the display center to a later bias toward quadrant centers