Criminal Law- Reckless Endangerment and Coercion- Union Officials May be Liable to Criminal Prosecution in Strike of Essential Public Employees. People v. Vizzini, 78 Misc. 2d 1040, 359 N.Y.S.2d 143 (Sup. Ct. 1974).

Defendants, officers of the Uniformed Firefighters Association (UFA), were charged with reckless endangerment in the second degree, attempted coercion, reckless endangerment of property, and related crimes. The basis of these charges was the five and one-half hour New York City fireman\u27s strike called by defendants despite express Taylor Law prohibitions against strikes by public employees. Defendants moved to dismiss the indictment on the grounds that a strike by firemen could not be the basis of a criminal prosecution, arguing that the Taylor Law provided the exclusive remedies and sanctions for public employee labor disputes. The New York Supreme Court denied defendants\u27 motion to dismiss, and permitted them to plead guilty to one charge of reckless endangerment

Criminal Law- Reckless Endangerment and Coercion- Union Officials May be Liable to Criminal Prosecution in Strike of Essential Public Employees. People v. Vizzini, 78 Misc. 2d 1040, 359 N.Y.S.2d 143 (Sup. Ct. 1974).

Defendants, officers of the Uniformed Firefighters Association (UFA), were charged with reckless endangerment in the second degree, attempted coercion, reckless endangerment of property, and related crimes. The basis of these charges was the five and one-half hour New York City fireman\u27s strike called by defendants despite express Taylor Law prohibitions against strikes by public employees. Defendants moved to dismiss the indictment on the grounds that a strike by firemen could not be the basis of a criminal prosecution, arguing that the Taylor Law provided the exclusive remedies and sanctions for public employee labor disputes. The New York Supreme Court denied defendants\u27 motion to dismiss, and permitted them to plead guilty to one charge of reckless endangerment

Harmonic hopping, and both punctuated and gradual evolution of acoustic characters in Selasphorus hummingbird tail-feathers.

Models of character evolution often assume a single mode of evolutionary change, such as continuous, or discrete. Here I provide an example in which a character exhibits both types of change. Hummingbirds in the genus Selasphorus produce sound with fluttering tail-feathers during courtship. The ancestral character state within Selasphorus is production of sound with an inner tail-feather, R2, in which the sound usually evolves gradually. Calliope and Allen's Hummingbirds have evolved autapomorphic acoustic mechanisms that involve feather-feather interactions. I develop a source-filter model of these interactions. The 'source' comprises feather(s) that are both necessary and sufficient for sound production, and are aerodynamically coupled to neighboring feathers, which act as filters. Filters are unnecessary or insufficient for sound production, but may evolve to become sources. Allen's Hummingbird has evolved to produce sound with two sources, one with feather R3, another frequency-modulated sound with R4, and their interaction frequencies. Allen's R2 retains the ancestral character state, a ∼1 kHz "ghost" fundamental frequency masked by R3, which is revealed when R3 is experimentally removed. In the ancestor to Allen's Hummingbird, the dominant frequency has 'hopped' to the second harmonic without passing through intermediate frequencies. This demonstrates that although the fundamental frequency of a communication sound may usually evolve gradually, occasional jumps from one character state to another can occur in a discrete fashion. Accordingly, mapping acoustic characters on a phylogeny may produce misleading results if the physical mechanism of production is not known

Simulated Economic Impact of TED Regulations on Selected Vessels in the Texas Shrimp Fishery

Shrimp fishermen trawling in the Gulf of Mexico and south Atlantic inadvertently capture and kill sea turtles which are classified as endangered species. Recent legislation requires the use of a Turtle Excluder Device(TED) which, when in place in the shrimp trawl, reduces sea turtle mortality. The impact of the TED on shrimp production is not known. This intermediate analysis of the TED regulations using an annual firm level simulation model indicated that the average Texas shrimp vessel had a low probability of being an economic success before regulations were enacted. An assumption that the TED regulations resulted in decreased production aggravated this condition and the change in Ending Net Worth and Net Present Value of Ending Net Worth before and after a TED was placed in the net was significant at the 5 percent level. However, the difference in the Internal Rate of Return for the TED and non-TED simulations was not significant unless the TED caused a substantial change in catch. This analysis did not allow for interactions between the fishermen in the shrimp industry, an assumption which could significantly alter the impact of TED use on the catch and earnings of the individual shrimp vessel

Personalization of Saliency Estimation

Most existing saliency models use low-level features or task descriptions when generating attention predictions. However, the link between observer characteristics and gaze patterns is rarely investigated. We present a novel saliency prediction technique which takes viewers' identities and personal traits into consideration when modeling human attention. Instead of only computing image salience for average observers, we consider the interpersonal variation in the viewing behaviors of observers with different personal traits and backgrounds. We present an enriched derivative of the GAN network, which is able to generate personalized saliency predictions when fed with image stimuli and specific information about the observer. Our model contains a generator which generates grayscale saliency heat maps based on the image and an observer label. The generator is paired with an adversarial discriminator which learns to distinguish generated salience from ground truth salience. The discriminator also has the observer label as an input, which contributes to the personalization ability of our approach. We evaluate the performance of our personalized salience model by comparison with a benchmark model along with other un-personalized predictions, and illustrate improvements in prediction accuracy for all tested observer groups

WAYLA - Generating Images from Eye Movements

We present a method for reconstructing images viewed by observers based only on their eye movements. By exploring the relationships between gaze patterns and image stimuli, the "What Are You Looking At?" (WAYLA) system learns to synthesize photo-realistic images that are similar to the original pictures being viewed. The WAYLA approach is based on the Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (Conditional GAN) image-to-image translation technique of Isola et al. We consider two specific applications - the first, of reconstructing newspaper images from gaze heat maps, and the second, of detailed reconstruction of images containing only text. The newspaper image reconstruction process is divided into two image-to-image translation operations, the first mapping gaze heat maps into image segmentations, and the second mapping the generated segmentation into a newspaper image. We validate the performance of our approach using various evaluation metrics, along with human visual inspection. All results confirm the ability of our network to perform image generation tasks using eye tracking data

Knowledge and the Objection to Religious Belief from Cognitive Science

A large chorus of voices has grown around the claim that theistic belief is epistemically suspect since, as some cognitive scientists have hypothesized, such beliefs are a byproduct of cognitive mechanisms which evolved for rather different adaptive purposes. This paper begins with an overview of the pertinent cognitive science followed by a short discussion of some relevant epistemic concepts. Working from within a largely Williamsonian framework, we then present two different ways in which this research can be formulated into an argument against theistic belief. We argue that neither version work