The Reconstruction of Southern Debtors: Bankruptcy After the Civil War

$outhern$elf-protection Debtors invoked federal law to protect businesses Bankruptcy in the United States reflects two quintessentially American themes. First, with apologies to H.L. Mencken and Puritanism, it reflects the belief that somewhere, someone is getting away with lega...

Not Enough? An Examination of China’s Compliance with the Intentions of the TRIPS Accord

As China is in its third year as a member of the World Trade organization, there is much anticipation as to whether its protection of intellectual property rights is up to international standards. Being one of the largest trading nations in the world, much attention has been given to China’s development since its accession to the WTO. The US Chamber of Commerce has recently made a visit to China in order to examine its progress on implementing WTO rules and the WTO’s Sixth Session of the Ministerial Conference will be hosted by Hong Kong, China. As an increasing amount of foreign direct investment is being poured into the PRC, there remains much concern as to protection of intellectual property rights within the state. This paper examines the development and efforts China has made to its intellectual property laws and whether it lives up to the intentions of the WTO’s Trade Related Agreement on Intellectual Property Rights

On-The-Fly Measurement Unit Conversion

Mobile devices include features to provide translation of text, audio, and video between languages. Multimodal translation enables users to interpret information in languages that they do not understand by having it automatically translated to their preferred language. However, current translation techniques do not convert measurement units. This disclosure describes techniques that provide on-the-fly conversion of measurement units and currency based on user preference. The user can specify their preferred unit for temperature, weight, distance, etc. as well as their preferred currency. When providing a translation or otherwise displaying text, the user device can automatically detect information that is in a different measurement unit and provide a translation to the user’s preferred unit

Task-driven influences on fixational eye movements

There is now compelling evidence that the spatiotemporal remapping carried out by fixational eye movements (FEMs) is an essential step in visual processing. Moreover, the overall Brownian-like statistics of FEMs are calibrated to map fine spatial detail into the temporal frequency range to which retinal circuitry is tuned. Here, we tested the hypothesis that the detailed spatial characteristics of FEMs can be adjusted to task demands via cognitive influences that operate even in the absence of a visual stimulus. We examined FEMs in a task that required subjects (N=6) to report which of two letters was displayed. Trials were blocked; in each block, the letter pair was known in advance: H vs. N or E vs. F. The task was demanding: letters were 1.5 deg and embedded in 1/f noise, and had a contrast that yielded ~75% correct performance. Note that the HN discrimination could be accomplished by identification of either a horizontal or oblique contour, but the EF discrimination required identification of a horizontal contour. Thus, in the EF blocks, only a vertical ocular drift would be expected to maximize the neural signal. For each condition, FEM velocity statistics, which were approximately Gaussian, were characterized by their covariance. As predicted, the ratio of velocity variance in the vertical vs. oblique direction was greater in EF trials than in HN trials. This difference was greater when no stimulus was present (20% of trials in each block), indicating open-loop control. We also found that single-trial drift trajectories could be decoded by a simple decoder to identify the task (HN vs. EF) at above-chance levels in most subjects. While the observed covariance patterns showed substantial inter-subject variability, we found that a single transformation, applied with subject-specific strengths, could largely account for all subjects’ findings. Critically, this shared transformation acts holistically on the plane, rather than individually on horizontal and vertical axes. In sum, we find that knowledge of the specific requirements of a visual task exerts fine-tuned open-loop control over ocular drifts, and we characterize the nature of this control