Brief targeted memory reactivation during the awake state enhances memory stability and benefits the weakest memories.

Reactivation of representations corresponding to recent experience is thought to be a critical mechanism supporting long-term memory stabilization. Targeted memory reactivation, or the re-exposure of recently learned cues, seeks to induce reactivation and has been shown to benefit later memory when it takes place during sleep. However, despite recent evidence for endogenous reactivation during post-encoding awake periods, less work has addressed whether awake targeted memory reactivation modulates memory. Here, we found that brief (50 ms) visual stimulus re-exposure during a repetitive foil task enhanced the stability of cued versus uncued associations in memory. The extent of external or task-oriented attention prior to re-exposure was inversely related to cueing benefits, suggesting that an internally-orientated state may be most permissible to reactivation. Critically, cueing-related memory benefits were greatest in participants without explicit recognition of cued items and remained reliable when only considering associations not recognized as cued, suggesting that explicit cue-triggered retrieval processes did not drive cueing benefits. Cueing benefits were strongest for associations and participants with the poorest initial learning. These findings expand our knowledge of the conditions under which targeted memory reactivation can benefit memory, and in doing so, support the notion that reactivation during awake time periods improves memory stabilization

Fact\u27s Fantasies and Feminism\u27s Future: An Analysis of the Fact Brief\u27s Treatment of Pornography Victims

In 1985, a group of women called the Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce ( FACT ) filed a brief that was influential in the Seventh Circuit\u27s decision-subsequently summarily affirmed by the United States Supreme Court-to invalidate Indianapolis\u27 antipornography civil rights ordinance. The brief callously discounted the very existence, and the substance, of extensive victim testimony given by women at the public hearings held in support of the proposed ordinance. Apparently, the writers of the brief existed in a fantasy world, far removed from the lives of women who testified publicly that pornography harmed them. While victim testimony established that women harmed by pornography wanted a civil remedy to empower themselves against makers and users of pornography who had hurt them, FACT\u27s brief stated that the antipornography ordinance was foisted upon women by right-wing men. While victim testimony established that women suffered physical and dignitary harms when they were used to make pornography or coerced to consume pornography, FACT\u27s brief stated that pornography consists of images and fantasies, no more harmful than the bogeyman. While victims testified that their lives were devastated by pornography, FACT\u27s brief argued that a civil ordinance that might raise the cost of pornography by damages paid to victims would deprive consumers by raising prices or putting pornographers out of business. While victims testified of their first-hand experience that pornography hurt them, FACT\u27s brief effectively argued that the only credible opinions were those of male experts who studied pornography\u27s effects in laboratories and concluded that there was no harm. While victimized women testified that they were coerced into consenting to make, consume, or reenact pornography, with damage to their civil rights resulting, FACT\u27s brief argued that for a woman to contest the consent she gave denies her agency. The same head-in-the-sand denial that enabled the writers of FACT\u27s brief to ignore victim testimony and maintain a fantasy that pornography does not hurt wo- men runs rampant today in both liberal and conservative views on pornography. The fantasy that pornography hurts no one is a part of feminism\u27s past and of feminism\u27s present. It must give way to an honoring of victims\u27 testimony so that feminism can go forward into its future

The Forensic Architecture Project : Virtual imagery as evidence in the contemporary context of the war on terror

‘Virtual imagery as evidence in the contemporary context of the war on terror’ This paper explores the evidentiary role of virtual reproductions produced by the research project Forensic Architecture in the context of the contemporary battlefields of the war on terror. The digitization of war has created a networked landscape whose processes often remain invisible to the public. Although drone operations and the tactic of targeted assassinations by the CIA depend largely on advanced visual technologies for engagement, there exists almost no resulting visible evidence of their fallouts. Evidentiary images through the traditional medium of photojournalism are rare due to members of the media being unable to access areas of drone attacks and the highly enforced fatal risks towards local journalists who document any evidence of drone attacks. This has lead to a war waged without visual evidence thereby creating a regime of unaccountability for the human collateral damage caused by the attacks. In response to this, the team of architects, artists and theorists of Forensic Architecture piece together witness accounts of drone attacks through virtual imagery that function as a new visual form of testimony and document. This paper explores how the role of virtual image production is utilized as evidence providing for visual documents where there is none. I will look at aspects of the digital production processes of the virtual image as a new visual syntax of a documentary image. These images provide not only visibility to those who are victims of the attack but also function to create space. In reconstructing the actual places of drone attacks, the virtual imagery provides the space of articulating the perspective of those experiencing drone warfare from below. The result is a form of reverse image, which counters the production of the drone image

State of the Art Report on Drone-Based Warfare

State of the art report on the latest cultural discourse and debate over contemporary forms of drone based warfare. primarily resulting from the disciplines of Law, Political Science, and Geography. 2014

Portraits of Automated Facial Recognition

Automated facial recognition algorithms are increasingly intervening in society. This book offers a unique analysis of these algorithms from a critical visual culture studies perspective. The first part of this study examines the example of an early facial recognition algorithm called »eigenface« and traces a history of the merging of statistics and vision. The second part addresses contemporary artistic engagements with facial recognition technology in the work of Thomas Ruff, Zach Blas, and Trevor Paglen. This book argues that we must take a closer look at the technology of automated facial recognition and claims that its forms of representation are embedded with visual politics. Even more significantly, this technology is redefining what it means to see and be seen in the contemporary world

Sharing the Costs and Benefits of Energy and Resource Activity: a new book by SEERIL’s Academic Advisory Group

This article summarises research in the field of energy and natural resources law, on the subject of the sharing of costs and benefits between developer companies, governments and local communities. It addresses a new phase in the sharing of costs and benefits that is readily discerned in many countries worldwide, and which compels a shift in thinking that is centred more traditionally on environmental and resource royalty regimes

A compilation, tabulation and analysis of spelling errors made by pupils in grades four, five, and six in free writing of sentences using given stimuli words

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit