Human single neuron activity precedes emergence of conscious perception

Identifying the neuronal basis of spontaneous changes in conscious experience in the absence of changes in the external environment is a major challenge. Binocular rivalry, in which two stationary monocular images lead to continuously changing perception, provides a unique opportunity to address this issue. We studied the activity of human single neurons in the medial temporal and frontal lobes while patients were engaged in binocular rivalry. Here we report that internal changes in the content of perception are signaled by very early (~-2000 ms) nonselective medial frontal activity, followed by selective activity of medial temporal lobe neurons that precedes the perceptual change by ~1000 ms. Such early activations are not found for externally driven perceptual changes. These results suggest that a medial fronto-temporal network may be involved in the preconscious internal generation of perceptual transitions

Development of octopus aquaculture: Rearing, handling and systems design for Octopus tetricus commercial aquaculture FRDC Project No 2009/206

The following document ‘Development of octopus aquaculture, rearing, handling and systems designs for Octopus tetricus commercial aquaculture’ contains protocols developed during the FRDC project 2009/206. These protocols encompass the most up-to-date rearing, handling and systems designs for Octopus tetricus commercial aquaculture. These protocols are the result of extensive research and development work carried out over the past four years by the Department of Fisheries, Western Australia and summarised in the final project report

Development of octopus aquaculture Final Report FRDC Project No 2009/206

During the past four years, the marine aquaculture group at the WA Fisheries and Marine Research Laboratories (WAFMRL) in collaboration with Occoculture Pty Ltd (subsidiary of Fremantle Octopus) and as a part of the FRDC project ‘Octopus Aquaculture Development’, investigated the potential of octopus aquaculture in Western Australia. Hatchery methods were developed in an attempt to close the life cycle. Advanced systems, rearing and feeding protocols were established for ranching Octopus tetricus juveniles

Faster Algorithms for Weighted Recursive State Machines

Pushdown systems (PDSs) and recursive state machines (RSMs), which are linearly equivalent, are standard models for interprocedural analysis. Yet RSMs are more convenient as they (a) explicitly model function calls and returns, and (b) specify many natural parameters for algorithmic analysis, e.g., the number of entries and exits. We consider a general framework where RSM transitions are labeled from a semiring and path properties are algebraic with semiring operations, which can model, e.g., interprocedural reachability and dataflow analysis problems. Our main contributions are new algorithms for several fundamental problems. As compared to a direct translation of RSMs to PDSs and the best-known existing bounds of PDSs, our analysis algorithm improves the complexity for finite-height semirings (that subsumes reachability and standard dataflow properties). We further consider the problem of extracting distance values from the representation structures computed by our algorithm, and give efficient algorithms that distinguish the complexity of a one-time preprocessing from the complexity of each individual query. Another advantage of our algorithm is that our improvements carry over to the concurrent setting, where we improve the best-known complexity for the context-bounded analysis of concurrent RSMs. Finally, we provide a prototype implementation that gives a significant speed-up on several benchmarks from the SLAM/SDV project

Beyond reachability: Shape abstraction in the presence of pointer arithmetic

Abstract. Previous shape analysis algorithms use a memory model where the heap is composed of discrete nodes that can be accessed only via access paths built from variables and field names, an assumption that is violated by pointer arithmetic. In this paper we show how this assumption can be removed, and pointer arithmetic embraced, by using an analysis based on separation logic. We describe an abstract domain whose elements are certain separation logic formulae, and an abstraction mechanism that automatically transits between a low-level RAM view of memory and a higher, fictional, view that abstracts from the representation of nodes and multiword linked-lists as certain configurations of the RAM. A widening operator is used to accelerate the analysis. We report experimental results obtained from running our analysis on a number of classic algorithms for dynamic memory management.