Dynamic Amodal Completion Through the Magic Wand Illusion

In the Magic Wand effect, an overlying figure of the same color as its background is revealed by the motion of a wand behind it. The occluding figure is inferred by integration of the occluding edge information over time. The overlying figure is perceived by modal completion, while the wand and the background underneath are perceived by amodal completion. This illusion is compared with its predecessor from nearly two centuries ago, the Plateau Anorthoscopic Illusion, in which an object is recognizable when moved behind a slit

The Emergent Dualism View of Quantum Physics and Consciousness

This paper introduces the ontology of Emergent Dualism, which takes the position that the elementary stuff of everything in the universe is energy, that this energy can become structured into a series of levels of emergent organization whose operating principles are not derivable from the previous levels, that one of these levels is the concatenations of neural processes called brains, that brains have some particular emergent process that gives rise to subjective experience from the internal viewpoint of that process, and that the private, subjective property of this emergent process entails a dualistic philosophical treatment of its analysis

The Job Guarantee as it Relates to People with Disabilities

We accept unemployment as an inevitability in our capitalist economy even when it is purportedly functioning at full capacity. Some economists propose that the government could directly intervene in the labor market to meet the peoples’ demand for jobs. Work in modern America is a central aspect of participation in society that directly impacts individuals’ identities. Unemployment is, therefore, a key mechanism of social exclusion. The Federal Job Guarantee seeks to provide work directly for the unemployed with work that serves the public good. People with disabilities disproportionately suffer from unemployment, underemployment, and often leave the workforce entirely. The majority of foreclosures and bankruptcies result from costs associated with a disability. A variety of social programs exist to support the livelihoods of people with disabilities, from supplemental income and medicare, to vocational rehabilitation services. To qualify for these benefits, people with disabilities must demonstrate their inability to work. Working can jeopardize their financial stability and access to affordable care. Advancing the rights of people with disabilities in the workplace is of great concern. Writing on the Job Guarantee has not previously investigated the impact of this sweeping labor policy on people with disabilities. This research addresses the potential impact of the Job Guarantee on people with disabilities of all kinds and people in the disability community like caregivers. Interviews of eight people with disabilities and a number of professionals at the intersection of employment and disability helped craft recommendations for the design, implementation, and maintenance of a Job Guarantee

Comprehensive analysis of the retinal cell contributions to the human ERG

Purpose. Standard electroretinogram (ERG) protocols are largely designed to isolate the responses of the rod and cone retinal pathways, including the use of adapting backgrounds to suppress unwanted off-pathway responses. Here, we record spectral ERGs in the low-to-high mesopic sensitivity range in the absence of any adapting background in order to assess interactions between the pathways. Methods. We have developed a comprehensive neuroanalytic model of the component structure of the ERG driven by knowledge of the underlying retinal physiology, to enhance its power as a critical diagnostic tool for a broad range of both retinal and systemic dysfunctions. The ERG is conceptualized as a highly diagnostic signal of the retinal subsystems, each consisting of: an a-wave (photoreceptor extracellular current flow), a b-wave (transient bipolar cells), an inner retinal photopic negative response (PhNR; ganglion cells), and a melanopsin response (intrinsic ganglion-cell light response). This model is applied to an array of full-field spectral ERGs over a range of colors and intensities. Results and Conclusion. Most of these response components are driven by both the rod and cone photoreceptor types, thus constituting about a dozen distinct components of the ERG, differentiated according to post-stimulus time of expression and the light level. At every light level, rod-driven components are typically slower than cone-driven components, equated for quantum catch. This neuroanalytic approach has been applied to a variety of spectral ERG datasets to account for as much as 95% of the variance of the ERG

In Search of Communication Satisfaction at the State Bar of Georgia

It has long been established that “communication is of fundamental importance in the operation of all organizations, and a knowledge of the efficiency of the general communication system is vital to achieve high levels of organizational effectiveness” (Greenbaum, Clampitt, & Willihnganz, 1988, p. 245). With this in mind, over the past forty years many organizations have turned to communication audits to identify strategies to improve their organizations’ communication practices. One such organization is the State Bar of Georgia. Using Downs and Hazen’s (1977) Communication Satisfaction Questionnaire, this study assessed the health/effectiveness of the Bar’s formal and informal communication channels, identified problems and made recommendations for improvement. In addition to gaining a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the Bar’s existing communication channels, the audit showed how communication practices at the Bar relate to employee job satisfaction

The Emergent Aspect Dualism View of Quantum Physics: A New Ontology to Resolve the Complementarity Conundrum

To resolve the conceptual problem of the conflict between quantal and relativistic formulations of Quantum Physics, this paper proposes a new conceptual ontology, Emergent Aspect Dualism, that reconceptualizes the foundations of the field. Emergent Aspect Dualism is a philosophical approach that starts from the assumption is that the primary “material” of the universe is energy, which can be manifested as kinetic energy, potential energy or matter. The flow of such energy throughout the universe is described by the continuous Schrödinger Equation, but in order to account for the hierarchy of levels of organization reality, we need to invoke the concept of emergence, under which the operative principles of each level of organization of this energy are entirely dissociated from those of the levels below it, and, crucially, the functional emergence of the properties of the conscious mind that are dualistically dissociated from the underlying biochemical principles of brain organization. Rather than assigning probabilities to the quantal realm, Emergent Aspect Dualism treats probability as an operational concept that can be held only by a conscious mind, a philosophical category that incorporates the properties of a) the superposition of states and b) the collapse of this superposition once an observation is made

Chloride Channels that Mediate a Transient Nitric Oxide-dependent Synaptic Polarity Switch in Retinal Amacrine Cells.

Cytosolic chloride (Cl-) concentration determines whether GABAergic and glycinergic synapses are inhibitory or excitatory. Ionotropic GABA and glycine receptors passively conduct Cl­- leading to membrane depolarization or hyperpolarization depending on the Cl- equilibrium potential. Accordingly, the distribution of Cl- across the plasma membrane has the potential to determine the properties of networks of retinal amacrine cells (ACs) and their postsynaptic partners. Ion channels are responsible for establishing Cl- reversal potential. Nitric oxide (NO) is a signaling molecule that can be generated in the inner retina where ACs form synapses. We have shown that NO initiates a release of Cl- from internal stores into the cytosol in retinal ACs, leading to elevated cytosolic Cl-. Our research implicates a novel role for the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) in the NO-dependent release of Cl- from acidic organelles. This internal function of CFTR is particularly relevant to neuronal physiology because postsynaptic cytosolic Cl- levels determine the outcome of GABA and glycinergic synaptic signaling. Chapter 2 shows CFTR is necessary for the transient effects of NO on cytosolic Cl- levels but the full mechanism remains to be elucidated. Chapter 3 further informs the mechanism with involvement of TMEM16A, a Ca2+ activated Cl- channel demonstrated to be functionally coupled with CFTR in some epithelial cell types. TMEM16A is expressed in the chicken retina as determined by western blot analysis, immunocytochemistry, and single cell RT-PCR. Pharmacological inhibition of TMEM16A with T16inh-AO1 reduced the NO-dependent Cl- release (NOdClr) measured as a reduction in the shift in the reversal potential of GABAA receptor-mediated currents. To confirm the involvement of TMEM16A in the NodClr, we used CRISPR/Cas9 via two different modalities targeting TMEM16A. We delivered either an all-in-one plasmid or functional ribonucleoprotein resulting in different effects on protein levels. The plasmid vector was unsuccessful in reducing the membrane expression of TMEM16A protein within the timeframe of culture viability. However, delivery of TMEM16A-specific crRNA/tracrRNA/Cas9 ribonucleoprotein was effective in reducing both TMEM16A protein levels and the NO-dependent shift in reversal potential of GABA-gated currents. These results demonstrate that ACs express CFTR and TMEM16A with both playing a role in the NodClr. Ultimately, the flexibility of retinal processing may be increased by co-expression of CFTR with different TMEM16 paralogues, thus allowing subsets of amacrine cells to perform specific and unique functions

Measuring Catastrophic Forgetting in Neural Networks

Deep neural networks are used in many state-of-the-art systems for machine perception. Once a network is trained to do a specific task, e.g., bird classification, it cannot easily be trained to do new tasks, e.g., incrementally learning to recognize additional bird species or learning an entirely different task such as flower recognition. When new tasks are added, typical deep neural networks are prone to catastrophically forgetting previous tasks. Networks that are capable of assimilating new information incrementally, much like how humans form new memories over time, will be more efficient than re-training the model from scratch each time a new task needs to be learned. There have been multiple attempts to develop schemes that mitigate catastrophic forgetting, but these methods have not been directly compared, the tests used to evaluate them vary considerably, and these methods have only been evaluated on small-scale problems (e.g., MNIST). In this paper, we introduce new metrics and benchmarks for directly comparing five different mechanisms designed to mitigate catastrophic forgetting in neural networks: regularization, ensembling, rehearsal, dual-memory, and sparse-coding. Our experiments on real-world images and sounds show that the mechanism(s) that are critical for optimal performance vary based on the incremental training paradigm and type of data being used, but they all demonstrate that the catastrophic forgetting problem has yet to be solved.Comment: To appear in AAAI 201