Railroad Retirement Board: Retirement, Survivor, Disability, Unemployment, and Sickness Benefits

[Excerpt] The Railroad Retirement Board (RRB), an independent federal agency, administers retirement, survivor, disability, unemployment, and sickness insurance for railroad workers and their families under the Railroad Retirement Act (RRA) and Railroad Unemployment Insurance Act (RUIA). These acts cover workers who are employed by railroads engaged in interstate commerce and related subsidiaries, railroad associations, and railroad labor organizations. Lifelong railroad workers receive railroad retirement benefits instead of Social Security benefits; railroad workers with nonrailroad experience receive benefits either from railroad retirement or Social Security, depending on the length of their railroad service. The number of railroad workers has been declining since the 1950s, although the rate of decline has been irregular and recent years have seen increases in railroad employment after reaching an all-time low of 215,000 workers in January 2010. Recently, railroad employment peaked in April 2015 to 253,000 workers, the highest level since November 1999, and then declined through FY2017, falling to 221,000 workers. The total number of beneficiaries under the RRA and RUIA decreased from 623,000 in FY2008 to 574,000 in FY2017, and the total benefit payments increased from $10.1 billion to$12.6 billion during the same time. During FY2017, the RRB paid nearly $12.5 billion in retirement, disability, and survivor benefits to approximately 548,000 beneficiaries. Almost$105.4 million in unemployment and sickness benefits were paid to approximately 28,000 claimants. This report explains the programs under RRA and RUIA, including how each program is financed, the eligibility rules, and the types of benefits available to railroad workers and family members. It also discusses how railroad retirement relates to the Social Security system

Primary visual cortex as a saliency map: parameter-free prediction of behavior from V1 physiology

It has been hypothesized that neural activities in the primary visual cortex (V1) represent a saliency map of the visual field to exogenously guide attention. This hypothesis has so far provided only qualitative predictions and their confirmations. We report this hypothesis' first quantitative prediction, derived without free parameters, and its confirmation by human behavioral data. The hypothesis provides a direct link between V1 neural responses to a visual location and the saliency of that location to guide attention exogenously. In a visual input containing many bars, one of them saliently different from all the other bars which are identical to each other, saliency at the singleton's location can be measured by the shortness of the reaction time in a visual search task to find the singleton. The hypothesis predicts quantitatively the whole distribution of the reaction times to find a singleton unique in color, orientation, and motion direction from the reaction times to find other types of singletons. The predicted distribution matches the experimentally observed distribution in all six human observers. A requirement for this successful prediction is a data-motivated assumption that V1 lacks neurons tuned simultaneously to color, orientation, and motion direction of visual inputs. Since evidence suggests that extrastriate cortices do have such neurons, we discuss the possibility that the extrastriate cortices play no role in guiding exogenous attention so that they can be devoted to other functional roles like visual decoding or endogenous attention.Comment: 11 figures, 66 page