Contour adaptation is a recently described paradigm that renders otherwise salient visual stimuli temporarily perceptually invisible. Here we investigate whether this illusion can be exploited to study visual awareness. We found that CA can induce seconds of sustained invisibility following similarly long periods of uninterrupted adaptation. Furthermore, even fragmented adaptors are capable of producing CA, with the strength of CA increasing monotonically as the adaptors encompass a greater fraction of the stimulus outline. However, different types of adaptor patterns, such as (...) distinctive shapes or illusory contours, produce equivalent levels of CA suggesting that the main determinants of CA are low-level stimulus characteristics, with minimal modulation by higher-order visual processes. Taken together, our results indicate that CA has desirable properties for studying visual awareness, including the production of prolonged periods of perceptual dissociation from stimulation as well as parametric dependencies of that dissociation on a host of stimulus parameters. (shrink)

Research is crucial to advancing knowledge about dementia, yet the burden of the disease currently outpaces research activity. Research often excludes people with dementia and other cognitive impairments because researchers and ethics committees are concerned about issues related to capacity, consent, and substitute decision-making. In Australia, participation in research by people with cognitive impairment is governed by a national ethics statement and a patchwork of state and territorial laws that have widely varying rules. We contend that this legislative variation precludes (...) a consistent approach to research governance and participation and hinders research that seeks to include people with impaired capacity. In this paper, we present key ethical principles, provide a comprehensive review of applicable legal rules in Australian states and territories, and highlight significant differences and ambiguities. Our analysis includes recommendations for reform to improve clarity and consistency in the law and reduce barriers that may exclude persons with dementia from participating in ethically approved research. Our recommendations seek to advance the national decision-making principles recommended by the Australian Law Reform Commission, which emphasize the rights of all adults to make their own decisions and for those with impaired capacity to have access to appropriate supports to help them make decisions that affect their lives. (shrink)

The role of followers in financial statement fraud has not been widely examined, even though these frauds typically involve collusion between followers and destructive leaders. In a study with 140 MBA students in the role of followers, we examined whether two follower personality traits were associated with behavioral intentions to comply with the demands of an unethical chief executive officer to be complicit in committing financial statement fraud. These personality traits are self-sacrificing self-enhancement, a form of maladaptive narcissism characterized by (...) seemingly altruistic behaviors that are actually intended to boost self-esteem and proactivity, a trait characterized by behaviors reflecting efforts to positively change one’s environment. As predicted, follower SSSE was positively associated with follower behavioral intentions to comply with CEO pressure to commit fraud, while follower proactivity was negatively associated with fraud compliance intentions. Also as predicted, follower SSSE interacted with follower proactivity, such that followers high in SSSE and high in proactivity reported greater intentions to resist pressure from the unethical CEO to commit fraud compared to low-SSSE followers. Implications for future research and corporate governance are discussed. (shrink)

Gene therapy approaches have great promise in the treatment of neurodegenerative disorders and malignant brain tumors. Neuwelt et al. review available viral-mediated gene therapy methods and their blood-brain-barrier (BBB) disruption delivery technique, briefly mentioning nonviral mediated gene therapy methods. This commentary discussed the BBB disruption delivery technique, viral and nonviral mediated gene therapy approaches to Parkinson's disease, and the potential use of antisense oligo to suppress malignant brain tumors.

There are many real-world applications like healthcare systems, job monitoring, well-being and personal fitness tracking, monitoring of elderly and frail people, assessment of rehabilitation and follow-up treatments, affording Fall Detection (FD) and ADL (Activity of Daily Living) identification, separately or even at a time. However, the two main drawbacks of these solutions are that most of the times, the devices deployed are obtrusive (devices worn on not quite common parts of the body like neck, waist and ankle) and the poor (...) battery life. Thus, this work proposes a low-power classification algorithm based on an Ensemble of KNN and K-Means algorithms (EKMeans) to identify Falls and High-Intensity ADL events such as running, jogging and climbing up stairs. The input of EKMeans are triaxial accelerometer data gathered from wrist-wearable devices. The proposal will be validated on the Fall&ADL publicly available datasets UMAFall, UCIFall and FallAllD, considering two kinds of activity labelling: Two-Class and Multi-Class. An exhaustive comparative study between our proposal, and the baseline algorithms KNN and a feed-forward Neural Network (NN) is deployed, where EKMeans outperformed clearly the Specificity (ADL classification) of the KNN and NN for the three datasets. Finally, a comparative battery consumption study has been included deploying the analyzed algorithms in a WearOS smartwatch, where EKMeans drains the battery from 100% to 0% in 27.45 hours, saving 5% and 21% concerning KNN and NN, respectively. Keywords: Human Activity Recognition, ADL Identification, Fall Detection TS Clustering, TS Classification, Wearable Devices, Low-Power HAR. (shrink)

De Neys's incisive critique of empirical and theoretical research on the exclusivity feature underscores the depth of the challenge of explaining the interplay of fast and slow processes. We argue that a closer look at research on mindreading reveals abundant evidence for the exclusivity feature – as well as methodological and theoretical perspectives that could inform research on fast and slow thinking.

Research is crucial to advancing knowledge about dementia, yet the burden of the disease currently outpaces research activity. Research often excludes people with dementia and other cognitive impairments because researchers and ethics committees are concerned about issues related to capacity, consent, and substitute decision-making. In Australia, participation in research by people with cognitive impairment is governed by a national ethics statement and a patchwork of state and territorial laws that have widely varying rules. We contend that this legislative variation precludes (...) a consistent approach to research governance and participation and hinders research that seeks to include people with impaired capacity. In this paper, we present key ethical principles, provide a comprehensive review of applicable legal rules in Australian states and territories, and highlight significant differences and ambiguities. Our analysis includes recommendations for reform to improve clarity and consistency in the law and reduce barriers that may exclude persons with dementia from participating in ethically approved research. Our recommendations seek to advance the national decision-making principles recommended by the Australian Law Reform Commission, which emphasize the rights of all adults to make their own decisions and for those with impaired capacity to have access to appropriate supports to help them make decisions that affect their lives. (shrink)

Our motor system can generate representations which carry information about the goals of another agent's actions. However, it is not known whether motor representations play a deeper role in social understanding, and, in particular, whether they enable tracking others' beliefs. Here we show that, for adult observers, reliably manifesting an ability to track another's false belief critically depends on representing the agent's potential actions motorically. One signature of motor representations is that they can be disrupted by constraints on an observed (...) agent's action capacities. We therefore used a `mummification' technique to manipulate whether the agent in a visual ball-detection task was free to act or whether he was visibly constrained from acting. Adults' reaction times reliably reflected the agent's beliefs only when the agent was free to act on the ball and not when the agent was visibly constrained from acting. Furthermore, it was the agent's constrained action capabilities, rather than any perceptual novelty, that determined whether adult observers' reaction times reliably reflected the agent's beliefs. These findings signal that our motor system may underpin more of social cognition than previously imagined, and, in particular, that motor representations may underpin automatic false-belief tracking. (shrink)

The Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 requires company executives to certify financial statements and internal controls as a means of reducing fraud. Many companies have operationalized this by instituting a sub-certification process and requiring lower-level managers to sign certification statements. These lower-level organizational members are often the individuals who are aware of fraud and are in the best position to provide information on the fraudulent act. However, the sub-certification process may have the effect of reducing employees’ intentions to report wrongdoing. We (...) suggest that subordinates with knowledge of a superior who committed a fraudulent act and certified that there is no fraud will feel less personal responsibility to report the act, thus, decreasing reporting intentions. Additionally, we suggest that if the fraud is discovered subsequent to the reports being filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, employees will perceive lower management responsiveness to investigate the fraud, which will reduce intentions to report. Using an experimental approach, we manipulate two between-participant variables: the presence or absence of sub-certification by the transgressor and the timing of fraud discovery, either before or after the reports have been filed with the SEC. We find that when sub-certification is present, perceived personal responsibility and intentions to report were diminished compared to when sub-certification is absent. Timing of the discovery of the fraudulent act did not influence perceived management responsiveness or reporting intentions. Supplemental analysis shows that personal responsibility partially mediates the relationship between sub-certification and reporting intentions. Our findings suggest that audit committees and senior executives may want to carefully consider the costs and benefits of the sub-certification process. (shrink)

In October 2010, the German conservative ruling coalition and Free Democratic Party ) passed a law permitting the extension of contracts for Germany’s seventeen nuclear power plants. This policy amended a law passed in 2001 by a Social Democratic Party and Green Party majority to phase out nuclear energy by the early 2020s. The explosions in the nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility, however, resulted in a decision to speed up the phaseout of nuclear energy. The nuclear (...) meltdowns in Japan sent hundreds of thousands of protesters onto the streets. Angry voters made their disillusionment with the nuclear politics of the conservative government coalition clear in local elections. The federal government responded by setting up an Ethics Commission for a Safe Energy Supply, which recommended an end to nuclear energy and a shift to a renewable energy-based economy. Within months of the Fukushima disaster, the government had permanently shut down eight of the country’s oldest nuclear power plants and issued a schedule for the phased shutdown of the remaining nine plants by 2022. In addition, the government reaffirmed its climate change plans, which call for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by around forty percent of 1990 levels by 2020 and eighty percent by 2050. Thus, out of a crisis, the German government is forging an opportunity to become a global leader in the promotion of new renewable energies, energy efficiency, and greenhouse gas emission reductions. In Japan, the nuclear crisis has also weakened support for nuclear energy, but with a strong industrial coalition calling for its continued use, both for energy stability and in response to climate change, a complete nuclear phaseout is less certain, at least in the short term. (shrink)

A Few years ago Professor Souter made the suggestion that the curious custom of beginning each page of a MS., or each column of a page, with a large letter might be of African origin. He was struck with this feature while examining a fragment, newly acquired for the British Museum, of the celebrated Codex Palatinus of the Gospels , which is supposed to give us the African text of the New Testament. In reply to the suggestion, the present writer (...) submitted a list of eighteen MSS. in which this usage is illustrated. As most of the MSS. are manifestly Italian, the African origin of the practice was shown to be untenable. Quite recently another theory has been put forward, localizing the practice within still narrower limits. According to Professor Weinberger, the use of a capital at the beginning of each page would seem to be a peculiarity of MSS. coming from Cassiodore's library at Vivarium; and he proceeded to use this feature as a touchstone for detecting Codices Vivarienses. Impressed by the unusual interest attaching to this feature, I began to assemble all the instances I had, and to look for others. I collected a list of nearly fifty items, an inspection of which showed me at once that in registering the phenomenon under discussion I had unwittingly drawn up a list of very ancient MSS. The list does not, to be sure, hold all our oldest MSS., but most of those it holds are, as will be seen, among the oldest. In other words, the use of a large letter at the beginning of each page is clearly a custom of very great antiquity. This being so, it seemed useful to interrogate these MSS. further, in order to ascertain what other practices they have of interest to palaeographers. (shrink)

As a contributory step toward a new edition of Du Cange's Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, planned by the International Association of Academies, the British Academy has undertaken to publish a critical edition of mediaeval glossaries. The most important of these glossaries, because it constitutes the parent-compilation from which subsequent compilers of glossaries drew their material, is that pair known as Abstrusa and Abolita, found combined in the Vatican MS. 3321, which is the oldest extant MS. of purely Latin glossaries. (...) It is with the date and home of this MS. that the present note is concerned. (shrink)

In an article entitled ‘Some Facts about our Oldest Latin Manuscripts,’ which appeared in this journal, the present writer put together a group of forty-seven MSS. which had this one feature in common, that each page or each column of a page they contained began with a large letter, regardless of whether that letter occurred in the middle of a sentence, or even in the middle of a word. It so happened that the list thus drawn up was composed almost (...) entirely of very ancient MSS.; indeed, it contained a very large proportion of the oldest MSS. extant. In the circumstances it seemed useful to note down the behaviour of these MSS. with respect to four other features—namely, the manner of indicating the omission of m and n at the end of lines, the use of running titles in the top margin, the size and arrangement of the written space, and the manner of signing quires. (shrink)

E. J. Lowe, a prominent figure in contemporary metaphysics, sets out and defends his theory of what there is. His four-category ontology is a metaphysical system which recognizes four fundamental categories of beings: substantial and non-substantial particulars and substantial and non-substantial universals. Lowe argues that this system has an explanatory power which is unrivalled by more parsimonious theories and that this counts decisively in its favour. He shows that it provides a powerful explanatory framework for a unified account of causation, (...) dispositions, natural laws, natural necessity and many other related matters, thus constituting a full metaphysical foundation for natural science. (shrink)

The chief works of Tacitus and Apuleius have come down to us in a single Beneventan—i.e. South Italian—MS. of the eleventh century. The Annals and Histories of Tacitus, and the Apologia, Metamorphoses, and Florida of Apuleius, depend solely on the authority of the famous Florentine MS. preserved in the Laurentian Library under the press-mark 68.2. Any new light that can be thrown on such a MS. is of interest to classical scholars. With the portion of the MS. containing the works (...) of Tacitus the writer has dealt at some length in a paper read in April, 1913, in London before the International Congress of Historical Studies, which paper will be published shortly. Here it is proposed to deal with the portion containing the works of Apuleius, and with the oldest extant transcript of this portion, which is also in Beneventan writing, and is likewise preserved in the Laurentian Library under the press-mark 29.2. In the critical apparatus of Apuleius Laur. 68.2 is cited as F, and Laur. 29.2 as ø. (shrink)