Research Interests:
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THE NOVEL CORONAVIRUS emerging out of Wuhan, China has been identified as a deadly strain that is also highly contagious. The response by China to date has included travel restrictions on tens of millions across several major cities in an... more
THE NOVEL CORONAVIRUS emerging out of Wuhan, China has been identified as a deadly strain that is also highly contagious. The response by China to date has included travel restrictions on tens of millions across several major cities in an effort to slow its spread. Despite this, positively identified cases have already been detected in many countries spanning the globe and there are doubts such containment would be effective. This note outlines some principles to bear in relation to such a process. Clearly, we are dealing with an extreme fat-tailed process owing to an increased connectivity, which increases the spreading in a nonlinear way [1], [2]. Fat tailed processes have special attributes, making conventional risk-management approaches inadequate.
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THE OUTBREAK of a novel Coronavirus we are facing is poised to become a global pandemic if current approaches to stemming its spread prove to be insufficient. While we can't yet say what the ultimate impact of this event will be, this... more
THE OUTBREAK of a novel Coronavirus we are facing is poised to become a global pandemic if current approaches to stemming its spread prove to be insufficient. While we can't yet say what the ultimate impact of this event will be, this crisis and governments' responses to it reveal vulnerabilities and fragilities in the structure of our global socioeconomic milieux that will continue to produce cascading crises regardless of whether or not we are successful in preventing devastation from this particular pathogen. Here we discuss the implications and some strategic considerations.
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It has long been thought (e.g., Cavanagh & Mather, 1989) that first-order motion-energy extraction via space-time comparator-type models (e.g., the elaborated Reichardt detector) is sufficient to account for human performance in the... more
It has long been thought (e.g., Cavanagh & Mather, 1989) that first-order motion-energy extraction via space-time comparator-type models (e.g., the elaborated Reichardt detector) is sufficient to account for human performance in the short-range motion paradigm (Braddick, 1974), including the perception of reverse-phi motion when the luminance polarity of the visual elements is inverted during successive frames. Human observers' ability to discriminate motion direction and use coherent motion information to segregate a region of a random cinematogram and determine its shape was tested; they performed better in the same-, as compared with the inverted-, polarity condition. Computational analyses of short-range motion perception based on the elaborated Reichardt motion energy detector (van Santen & Sperling, 1985) predict, incorrectly, that symmetrical results will be obtained for the same-and inverted-polarity conditions. In contrast, the counterchange detector (Hock, Schöner, & Gilroy, 2009) predicts an asymmetry quite similar to that of human observers in both motion direction and shape discrimination. The further advantage of counterchange, as compared with motion energy, detection for the perception of spatial shape-and depth-from-motion is discussed.
Explaining the Precautionary Principle and the need for overreaction under certain classes of multiplicative systemic risk.