Given that the core issues of attention research have been recognized for millenia, we do not know as much about attention as we should. I argue that the reasons for this failure are (1) we create spurious dichotomies, (2) we reify attention, treating it as a cause, when it is an effect, and (3) we equate a collection of facts with a theory. In order to correct these errors, we need a new techn...

Is the Introspection Thesis true? It certainly isn’t obvious. Introspection is the faculty by which each of us has access to his or her own mental states. Even if we were to suppose that mental states are identical to brain states, it doesn’t follow immediately from this supposition that we can introspect our mental states as brain states. This point is analogous to the following. It doesn’t fo...

[1] The ability to monitor transient motion along faults is critical to improving our ability to understand many natural phenomena such as landslides and earthquakes. Here, we usedata from a GPS and seismometer network that were deployed to monitor the regularly repeating glacial earthquakes of Whillans Ice Stream, West Antarctica to show that a unique pattern of precursory slip precedes comple...

Operational earthquake forecasting in the Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast, version 3 (UCERF3) model will be implemented using the Epidemic Type Aftershock Sequence (ETAS) model. Parameter values for the ETAS model are determined by fitting that model to the recent instrumental earthquake catalog. A grid search is done, and the loglikelihood is used as a measure of fit to estimate...

conomists love to say that there is no such thing as a free lunch. But the Chilean government agency responsible for school grants, Junta Nacional de Auxilio Escolar y Becas (JUNAEB), is an exception to the rule. During the school year, JUNAEB provides breakfast and lunch for 2 million children in primary and secondary public schools. In a developing country where about 14 percent of children u...

Niels Bohr once observed: “How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.” This situation is happening in the long-frustrating effort to understand large earthquakes in continental interiors. The paradox arises from a series of GPS studies across the New Madrid seismic zone (NMSZ). Large (magnitude >7) earthquakes felt across the Midwest occurred here i...

The 2011 off the Pacific coast of Tohoku earthquake (Mw9.0), which produced many strong motion records, provides an opportunity to examine the characteristics of strong ground motion from a gigantic earthquake. In this paper, the preliminary analysis of the ground motion attenuation, spectral shape and duration was performed using the selected strong motion records of the earthquake. The result...

The binned distribution densities of magnitudes in both the complete and the declustered catalogs of earthquakes in the Southern California region have two significantly different branches with crossover magnitude near M = 4.8. In the case of declustered earthquakes, the b-values on the two branches differ significantly from each other by a factor of about two. The absence of self-similarity ac...

Cylindrical steel tanks are important components of many industrial plants such as oil refineries and chemical plants. Usually failure of cylindrical tanks leads to serious consequences. During the past earthquakes such as 1964 Alaska and 1999 Turkey seismic performance of cylindrical tanks revealed that tanks are seismically vulnerable. Therefore, evaluation of seismic performance of these str...