Biological systems like the human cortex show homogeneous connectivity, with additional strongly heterogeneous projections from one area to another. Here we report how such a dynamic system performs a macroscopically coherent pattern formation. The connection topology is used systematically as a control parameter to guide the neural system through a series of phase transitions. We discuss the e...

Anatomically selective medial prefrontal cortical projections regulate the extinction of stimulus-reinforcement associations, but the mechanisms underlying extinction of an instrumental response for reward are less well-defined and may involve structures that regulate goal-directed action. We show brain-derived neurotrophic factor (bdnf) knock-down in the prelimbic, but not orbitofrontal, corte...

The literature contains some hypotheses regarding the most favorable ground reaction force (GRF) for sprint running and how it might be achieved. This study tested the relevance of these hypotheses to the acceleration phase of a sprint, using GRF impulse as the GRF variable of interest. Thirty-six athletes performed maximal-effort sprints from which video and GRF data were collected at the 16-m...

Reflective Physically Unclonable Functions (r-PUFs) are a manifestation of a security principle where two dimensional projections of randomly distributed reflective microstructures in a three dimensional plane form the basis of an anticounterfeiting technique. In this paper we present an overview of the system design with focus on optical aspects of the technique along with summary results.

The split equality problem (SEP) has extraordinary utility and broad applicability in many areas of applied mathematics. Recently, Byrne and Moudafi (2013) proposed a CQ algorithm for solving it. In this paper, we propose a modification for the CQ algorithm, which computes the stepsize adaptively and performs an additional projection step onto two half-spaces in each iteration. We further propo...

Few studies examine nativity disparities in smoking in the U.S., thus a major gap remains in understanding whether immigrant Latinos' smoking prevalence is stable, converging, or diverging, compared with U.S.-born Latinos. This study aimed to disentangle the roles of period changes, duration of U.S. residence, and immigrant arrival cohort in explaining the gap in smoking prevalence between fore...

The development of orderly topographic maps in the central nervous system (CNS) results from a collaboration of chemoaffinity cues that establish the coarse organization of the projection and activity-dependent mechanisms that fine-tune the map. Using the retinotectal projection as a model system, we describe evidence that biochemical tags and patterned neural activity work in parallel to produ...

This paper utilizes data on subjective probabilities to study the impact of the stock market crash of 2008 on households' expectations about the returns on the stock market index. We use data from the Health and Retirement Study that was fielded in February 2008 through February 2009. The effect of the crash is identified from the date of the interview, which is shown to be exogenous to previou...

Recent research on multisensory perception suggests a number of general principles for crossmodal integration and that the standard model in the field--feedforward convergence of information--must be modified to include a role for feedback projections from multimodal to unimodal brain areas.

We present a tolerance analysis that is applicable to a large group of stimuli used in structure-from-motion tasks. Human performance in structure-from-motion tasks reflects the fact that the visual system deals with projections of a 3-D world on the retina. A tolerance analysis reveals the relationship between the projections and the 3-D world. Any realistic model of the visual system should i...