To finance basic pro-poor services, the Government of Ghana must mobilize more public revenue. But tax reform has been highly controversial in Ghana. An attempt to introduce VAT in 1995 failed after widespread protests. Although a second attempt to introduce VAT in 1998 succeeded, strong resistance to tax reform remains, and the total tax base remains narrow and over-dependent on petroleum taxe...

As the number of systems which offer annotations on digital documents increases, robust anchoring of annotations is a key challenge. It is especially important if the annotator lacks write-access to the document being annotated. For example, if someone makes an annotation on a web page today and the web page changes tomorrow, what happens to the annotation? One approach is simply to “orphan” th...

For whole-body interaction for computer entertainment, I propose applying electrical stimulations to tendons to create an illusory motion of the limbs so that real motion becomes unnecessary. Strong vibrations to joints induce the well-known kinesthetic illusion, but electrically inducing this illusion has been rarely explored. An experiment is described showing that this illusion can be genera...

The phenomenon of change blindness has received a great deal of attention during the last decade, but very few experiments have examined the effects of the subjective importance of the visual stimuli under study. We have addressed this question in a series of studies by introducing choice as a critical variable in change detection (see Johansson, Hall, Sikström, & Olsson, 2005, Johansson, Hall,...

The vertical-horizontal illusion is the tendency for observers to overestimate the length of a vertical line relative to a horizontal line that has the same length. One explanation of this illusion is that the visual field is elongated in the horizontal direction, and that the vertical-horizontal illusion is a kind of framing effect (Künnapas, 1957a, 1957b, 1957c). Since the monocular visual fi...

The present study examined the degree to which positive illusion is associated with sport performance in basketball players among 3 different cultures: The United States of America, Croatia, and Norway. Positive illusion is a cognitive characteristic that is common in mentally healthy individuals, and becomes especially important in the athletic arena. The model tested in this study depicts the...

As virtual environment (VE) technology has become more disseminated, harmful physiological influences on users of VE have been reported such as simulator sickness and motion sickness -collectively called VE sickness. For VE safety and comfort, we note a new dynamic visual illusion, called" rotational dynamic illusion" .Several psychophysical experiments measuring head movement in illusion obser...