Extraordinary Feats Research Articles

Reinforcement learning as a robotics-inspired framework for insect navigation: from spatial representations to neural implementation.

Bees are among the master navigators of the insect world. Despite impressive advances in robot navigation research, the performance of these insects is still unrivaled by any artificial system in terms of training efficiency and generalization capabilities, particularly considering the limited computational capacity. On the other hand, computational principles underlying these extraordinary feats are still only partially understood. The theoretical framework of reinforcement learning (RL) provides an ideal focal point to bring the two fields together for mutual benefit. In particular, we analyze and compare representations of space in robot and insect navigation models through the lens of RL, as the efficiency of insect navigation is likely rooted in an efficient and robust internal representation, linking retinotopic (egocentric) visual input with the geometry of the environment. While RL has long been at the core of robot navigation research, current computational theories of insect navigation are not commonly formulated within this framework, but largely as an associative learning process implemented in the insect brain, especially in the mushroom body (MB). Here we propose specific hypothetical components of the MB circuit that would enable the implementation of a certain class of relatively simple RL algorithms, capable of integrating distinct components of a navigation task, reminiscent of hierarchical RL models used in robot navigation. We discuss how current models of insect and robot navigation are exploring representations beyond classical, complete map-like representations, with spatial information being embedded in the respective latent representations to varying degrees.

Small sensors for special surgery

The brain is a living miracle. There are so many tasks to be done at once, so many neurons that need to talk with each other, integrate and interact to perform perfection in one part of one synaptic or non-synaptic action and within femtoseconds. We understand that the diseased brain that is compromised need not be thought of as a damaged brain. It is simply one that needs to be and can be fixed, in fact, with brilliant technologies that are at our fingertips. We believe that the brain is an electronic and chemical device that matches in temporal and spatial synchrony our first- class small sensor for surgery trademarked, the BRODERICK PROBE® series of nanoprobes and circuits. It is said to be one of the latest extraordinary feats in the surgical world and it is named affectionately after the author’s father, Paddy Broderick, from County Clare, Ireland. Thus, we think of brain and spinal cord disease as a mismatched connection, some connection that is wrong-just not right- as the fabulous network of dendrites work as do our internet cables, in this case, insulated from the extracellular space and as these dendrites impinge on an axon at the terminal synapses, neuronal and glial decisions are made and so our tethered telemetry and fiber optic sensors soar sweetly through the milieu of cerebral matter to allow us to see, to image online and in real time and in vivo, what the brain is feeling or doing at any precise sub-second during intraoperative brain surgery. This is the true story of how the announcement of this amazing discovery is credited for repurpose. With gratitude to Medcrave, we share the original work and the intricate know-how with surgeons worldwide.

A Review of Deep Reinforcement Learning Methods and Military Application Research

In the area of artificial intelligence, deep reinforcement learning has grown in significance. It has accomplished extraordinary feats and offers a fresh approach to previously challenging challenges, such as controlling a robotic arm and discovering game strategies. The two primary categories of deep reinforcement learning methods—deep reinforcement learning based on value function and deep reinforcement learning based on policy gradient—are initially explained in this study. The limitations of current approaches and the difficulties faced by deep reinforcement learning methods in related domains are further sorted out, and then the future application directions of deep reinforcement learning methods in the military sphere are examined. Finally, a growing trend for deep reinforcement learning techniques is anticipated in military applications.

Charisma's Birth from the Bottom Up: Lula, ABC's Metalworkers’ Strikes and the Social History of Brazilian Politics

AbstractIf David Bell in his book Men on Horseback (2020) focuses on what is political charisma, how it functions, and what it means ‘to write its history’, this article examines how Brazil's ex-President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (‘Lula’) acquired charisma during the dramatic 1978–80 metalworkers’ strikes in the industrial ABC region of São Paulo, Brazil. While generating a vast literature, scholars of the ABC strikes have evaded the question of how Lula, the gifted organiser, emerged as a recognisably charismatic figure. This article explains where, when and why this happened and how a charismatic bond was forged as 100,000 stigmatised, fearful, self-doubting ‘peons’ came to constitute themselves as a locally articulated social actor, a group in fusion, whose boldness and creativity led to extraordinary feats of organisation and mobilisation. Arguing against conflating charisma and populism, it also establishes the utility of the theorisation of group-making advanced in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Genome-wide transcriptomic changes reveal the genetic pathways involved in insect migration.

Insects are capable of extraordinary feats of long‐distance movement that have profound impacts on the function of terrestrial ecosystems. The ability to undertake these movements arose multiple times through the evolution of a suite of traits that make up the migratory syndrome, however the underlying genetic pathways involved remain poorly understood. Migratory hoverflies (Diptera: Syrphidae) are an emerging model group for studies of migration. They undertake seasonal movements in huge numbers across large parts of the globe and are important pollinators, biological control agents and decomposers. Here, we assembled a high‐quality draft genome of the marmalade hoverfly (Episyrphus balteatus). We leveraged this genomic resource to undertake a genome‐wide transcriptomic comparison of actively migrating Episyrphus, captured from a high mountain pass as they flew south to overwinter, with the transcriptomes of summer forms which were non‐migratory. We identified 1543 genes with very strong evidence for differential expression. Interrogation of this gene set reveals a remarkable range of roles in metabolism, muscle structure and function, hormonal regulation, immunity, stress resistance, flight and feeding behaviour, longevity, reproductive diapause and sensory perception. These features of the migrant phenotype have arisen by the integration and modification of pathways such as insulin signalling for diapause and longevity, JAK/SAT for immunity, and those leading to octopamine production and fuelling to boost flight capabilities. Our results provide a powerful genomic resource for future research, and paint a comprehensive picture of global expression changes in an actively migrating insect, identifying key genomic components involved in this important life‐history strategy.

The effects of mental abacus expertise on working memory, mental representations and calculation strategies used for two-digit Hindu-Arabic numbers

In Asia, some children are taught a calculation technique known as the ‘mental abacus’. Previous research indicated that mental abacus experts can perform extraordinary feats of mental arithmetic, but it disagrees as to whether the technique improves working memory. The present study extended and clarified these findings by contrasting performance from several numerical and working memory tasks across three groups of participants: Japanese mental abacus experts, abacus-naïve Australian undergraduates, and abacus-naïve Japanese undergraduates. It also investigated whether the mental representations and strategies used to process two-digit numbers differed across the three groups. First, the results showed that the Japanese mental abacus experts only performed better when the numerical and working memory tasks involved arithmetic problems, suggesting domain-specific transfer rather than domain-general improvements to numerical processing or working memory. Second, the results suggest that the Japanese mental abacus experts were less reliant on decomposed magnitude representations, and used a processing strategy that is less sensitive to the perceptual overlap between numbers. Finally, performance was less discrepant between the Australian and Japanese abacus-naïve undergraduates than either group with the Japanese mental abacus experts, indicating that mental abacus training, rather than socio-cultural differences, was responsible for the observed group differences.

Fusing compressed deep ConvNets with a self-normalizing residual block and alpha dropout for a cost-efficient classification and diagnosis of gastrointestinal tract diseases

The challenging task of diagnosing gastrointestinal (GI) tracts recently became a popular research topic, where most researchers performed extraordinary feats using numerous deep learning (DL) and computer vision techniques to achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) diagnostic performance based on accuracy. However, most proposed methods relied on combining complex computational methods and algorithms, causing a significant increase in production difficulty, parameter size, and even training cost. Therefore, this method proposes a straightforward approach to developing a vision-based DL model without requiring heavy computing resources or reliance on other complex feature processing and learning algorithms. This paper included the step-by-step procedure consisting of network compression, layer-wise fusion, and the addition of a modified residual layer (MResBlock) with a self-normalizing attribute and a more robust regularization. In addition, the paper also presents the performance of the proposed method toward the diagnosis of four GI tract conditions, including polyps, ulcers, esophagitis, and healthy mucosa. The paper concludes that the proposed method did radiate a significant improvement in the overall performance, cost-efficiency, and especially practicality compared to most current SOTA methods.•The proposed method combined profound techniques like feature fusion, residual learning, and self-normalization to develop a lightweight model that accurately diagnoses gastrointestinal (GI) tract conditions.•The model produced from the proposed method generated better performance than most pre-existing state-of-the-art Deep Convolutional Neural Networks that diagnosed the presented four GI tract conditions.•Aside from its competitive performance, the model based on the proposed method only had 1.2M parameters and only consumed 1.5 GFLOPS, making it significantly more cost-efficient than most existing solutions.

“Bravo!”: Co-constructing praise in French family life

Children and praise is an under-researched area that is addressed in this study, which explores in detail praise sequences in parent-child interaction in French family life (45 h; video). Language socialization practices (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1989, 2012) are analyzed in verbal praise sequences, including response cries – like ‘ouais’, ‘bravo’, ‘oh là là’ – and audible glee (Goffman, 1978) as well as what we have called glee gestures (e.g. applauds, victory gestures). Work in conversation analysis has shown that adults avoid self-praise. This study extends prior work on praise, showing that young children (toddlers) recurrently deployed self-praise. Moreover, they engaged in role reversal play, when recycling adults' praise. They talked to themselves, using prior praise like mantras, when engaging in demanding novel tasks and they smiled and laughed in self-celebration. The findings contribute to language socialization theory in showing that children's self-praise was linked to adult praise and to scaffolding and joyful emotion sharing. Praise was co-construed and upgraded through an array of resources, and the children's actions were sequentially transformed into accomplishments. In its multimodal enactment, praise may change ordinary actions into extraordinary feats, momentarily transforming little children into the celebrated heroes of family life.

‘Everyone Has Secrets’: Revealing the Whistleblower in Hollwood Film in the Examples of <em>Snowden</em> and <em>The Fifth Estate</em>

‘Everyone Has Secrets’: Revealing the Whistleblower in Hollwood Film in the Examples of <em>Snowden</em> and <em>The Fifth Estate</em>

Optical Illusion Images Dataset

Human vision is capable of performing many tasks not optimized for during its long evolution. Reading text and identifying artificial objects such as road signs are both tasks that mammalian brains never encountered in the wild but are very easy for us to perform. However, humans have discovered many very specific tricks or illusions that cause us to misjudge the color, size, alignment, and movement of what we are looking at. A better understanding of these phenomenon could reveal insights into how human perception achieves these extraordinary feats. In this paper we present a dataset of 6,725 illusion images gathered from two websites, and a smaller dataset of 500 hand-picked images. We will discuss the process of collecting this data, models trained on the data, and the work that needs to be done to make this information of value to computer vision researchers.

Of the brain, by the brain, and for the brain.

Circa 400 bc, Hippocrates made the first postulate regarding the origin of all human emotion and declared, “Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joy, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs, and tears.”1 How does a barrage of action potentials, cascading down a neuron, accomplish these extraordinary feats? How do we explain love at first saccade? And how does the brain contemplate the vastness of this universe? Such beguiling complexities keep “us” at the study of the neurosciences.

Timing Deficits in ADHD: Insights From the Neuroscience of Musical Rhythm.

Everyday human behavior relies upon extraordinary feats of coordination within the brain. In this perspective paper, we argue that the rich temporal structure of music provides an informative context in which to investigate how the brain coordinates its complex activities in time, and how that coordination can be disrupted. We bring insights from the neuroscience of musical rhythm to considerations of timing deficits in Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), highlighting the significant overlap between neural systems involved in processing musical rhythm and those implicated in ADHD. We suggest that timing deficits warrant closer investigation since they could lead to the identification of potentially informative phenotypes, tied to neurobiological and genetic factors. Our novel interdisciplinary approach builds upon recent trends in both fields of research: in the neuroscience of rhythm, an increasingly nuanced understanding of the specific contributions of neural systems to rhythm processing, and in ADHD, an increasing focus on differentiating phenotypes and identifying distinct etiological pathways associated with the disorder. Finally, we consider the impact of musical experience on rhythm processing and the potential value of musical rhythm in therapeutic interventions.

Hippocampal\u2013caudate nucleus interactions support exceptional memory performance

Participants of the annual World Memory Championships regularly demonstrate extraordinary memory feats, such as memorising the order of 52 playing cards in 20 s or 1000 binary digits in 5 min. On a cognitive level, memory athletes use well-known mnemonic strategies, such as the method of loci. However, whether these feats are enabled solely through the use of mnemonic strategies or whether they benefit additionally from optimised neural circuits is still not fully clarified. Investigating 23 leading memory athletes, we found volumes of their right hippocampus and caudate nucleus were stronger correlated with each other compared to matched controls; both these volumes positively correlated with their position in the memory sports world ranking. Furthermore, we observed larger volumes of the right anterior hippocampus in athletes. Complementing these structural findings, on a functional level, fMRI resting state connectivity of the anterior hippocampus to both the posterior hippocampus and caudate nucleus predicted the athletes rank. While a competitive interaction between hippocampus and caudate nucleus is often observed in normal memory function, our findings suggest that a hippocampal–caudate nucleus cooperation may enable exceptional memory performance. We speculate that this cooperation reflects an integration of the two memory systems at issue-enabling optimal combination of stimulus-response learning and map-based learning when using mnemonic strategies as for example the method of loci.

Perceptions of Athletes in Disabled and Non-Disabled Sport Contexts: A Descriptive Qualitative Research Study

The term supercrip suggests extraordinary feats but is sometimes applied to any proficiency demonstrated by an athlete with a disability. This use of the term potentially undermines spectator appreciation for achievements of the upper echelon of disability sports participants. Prior disability sport researchers have suggested that a comparison of individuals’ perceptions of athletic heroes with and without disabilities has potential to help disability sport marketers counter the supercrip stereotype. The purpose of this research was to explore differences in perceptions by comparing participant descriptions of role models with and without disabilities. Research participants, who consisted of undergraduate students at a large southwestern university, viewed video recorded scenarios of athletes with and without disabilities and participated in focus group interviews. Our findings supported those of prior researchers who suggested that participants were most likely to describe relatable circumstances as inspiring. Our participants also critiqued the depth of the stories presented in the scenarios based on their prior exposure to disability narratives. Disability sport marketers might benefit from emphasizing multiple elements of athletes’ backgrounds to appeal to potential consumers. Marketers should also consider that consumers might have developed preexisting expectations about style of presentation of athlete interest stories.

Special report : Can we copy the brain? - A road map for the artificial brain

Brain - inspired computing is having a moment. Artificial neural network algorithms like deep learning, which are very loosely based on the way the human brain operates, now allow digital computers to perform such extraordinary feats as translating language, hunting for subtle patterns in huge amounts of data, and beating the best human players at Go. But even as engineers continue to push this mighty computing strategy, the energy efficiency of digital computing is fast approaching its limits. Our data centers and supercomputers already draw megawatts-some 2 percent of the electricity consumed in the United States goes to data centers alone. The human brain, by contrast, runs quite well on about 20 watts, which represents the power produced by just a fraction of the food a person eats each day. If we want to keep improving computing, we will need our computers to become more like our brains.

Between friendship and justice: on Lincoln’s political thought

ABSTRACTReading Aristotle and applying his notion of philia, or political friendship, across 26 centuries sheds significant light into Abraham Lincoln’s career. It is precisely in Lincoln’s embodiment of the Aristotelian notion of friendship that we come to understand his unique greatness. Perhaps he alone of all Americans proved capable of such extraordinary feats as leading the Republican party to victory in 1860, holding the Union together through the secession crisis and four long years of bloody civil war, ending slavery without white backlash, and offering reconciliation with the incredible magnanimity expressed in the ringing phrases of the Second Inaugural address. The basis of Lincoln’s preternatural political genius proved to be his ability to comprehend all sides, a comprehension that can only come from a profound belief in the importance of friendship. Americans, Lincoln argued throughout a terrible war as he had his entire life, were not enemies but friends who shared a commitment to nature and nature’s law as expressed in the Declaration.

Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared by Trinh T. Minh-ha

Reviewed by: Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared by Trinh T. Minh-ha Krista Geneviève Lynes Trinh T. Minh-ha, Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared New York: Fordham University Press, 2016, 298 pp. ISBN 978-0-8232-7110-8 Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared is written in the midst of a wartime violence whose endless terror has engendered and sanctified new forms of domestic and international surveillance, "security" measures, the militarization of daily life, discriminatory policing, and imperialist bluster. Haunted by the specters of other conflicts—Sudan, Tibet, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Rwanda, Congo, Burma, Bosnia, Kosovo, South Africa, Cambodia, and Vietnam—Trinh Minh-ha elaborates the intimate and worldly effects of war's Manichean violence on daily embodied life, on living "exiled, expatriated, segregated, deported, displaced, discarded, repudiated, estranged, disappeared, unsettled and unsettling" in times of crisis (2). The book tracks both the rising US military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan and China's occupation of Tibet, mapping the intersecting forms of imperialism whose discursive force makes certain forms of writing and making impossible. In the face of wartime image making and iconoclasm, Trinh devises a method and language to write from and through the contemporary moment's unsettling climate. Lovecidal is partially a factual account of the state of war under US and Chinese imperialism and partially a philosophical account of the epistemological and ontological conditions of [End Page 377] the post-9/11 world, these two accounts interspersed with lyrical passages of a woman's movement through a twilight landscape, as well as black-and-white photographic images of fragmented, bisected, and mirrored female bodies in natural landscapes. The book aims explicitly to challenge acts of militarism and surveillance, as well as the confiscation of language by militarized rhetoric, and to find a voice resonant with the forms of resistance she turns to in and through the text. Much of her account of imperial power (by both the United States and China) revolves around the intersections of state violence with image making and image repression. In response to the missing image of the corpse of Osama bin Laden, for instance, Trinh recounts the frenzied circulation of hoaxes on the internet, including a doctored photo of bin Laden's bloodied head that appeared on Pakistan's GeoTV (10). Image making, for Trinh, is a tactic of wartime propaganda, the reiteration of power through showing sensational, exceptional, extra-ordinary feats, what she calls a "mise-en-scène of victory" (43). She points to the 1991 Gulf War (the first twenty-four-hour cable news war) as a site for the orchestration of homogeneous coverage of an event, which programmed the world to feel "shock" and "awe" at "the deployment of power via images of raw sensational destruction" (43) and the "power of the camera indulging evil as aesthetics" (58). The Gulf War was not only a spectacle of "shock" and "awe," though, but also a concerted orchestration of the absence of the war itself. The "war" went unseen as the coverage focused on techniques of war processing, a "carefully filled Absence: since the press was not allowed to see what was happening" (87). The account Trinh builds of wartime is contemporary but transversal—sliding between the first and second Gulf Wars, between the "war on terror" and the war in Vietnam, between the imperial ventures of the United States and France, and between Western and Eastern imperial power. Drawing predominantly from news reports, popular magazines, blogs, and alternative press sites, Trinh builds an account of war in its very emergence, in the liveliness of its contemporary moment, through the media apparatuses that give it (and its repressive effects) shape. If the first half of the book concerns itself with US imperial power, the second half focuses its lens more properly on emergent Chinese imperialism, most particularly evidenced in its occupation of Tibet. China exercises its power not only through direct repression of dissent, but also through complex processes of displacement (the forced modernization and "Sinicization" of Tibet) and censorship of all objects of Buddhist veneration, most notably images of the Dalai Lama. Throughout her account, Trinh traces how the war of words empties language (and signifying...

Fifteen years of cold matter on the atom chip: promise, realizations, and prospects

Here we review the field of atom chips in the context of Bose–Einstein Condensates (BEC) as well as cold matter in general. Twenty years after the first realization of the BEC and 15 years after the realization of the atom chip, the latter has been found to enable extraordinary feats: from producing BECs at a rate of several per second, through the realization of matter-wave interferometry, and all the way to novel probing of surfaces and new forces. In addition, technological applications are also being intensively pursued. This review will describe these developments and more, including new ideas which have not yet been realized.

The multi-functional foot in athletic movement: extraordinary feats by our extraordinary feet

The unique architecture of the foot system provides a sensitive, multi-tensional method of communicating with the surrounding environment. Within the premise of the paper, we discuss three themes: complexity, degeneracy and bio-tensegrity. Complex structures within the foot allow the human movement system to negotiate strategies for dynamic movement during athletic endeavours. We discuss such complex structures with particular attention to properties of a bio-tensegrity system. Degeneracy within the foot structure offers a distinctive solution to the problems posed by differing terrains and uneven surfaces allowing lower extremity structures to overcome perturbation as and when it occurs. This extraordinary structure offers a significant contribution to bipedalism through presenting a robust base of support and as such, should be given more consideration when designing athletic development programmes.

March of the Red Devil

Tennesen talks about the Adult Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas), a fierce predator. The Adult Humboldt squid are roughly the size and weight of an adult human, have eight arms, two long tentacles covered with toothed suckers and are notoriously aggressive. They will fearlessly latch onto divers with their powerful arms. While many ocean dwellers are suffering as climate change makes waters warmer, less alkaline and less oxygenated, these beasts thrive and push into new territories. Recent observations suggest that this is all down to extraordinary feats of transformation. When pulled from the sea they flash a deep, angry shade of red and flail muscular tentacles. Underwater, they use their two tentacles with barbed suckers to capture passing prey in a flash and pull them to their arms and parrot-like beak.