Instant rivalry: the Melbourne Victory versus Melbourne Heart derby

The Australian A-League football (soccer) competition only began in 2005 after a major reconstruction of the governance of the game. The model adopted was one team per city so local derbies, often the focus of intense and long-running rivalries in football overseas, did not exist. In 2010 a second team began in Melbourne where previously Melbourne Victory had a monopoly. Within a couple of seasons an intense local rivalry has developed attracting over 40,000 fans to games between Victory and newcomer Melbourne Heart. This is the story of that rivalry and how it has become one of the most eagerly anticipated sporting occasions in a country where historically soccer has been a minority sport.

Use of monocular and binocular visual cues for postural control in children

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

The Chilean system of contributory pensions as locus of rivalry and of a new social compact

This study assesses the contributory pension system in Chile and offers some recommendations for reform, from the viewpoint of social rights that generate expectations of satisfaction. The primary objective of any pension system is to provide income security to the elderly, and contributory pensions must reflect the savings achieved throughout working life in order to guarantee that, for similar levels of effort, similar and proportionate protection will be obtained.

Projeto de um transdutor binocular utilizando extensometria e aplicação na pesagem rodoviária

With the passage of time, the variety of companies from each branch has gradually grown throughout the country. As a consequence, the logistics to attend to such demand has grown in the same proportion. One factor to highlight about this rapid growth is the increase of freight vehicles roaming the roads, often carrying loads over the limit established by law. At first it may seem that this would not bring any problem, however, note that an excessive number of overloads ends up deteriorating the asphalt, causing ondulations, potholes and other imperfections on the roads, which can cause accidents. In addition, the money spent for the maintenance of the roads is high. Thinking about it, it was established by law a regulation that restricts the weight limit for these vehicles, through axle weighing, subject to a fine. With this control the road floor is preserved for longer, requiring less maintenance expenses. The weighing stations use load cells to display the inferred weight, these cells use strain gages in its construction. The following work presents a methodology to dimension a binocular load cell, its main elements and its dimensioning. Showing how different materials can affect the dimensioning, so that can work satisfactorily. It also presents an overview of how are the parameters for weighing, and fines

Cataract surgery: emotional reactions of patients with monocular versus binocular vision

Purpose: To analyze emotional reactions related to cataract surgery in two groups of patients (monocular vision - Group 1; binocular vision - Group 2). Methods: A transversal comparative study was performed using a structured questionnaire from a previous exploratory study before cataract surgery. Results: 206 patients were enrolled in the study, 96 individuals in Group 1 (69.3 +/- 10.4 years) and 110 in Group 2 (68.2 +/- 10.2 years). Most patients in group 1 (40.6%) and 22.7% of group 2, reported fear of surgery (p<0.001). The most important causes of fear were: possibility of blindness, ocular complications and death during surgery. The most prevalent feelings among the groups were doubts about good results and nervousness. Conclusion: Patients with monocular vision reported more fear and doubts related to surgical outcomes. Thus, it is necessary that phisycians considers such emotional reactions and invest more time than usual explaining the risks and the benefits of cataract surgery. Ouvir

Parental influence on sibling rivalry in great tit, Parus major, nests

Sibling and parente-offspring conflicts arise mainly over the amount and distribution of parental care, especially food. In altricial bird species where the young depend on parents for obtaining food, parents may control sibling competition by the choice of their respective provisioning locations. In great tits, the parents use fixed provisioning positions on the nest rim that are determined early in the breeding cycle and maintained until. edging. The two parents may choose positions that are close to each other, or far apart, and thereby increase or relax the pressure for optimal feeding positioning among nestlings. As an inspiration to this study we previously found that the two parents provide food from closer positions if the nest is infested by ectoparasites. Here, we tested the hypothesis that the parental choice of relative provisioning locations could be strategically used to control nestling competition. We forced parents to feed from either one or two provisioning locations and assessed the induced change in nestling movement, weight gain, and food distribution among siblings. We show that the angular distance between male and female locations influences the level of behavioural competition and affects nestling weight gain and food distribution. It is the first evidence for hole-nesting birds, where it was assumed that the nestling closest to the entrance hole was fed first, that the apparent choice of feeding positions by parents could be a way of controlling sibling competition and thereby also taking partial control over the outcome of parente-offspring conflict. (c) 2007 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Evaluation of Binocular Eye Trackers and Algorithms for 3D Gaze Interaction in Virtual Reality Environments

Tracking user’s visual attention is a fundamental aspect in novel human-computer interaction paradigms found in Virtual Reality. For example, multimodal interfaces or dialogue-based communications with virtual and real agents greatly benefit from the analysis of the user’s visual attention as a vital source for deictic references or turn-taking signals. Current approaches to determine visual attention rely primarily on monocular eye trackers. Hence they are restricted to the interpretation of two-dimensional fixations relative to a defined area of projection. The study presented in this article compares precision, accuracy and application performance of two binocular eye tracking devices. Two algorithms are compared which derive depth information as required for visual attention-based 3D interfaces. This information is further applied to an improved VR selection task in which a binocular eye tracker and an adaptive neural network algorithm is used during the disambiguation of partly occluded objects.

Recovery from monocular deprivation using binocular deprivation.

Ocular dominance (OD) plasticity is a robust paradigm for examining the functional consequences of synaptic plasticity. Previous experimental and theoretical results have shown that OD plasticity can be accounted for by known synaptic plasticity mechanisms, using the assumption that deprivation by lid suture eliminates spatial structure in the deprived channel. Here we show that in the mouse, recovery from monocular lid suture can be obtained by subsequent binocular lid suture but not by dark rearing. This poses a significant challenge to previous theoretical results. We therefore performed simulations with a natural input environment appropriate for mouse visual cortex. In contrast to previous work, we assume that lid suture causes degradation but not elimination of spatial structure, whereas dark rearing produces elimination of spatial structure. We present experimental evidence that supports this assumption, measuring responses through sutured lids in the mouse. The change in assumptions about the input environment is sufficient to account for new experimental observations, while still accounting for previous experimental results.

Rivalry of homeostatic and sensory-evoked emotions: dehydration attenuates olfactory disgust and its neural correlates

Neural correlates have been described for emotions evoked by states of homeostatic imbalance (e.g. thirst, hunger, and breathlessness) and for emotions induced by external sensory stimulation (such as fear and disgust). However, the neurobiological mechanisms of their interaction, when they are experienced simultaneously, are still unknown. We investigated the interaction on the neurobiological and the perceptional level using subjective ratings, serum parameters, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a situation of emotional rivalry, when both a homeostatic and a sensory-evoked emotion were experienced at the same time. Twenty highly dehydrated male subjects rated a disgusting odor as significantly less repulsive when they were thirsty. On the neurobiological level, we found that this reduction in subjective disgust during thirst was accompanied by a significantly reduced neural activity in the insular cortex, a brain area known to be considerably involved in processing of disgust. Furthermore, during the experience of disgust in the satiated condition, we observed a significant functional connectivity between brain areas responding to the disgusting odor, which was absent during the stimulation in the thirsty condition. These results suggest interference of conflicting emotions: An acute homeostatic imbalance can attenuate the experience of another emotion evoked by the sensory perception of a potentially harmful external agent. This finding offers novel insights with regard to the behavioral relevance of biologically different types of emotions, indicating that some types of emotions are more imperative for behavior than others. As a general principle, this modulatory effect during the conflict of homeostatic and sensory-evoked emotions may function to safeguard survival.

Exploring the emotional brain: Neural correlates of homeostatic and sensory-evoked emotions and their interaction in emotional rivalry

Human emotions are essential for survival. They are vital for the satisfaction of basic needs, the regulation of personal life and successful integration into social structures. Depending on which aspect of an emotion is used in its definition, many different theories offer possible answers to the questions of what emotions are and how they can be distinguished. The systematic investigation of emotions in cognitive neuroscience is relatively new, and neuroimaging studies specifically focussing on the neural correlates of different categories of emotions are still lacking. Therefore, the current thesis aimed at investigating the behavioural and neurophysiological correlates of different human emotional levels and their interaction in healthy subjects. We differentiated between emotions according to their cerebral entry site and neural processing pathways: homeostatic emotions, which are elicited by metabolic changes and processed by the interoceptive system (such as thirst, hunger, and need for air), and sensory-evoked emotions, which are evoked by external inputs via the eyes, ears or nose, or their corresponding mental representations and processed in the brain as sensory perception (e.g. fear, disgust, or pride). Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and behavioural parameters, we examined both the specific neural underpinnings of a homeostatic emotion (thirst) and a sensory-evoked emotion (disgust), and their interaction in a situation of emotional rivalry when both emotions were perceived simultaneously. This thesis comprises three research articles reporting the results of this research. The first paper presents disgust-related brain imaging data in a thirsty and a satiated condition. We found that disgust mainly activated the anterior insular cortex. In the thirsty condition, however, we observed an interaction effect between disgust and thirst: when thirsty, the subjects rated the disgusting stimulus as less repulsive. On the neurobiological level, this reduction of subjective disgust was accompanied by significantly reduced neural activity in the insular cortex. These results provide new neurophysiological evidence for a hierarchical organization among homeostatic and sensory-evoked emotions, revealing that in a situation of emotional conflict, homeostatic emotions are prioritized over sensory-evoked emotions. In the second paper, findings on brain perfusion over four different thirst stages are reported, with a special focus on the parametric progression of thirst. Cerebral perfusion differences over all thirst stages were found in the posterior insular cortex. Taking this result together with the findings of the first paper, the insular cortex seems to be a key player in human emotional processing, since it comprises specific representations of homeostatic and sensory-evoked emotions and also represents the site of cortical interaction between the two levels of emotions. Finally, although this thesis focussed on the homeostatic modulation of disgust, we were also interested in whether dehydration modulates taste perception. The results of this behavioural experiment are described in the third paper, where we show that dehydration alters the perception of neutral taste stimuli.

Binocular vision in insects: How mantids solve the correspondence problem

Praying mantids use binocular cues to judge whether their prey is in striking distance. When there are several moving targets within their binocular visual field, mantids need to solve the correspondence problem. They must select between the possible pairings of retinal images in the two eyes so that they can strike at a single real target. In this study, mantids were presented with two targets in various configurations, and the resulting fixating saccades that precede the strike were analyzed. The distributions of saccades show that mantids consistently prefer one out of several possible matches. Selection is in part guided by the position and the spatiotemporal features of the target image in each eye. Selection also depends upon the binocular disparity of the images, suggesting that insects can perform local binocular computations. The pairing rules ensure that mantids tend to aim at real targets and not at “ghost” targets arising from false matches.

Neural mechanisms underlying binocular fusion and stereopsis: Position vs. phase

The visual system utilizes binocular disparity to discriminate the relative depth of objects in space. Since the striate cortex is the first site along the central visual pathways at which signals from the left and right eyes converge onto a single neuron, encoding of binocular disparity is thought to begin in this region. There are two possible mechanisms for encoding binocular disparity through simple cells in the striate cortex: a difference in receptive field (RF) position between the two eyes (RF position disparity) and a difference in RF profile between the two eyes (RF phase disparity). Although there have been studies supporting each of the two encoding mechanisms, both mechanisms have not been examined in a single study. Therefore, the relative roles of the two mechanisms have not been determined. To address this issue, we have mapped left and right eye RFs of simple cells in the cat’s striate cortex using binary m-sequence noise, and then we have estimated RF position and phase disparities. We find that RF position disparities are generally limited to small values that are not sufficient to encode large binocular disparities. In contrast, RF phase disparities cover a wide range of binocular disparities and exhibit dependencies on orientation and spatial frequency in a manner expected for a mechanism that encodes binocular disparity. These results indicate that binocular disparity is mainly encoded through RF phase disparity. However, RF position disparity may play a significant role for cells with high spatial frequency selectivity, which are constrained to small RF phase disparities.