Phenomenology of consciousness from apprehension to judgment

We explore two different moments of human cognition, namely apprehension (A), whereby a coherent perception emerges by recruitment of large neuron groups and judgment (B), whereby memory retrieval of different (A) units coded in a suitable language and comparison of them leads to the formulation of a judgment. The first one has a duration around 1 sec (from 0.5 to 3 sec), it appears as an a-temporal present and its neural correlate is a wide synchronization in the EEG gamma band. It may be described as an interpretation of sensorial stimuli in terms of some stored algorithm, via a Bayes procedure. The second one entails the comparison of two apprehensions acquired at different times, coded in a given language, and retrieved by memory. It lasts around 3 sec and requires self-consciousness, as the judging agent must be well aware that he/she is the same one who faces the two coded apprehensions under scrutiny in order to extract a mutual relation. At variance with (A), (B) does not presuppose an algorithm, but it rather builds a new behavioural model by an inverse Bayes procedure. It will be shown how this build up of a novel model is related to creativity and free will.     

Measurements of the fine structure of laser intensity correlations near threshold

The correlation function of the intensity fluctuations of a single mode laser in the threshold region has been measured with a fast digital correlator. The various exponential components have been separated for the first time, by exploiting the nonlinear characteristics of the correlator. The results are in quantitative agreement with the theoretical predictions.     

A new class of optical multistabilities and instabilities induced by atomic coherence

We investigate the collective radiative behaviour of three level atoms with two degenerate levels in the ground state, with particular emphasis on the role of the ground state atomic coherence. When put in a cavity resonator, these atoms yield not only tristability, but also a higher-order bistability, a quadristability and a region of self generated oscillations.     

Tin-free intermolecular addition of primary alkyls to imines via the dimethylzinc-air radical process

[reaction: see text] A dimethylzinc-air initiator was applied to the generation of primary alkyl radicals from alkyl iodides. The addition of the generated primary alkyl radicals to N-tosylimines was accelerated by the action of boron trifluoride-diethyl etherate and copper(II) triflate to give the corresponding adducts in good yields after 2-3 h. Air oxygen was essential for the reaction to proceed, showing involvement of a radical process in the reaction.     

Scenario reduction for stochastic programs with Conditional Value-at-Risk

In this paper we discuss scenario reduction methods for risk-averse stochastic optimization problems. Scenario reduction techniques have received some attention in the literature and are used by practitioners, as such methods allow for an approximation of the random variables in the problem with a moderate number of scenarios, which in turn make the optimization problem easier to solve. The majority of works for scenario reduction are designed for classical risk-neutral stochastic optimization problems; however, it is intuitive that in the risk-averse case one is more concerned with scenarios that correspond to high cost. By building upon the notion of effective scenarios recently introduced in the literature, we formalize that intuitive idea and propose a scenario reduction technique for stochastic optimization problems where the objective function is a Conditional Value-at-Risk. Numerical results presented with problems from the literature illustrate the performance of the method and indicate the cases where we expect it to perform well.