This paper examines discretionary decision making in a property law context: the statutory power to correct a mistaken entry on the land register. This discretionary power has importance as an occasion when the allocation of property occurs without fixed rules but is put into the control of the court without guidance on content or goals. The case-law is studied using legal empirical analysis. The judicial approach is described and findings are analysed. The paper relates the conclusions to doctrinal and policy debates in land registration and discusses how the judicial input advances understanding of the registration system as an integrated whole.

Might authoritarian one-party systems experience something akin to party identification – or affective proximity to the Party – that waxes and wanes over time? Such cycles do not centre on elections but on the politics of succession, new policy initiatives and ad hoc housecleaning, and their focus would be officials within the system as opposed to the electorate outside it. I argue that a key mechanism animating such variation in party identification of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cadres lies within the recurring rectification efforts seeking to temper these individuals and make them more submissive to the larger political goals of the Party centre. Such priming is largely an in-house phenomenon, taking place increasingly deeper within the CCP apparatus. This process tends to involve an extensive arsenal of institutional mechanisms that constitute a particularly big stick and within which pressures to comply can be uncomfortable, even excruciating. Normative elements of these movements, such as the language and substantive written materials used during study, analysis and self-criticism are predominantly in the service of enhancing the sheer domineering quality of the Party vis-à-vis the individuals that make up its ranks. I explore this through an examination of the three stresses (san jiang) campaign of 1998–2002.

This article argues that mistakes in written contracts should be corrected under the equitable doctrine of rectification rather than the common law of interpretation. But rectification on the basis of a common mistake should only be granted where both parties are actually mistaken. Any other approach is inconsistent with the nature of the equitable jurisdiction, and blurs the boundary between common mistake and unilateral mistake rectification.

When the Land Registration Act 2002 first came into force, the prevailing academic view was that it had created a system of “title by registration”, such that, where someone (B) is mistakenly registered as owner of another person's (A's) land, he acquires a good title (notwithstanding the mistake) that can validly be conveyed to someone else (C). The thesis of this article is that, whilst the logic of the “title by registration” principle might be conceptually attractive, it has proven to be unworkable in practice, is questionable as a matter of policy, and – looking to the future – ought to be abandoned in favour of a more subtle legislative scheme for resolving A-B-C disputes.

We explain how higher homotopy operations, defined topologically, may be identified under mild assumptions with (the last of) the Dwyer-Kan-Smith cohomological obstructions to rectifying homotopy-commutative diagrams.

Some visual stimuli produce a strong percept of motion, even though they fail to excite motion detectors based on Fourier energy or cross correlation. Models which suffice to explain the motion percept in these non-Fourier motion (NFM) stimuli include linear spatiotemporal filtering, followed by rectification, followed by standard motion analysis (Chubb & Sperling 1988). We used the human “motion-onset” evoked potential, which has been assigned to area 17 on the basis of work in the macaque (van Dijk et al., 1986; van Dijk & Spekreijse, 1989), to investigate the neural substrate of the processing stages postulated in the above models. Motion-onset VEPs elicited by FM and NFM matched for spatial and temporal characteristics were indistinguishable in temporal characteristics and scalp topography at a transverse chain of electrodes. Addition of textural cues (granularity and higher-order form) did not influence the response dynamics or scalp topography of NFM responses. However, comparison of responses to NFM stimuli and related stimuli without coherent motion but similar spatial and temporal properties showed that the motion-onset responses were distinct from responses to the onset of fixed flicker-defined contours not undergoing coherent motion. We discuss the implications of these results for computational models of motion analysis.

Visual information is processed in a series of subsequent steps. The performance of each of these steps depends not only on the computations it performs itself but also on the representation of the visual surround on which it operates. Here we investigate the consequences of signal preprocessing for the performance of the motion-detection system of the fly. In particular, we analyze whether the retinal input signals are rectified and segregate into separate ON and OFF channels, which then feed independent parallel motion-detection pathways. We recorded the activity of an identified directionally selective interneuron (HI-cell) in response to apparent motion stimuli, i.e. sequential brightness changes at two neighboring locations in the visual field, as well as to brightness changes at only a single location. For apparent motion stimuli, the motion-dependent response component was determined by subtracting from the overall response the responses to the individual stimulus components when presented alone. The following conclusions could be derived: (1) Apparent motion consisting of a sequence of increased or decreased brightness at two locations in the visual field have the same optimum interstimulus time interval (Fig. 3). (2) Sequences of brightness steps of like polarity (either increments or decrements) elicit positive and negative motion-dependent response components when mimicking motion in the cell's preferred and null direction, respectively. The motion-dependent response components are inverted in sign when the brightness steps of a stimulus sequence have a different polarity (Fig. 7). (3) The responses to the beginning and the end of a brightness pulse depend on the pulse duration. For pulse durations of less than 2 s, both events interact with each other (Fig. 9). All of these results do not provide any indication that the fly processes motion information in independent ON and OFF motion detectors. Brightness changes of both signs are rather represented at the input of the same movement detectors, and interactions between signals resulting from both brightness increments and decrements take their sign into account. This type of preprocessing of the retinal input is argued to render a motion-detection system particularly robust against noise.