Author: jlolds

Native Angeleno, professor of Neuroscience and Public Policy at George Mason University

Disciplinary Walls: Physics compared with Economics

Hat tip to Marginal Revolution. Here is a very interesting blog entry from orgtheory.net on how two disciplines handle their own publishing outside the normal boundaries of the field. Read all the comments–they are excellent.

Here at Krasnow we have three very excellent physicists who work on neural dynamics. We also have an economist working cognitive neuroscience and another economist (also affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute) who does agent-based models of social complexity.

Jim

How bad exactly is the ice on your next commercial flight?

From Revere at Effect Measure on bacteria counts aboard commercial aircraft:

Shortly thereafter the news carried stories that the US EPA had determined that 15% of water on a sample of 327 aircraft flunked the total coliform standards and inspections showed that all aircraft were out of compliance with the national drinking water standards.

Too bad we can’t bring our own beverages any more.

Jim

A talk at the National Defense University

I gave a talk for my friend and colleague Professor Margaret Polski at NDU today for her class on planning for what’s ahead in Afghanistan. Margaret is also an affiliate here at the Institute. I was delighted to find out that her mentor at Indiana was none other than newly minted Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom.

The class was really tough. I found that making the case for the importance of neuroscience to a bunch of practical smart folks about to be deployed to Afghanistan is a difficult proposition!
Here’s a plug for Margaret’s book.
Jim

Follow up on nuclear physics

As a follow-up to the previous post, here’s an excellent essay on what’s gone awry for the field of nuclear physics over the last sixty years.

Money quote:

The story of nuclear physics is one of the most remarkable marketing disasters in intellectual history. In the space of a few decades, the public perception of the atom’s promise to serve humanity, and the international admiration that surrounded the many brilliant people who unraveled the mysteries of matter, had collapsed. So pronounced was the erosion of attitudes toward nuclear physics that, by the late 1990s, several European physicists felt it necessary to establish an organization called Public Awareness of Nuclear Science for the explicit purpose of improving the public image of their discipline.

Higgs particle sabotaging the Large Hadron Collider?

I’ll have to put this one out to my theoretical physicist colleagues, but apparently there’s this wild idea that Nature is sabotaging the Large Hadron Collider to avoid creating a Higgs particle (which apparently gives things their property of mass). The notion is that creating a Higgs particle would be very bad.

Sounds like Drudge? Nope, it’s in the NY Times right here.

Elinor Ostrum

This year’s co-winner of the Nobel Economics Prize, Elinor Ostrum works on a topic familiar to many Institute social complexity scientists: the tragedy of the commons. While this is a fascinating issue from the standpoint of human social behavior, I wonder to what extent our brain’s own cognitive resources (taken as a whole) are subject to something similar as we shift our attention from one thing to another. Isn’t cognitive overload essentially a tragedy of the neural commons? And is the entire cognitive attentional machinery a means of trying to avoid tragedy of the neural commons?

I keep thinking back to the terrible fix that the pilots of Air France Flight 447 must have been in as they entered an area of extreme thunderstorm activity with multiple system failure warnings, degrading of the jet’s fly-by-wire system into a “safe” mode, and whatever else cropped up in the deadly minutes before disaster. The cockpit is potentially always a place for tragedy of the neural commons.

Poker and the brain

The Chronicle Review has an interesting article on Poker viewed through a kind of De Toqueville lens as integral the character of Americans. When I was in growing up in Pasadena as a Caltech faculty-brat Poker was a very important part of my socialization. My high school buddies and I played it with the intensity that I think some people ascribe more to chess–and we certainly weren’t playing for high stakes.

I’m wondering if Poker has yet made it to the fMRI literature? It would be interesting to visualize the neurobiological substrate of “folding”.
Loyal readers care to point me in the right direction?
Jim