Author: jlolds

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

Jonathan Moreno on NeuroDOD

From the ScienceProgress blog:

[the] National Research Council has released a report,Opportunities in Neuroscience for Future Army Applications, that suggests tailoring individual soldiers’ training to recent discoveries about the brain from modern neuroscience can provide valuable advances in military instruction. Along with traditional areas of concern to the military like leadership and decision making under stress, the report suggests that the services should also take cognitive fitness, brain-machine interfaces, and biomarkers (biological indicators of brain states) into consideration during basic training.

Flexner II Continued: AAMC/HHMI report on medical school training

Money quote:

The report, “Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians,” is based on recommendations from a 22-member committee of researchers, physicians, and science educators.

The committee members hope that by focusing on a dynamic set of competencies, rather than specific courses, they will open the door to more innovation in both premedical and medical curricula, and make it easier for premeds to take a variety of nonscience, liberal-arts courses.

Are science bloggers part of the media–or are they scientists?

Looks like there were some fireworks at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on twittered/blogged transmission of new science.

My own sense is that this needs to be handled on a case-by-case basis. Some science bloggers are scientists in their own right (they conduct scholarly research and publish their results in journals–among other places). Some science bloggers are in fact journalists. 
When Andrew Sullivan blogs about science, he’s clearly a journalist paid by The Atlantic. When Tyler Cowen blogs about economics, he’s an academic and holds the position of professor (at George Mason).
That said, as a journal editor, I would have real problems publishing something that had had been already put up on the web in a blog. And as a scientist, I would have real problems with a journalist blogging my results in substance (rather than in summary) before I published them myself.

Thanks for the seven days!

I’ve taken the liberty of a week’s break and am ready to get back to blogging again. The high point of the week was an excellent performance of Turandot at Kennedy Center yesterday evening. My weakness for Puccini stems from early imprinting from my neuroscientist parents, who were as interested in classical music as anything except the brain itself.

This coming week, I’ll be thinking about a real-time functional MRI experiment that I’m interested in running with some close colleagues. Real time fMRI is a relatively new technique that allows one to reveal the BOLD signal as it is happening without further image processing.
Jim

Markoff on the new AI

The NY Times’ John Markoff sees AI as emerging from its “caution flag” state that it entered in the mid-1980’s.

Money quote for Krasnow Institute colleagues:

“I see the debate over whether we should build these artificial intellects as becoming the dominant political question of the century,” said Hugo de Garis, an Australian artificial-intelligence researcher, who has written a book, “The Artilect War,” that argues that the debate is likely to end in global war.

NIH to the rescue on the drug pipeline

ScienceInsider reports on NIH’s new initiative to develop drugs for orphan diseases. Money quote:

NIH leaders today announced a $120 million, 5-year plan to set up a drug development service center at the agency. The center’s chemists and toxicologists will modify promising compounds until they’re ready to be tested in people. The focus will be on rare and neglected diseases.