I spent yesterday up on Capitol Hill. It was quite hot and humid and reminded me nothing so much as of my intern days working for the New England Congressional Caucus. Today I’ve got a stack of NSF grants in front of me to review.

Jim

Chistoph Adami writes the review in the May 25 issue of Science Magazine. Interesting comparison to Koch’s recent book, The Quest for Consciousness.

The money quote:

In fact, Hofstadter’s book and Koch’s recent The Quest for Consciousness (3) make for an interesting juxtaposition. Each addresses the same problem but entirely on different levels. Yet both authors reach some of the same conclusions, sometimes using precisely the same metaphor (as when they compare the activity of “making up one’s mind” in terms of a voting process). In the end, both authors could have profited from peeking at each other’s arsenal: Hofstadter would probably be delighted to see some of the putative neural underpinnings of consciousness, to peer underneath the strange loop as it were, at the inordinately complex firework and the neuroanatomy that supports it. For his part, Koch would no doubt appreciate the computational trick that Gödel incompleteness plays on us, as well as the developmental aspect of consciousness that Hofstadter advocates.

Jim

I would have thought, based on previous years experiences, that the pace would have slowed down here but this time that’s not the case–at least so far. My graduate students are both hard at work on upcoming presentations, we’re in the process of welcoming new PI’s and taking delivery of our new space.

I’m very pleased about the first meeting of Mason’s Neuroscience Advisory Council this past week. The Council is the faculty body charged with coordinating the neuroscience curriculum across the University. It’s an exciting group with a tremendous amount of energy and the full support of the administration.

I’ll end this blog entry with some useful links:

Neuroscience at Mason
Social Complexity at Mason

Jim

Today’s New York Times has an article about a very interesting new company that is using metabolic engineering technology to cure Malaria and churn out petroleum replacement fuels.

Money quote:

Until recently, genetic engineering of the sort associated with traditional biotechnology has been limited to modifying a cell’s processes by inserting, mutating or deleting a single gene or a few significant genes. Genetic engineering has coaxed microorganisms like the common bacterium E. coli to produce drugs like human insulin, but has produced little else besides such protein drugs and a few antibiotics.

Mr. Keasling’s metabolic engineering is farther-reaching and, potentially, much more productive. His lab has invented techniques that rewrite the metabolisms of microorganisms. By modifying the structure of a microorganism’s proteins and adding genes from other organisms, Mr. Keasling has designed microbial factories that can produce a tremendous variety of drugs, biofuels and other chemicals.

The recent Decade of the Mind talks are now all on-line for your viewing pleasure.

Jim

Baruchi and Ben-Jacob report storing a set of engrams onto a set of neurons growing in a dish.

Money quote:

We show that using local chemical stimulations it is possible to imprint persisting (days) multiple memories (collective modes of neuron firing) in the activity of cultured neural networks. Microdroplets of inhibitory antagonist are injected at a location selected based on real-time analysis of the recorded activity. The neurons at the stimulated locations turn into a focus for initiating synchronized bursting events (the collective modes) each with its own specific spatiotemporal pattern of neuron firing.

Jim

Interesting short piece in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education. Key concept: Florida outsources management of university-owned IP to seasoned managers.

Jim

The Washington Post today had a wonderful piece on Krasnow scientist Paul So’s new venture on U St. NW–where he is opening up a new kind of art gallery. That on top of his work in the physics of neural dynamics!

Jim

Dale Purves’ group at Duke has a very interesting new perspective on where human music gets its constraints from. I wonder if that counts hip hop?

Jim

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a really important piece in the current issue that lays out a very solid case against the objectivity of the famed US News and World Report rankings.

Money quote:

So it appears that public universities have a hard time competing because of the other categories, based on quantitative data used by U.S. News. A closer look reveals that almost every one of those measures favors private institutions over public ones:

Six-year graduation rates. Most public colleges must, according to their missions, take less-qualified students. Private institutions graduate 64 percent of students, compared with 54 percent for public colleges, according to 2006 federal data.

Alumni-giving rate. Private institutions have typically been raising money for longer periods than have public ones. In 2006, 17.5 percent of graduates of private research universities contributed to their alma mater, compared with 11 percent of graduates of public research institutions, according to the Voluntary Support of Education survey.

Student-faculty ratio. There were 15.4 students per faculty member at public four-year institutions in 2005, compared with 12.5 students per faculty member at private institutions, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Acceptance rate. Because of their public mission, many state institutions must accept higher proportions of applicants. Berkeley and the University of California at Los Angeles accepted 27 percent of applicants in 2006, the lowest rates among public institutions, according to U.S. News data. But 14 private institutions had lower rates.

There is an interesting move afoot to break the near monopoly that U.S. News has on the rankings. Strap in for some interesting times in higher education.

Jim