I got a call from the marketing director of an architectural firm today. He had read about this blog’s off-spring, the Krasnow construction blog in the AIA magazine and decided to look around for himself. He thought that maybe a blog of this type might be a good idea for K-12 construction projects in his home town and I have to say, based on the experience here, I agree with him.

We also got to chatting about the larger utility of a web-instrument such as this. And that discussion dovetailed with a recent discussion I had, in another context, about academic-types and editorials. That discussion revolved around the complexities that often arise when the opinions of say…the chairperson of Dept X and Institution Y (signing as such) is mistaken for the official stance of Y. Needless to say, those complexities often lead to inboxes full of angry emails.

Blogs such as this one occupy a gray zone. They are neither the Op-Ed piece, nor are they an email listserv. The blog, writ large, still awaits the perspective that only some decades of being around will give it, in order for its place as a communication instrument to be fully understood. Until that time, we must settle on this: what’s here is not the official position of my institution–they are instead the open musings of an academic administrator, the internet equivalent of an open office door and a shared cup of java.

Jim

MRI: The machine will arrive on May 8. The schedule slip was due primarily to additional precautions and research into interference with existing labs. Renovation should start about February 20, with dust protection followed by demolition.

Expansion: We are applying for the preliminary design review today. Once we have approved preliminary design we will be able to get foundation and Steel erection permits. We will be applying for site clearing permits most likely in the morning. Tree clearing will be limited to the extents of the building foundation + 20 ‘ to allow for code clearance and construction equipment travel. The trees affected will be minimal. You may start seeing some cones and other equipment showing up over the next few weeks. Office trailers will be set in place as soon as we have a permit for them. We will be installing fencing around the perimeter of the project to limit access to the site. Once this happens, we will loose some parking in the rear access area, and incoming traffic into the building from the rear door will need to be limited.

Jim

The spring semester begins tomorrow at Mason. I’ll be teaching a class
on molecular signal transduction within the context of neuroscience–it
should be as interesting for me as it will be for our doctoral students.

In the meantime, I wish all of our students, faculty and staff the very
best of luck,

Jim

In today’s NY Times magazine. Aren’t these questions that we should be studying at Krasnow?

Money quote:
“Q:Yet faith, by definition, means believing in something whose existence cannot be proved scientifically. If we knew for sure that God existed, it would not require a leap of faith to believe in him.

D: Isn’t it interesting that you want to take that leap? Why do you want to take that leap? Why does our craving for God persist? It may be that we need it for something. It may be that we don’t need it, and it is left over from something that we used to be. There are lots of biological possibilities.”

Dennett serves on Krasnow’s Scientific Advisory Board.

The Economist has a wonderful story on the rebirth of the City University of New York (CUNY). It’s uplifting and it strikes me as perhaps enlightening for our own public university.

Jim

There are several other important other imaging modalities for an MRI–diffusion tensor (DT) imaging has the potential to allow for the in vivo imaging of tracts within the brain, magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) has the capability of imaging chemical compounds (such as neurotransmitter metabolites)–just to name two.

As we open our Krasnow brain imaging center, I hope that we’ll do more than fMRI. Ultimately I believe it will be a fusion of data that will yield the most important clues in the non-invasive human brain imaging field. Imagine the power of EEG data collected real time with the BOLD signal (the dependent variable in functional MRI) and simultaneously with MRS data related to glutamate and GABA….at that point you begin to force the brain to yield up something more than clues, no?

Jim

We had an interesting discussion the other day about two orthogonal approaches in faculty recruitment: in one, a department tries to distribute its expertise broad across a discipline so as to be able to teach a variety degree programs. In the other, a department focuses on one particular area, so as to become “the best place in the world” to do research on that particular set of research questions.

Interestingly, neither of those approaches works for an institute like Krasnow. Fundamentally, an institute for advanced study is about research that can change the paradigm–in any number of fields. You do that by hiring risk takers who think about science across disciplines.

Jim

Last week’s science retreat was an excellent opportunity to get a broad brush strokes picture of what we are doing as a whole. I was particularly impressed by the shear quantity of excellent new data from clearly well-conceived experiments across a large domains of science. One great addition this year, was allowing more junior investigators (eg. postdoctoral fellows and graduate students) to present as well as principal investigators. It’s great watching new scientists get excited about their experiments.

I was also very pleased because there is now real balance in the Krasnow science portfolio. With the addition of Claudio Cioffi’s Center on Social Complexity combined with Ken DeJong’s Adaptive Systems Laboratory, the Venn Diagram that was in the mind’s eye of our founders (an intersection of neuroscience, computer science, and cognitive psychology/behavioral biology) is considerably more reified. This allows us to approach the subject of “cognition” from multiple disciplinary directions at the same time and, I hope, will eventually lead to some very fruitful collaborative discoveries.

Jim

The image is of the official groundbreaking two days ago. Congressman Tom Davis (R-VA) and Mason President Alan G. Merten played key roles in the ceremony along with Advisory Board Members Virginia Pomata and William Nitze. It was a grand time for all.

Yesterday, for those of you who watch News Channel 8 in the Washington DC Metro area, you would have seen a story about Krasnow along with footage of our annual science retreat which was held yesterday. The quality of the presentations was excellent! But it was also clear to me that 15 minutes per presentation simply isn’t enough. So we’re going to brainstorm up a way to allow folks more time to present their science, in a venue that is in addition to the annual retreat–perhaps a brownbag series.

Jim

Things are moving (from an approval standpoint) faster than we anticipated. Clearing is expected to commence in the next several weeks (which puts us in late January).

Latest news will be on the right margin of this blog above the copyright.

Jim