Author: jlolds

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

Our global readers….

I’ve posted this map several years ago, but it’s been long enough to note some new trends: while most of Advanced Studies readers continue to be in the US, we’ve made real gains in China, Russia and Australia.

Interestingly our readers in Europe tend not to be from the Nordic countries or from the Eurozone’s economically-stressed southern rim.

For an interesting correlation, check out this global pie chart on shares of total world R&D, here.

I continue to be really gratified by Advanced Studies global audience over the years. It continues to be a labor of love on this end.

Robotic in vivo patch clamp–brought to you by MIT

Ed Yong’s long piece from Wired is here.

Money quote for my colleagues:

Boyden, 33, makes tools for brain hackers. From his lab at MIT, he is building technology that will vastly expand the range of experiments that other scientists can pull off. His latest invention is a classic example: a robot that patch-clamps as well as a human scientist, with none of the fatigue or variability. It works all day. It does not need lunch breaks. It has transformed a technique that had only been mastered by an elite few into something that anyone can do, and hundreds of labs are queuing up to buy or make an auto-patcher of their own. 

Measuring federal science ROI….

Behind the pay-wall, but well worth it: from Paul Baskin, in the Chronicle, here.  Money quote:

And yet, after years of trying, the science community still cannot answer a simple question, one that has gained the growing attention of policy makers as the economy limps along: How much payback, in real dollars, does science spending actually provide?

Turns out the answer to this question is not exactly easy to get at. You can readily underestimate it by acting as if federal science R&D was just like building a highway (and that’s what NIH Director Francis Collins apparently does), but to get at the real value, you need to explore the provenance of just about every item made or sold–from iPhones to Boeing jets.

Is it worth doing? I think the answer is yes. Society needs to understand concretely what it’s buying in order to continue spending the big bucks (and yes, the US is still the giant when it comes to this kind of research investment).

So here’s a bleg: how might we turn this into a Fermi Problem?

Phase Shift on Fiscal Cliff

Maybe it’s something that’s been added to the drinking water, but the signals coming out of the GOP over the last 48 hrs, make me still more optimistic that the fiscal cliff can be avoided. The key driver is the element of last year’s Budget Control Act that automates disaster (i.e. the cliff) without positive action on the part of Congress and the President. Specifically, the Bush tax cuts will go away (all of them) on January 1, 2013 without agreement. So the President can effectively do nothing and the House GOP automatically loses what they care about most. That’s a powerful driver.

The outlines of an agreement prior to January 1 look like this: the GOP agrees to a Bush tax sunset for the very rich, the President agrees to continue the Bush tax cuts for the middle class. Sequestration goes away in favor of targeted cuts to discretionary spending. Debt ceiling increase agreed to. And a commitment to do major tax reform in the new Congress with an effective enforcement mechanism.

It’s really that simple.

The long term challenge will be to get tax reform right, and to figure out real ways to bend the health care curve down, even with Obamacare.

That’s not simple.

Stay tuned….

A Chess Master and a Silicon Valley Giant…

From today’s FT, Garry Kasparov and Peter Thiel weigh in on the grand challenges of our times here.

Money quote:


Our culture has not caught up with the reality of stagnation. Our institutions are addicted to incrementalism. The only huge leap proposed is a leap backward: to slow down for the environment’s sake. But the only means for humanity to consume fewer resources is through new technology.


Seems that there are two huge elephants in the room here: geoengineering as a response to climate change and private-development of space travel as an alternative to NASA-like approaches. Why? Because these are examples of individuals funding and supporting radically new technology as an alternative to current incremental approaches.