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

Our last talk yesterday was from Nobel Prize winning economist Vernon Smith, the founder of experimental economics. The link is to a very interesting piece in Scientific American on a variation of the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma game.

Money quote:

If I were to play this game, I would say to myself: “Forget game-theoretic logic. I will play a large number (perhaps 95), and I know my opponent will play something similar and both of us will ignore the rational argument that the next smaller number would be better than whatever number we choose.� What is interesting is that this rejection of formal rationality and logic has a kind of meta-rationality attached to it. If both players follow this meta-rational course, both will do well. The idea of behavior generated by rationally rejecting rational behavior is a hard one to formalize. But in it lies the step that will have to be taken in the future to solve the paradoxes of rationality that plague game theory and are codified in Traveler’s Dilemma.

Jim

The last two days of the Decade of the Mind have been amazing. The
quality of the talks was spectacular. I learned a tremendous amount from
all of the speakers. The podcasts are going to be shortly available at
the decade web site (http://krasnow.gmu.edu/decade). I highly recommend
them. Going forward, there will be a manifesto authored by the speakers
and I'll have more on that subject later.

In the meantime, my academic summer begins this morning. I intend to
read journal papers and work on my own manuscripts most of the day.

Jim

Governor Tim Kaine gave the speech. And some 6000 students got their diploma. And it was beautiful weather. Academic regalia is quite the sight!

Jim

Here’s another take on the tenure process from another academic blog, this one in physics.

Jim