I had lunch at my club in Washington today (the discussion covered everything from neuroscience to nuclear weapons detection) with one of my favorite board members. This afternoon I’ve been ensconced in a small room at the very top of the old mansion (under the rafters but with a great view overlooking Massachusetts Avenue). It’s been the perfect place to work on a number of projects all of which are coming due at approximately the same time–hence the paucity of writing here over the past week. I’m taking a break however to consider the room itself: the walls are covered with member book covers, a letter from Mark Twain and some doodles made my President Theodore Roosevelt. There is an excellent network connection and my cell phone works quite well this high up….all in all, a wonderful place to get writing done on a Thursday afternoon.

Jim

All universities have policies. They cover all sorts of things germane to science ranging from regulating direct charges to grants all the way to scientific misconduct. I spend a fair amount of my time as a university administrator, thinking about these policies. Concretely, it seems that there is a fair amount of my time that is spent on university committees working on the language of these documents so that they both comply with relevant laws and protect the interests of George Mason.

At the same time, it seems as if there certainly was a time when there were less of these policies. When my father was a professor, the laboratory he ran was subject to much less regulation. And yet, it managed to produce good science, avoid breaking the law and even educate students. My concern, as an administrator, is that we may be, by creating policies to cover everything, creating too great a bureaucratic burden for working scientists. A good colleague of mine, thinks just the opposite: well written policies actually protect the PI, but laying out the “red lines” and removing the ambiguities inherent in both doing sponsored research and managing people.

At one level, the policy explosion simply reflects the way our society has changed writ large: there are many more laws…and many lawyers.

Jim

I’ve previously blogged about Nicholas Humphrey’s book “Seeing Red” here. In the link above Paul Broks brilliantly dives into the hard question of consciousness.

Money quote:

Evolution then takes the animal to another level at which it comes to care about the world just beyond its body, so that, for example, it becomes sensitive to the chemical and air pressure signals of the proximity of predator or prey. This requires quite another style of information processing. “When the question is ‘What is happening to me?’ the answer that is wanted is qualitative, present-tense, transient, and subjective. When the question is ‘What is happening out there in the world?’ the answer that is wanted is quantitative, analytical, permanent, and objective.” The old sensory channels continue to provide a body-centred picture of what the stimulation is doing to the animal, but a second system is set up “to provide a more neutral, abstract, body-independent representation of the outside world.” This is the prototype of perception. At this stage the animal is still responding to stimulation with overt bodily activity, but eventually it achieves a degree of independence and is no longer bound by rigid stimulus-response rules. It still needs to know what’s going on in the world, so the old sensory systems stay in service, and it still learns about what is happening to it by monitoring the command signals for its own responses. But now it can issue virtual commands which don’t result in overt action. In other words, it no longer wriggles. Rather than going all the way out to the surface of the body, the commands are short-circuited, reaching only to a point on the incoming sensory pathway. Over evolutionary time the target of the command retreats further from the periphery until “the whole process becomes closed off from the outside world in an internal loop within the brain.” Sensory activity has become “privatised.”

Krasnow’s own Center for Social Complexity web link can be found here.

But I bring your attention to the Complexity and Social Networks Blog at Harvard (click the link above) edited by David Lazer. It’s good to see this field taking off. This afternoon, I’m attending the regular 3PM Friday tea at our own center.

Jim

The word on the street is that university presidents may be thinking of collectively refusing to provide data to US News and World Report used for the famed college rankings.

The Wall Street Journal thinks we should have a larger market of metrics besides the US News and World Report rankings of higher education. They quote my George Mason colleague, Tyler Cowan as being skeptical the supposedly “scientific” rankings tell us anything new.

From Tyler quoted in the linked WSJ piece: “there is really no difference at all between a school ranked 24 and one ranked 36.”

Yesterday I had a related conversation with a director of media relations at a very elite liberal arts college about the notion of brand identity among the top schools in the rankings. If there is no difference between number 1 and number 2, then why do alumni get so bent out of shape by a trend-line headed in the wrong direction. My thought is that the rankings (and hence the institution’s brand identity) are picking up information from the market (the market place of students, the market place of ideas) regarding underlying academic quality. So when things move “south” with the rankings, the assumption is that something real and substantive must be changing. A bit different perspective from Tyler’s.

Jim

Folks who read my blog know that I’m very interested in medical education. Today’s Chronicle of Higher Education references two very interesting curricular programs, one at the University of Missouri Kansas City and the other at Duke. The Missouri program is actually quite mature (35 years) and facilitates an early medical degree by integration with a baccalaureate program. The Duke program is a bit more interesting in that it modifies the medical curriculum to facilitate clinical clerkships and research opportunities in years M3 and M4–the goal being more clinical researchers.

I additionally bring to your attention a new call for Flexner II from Academic Medicine. That meme seems to be expanding.

Jim

Bottom line: our brains can’t really handle more than one task at once without degrading performance.

Money quote:

Several research reports, both recently published and not yet published, provide evidence of the limits of multitasking. The findings, according to neuroscientists, psychologists and management professors, suggest that many people would be wise to curb their multitasking behavior when working in an office, studying or driving a car.

I wonder if I should stop reading my blackberry when stopped at red lights?

Jim

Colleague Dharmendra Modha (of IBM’s Almaden Research Center) refers me to the web page for what looks like a very interesting conference in early May. Besides Dharmendra, speakers include Nobel Laureate Don Glaser and Michael Arbib.

Jim

Relating an interesting debate between author and neuroscience grad student Sam Harris and Stuart Hameroff. Andrew Sullivan himself has been involved recently in a long exchange of thoughtful emails with Harris on the question of faith and science.

The wonderful weekend edition of The Financial Times reviews three books on the neurophilosophy of free will.

Money quote:

Two neuroscientists working in Australia have taken Libet’s discovery one step further. They found that, when asking people to choose to move either their left or right hands, it was possible to influence their choice by electronically stimulating certain parts of their brains. So, for example, the scientists could force the subjects always to choose to move their left hands. But despite their choice being electronically directed, these patients continued to report that they were freely choosing which hand to move.

So not only is your steering wheel not attached to anything, but if your car was being steered by someone else by remote control, you would not even notice. Every time it turns left, you just move your toy steering wheel and think, ”Ah yes, I want to turn left.”