Via, the Wayback Machine, here’s the homepage from circa 2008. Often called, SFI East, the Institute was a product of private east coast money and west coast intellect. Its founders included the likes of Murray Gell-Mann. For a while, it was also a small-ish academic unit of George Mason University offering degrees in computational social science and neuroscience. It’s first Director, Harold Morowitz, was a pioneer in biophysics at Yale University who later became a Robinson Professor of Natural Philosophy at Mason.

The Institute is no more, it was killed off while I was in government, by the short-sightedness of former leadership of the University who are now long gone. But the gorgeous building is still there along with its art and glass-cubed great room surrounded by forest. It’s worth seeing if you are in the neighborhood.

If you look closely at the homepage, you’ll notice a bullet for the “Decade of the Mind” back in 2007. That Decade of the Mind became something called The BRAIN Initiative. Good ideas have a way of living beyond the lifetimes of their inventors.

There exists at some large public R1 universities an ‘entity’, let’s call it a quasi-academic unit, that seeks to bring the essence of a small liberal arts college education into the big campus milieu. This often includes a residential housing offering combined with small seminar-style classes given by full-time instructional faculty. If we call the entity an honors college, that captures both the academic competitiveness aspect that goes with the instruction and the idea of something like a real academic unit with its own decanal head. The term varies–at my institution, it is in fact, the Honors College–but the name varies. At Michigan, it’s the Residential College. The generic term is a living-learning community, but you get the idea. From a business standpoint, it’s a smart segmentation of the overall product, reminiscent of economy-plus seats on your favorite airline.

What if R1’s pursued something similar, but in the research rather than instructional domain? Imagine something like a mini-Caltech or -Rockefeller inside a Big Ten. Principal investigators inside the ‘thing’ might have an entirely different deal, more akin to HHMI extramural investigators. Darn, they might even have their own Janelia Farm lab building. Maybe they’d even have a residential option somewhat like University of Chicago’s MBL.

The idea is the same sort of business segmentation as the honors college, and it might add value. Faculty might even self-select to belong to the research-living community.

You think it’d never fly? People rail at airlines the segment everything in the flying experience to separate charges, but they do fly them. The segmentation adds value.

A friend is visiting this weekend and told us about an Internet meme that’s gone somewhat viral: that the the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor never happened. It strikes me that blaming this phenomenon (and there are many exemplars) on social media software is inadequate. To me there is something more subtle at work: the slow erosion of the dichotomy between facts and strongly held opinions. And I blame a lot of this on K-20 education, where outside the realm of STEM, there is no longer a canon, but rather something entirely more squishy. Historical fact (like Pearl Harbor) then becomes something post-modernized. If this happened in STEM, the facts of say quantum mechanics, the Periodic Chart and germ theory would quickly enforce inconvenient truth on political opinion.

How do we fix this? I’m not sure. It may simply be that our education system has become somewhat of a lousy product for its student customers. And that’s a product of perverse incentives that are a result of an outdated business model. But in any case, the outcome is Pearl Harbor as hoax.

I’ve been putting it through its paces in the life sciences. Overall, it’s quite good at hypothesis generation and being insightful in cell biology. In neuroscience, it’s got great verbiage, but it’s often dead wrong (factually). If it were a qualifying exam, I’d have to flunk it. In plant biology it’s at the level of a very smart undergraduate major.

Sam Rodriquez’s take here. He’s actually pretty spot on. If we could get really good at digital twins, it probably would help on the regulatory side.

Link is here. Kudos to NASA.