The American Dream

David Brooks and Gail Collins on the future of the American Dream. I find myself agreeing with both of them. But without an economy that heavily leverages advances in science and technology, it’ll be very difficult for me to be at all optimistic about the future. So we not only need a creative class (think Richard Florida), we also need that creative class to be producing real products that offer solutions to our huge problems (think the intersection of climate and energy or health care).

Open letter to Congress from US Scientists

Can be found here.

Money quote:

These “multiple independent lines of evidence” are drawn from numerous public and private

research centers all across the United States and beyond, including several independent

analyses of surface temperature data. Even without including analyses from the UK research

center from which the emails were stolen, the body of evidence underlying our understanding

of human-caused global warming remains robust.


The dangers of email revisited

I and many others have been following the so-called “Climate-gate” story out of the U.K. As has been well-described now, hackers broke into servers and released emails between respected climate change scientists which were, at the very least, embarrassing. This incident may have very far reaching consequences for policy, but is also a reminder of how potentially damaging electronic mail can be (at a professional and personal level).

I’ve written about this matter before, but it’s useful to remind readers of the following heuristic: if you’re not comfortable seeing your words as a headline in tomorrow’s New York Times, then it’s better not to hit that send button.
And as a corollary, always check to see who’s actually on the cc line.
Jim

Happy Thanksgiving to loyal readers

Here at our Wintergreen house, we’re listening to holiday tunes, baking bread and leisurely making our way through yesterday’s Financial Times. It’s time to say thank you to all of my readers, especially those who have contributed their own thoughts from time to time.

It’s also a good time to give a shout-out for collegiality in science. There’s been a lot of sturm and drang recently among both climate scientists and, to some extent, in the computational neuroscience community. Collegiality facilitates collaboration and is essential for trans-disciplinary science to progress (at least until we all become experts in all fields–a while I think).
Happy Thanksgiving!
Jim

A busy week

I’ve been swamped this week with an ONR Workshop and the new Krasnow construction project. But have been keeping a close eye on interesting netsam floating over the Web-Ocean. I’m really pleased about the new NIH investment in behavioral sciences, OppNet–kudos to colleagues who have been working towards this goal for a very long time!Link

Big Blue’s Dharmendra Modha and Cat Neocortex simulation

Dharmendra’s team at IBM are making the news this morning. Here’s AP’s Jordan Robertson’s story.

Money quote:

A computer with the power of a human brain is not yet near. But this week researchers from IBM Corp. are reporting that they’ve simulated a cat’s cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer. The computer has 147,456 processors (most modern PCs have just one or two processors) and 144 terabytes of main memory — 100,000 times as much as your computer has.