The Chronicle weighs in on provostial teas

I know it’s behind the firewall, but if you get a chance, it’s well worth the read. Money quote:

Several times a semester, Peter N. Stearns invites a couple of dozen faculty members to join him for tea and cookies in the administration building at George Mason University. During teatimes, Mr. Stearns, the provost, takes questions and listens to professors’ suggestions. Sometimes, he says, professors share “imaginative approaches” to teaching that he then passes along to others.

Mr. Stearns believes that the teas have opened up communication with professors and are the kind of thing that leads employees to rank George Mason highly when it comes to relations between faculty members and administrators.

The provost says administrators at George Mason also try to react quickly when professors have good ideas. “If a faculty member comes to me or the president or a dean and says, ‘I’ve got this idea,’ our systematic reaction is: That’s great. Let’s make it work.” Just six months ago, a professor told the provost he wanted to create a center to help third-world countries enhance information security. Administrators gave the OK, and the International Cyber Center was born. The professor who started it is already planning the center’s first conference.

Last day of vacation

I am back in Washington. Tomorrow I’ll return to Krasnow for what will turn out to be quite a busy rest of the summer. There are real challenges ahead–the new construction as we continue to expand, the acquisition of a cellular imaging facility that I believe will complement our MRI and the now accelerating momentum of the Decade of the Mind project as we approach the US general election.

My own take on Science 2.0 has been accepted for publication at The Biological Bulletin. It will be in the August issue.

Jim

The dangers of looking to closely

They’re called incidental findings in brain imaging research on “normal volunteers”. In today’s NY Times Gina Kolata looks at microbleeds in the brain:

“If there were more than we knew of in the general population, that might — and I want to stress might — have important consequences,” Dr. Breteler said. “That is why we started to look for them.”

For more than a decade, Dr. Breteler and her colleagues have followed a group of Rotterdam residents age 45 and older. The goal is to do repeated brain scans on 8,000 people; so far they have scanned nearly 4,000 and are analyzing those data.

“What we found came as a big surprise,” Dr. Breteler said. Previous estimates were that 5 to 7 percent of healthy older people had microbleeds. The Rotterdam study found them in more than 20 percent. And the older the person, the more likely the microbleeds. They were present in 18 percent of 60-year-olds and nearly 40 percent of those over 80.

“We now know that these changes are there and that they are frequent,” Dr. Breteler said. “But we don’t know yet what their clinical impact is, what their prognosis is.”

The Carr debate morphs: the internet does not equal a brain

Charles Arthur of the Guardian evolves the debate. It’s now about the complexity of the net versus the complexity of the brain (which of course is not a scientific debate unless you are talking about the brain of a simple animal like Aplysia californica).

Money quote on the idea the hyperlinks are like synapses:

This is simply rubbish. A hyperlink is nothing like a synapse, except that both describe a connection between two points… a synapse is a responsive, organic mechanism that has been tuned by hundreds of millions of years of evolution to react more strongly to some inputs rather than others. Throw in something between 1 and 10 quadrillion (1 quadrillion = 10^16) synapses in a human brain, and you have an organism that somehow becomes conscious, and yet can also function unconsciously, which uses chemicals for its transmission systems (across the synaptic gap, which is key to how synapses can vary in behaviour).

I’m with Arthur here.

Jim

Vacation

After our regular Dean’s and Director’s meeting today I’m headed to the second day of a very stimulating conference on “biologically inspired innovation” that’s being held over at IDA and then am off to my nephew Nate’s wedding in Cambridge Massachusetts. Nate is a doctoral student in Ann Arbor along with his bride-to-be, Seneca. He is a Harvard and Teach-for-America alumnus–I’m pretty proud of him.

After the wedding, We’ll head back to Virginia and ten days vacation at our Wintergreen house in the Blue Ridge. I’ll be blogging.

Jim