Tea on the Institute Mezzanine

This past Monday we moved our 3:30PM pre-seminar tea out onto the beautiful Institute mezzanine and it drew a wonderful crowd of folks who spent the time talking about complexity, neuroscience, consciousness and all the other deep questions that go with tea and cookies in the half hour before we dive into the serious business of our weekly seminar.

Harold Morowitz, the founding director of the Institute once said that everyone should spend 5% of their time on the fringe of the paradigm (at least at an institute for advanced study). Part of the way we can accomplish that is by talking science over tea with an institute colleague whose disciplinary expertise is very different from our own.

I think we’ll continue to have those teas out on the mezzanine—with the institute woods greening up by the day–it’ll be a conducive environment for science at the fringe of the paradigm.

Jim

Neuroscience meets modern dance

Regular readers know how much I enjoy the Saturday Financial Times. Here’s an interesting article on how the Royal Ballet’s new resident choreographer is using neuroscience as inspiration.

Key quote:

The result, performed by his Random Dance company, which he founded at the age of 22, is a dance that will “look at the body from inside out”. McGregor has worked with 12 neuroscientists from around the world to examine the nature of kinaesthetic intelligence, producing a series of computerised “choreographic agents” from which he has drawn inspiration for the stage.

Jim

Who should use slides?

Several years ago I was on on Capitol Hill sharing the podium with a high NIH official and a Congressman speaking about science policy to a lay audience of constituents, stakeholders and decision-makers.

They didn’t use slides, I did. The projector failed fairly spectacularly. They were fine, I wasn’t.

Who should use slides and who shouldn’t and under what circumstances?

Jim

The Chronicle on College Presidents

My great-grandfather was one–George D. Olds was President of Amherst College during the mid-1920’s. So it is with interest that I read this essay by Stephen J. Nelson on what modern college presidents should do:

Presidents can respond by acting as architects of a middle ground, shaping a center that is able to hold.

Nelson argues that if they don’t, it’s at their peril. And that modern technology only magnifies the risks.

Jim

When MRI can do what PET can…

One of the advantages of positron emission tomography is its ability to probe the molecular aspects of brain function. Of course PET is quite invasive: your brain is injected with radioactive material.

Now MRI is going molecular without the radioactive burden.

Money quote from the press release:

In this report, Harvard researchers describe how they link a relatively common MRI probe (superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles) to a short DNA sequence that binds to proteins in cells responsible for brain tissue repair (glia and astrocytes). Then, researchers used the eye drops on mice with conditions that cause “leaks” in the blood-brain barrier. When the animals’ brains were scanned using MRI, brain repair activity was visible. Glia and astrocytes help repair brain and nerve tissue, and have a role in numerous diseases and disorders that cause at least microscopic breaches in the blood-brain barrier, including traumatic brain injury, multiple sclerosis, stroke, cardiac arrest, and glioma, among others. Furthermore, the researchers believe that the probes may also help diagnose thinning of vascular walls in brains, which occurs as Alzheimer’s disease progresses.

Jim

Participation in the intellectual life of the Institute

One of the constant challenges of an institute director, particularly one who runs an institute for advanced study, is the struggle to persuade PI’s to invest in the collective intellectual life of Krasnow, as well as their own scientific program. Given the very real limitations of our time, this can seem like a zero-sum game.

It can seem very tempting indeed to decide that attending the Monday seminar is less important than finishing that grant or paper with a deadline looming. It can seem that a better allocation of labor is working on that very last replication needed to write something up, even as that decision may remove the trainee from the scientific give-and-take that only the collective can offer.

Let me make the counter-case: the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study is the intellectual home of those who work here. The PI’s and trainees who make up our faculty can decide to make that home an enriched, highly stimulating environment….or….we can all decide to be latch-key kids where we come into this beautiful environment to do our thinking and science, mostly alone, and then head home to our personal lives.

If we want to make that environment the enriched version that I mentioned above, then it takes an individual commitment from each of us in order to make it happen. If we rely on others to attend seminars, to engage our fellow faculty on issues that may not be central to our research, to telecommute at the cost of scientific argument, then what results is a true tragedy of the commons. Not only that, but we send the message to our trainees that such an impoverished environment is the way things should be.

This past Monday, Gerry Rubin, Director of the Janelia Farm Campus of HHMI, gave an exciting talk about his work at revealing the true complexity of the Drosophila neural network. But he also talked about his ideals for the “experiment” taking place at Janelia. One of the key points that struck me, was how critical collaborative intellectual exchange is to that project.

I agree with him on that.

Accordingly, I’ll be working on new ways to persuade and argue for a greater scientific “civic engagement” among our faculty.

Jim

Tyler Cowen on Wikipedia

….meanwhile at The New Republic, my colleague and friend Tyler Cowen weighs in on dissing Wikipedia…..

So, should the academic journal or the Wikipedia entry receive more respect? Should we give literary critics tenure for sparkling reviews on Amazon.com? Should The New York Times, on a given day, simply link to the best of the web?

Sadly, the final lessons here are brutal. We cannot quite embrace the wonderfully egalitarian world of knowledge on the web. Error, falsehood, sloppy untruths, and just downright lies are found all too frequently and they threaten to spread even further. That’s why we should defend institutions–such as academia and the standard canons of traditional journalism–that promise full fact-checking and tough standards of rigor. Yes those institutions are very often hypocritical. Everyone faces a deadline or a budget. Nonetheless, dropping our stated loyalties to such institutions would be like removing our thumb from the dike and letting the flood waters in.

I don’t mean this as a call to let up on vigilance. We should criticize our truth-testing institutions and try to improve their truth-tracking properties; of course, this can mean an active life in Wikipedia, Amazon.com, and the blogosphere. But in the final analysis the standards of mainstream institutions are necessary. We should use the web to strengthen, rather than weaken, those procedures.

My own sense is that the real danger with Wikipedia is that the mere knowledge that decision makers with little time to go to the library, “cheat” to it when their boss asks about X (which they’ve never heard of before) creates an opportunity for mischief.

Jim

Do students over-use Wikipedia?

Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory, on the over-use of the on-line source for their “research” in the Chronicle of Higher Education Review. I think the point is well taken.

Money quote:

Here, the problem lies in the use. In doing research, students don’t consult enough sources. Wikipedia is so easy and accessible that it stands out from all other reference works. Thirty years ago, students might check several encyclopedias, look up Cliff Notes, pore through the stacks for background texts, etc. Now, it’s Wikipedia first and, too often, last.

If you have access to the link, take a look at the comments, they are illuminating. What do you think about Wikipedia?