Losing research dollars to overseas universities

Here’s an interesting piece by Carl Schramm, who is the president and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. He posits a slow decline in American research universities so that “it may be unwise, therefore, for regions to rely on universities as primary engines of growth and innovation. But local governments might pursue a strategy of urging universities to pool their commercialization efforts.”

The reason for the decline?

Money quote:

The likeliest reason for this worrisome trend is that many companies are tired of haggling over intellectual property rights—and in a world of globalized R&D, they no longer have to. IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Baker Hughes, Intel, Texas Instruments, and Microsoft, to name just a few major firms on a growing list, are now shifting research funding to universities in England, India, Russia, and China, where they have access to top scientists and often face fewer intellectual property hurdles.

Memo to University IP operation: please take note.

Jim

Reading NSF grants

Yes, I’ve got quite a stack of them on my desk. Some of them are really superb. Some of the ones you would expect to be the best, however, are quite flawed. Reviewing grants takes time and lots of energy but can be very rewarding intellectually. There is something about making a case for funding in writing that is both very difficult and yet eminently possible. Hence, we all continue to write grants….and review them.

Jim

Nature’s Cover

Yes, it’s that time of year: the Society for Neuroscience’s meeting this year is in San Diego. On cue, Nature and Science usually devote their cover to the field. This year Nature has a spectacular cover on the Brainbow project at Harvard.

As usual Science Magazine follows suit. Neuroscience is a field in full.

This year I’ll be staying in Washington. However, the Institute will have a very significant presence at the convention. I’ll look for some guest contributions on the meeting when our folks return.

Jim

NPR’s series on Deception

NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston is doing a three part series on deception (the second part of which aired on today’s Morning Edition). I think it’s pretty excellent and worth paying attention to. I do think however, that my own notion of the “lies that we are interested in” as opposed to the casual non-interesting lie is key. Lie detection only makes sense in the context of catching spies, fraud etc. It doesn’t seem to be fruitful in terms of finding out what your colleagues really think of you.

Jim

Neuroscience on the Mall

This evening I’m giving a talk at the Smithsonian about where neuroscience is as a field, here early in the 21st century. In some senses I’ll be optimistic. Certainly there has been much progress understanding some of the fundamental processes that underlie neural function, particularly where it is mainly homeostatic as opposed to cognitive. But in another sense, there is a real frustration–one that I’ve expressed before, that we are very very far from a coherent theory of brain function. That is why I have a real worry, with all the new “neuro” social fields (eg. neurolaw, neuroeconomics) that the field will get “over-sold” the way AI did in the 1960’s.

How to avoid.

Well, I believe we need to really adopt integrative approaches that study the brain across the different spatial and temporal levels (and there are many). For example, if we are to understand why music is the muse for so many humans, that it is–across cultures–then we need to know something about the auditory pathways. But we also need to understand something about the brain’s dopamine reinforcement systems…and perhaps something about synaptic plasticity….but also we need to look at a phenomenon like perfect pitch. All of these various aspects of music (within the context of brain function) need to be integrated. Without studying the phenomenon across multiple levels, it’s just hair cell physiology, auditory cortex tonotopic maps, and a human with a smile on his or her face.

Which brings me to the subject of “mind” and the notion of a federal investment into a “Decade of the Mind”. Why, given the above worries, do I believe that now is the time for a Decade of the Mind? The answer I believe has to do with an emerging critical mass of scientists (across many fields, not just neuroscience) who are seriously studying the phenomena of mind (such as music) across levels. They are using new imaging techniques. They are using high performance computation to build models and then testing those models against real data. They are sharing that data. And most importantly they are approaching this monumentally important scientific question in an integrative manner.

The pay off: in terms of people healed, technologies developed, economic growth and security (writ large) would without a doubt be huge.

Jim

West Point on a cloudy morning


The built in camera in a macbook saves a mirror image, so left and right are reversed in this image taken from my fifth floor hotel room at the U.S. Military Academy’s Hotel Thayer. It really is quite the view though of the Hudson, looking southeast, about an hour’s drive from New York. The interesting interference pattern is caused by the insect screening in the window.

The meeting here is on Network science. I’m very interested in a talk this afternoon on the effect of listening to music on EEG by Paolo Grigolini, who is Scientific Director of the Center for Non-Linear Science at the University of North Texas. I’ll be out of here around 3PM for a hopefully uneventful drive down the I95 corridor back to Washington.

Jim

Are financial markets too complicated for mathematical analysis?

Here’s a really interesting article from MIT’s Technology Review on how the math folks (called quants) may have inadvertently caused the recent Sub-Prime crisis. The article was picked up by one of my graduate students, Mike Cloud…it’s well worth reading. Left unsaid is the question of what role individual neural behavior plays in the behavior of markets (that’s the place of neuro-economics) although from this article’s perspective it’s more and more indirect: humans create the algorithms that place the trades automatically.

Jim

Networks

I am off tomorrow to drive to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to give a talk about neocortical networks during human development (in particular, the first six years of life). This is work that I’ve been conducting with my graduate student, David Cooper–we’ve been using a massive data set built up from the 1930’s until the 1960’s by J. Conel, who was a pediatric neurosurgeon in Boston. The notion has been to use very advanced statistical techniques on the Conel data to reveal coordinated cortical neurodevelopment during the first six years of life. In particular, we’re interested in the idea of a “hidden” clock which paces development in much the same way as a coxain paces the oarsman of a crew team. For some cortical areas development is very much paced by this clock (we surmise these are cortical areas where selection pressure is very much against “innovation”. In other areas, development proceeds completely independently of the clock (as if driven by external environmental stimulation).

The interesting driver here is that the pacing or coordination can manifest as either neurogenesis/migration or pruning. In other words, the direction of the change doesn’t matter, it’s the timing of the changes.

Jim

Supporting the Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason

While, this blog is primarily a way for me to communicate about the Institute’s programs, sometimes, it’s good to ask our loyal readership to lend a hand. One of the ways for readers to get involved with the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study and its work on understanding the brain is to contribute financially. If you are interested in making a gift to support our science, click here.

The institute’s immediate needs include

  • Current use and endowed support for graduate student fellowships to recruit and retain the best and brightest graduate students.

  • Current use and endowed faculty support to support the work of the various research teams at Krasnow and their highly specialized scientific inquiry.

  • Operational support to advance the institute as a whole and provide the necessary resources to advance scientific research.

Jim