Digging out

It’s been a couple of days to get things moving again after the storm, but we’re making progress. At the same time, I managed to screw up my home directory on my macbook, so I spent much of yesterday reconstructing the account–which is now fine. So there are a couple of fine excuses for the sparseness of posting.

It has been extremely busy however. We’re working on a reconfiguration for the various neuroscience programs that will put the Krasnow Institute in a more central role academically. At the same time we’re now preparing to make offers in our three faculty searches. All of this has been going on the last 48hrs using Treos, Blackberries and home networks–we’re not very good at dealing with the winter weather here in Washington.

Jim

working from home

We're getting one of the mid-Atlantic's typical weather events today: a combination of various winter precipitation mixtures that is a result of having an ambient temperature of right around freezing. Worst case and everything turns to ice, the power goes out for several days and cars spin like pin-wheels. Best case, it stays all rain, albeit the very cold miserable variety. Middle case, we get several inches of snow. Impossible to tell right now, but I'll be working from home today.

Which will give me time to read some articles and necessary time to work on a very complicated budget for next academic year.

Jim

Patricia and Paul Churchland profile

It’s behind their subscription wall, but you can just go out and pick up a copy of The New Yorker at your local newsstand: Larissa MacFarquhar’s wonderful profile of Patricia and Paul Churchland (a marriage devoted to the mind-body problem).

In the meantime, a reminder that Patricia will be at Krasnow in May for the “Decade of the Mind” symposium.

Jim

Krasnow in 2056: II

My hope is that the Institute will have no more than perhaps 150 scientific staff. That’s just a bit more than twice our current size. The reason is that, at least in my experience, scientific research institutions when they grow larger than that, inevitably gain an intermediate layer of bureaucracy–the dreaded mid-level managers. I’m guessing that 50 years from now, interpersonal interactions between real people will still be crucial to maintaining a productive milieu for doing science. Hence, the current growth path (in terms of staff numbers) will have to slow.

On the other hand, I’m imagining that the scientific productivity of our staff will reach a level qualitatively different from what we do now. Part of that will be due to advances in technology which will allow us to finally ask (and answer) some of the hard questions about human consciousness, and part will be due to a new level of data-sharing between researchers around the world. Krasnow scientists will have access to primary experimental data (and therefore be able to test hypotheses) in an open access manner. My hope is that this data-sharing gives us a much larger bang-for-the research buck.

I am also anticipating that Krasnow scientists will be studying cognition and developing theories of neural and machine computation that are much more unified with the rest of our physical model of the universe around us. It seems to me that new hierarchical levels will be added to the ones we currently study (molecules to brains) that connect us both to the quantum world but also to the galactic scale. Perhaps, we will find new rules that constrain intelligence (or at least our complete understanding of the same). Alternatively, perhaps we will find traces of the emergence of human intelligence in the initial events of The Big Bang. These are some of the mysteries for the future.

Jim

Financial Times on doctors with MBA’s

This is an issue that I talk about quite a bit with colleagues: the notion that as we train a new generation of physicians, they will need a constellation of skills above and beyond their classical medical training. One such area has to do with business know how. Today’s Financial Times (click on the link above) has an excellent article about this new niche in business education.

Money quote:

In the fast-changing world of modern healthcare, the job of a doctor is more and more like the job of chief executive. The people who run hospitals and physicians’ practices don’t just need to know medicine. They must also be able to balance budgets, motivate a large and diverse staff and make difficult marketing and legal decisions.

What will Krasnow look like in 2056?: I

Over the next several blogposts I’ll imagine a thriving institute for
advanced study in the year 2056, a half-century from now. I’ll be long
gone of course, but my hope is that the Institute will be a world-center
for research, even more-so than it is today–perhaps with science
spanning the fields of astrobiology, anthropology, brain sciences and
new fields that we don’t even have names for today.

Will we be bigger? I imagine yes, but not by that much. Too many PI’s
and management starts to become unwieldy. But our tendrils will be
everywhere: summer school courses at exotic locations, Krasnow PI
authored books translated into many languages and perhaps intelligent
machines (robots) designed at Krasnow exploring the nether reaches of
the solar system.

This will be an optimistic look ahead: one that assumes we’ve got the
world’s current existential problems well in hand. There will be
problems of course–and Institute scientists will be at the forefront of
solving practical problems, but no apocalypse….call me naive.

So let’s look ahead….

Jim

New Einstein letters

I’ve always been quite interested in Einstein’s biography. Some new primary material is now available (click on the link): letters from 1915 when he was working on the general theory of relativity.

Jim

Lawrence Summers on the Biosciences Century

Former Harvard President Lawrence Summers has a very interesting Op-Ed in today’s Financial Times. It’s a link that’s open to subscribers only, but here’s the money quote:

If the 20th century was defined by developments in the physical sciences, the 21st century will be defined by developments in the life sciences….Life science approaches will lead to everything from further agricultural revolutions to profound changes in energy technology and the development of new materials. The “drugs that help you study” that are now pervasive on college campuses are just a precursor of developments that will make it possible to alter human capacities and human natures in profound ways.

Summers may have lost his job at Harvard, but he sure hasn’t lost his intellectual edge. I think he’s spot on here.

Jim