It’s here in the Wilson Quarterly. It should be read in the context of Tyler Cowen’s long piece, The Great Stagnation, among others.
Akst is a regular WSJ columnist, but he argues rather persuasively for the need to focus on wealth redistribution.
From the MIT Technology Review, the story is here. Money quote:
a growing army of like-minded researchers have marshaled a pile of data to argue that we can alter the emotional impact of a memory by adding new information to it or recalling it in a different context.
I suppose learning that the C+ you scored on the final exam was actually the best grade in the class would change a bad memory into a good one…
Bottom line, their high cost and inability to handle individual differences in pharmaco-genomics, NYT editorial here.
New Secretary of Energy, Ernest Moniz, is moving on reform, the story from ScienceInsider is here.
Just in time to resume blogging. Having spent some quality time in some of the less metropolitan parts of the US, I’ll simply note this piece in today’s US edition of the Financial Times. My readers can draw their own conclusions.
I just took this photo from the Institute mezzanine looking down towards the Great Room. The Institute’s “forest”, home to pileated woodpeckers, foxes and deer, lies in summer livery, green just beyond the windows.
It’s quiet here this time of year. Our doctoral students are still ubiquitous, but faculty are mostly on their summer travels, at scientific meetings, symposia and the like all over the world.
For me, this marks the end of my fifteenth year as director. I’ve watched a lot of changes, mostly all positive. The Institute has progressed through its adolescence and is now both stable and healthy. The challenge of course will be to keep our “fire in the mind”–to quote my friend George Johnson.
To me, that means continuing to take scientific risks, to insist on scientific excellence and to break down the barriers to gaining further knowledge, even when those barriers are formidable.
I’m lucky to serve with a brilliant scientific faculty, outstanding trainees and the best staff that an institute director could ever hope to have. At the same time, the University has transitioned to new leadership, it’s best days are still ahead of it and I’m as optimistic about the future as I’ve ever been.
Friday, I’m off to Alaska for some vacation time. I hope to read as little email as possible and to concentrate on the spectacular natural beauty of our planet–all too vulnerable, yet made all the more precious for that vulnerability.
A blog hiatus is therefore to be expected. We’ll be back around the 11th of July. Happy Summer!
ScienceInsider has the story, here. The actual report is here [pdf].
Money quote from the Executive Summary: “The federal government must reform the labs from their 20th century atomic-energy roots to create 21st century engines of innovation. This report aims to lay the groundwork for reformby proposing a more flexible lab-management model that strengthens the labs’ ability to address national needs and produce a consistent flow of innovative ideas and technologies. The underlying philosophy of this report is not to just tinker around the edges but to build policy reforms that re-envision the lab system.”
David Samuel’s long piece in Wired, here. The start-up in question, Skybox, aims to be to satellite imagery what Google is to search….the advantage over Google Earth: much more dynamic data streams and an off-the-shelf approach to the technology.
I’m wondering if my colleagues in our own Computational Social Science Department here at Krasnow might be able to use such data–I’m guessing the answer is definitely yes.
Point counter point on whether neuroscience is good for something. Gary Marcus in The New Yorker, here. The New York Times’ David Brooks here.
Marcus rightly points out that critiquing functional MRI brain scan data analysis is not the same thing as rejecting all of neuroscience–most of neuroscience (the parts not seen so much in the mass media) is knowledge obtained from a huge variety of robust and elegant methods, ranging from optogenetics to electrophysiology.
But it’s a good debate–perhaps it’ll prevent neuroscience from being oversold.
Discoverers and Discoveries 