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.
A lot more actually. Tim Kreider’s essay on objective knowledge about oneself is here from the NYT.
I missed this one when it came out earlier this year in Scientific American. One of the authors, Christof Koch is Chief Scientific Officer at the Allen Brain Institute, which collaborated with Krasnow on the DIADEM challenge.
The key point is that certain scientific questions can only be asked in a particular methodological context–in this case, epileptic surgical patients. I’m not sure I agree with the conclusion however–there is an awful lot of alternative evidence supporting the notion of widely distributed engrams. Koch would argue (I think) that the methods that support the distributed hypothesis are flawed. Functional brain imaging using MRI for example has both poor spatial and temporal resolution compared to the electrophysiological data from these patients.
But if functional brain imaging is flawed in this way, it’s also conservative–very sparse representations would be invisible. In fact, the representations that show us are widely distributed. See the work of Tom Mitchell and colleagues, here.
A terrific conference is winding up at the Krasnow Institute today, the web site is here. Organized by Krasnow’s own NeuroMorpho.org, under the visionary leadership of Giorgio Ascoli, with the sponsorship of Burroughs Wellcome Fund USA and MBF Bioscience, the conference has brought together some of the best and the brightest in the field. To my mind, this is the single most important event for scientists working in this arena since the DIADEM challenge event of several years ago.
Small conferences like this one are a key example of what Krasnow does really well for the global advanced studies community. For readers who may have heard about the White House BRAIN project, or the Connectome, all of those initiatives depend of advances in automated digital reconstruction of neurons.
Krasnow’s own Hippocampome Project is an example of how this type of data can be mined and harvested to yield new neurobiological knowledge, in this case, about the brain region most clearly identified with learning and memory in mammals (such as us).
Not the Dem/GOP variety. I mean the palace intrigue kind. There’s way too much of it. And I mean in general…it’s deeply embedded in every institution that I visit, at least here in the States.
This type of politics represents a real challenge because it distracts us from why we are really here. Essentially it eats productivity. It creates a constant need for workers to keep a weather eye out for political threats increasing cognitive load while decreasing the brain power that might be used for creativity, invention, problem-solving and other useful tasks.
Business schools should work towards some solutions to this problem. And so should organizational psychologists.
In the meantime, I head off to my Alma Mater for reunion tomorrow. I expect to find more of the same there, but perhaps will be happily surprised.
The blogpost is here. Read it and the comments, they make for a really interesting case study on where higher education might be heading.
Money quote to get you interested:
“It’s a well-known fact — well-known around GMU that is — that GMU graduates earn higher average salaries than do UVA grads (direct linkhere), that is for four year undergrads in their first year of employment.”
1) Strange Rebels, 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl. Amazon Link is here.
2) Latest issue of The Biological Bulletin, note the gorgeous blue crab on the cover, here.
3) Special intellectual property section of today’s FT, here.
4) Robert Caro’s latest LBJ volume. Amazon link here.
Jeff Selingo’s new book College (Un)bound. Managed to get through the bulk of it while our United flight was exiled to the penalty box at Chicago O’Hare for several hours…there is much I agree with.
Note added later: and much that I don’t.
Discoverers and Discoveries 