The new Coronavirus….

It’s London1_novel CoV 2012 and it’s made some people very sick. The NPR version of the story is here.

Money quote:

Both patients showed symptoms similar SARS. But thanks to fast and accurate gene sequencing, health officials quickly realized that this isn’t SARS or even a known coronavirus that causes colds. Rather it’s a totally new virus that needs to be handled with caution until more is known about it.

Not coming back: state support for higher ed

An excellent piece in the Chronicle about a recent NSF report, here. Most interesting to me what not the overall finding, but what the new President at CU Boulder has done in response:

He cited $8-million in savings by opting out of state procurement systems, $4-million in savings by adopting self-insurance, and $2.3-million from an insurance audit. The system also winnowed 209 procedural policies down to 89, making changes such as raising to $500 from $100 the threshold at which an event on a campus requires authorization paperwork.
“I just told everybody when I got here, All right, let’s get through this place, and let’s clean it out, and let’s get rid of the stuff that doesn’t make sense, let’s get lean and mean,” Mr. Benson said.

This is an approach which might usefully be employed elsewhere. Note that, in contrast to the usual austerity imposed on the academic units, at CU administrative processes were systematically streamlined.

Overselling Neuroscience…

In The New Statesman, Steve Poole’s excellent screed against the current vogue to use neuroscience as an explanation for everything, here.

At Huffington, here’s a classic example of what he’s worried about.

This is a real and present danger for the discipline. Overselling can lead to catastrophic loss of credibility for an entire field.

European High Tech: imec

We were hosted at by imec (yes, all lower case) in Leuven. One of the more interesting aspects of the visit was a tour of imec’s clean room fabrication facilities. This machine is fairly close to one that they wouldn’t let us take a photo of–but they did tell us it’s cost: $100M euros. I was impressed. After a brief web search this morning, I believe I’ve found it here. And it looks like there’s a serious problem–they don’t produce chips fast enough. We’ll have to see how this plays out in the market.

STEM education is different

According to Physics Nobelist Carl Wieman it’s a lot like “effective coaching”. This in his testimony to Congress after stepping down from OSTP–story is here.

I couldn’t agree more. The fundamental problem with STEM education as its practiced here in the US is the notion that that effective pedagogy involves lecturing in front of a class. My best chemistry professor at Amherst College taught quantum chemistry by having us solve progressively more difficult problems, all while being available (seemed like 24/7–and before the Internet) to coach us through what seemed impossible.

Convergent technologies in Leuven….

This morning I’m giving a talk on convergent technologies within the context of brain sciences here at the imec facility in Leuven. I just went through my slides and came to the late conclusion that convergence means quite different things to various scientific consituencies…in the neuroengineering field, it might mean deploying nanomaterial electrodes to make electrophysiological measurements. In the signal transduction world, it might mean the cross-talk between the cyclic AMP and Protein Kinase C pathways. So context is all important.

In the meantime, I note from afar, that the Nationals split a double-header with the Los Angeles Dodgers–their magic number for a wildcard spot is now down to one game.