Undergraduate research at the Krasnow Institute….

I’ve written a lot about our doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows. What readers of Advanced Studies may not know is that the Institute is filled with George Mason undergraduates also.

The undergraduate research experience at Krasnow usually involves intense laboratory bench work, collaborating with fellow students and especially frequent one-on-one interactions with our faculty members. It’s one of the great ways that the Institute supports the Students as Scholars programs here at Mason.

If you are a George Mason undergraduate student and you are interested in the possibility of having an experience like this, as part of your college experience, just drop me a line and we’ll see what might work.

Hacking your stuff with consumer-grade EEG…

Apparently those fancy consumer-electronic EEG machines can be used for more than enhancing your personal growth….the report is here, hat tip to Bruce Schneier.

This brings up the larger question of how society will respond to the Makerization of Brain-Machine interfaces. Looking for analogies, the availability of consumer genomics seems to be going pretty well–although what happens when garage-lab DYI-types start trying to produce their own GM-crops remains to be seen!

Back from Renaissance Weekend….

Aspen Meadows Resort

That’s the home of the Aspen Institute, yesterday morning after   the last panel session for Renaissance Weekend. I was incredibly impressed with the intelligence and kindness of my fellow attendees– the weekend was an invigorating way to mark the end of Summer.

My own synthesis of the weekend is that we (our society) face unprecedented changes ahead. How intelligently we manage those changes will, to a significant extent, determine our futures. And to get ourselves on a smart trajectory–it’s becoming increasingly clear that listening seriously to other points of view than one’s own will be critical.

A note on the photo: it was taken with an iPhone 4 without any filters or image processing. It’s both a tribute to the beauty of the Rocky Mountain skies and to the convergent technologies which are now embedded into our smartphones.

The good Armstrong…

The dean of Australian aerospace journalists, Ben Sandilands, on Neil Armstrong’s death, here.

I was just about to turn 13 years old, on July 20, 1969 and I remember every bit of the landing and subsequent moon walk. To a kid growing up in the shadow of Caltech among the palm trees of Pasadena, it seemed then that the future was truly filled with wondrous possibilities.

Professor Armstrong passed away yesterday at the age of 82. There will never be another first man on the moon.