What’s going to happen to NIH and NSF?

If the “fiscal cliff” scenario happens? My current guess is that if the Cliff does kick in on January 1, it’ll create complete havoc inside the Federal government and then will be quickly resolved (possibly at the cost of a credit downgrade) by a further kicking of the can down the road. This regardless who wins the election–I’m beginning to be convinced that either a re-elected or lame duck Obama administration may see the expiration of Bush tax cuts as a strategically good move no matter the chaos…and the GOP in a lame duck session wont be able to do a thing about it.

None of this is good for NIH or NSF. Because the fiscal cliff cuts are across the board, they are mindless (remember, the cliff was supposed to be a deterrent) so the excellent will get thrown out with the merely good.

The DOD contractors have been lobbying intensely about the Cliff for some time now. The problem though: avoiding the cliff requires something qualitatively different from the political paralysis that has become the norm on the Hill.

If aspects of the Cliff are removed in the new Congress: expect a trade on tax cuts for restoration of DOD funding. I have a hard time seeing NIH and NSF being part of that deal. So worst case: road kill on a bridge to nowhere.

Google Docs as a collaborating tool

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been collaborating on a quite extensive chapter with colleagues across the country. In general, we’ve been using Google Docs and I have to say, the power of it as a collaboration tool is really quite amazing. Specifically, the simplicity and elegance combined with an ability to have multiple edits in real time represents a huge advantage of Office suites (generically). I’m impressed!

Google: the non-technology company

The debate between Peter Thiel and Eric Schmidt is summarized over at Marginal Revolution. Alex’s conclusion is that Google’s cash hording is the best evidence there is for The Great Stagnation. I see it as more as evidence that Google has no faith in the stability of the global economy–it’s best to hoard cash if you think the deluge is almost upon us….

Money quote:

PETER THIEL: …Google is a great company.  It has 30,000 people, or 20,000, whatever the number is.  They have pretty safe jobs.  On the other hand, Google also has 30, 40, 50 billion in cash.  It has no idea how to invest that money in technology effectively.  So, it prefers getting zero percent interest from Mr. Bernanke, effectively the cash sort of gets burned away over time through inflation, because there are no ideas that Google has how to spend money.

The Farm and the Valley…

The slang name for Stanford University is the “Farm”. And of course it begot the enriched Hi-Tech entrepreneurial giant we call Silicon Valley. I missed it when it came out, but here’s Ken Auletta’s fine New Yorker piece on the relationship between the two.

Most importantly this is a superb profile of Stanford’s President, John Hennessy as he has dealt with all of the recent challenges to Higher Ed in the steroidal environment of Palo Alto. A worthwhile read.

The P300, Neurotechnology and the Military

Here’s a thoughtful piece from the Chronicle on the connections between neurotechnology, neuroethics and the military. Prominently mentioned is the so-called P300 (EEG positive deflection at 300 milliseconds) that correlates well with brain recognition of a rare visual stimulus (think seeing your grandmother’s face in the middle of 500 sequential presentations of face images).

The P300 is an evoked potential the jumps out of averaged EEG recordings time locked to the delivery of stimuli. Of greater interest to me as a neuroscientist is the un-averaged EEG activity–much more difficult to interpret, but far richer in neural information.