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thinkahol *

Japan team says stem cells made paralysed monkey jump again - 0 views

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    Japanese researchers said Wednesday they had used stem cells to restore partial mobility in a small monkey that had been paralysed from the neck down by a spinal injury.
Todd Suomela

Information Processing: The Age of Computing - 0 views

  • By their less than wholly objective accounts of the development of physics, historians have conspired to propagate the myth of science as being essentially theoretical physics. Though the myth no longer described scientific reality 50 years ago, historians pretended that all was well, that nothing had changed since the old heroic days of Einstein and his generation.
    • Todd Suomela
       
      Don Ihde discusses this predisposition toward theoretical physics in his book Philosophy of Technology.
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    ...Historians of science have always had a soft spot for the history of theoretical physics. The great theoretical advances of this century -- relativity and quantum mechanics -- have been documented in fascinating historical accounts that have captivated the mind of the cultivated public. There are no comparable studies of the relations between science and engineering. Breaking with the tradition of the Fachidiot, theoretical physicists have bestowed their romantic autobiographies on the world, portraying themselves as the high priests of the reigning cult.
thinkahol *

On "Consciousness: The Black Hole of Neuroscience" aka the "hard" problem | Thinkahol's... - 1 views

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    What had been lacking until relatively recently was an overarching framework or theory through which to grasp the nature of consciousness. The lack of a general theory of consciousness, of how it comes to be that there is something that it is like to be, was really the last rational bastion of opposition to the scientific assertion that consciousness emerges from the brain.
Todd Suomela

Thatcher, Scientist - 0 views

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    This paper has two halves. First, I piece together what we know about Margaret Thatcher's training and employment as a scientist. She took science subjects at school; she studied chemistry at Oxford, arriving during World War II and coming under the influence (and comment) of two excellent women scientists, Janet Vaughan and Dorothy Hodgkin. She did a fourth-year dissertation on X-ray crystallography of gramicidin just after the war. She then gathered four years' experience as a working industrial chemist, at British Xylonite Plastics and at Lyons. Second, my argument is that, having lived the life of a working research scientist, she had a quite different view of science from that of any other minister responsible for science. This is crucial in understanding her reaction to the proposals-associated with the Rothschild reforms of the early 1970s-to reinterpret aspects of science policy in market terms. Although she was strongly pressured by bodies such as the Royal Society to reaffirm the established place of science as a different kind of entity-one, at least at core, that was unsuitable to marketization-Thatcher took a different line.
thinkahol *

YouTube - Think faster focus better and remember moreRewiring our brain to stay younger... - 0 views

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    October 24, 2008 - Google Tech Talks June 16, 2008 ABSTRACT Explore the brain's amazing ability to change throughout a person's life. This phenomenon-called neuroplasticty-is the science behind brain fitness, and it has been called one of the most extraordinary scientific discoveries of the 20th century. PBS had recently aired this special, The Brain Fitness Program, which explains the brain's complexities in a way that both scientists and people with no scientific background can appreciate. This is opportunity to learn more about how our minds work-and to find out more about the latest in cutting-edge brain research, from the founder of Posit Science and creator of the Brain Fitness Program software, Dr. Michael Merzenich. Speaker: Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. Michael M. Merzenich, PhD: Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Merzenich leads the company's scientific team. For more than three decades, Dr. Merzenich has been a leading pioneer in brain plasticity research. He is the Francis A. Sooy Professor at the Keck Center for Integrative Neurosciences at UCSF. Dr. Merzenich is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the Ipsen Prize, Zulch Prize of the Max Planck Institute, Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award and Purkinje Medal. Dr. Merzenich has published more than 200 articles, including many in leading peer-reviewed journals, such as Science and Nature. His work is also often covered in the popular press, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time and Newsweek. He has appeared on Sixty Minutes II, CBS Evening News and Good Morning America. In the late 1980s, Dr. Merzenich was on the team that invented the cochlear implant, now distributed by market leader Advanced Bionics. In 1996, Dr. Merzenich was the founding CEO of Scientific Learning Corporation (Nasdaq: SCIL), which markets and distributes software that applies principles of brain plasticity to assist children with language
Infogreen Global

Brazil Outpaces All Other Countries in Reducing Global Warming Emissions - 0 views

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    "Brazil has done more than any other country over the past five years to cut global warming emissions by dramatically reducing its deforestation. Destroying tropical forests is responsible for about 15 percent of global warming pollution, and Brazil had been the biggest source of deforestation pollution. Its reduction is a stunning turnaround.
Todd Suomela

The Bohr paradox - physicsworld.com - 0 views

  • Why? The best explanation I have heard is advanced by the physicist John H Marburger, who is currently science advisor to US President George Bush. By 1930, Marburger points out, physicists had found a perfectly adequate way of representing classical concepts within the quantum framework using Hilbert (infinite-dimensional) space. Quantum systems, he says, “live” in Hilbert space, and the concepts of position and momentum, for instance, are associated with different sets of coordinate axes that do not line up with each other, thereby resulting in the situation captured in ordinary-language terms by complementarity.“It’s a clear, logical and consistent way of framing the complementarity issue,” Marburger explained to me. “It clarifies how quantum phenomena are represented in alternative classical ‘pictures’, and it fits in beautifully with the rest of physics. The clarity of this scheme removes much of the mysticism surrounding complementarity. What happened was like a gestalt-switch, from a struggle to view microscopic nature from a classical point of view to an acceptance of the Hilbert-space picture, from which classical concepts emerged naturally. Bohr brokered that transition.”
  • In his book Niels Bohr’s Times, the physicist Abraham Pais captures a paradox in his subject’s legacy by quoting three conflicting assessments. Pais cites Max Born, of the first generation of quantum physics, and Werner Heisenberg, of the second, as saying that Bohr had a greater influence on physics and physicists than any other scientist. Yet Pais also reports a distinguished younger colleague asking with puzzlement and scepticism “What did Bohr really do?”.
Todd Suomela

H. M., an Unforgettable Amnesiac, Dies at 82 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    In 1953, he underwent an experimental brain operation in Hartford to correct a seizure disorder, only to emerge from it fundamentally and irreparably changed. He developed a syndrome neurologists call profound amnesia. He had lost the ability to form new memories. For the next 55 years, each time he met a friend, each time he ate a meal, each time he walked in the woods, it was as if for the first time. And for those five decades, he was recognized as the most important patient in the history of brain science.
thinkahol *

The American Wikileaks Hacker | Rolling Stone Culture - 0 views

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    On July 29th, returning from a trip to Europe, Jacob Appelbaum, a lanky, unassuming 27-year-old wearing a black T-shirt with the slogan "Be the trouble you want to see in the world," was detained at customs by a posse of federal agents. In an interrogation room at Newark Liberty airport, he was grilled about his role in Wikileaks, the whistle-blower group that has exposed the government's most closely guarded intelligence reports about the war in Afghanistan. The agents photocopied his receipts, seized three of his cellphones - he owns more than a dozen - and confiscated his computer. They informed him that he was under government surveillance. They questioned him about the trove of 91,000 classified military documents that Wikileaks had released the week before, a leak that Vietnam-era activist Daniel Ellsberg called "the largest unauthorized disclosure since the Pentagon Papers." They demanded to know where Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, was hiding. They pressed him on his opinions about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Appelbaum refused to answer. Finally, after three hours, he was released. Sex, Drugs, and the Biggest Cybercrime of All Time Appelbaum is the only known American member of Wikileaks and the leading evangelist for the software program that helped make the leak possible. In a sense, he's a bizarro version of Mark Zuckerberg: If Facebook's ambition is to "make the world more open and connected," Appelbaum has dedicated his life to fighting for anonymity and privacy. An anarchist street kid raised by a heroin- addict father, he dropped out of high school, taught himself the intricacies of code and developed a healthy paranoia along the way. "I don't want to live in a world where everyone is watched all the time," he says. "I want to be left alone as much as possible. I don't want a data trail to tell a story that isn't true." We have transferred our most intimate and personal information - our bank accounts, e-mails, photographs, ph
thinkahol *

Let's Regulate Facebook! | The Awl - 0 views

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    Apparently, if Facebook wanted to repair its reputation, all it had to do was seem like it was helping to topple an authoritarian regime. Now that the U.S. media is loudly pushing the idea that social media can change Egypt-and next, the world!-it makes Mark Zuckerberg's tendency to monetize every aspect of our online lives seem less important.
thinkahol *

Mind-reading scan identifies simple thoughts - health - 26 May 2011 - New Scientist - 0 views

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    A new new brain imaging system that can identify a subject's simple thoughts may lead to clearer diagnoses for Alzheimer's disease or schizophrenia - as well as possibly paving the way for reading people's minds. Michael Greicius at Stanford University in California and colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify patterns of brain activity associated with different mental states. He asked 14 volunteers to do one of four tasks: sing songs silently to themselves; recall the events of the day; count backwards in threes; or simply relax. Participants were given a 10-minute period during which they had to do this. For the rest of that time they were free to think about whatever they liked. The participants' brains were scanned for the entire 10 minutes, and the patterns of connectivity associated with each task were teased out by computer algorithms that compared scans from several volunteers doing the same task. This differs from previous experiments, in which the subjects were required to perform mental activities at specific times and the scans were then compared with brain activity when they were at rest. Greicius reasons his method encourages "natural" brain activity more like that which occurs in normal thought.
Todd Suomela

Human Computer Interaction (HCI) by John M. Carroll - Interaction-Design.org: HCI, Usab... - 0 views

  • The challenge of personal computing became manifest at an opportune time. The broad project of cognitive science, which incorporated cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, cognitive anthropology, and the philosophy of mind, had formed at the end of the 1970s. Part of the programme of cognitive science was to articulate systematic and scientifically-informed applications to be known as "cognitive engineering". Thus, at just the point when personal computing presented the practical need for HCI, cognitive science presented people, concepts, skills, and a vision for addressing such needs. HCI was one of the first examples of cognitive engineering. Other historically fortuitous developments contributed to establishment of HCI. Software engineering, mired in unmanageable software complexity in the 1970s, was starting to focus on nonfunctional requirements, including usability and maintainability, and on non-linear software development processes that relied heavily on testing. Computer graphics and information retrieval had emerged in the 1970s, and rapidly came to recognize that interactive systems were the key to progressing beyond early achievements. All these threads of development in computer science pointed to the same conclusion: The way forward for computing entailed understanding and better empowering users.
  • One of the most significant achievements of HCI is its evolving model of the integration of science and practice. Initially this model was articulated as a reciprocal relation between cognitive science and cognitive engineering. Later, it ambitiously incorporated a diverse science foundation, notably Activity Theory, distributed cognition, and ethnomethodology, and a culturally embedded conception of human activity, including the activities of design and technology development. Currently, the model is incorporating design practices and research across a broad spectrum. In these developments, HCI provides a blueprint for a mutual relation between science and practice that is unprecedented.
  • In the latter 1980s and early 1990s, HCI assimilated ideas from Activity Theory, distributed cognition, and ethnomethodology. This comprised a fundamental epistemological realignment. For example, the representational theory of mind, a cornerstone of cognitive science, is no longer axiomatic for HCI science. Information processing psychology and laboratory user studies, once the kernel of HCI research, became important, but niche areas. The most canonical theory-base in HCI now is socio-cultural, Activity Theory. Field studies became typical, and eventually dominant as an empirical paradigm. Collaborative interactions, that is, groups of people working together through and around computer systems (in contrast to the early 1980s user-at-PC situation) have become the default unit of analysis. It is remarkable that such fundamental realignments were so easily assimilated by the HCI community.
Todd Suomela

The Technium: The World Without Technology - 0 views

  • Although strictly speaking simple tools are a type of technology made by one person, we tend to think of technology as something much more complicated. But in fact technology is anything designed by a mind. Technology includes not only nuclear reactors and genetically modified crops, but also bows and arrows, hide tanning techniques, fire starters, and domesticated crops. Technology also includes intangible inventions such as calendars, mathematics, software, law, and writing, as these too derive from our heads. But technology also must include birds' nests and beaver dams since these too are the work of brains. All technology, both the chimp's termite fishing spear and the human's fishing spear, the beaver's dam and the human's dam, the warbler's hanging basket and the human's hanging basket, the leafcutter ant's garden and the human's garden, are all fundamentally natural. We tend to isolate human-made technology from nature, even to the point of thinking of it as anti-nature, only because it has grown to rival the impact and power of its home. But in its origins and fundamentals a tool is as natural as our life.
  • The gravity of technology holds us where we are. We accept our attachment. But to really appreciate the effects of technology – both its virtues and costs -- we need to examine the world of humans before technology. What were our lives like without inventions? For that we need to peek back into the Paleolithic era when technology was scarce and humans lived primarily surrounded by things they did not make. We can also examine the remaining contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes still living close to nature to measure what, if anything, they gain from the small amount of technology they use.
  • Then about 50,000 years ago something amazing happened. While the bodies of early humans in Africa remained unchanged, their genes and minds shifted noticeably. For the first time hominins were full of ideas and innovation. These newly vitalized modern humans, which we now call Sapiens, charged into new regions beyond their ancestral homes in eastern Africa. They fanned out from the grasslands and in a relatively brief burst exploded from a few tens of thousands in Africa to an estimated 8 million worldwide just before the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago.
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  • It should have been clear to Neanderthal, as it is now clear to us in the 21st century, that something new and big had appeared -- a new biological and geological force. A number of scientists (Richard Klein, Ian Tattersall, William Calvin, among many others) think that the "something" that happened 50,000 years ago was the invention of language. Up until this point, humanoids were smart. They could make crude tools in a hit or miss way and handle fire – perhaps like an exceedingly smart chimp. The African hominin's growing brain size and physical stature had leveled off its increase, but evolution continued inside the brain.  "What happened 50,000 years ago," says Klein, "was a change in the operating system of humans. Perhaps a point mutation effected the way the brain is wired that allowed languages, as we understand language today: rapidly produced, articulate speech."  Instead of acquiring a larger brain, as the Neanderthal and Erectus did, Sapien gained a rewired brain.  Language altered the Neanderthal-type mind, and allowed Sapien minds for the first time to invent with purpose and deliberation. Philosopher Daniel Dennet crows in elegant language: "There is no step more uplifting, more momentous in the history of mind design, than the invention of language. When Homo sapiens became the beneficiary of this invention, the species stepped into a slingshot that has launched it far beyond all other earthly species." The creation of language was the first singularity for humans. It changed everything. Life after language was unimaginable to those on the far side before it.
thinkahol *

25% of US car accidents due to using gadgets | KurzweilAI - 0 views

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    Driving distractions such as cell phones and other electronic devices cause as much as 25% of all U.S. car accidents, researchers at the Governors Highway Safety Association have found, WinBETA notes. A major finding was that being distracted was the cause of 15 to 25% of all accidents, ranging from minor property damage to death. Their findings suggest that distracted driving accidents be reported in accident reports to assist in evaluating distracted driving laws and programs. They propose creating low-cost roadway measures that alert motorists when they are drifting out of their driving lane. They also propose that all cell phones be banned on the road, even hands-free versions. In another report by The New York Times, police in Syracuse and Hartford have handed out nearly 20,000 tickets for illegal use of a phone while driving - either for texting or use of a handheld phone. According to the federal government, these efforts have had the desired effect: distracted driving has fallen sharply. Their research shows that drivers talking on a phone are four times as likely to get into a crash as those not on a phone, and that the risks for motorists who text are at least twice as high. In Syracuse, handheld cellphone use and texting have each fallen by one-third. In Hartford, handheld cellphone use by drivers fell 57 percent while texting fell by 75 percent, the Times reports. Ref.: Vicki Harper. et al., Distracted Driving: What Research Shows and What States Can Do, GHSA, 2011
David Mills

Reliable Vehicle Monitoring Device - 1 views

I thought I can never set myself free from worrying about my cargo trucks that usually travel to far places. Undeniably, there were drivers who cannot be fully trusted. But if I had to keep on chan...

Truck tracking

started by David Mills on 04 Oct 13 no follow-up yet
Todd Suomela

Guest Post: Tom Levenson on Isaac Newton as the First Cosmologist | Cosmic Variance - 0 views

  • Newton knew what he had done. He was no accidental writer. A parabola, of course, is a curve that keeps on going – and that meant that at the end of a very long and very dense book, he lifted off again from the hard ground of daily reality and said, in effect, look: All this math and all these physical ideas govern everything we can see, out to and past the point where we can’t see anymore. Most important, he did so with implacable rigor, a demonstration that, he argued, should leave no room for dissent. He wrote “The theory that corresponds exactly to so nonuniform a motion through the greatest part of the heavens, and that observes the same laws as the theory of the planets and that agrees exactly with exact astronomical observations cannot fail to be true.” (Italics added).
  • To make his ambitions absolutely clear Newton used the same phrase for the title of book three. There his readers would discover “The System of the World.” This is where the literary structure of the work really comes into play, in my view. Through book three, Newton takes his audience through a carefully constructed tour of all the places within the grasp of his new physics. It begins with an analysis of the moons of Jupiter, demonstrating that inverse square relationships govern those motions. He went on, to show how the interaction between Jupiter and Saturn would pull each out of a perfect elliptical orbit; the real world, he says here, is messier than a geometer’s dream.
seth kutcher

The Best Remote PC Support I Ever Had - 1 views

The Remote PC Support Now excellent remote PC support services are the best. They have skilled computer tech professionals who can fix your PC while you wait or just go back to work or just simpl...

remote PC support

started by seth kutcher on 12 Sep 11 no follow-up yet
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