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Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/05/23/Marcus_Chown_in_Conversation_with_Fred_Watson Marcus Chown, author of Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You: A Guide to the Universe, discusses the mechanics behind quantum computers, explaining that they function by having atoms exist in multiple places at once. He predicts that quantum computers will be produced within 20 years. ----- The two towering achievements of modern physics are quantum theory and Einsteins general theory of relativity. Together, they explain virtually everything about the world in which we live. But almost a century after their advent, most people havent the slightest clue what either is about. Radio astronomer, award-winning writer and broadcaster Marcus Chown talks to fellow stargazer Fred Watson about his book Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You. - Australian Broadcasting Corporation Marcus Chown is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. Formerly a radio astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, he is now cosmology consultant of the weekly science magazine New Scientist. The Magic Furnace, Marcus' second book, was chosen in Japan as one of the Books of the Year by Asahi Shimbun. In the UK, the Daily Mail called it "a dizzy page-turner with all the narrative devices you'd expect to find in Harry Potter". His latest book is called Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You.

The Rhizomik initiative is inspired by the rhizome metaphor when working with knowledge from a scientific, technological but also philosophical point of view. This metaphor has accompanied us in our research about knowledge in many different fields, fundamentally Semantic Web, Human-Computer Interaction, Web Science, Complex Systems and Cognitive Science.

The EconCS Group pursues research, both theoretical and experimental, at the intersection between computer science and economics.

e-LICO: An e-Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Collaborative Research in Data Mining and Data-Intensive Science

"CTRL-Labs dedicates itself to answering the biggest questions in computing, neuroscience, and design so creators can dream. Our work to build a transformative brain-machine interface spans research and challenges at the intersection of computational neuroscience, statistics, machine learning, biophysics, hardware, and human-computer interaction."

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

The Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department is the largest department at MIT, preparing over 300 graduate and undergraduate students each year to become leaders in diverse career fields such as academia, biomedical technology, finance, consulting, law, nanotechnology and more.  MIT EECS consistently ranks top by the the U.S. News and World Reports and is known globally for its world class faculty creating the best possible education, which is based on their innovative and award winning research.

MindModeling@Home (Beta) is a research project that uses volunteer computing for the advancement of cognitive science. The research focuses on utilizing computational cognitive process modeling to better understand the human mind. We need your help to improve on the scientific foundations that explain the mechanisms and processes that enable and moderate human performance and learning.

Constellation is a platform for research projects that use Internet-connected computers to do research in various aerospace related sciences and engineering. You can participate by downloading and running a free program on your computer.

Mathematica is renowned as the world's ultimate application for computations. But it's much more-it's the only development platform fully integrating computation into complete workflows, moving you seamlessly from initial ideas all the way to deployed individual or enterprise solutions.

"Can computers learn to read? We think so. "Read the Web" is a research project that attempts to create a computer system that learns over time to read the web. Since January 2010, our computer system called NELL (Never-Ending Language Learner) has been running continuously, attempting to perform two tasks each day:"

"computerbasedmath.org is the project to perform this reset. We're building a completely new math curriculum with computer-based computation at its heart, while campaigning at all levels to redefine math education away from historical hand-calculating techniques and toward real-life problem-solving situations that drive high-concept math understanding and experience."

"With its mission to spread the promise of computation and knowledge as widely as possible, Wolfram has a long history of creating top computation and knowledge resources and providing free public access-with a special emphasis on education at all levels."

Listen up, Facebook and Twitter groupies: how easily can social pressure affect your memory? Very easily, researchers at the Weizmann Institute and University College London have proved, and they think they even know what part of the brain is responsible. The participants conformed to the group on these "planted" responses, giving incorrect answers nearly 70% of the time. Volunteers watched a documentary film in small groups. Three days later, they returned to the lab individually to take a memory test, answering questions about the film. They were also asked how confident they were in their answers. They were later invited back to the lab to retake the test. This time, the subjects were also given supposed answers of the others in their film-viewing group (along with social-media-style photos) while being scanned in a functional MRI (fMRI) that revealed their brain activity. Is most of what you know false? Planted among these were false answers to questions the volunteers had previously answered correctly and confidently. The participants conformed to the group on these "planted" responses, giving incorrect answers nearly 70% of the time. To determine if their memory of the film had actually undergone a change, the researchers invited the subjects back to the lab later to take the memory test once again, telling them that the answers they had previously been fed were not those of their fellow film watchers, but random computer generations. Some of the responses reverted back to the original, correct ones, but get this: despite finding out the scientists messed with their minds, close to half of their responses remained erroneous, implying that the subjects were relying on false memories implanted in the earlier session. An analysis of the fMRI data showed a strong co-activation and connectivity between two brain areas: the hippocampus and the amygdala. Social reinforcement could act on the amygdala to persuade our brains to replace a strong memory wi

A new study by MIT shows that babies can perform sophisticated analyses of how the physical world should behave. The scientists developed a computational model of infant cognition that accurately predicts infants' surprise at events that violate their conception of the physical world. The model, which simulates a type of intelligence known as pure reasoning, calculates the probability of a particular event, given what it knows about how objects behave. The close correlation between the model's predictions and the infants' actual responses to such events suggests that infants reason in a similar way, says Josh Tenenbaum, associate professor of cognitive science and computation at MIT.

Wolfram|Alpha Pro gives you a whole new way to interact with Wolfram|Alpha-and immediate access to new, more personal, computational knowledge.