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US Joins Google, Microsoft In "Brain Race"
Nerval's Lobster writes "Decades after the space race pitted the United States against Russia, a new race has emerged: the race to map the human brain. The New York Times reported Feb. 18 that the Obama administration is gearing up to announce the Brain Activity Map project, an effort to map an active human brain that could give new insight into how neurons interact with each other, providing new avenues of research for diseases such as Alzheimer's. The U.S. will apparently pit itself against a collection of European research agencies that have announced similar projects. The U.S. effort, however, will apparently involve U.S. businesses, which would naturally benefit from the high-profile nature of the effort; in theory, the latter could also apply the resulting discoveries to their own computing efforts. The Times reported that representatives from Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm met with government representatives at the California Institute of Technology to try and figure out whether or not there are sufficient computing resources to process the vast amounts of data that the experiments are expected to produce, or whether new ones would need to be built."
n/c
"to try and figure out"
Why don't they skip the try part and just figure out?
Decades after the space race pitted the United States against Russia, a new race has emerged: the race to map the human brain.
Money quote: "One small step for (a) man, one giant leap for ... [squish] oops!"
Set your phasers on "funky"!
n/c
He's not commenting?
Why does research always have to be done to cure diseases? Have we stopped doing research just because it would be nice to know this, because we might be able to do things we haven't dreamed of yet? 'Curing disease' is the reporting version of fighting terrorists and stopping kiddy porn - filler because you can't think of anything real to say. Surely understanding how our brains work is one of the most interesting things we can do, isn't that good enough?
So I'm guessing the U.S. government and Microsoft are one of the control groups...
Anything involving MS would result in studies of how a virus effects the brain...
The results of which would be bloated beyond the ability to compute.
N/C No Change
N/C No Comment
N/C No Charge
N/C Not Covered
N/C new condition
N/C Numerical Control
N/C No Connect (electronics)
N/C Normally Closed Contact
N/C Non-Consensual
N/C Nuclear to Cytoplasmic
N/C Newton Per Coulomb
N/C Number of Users Per Cell Density
"Nuclear to Cytoplasmic" sounds like Ray. I don't know what it means but that's par for the course, eh?
This sounds like a pork program. When I read about computer companies talking to the Government about there not being "enough compute resources", I think of the various supercomputer boondoggles. Here's the current job list for the Mississippi Supercomputer Center. Look at the CPU and memory usage columns. Most, if not all, of those jobs could be running on a 4-core 64-bit desktop machine. Instead, they're running some 10-year old SGI supercomputers as a batch processing service, free to Mississippi academics.
This is just a poor copy of the European Union project to model the brain. This is an investment of a milliard euros over some years that has the goal to understand the human brain by building a working simulation of equivalent size in information and complexity terms.
it takes much less time to map sheeple brains!
I wonder if people will troll the "street view" cars of their brain? /might be high
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
It's rather stupid to make or even portray this as a "brain race" between countries akin to the cold war space race. Diseases such as Alzheimer's are a serious problem for every society and research into them should involve high levels of cross-border cooperation not a race, least of all a politically driven one.
Then again, almost every president since JFK has tried to mimic his silly call to put men on the moon by the end of the decade. That egotistical race to do quickly what should have been done well is why we haven't returned to the moon is some forty years. As the economy continues to struggle and Obama's popularity slides ever downward, our politicians will try to distract us with races to this and wars against that.
Note, for instace that the NY Times articles mentions: "The initiative, if successful, could provide a lift for the economy." Not so. Having a president that:
1. Knows something about business, particularly small businesses.
2. Doesn't hate every form of capitalism but politician-enriching crony capitalism.
Is a much better answer to our economic woes than falling for political posturing like this.
There are 13 billion bits of information in a human DNA sequence. A brain has a trillion cells of several dozen types that may touch 10,000 other cells. You are talking about a 100 quadrillion edge graph there.
Anybody fancy a guess as to how many (more) brains will be produced by unskilled labor before the first one is simulated?
Admit it, half of you beleived the following line of BS.
Sounds like a plan to solve the deficit.
It's like any other braindead plan of congress, wherein you have less money and less freedom than when they started.
But we have a populace insisting on their place in a stall at the slaughterhouse.
I suppose wasting more than ten years in Great Britain give you at least some answers (obviously, about questions that should not exist). As I told one guy before I was finally kicked out: Why are you the only person I tell I am not the job? I suppose I should have said more accuratelly: Why are you the only person in the cuntry I tell I am not the job?
First faction to discover Secrets of the Human Brain gets a free tech!
Stories like this one always make me want to play Alpha Centauri again. It always feels strange how much of the early technology in that game we've already discovered or probably will discover soon.
And when Apple comes out with their map, iPhone users will all go mad.
Have gnu, will travel.
True AI will appear on the world scene decades before these guys finish mapping anything and long before they even begin to understand what they have mapped. You could map a billion cortical columns but, unless you know what it is supposed to do and how it evolves during learning, you understand diddly squat. All you have is a gigantic map with no labels. The best way to understand the brain is by generating multiple hypotheses and principles that we think might lead to intelligence and writing algorithms to simulate biologically plausible models based on those principles. The principles are bound to be very few in number compared to the astronomical number of possible neural configurations that the brain can take during its lifetime or even while it is paying attention to some new patterns in its sensory space. Which of those configurations are we planning to map? The government is to be lauded for embarking on such grand projects but I think that, in this case, our tax money would be better served by taking a more sensible approach. Sorry.
I dare you to set C to zero.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Microsoft will realize their efforts were doomed from the start when they applied Randian philosophy to pick the best brain to study and ended up with Steve Ballmer's.
There is someting wrong with spamfilter today.
Mods are working overtime
Apple computers are slightly gay.
No doubt the processes discovered in the brains inner workings will be patented and I will no longer be allowed to think unless I pay a license fee.
Regarding project to map human brain, I predict that a number of university papers and a heap of data will be generated, and that some spinoff technologies, and then eventually the government will realize they can't afford it and reduce and eventually stop funding altogether.
Why does the government have to waste millions of dollars to create some spinoff tech? Fucked if I know; because it is packed with bureaucratic public service morons trying desperately to justify their pay.
Private companies spend their R&D money much more efficiently than the government could ever possibly hope to achieve.
Companies put R&D money into emerging markets with projected consumer demand. While there may conceivably be demand for mapping the human brain, it is speculative at best. What do they hope to achieve? These kinds of airy-fairy projects always have abstract and intangible objectives like "to better understand how the brain works", with no clear practical or market objective from the outset. It's just one of those financial black holes designed to suck in money and without any means to measure success (because of a lack of a clear goal that can even be measured). Medical R&D is normally incremental. Even if the brain mapping project were "successful" (whatever that means) the medical tech industry would have to spend time (probably years) disseminating whatever information comes out of it to make something marketable from it. Government money would be better spent on fiscally responsible programs like debt reduction, and private investment would be better spent on the normal incremental R&D process with clear market objectives from the outset.
Even the moon race was a waste of money measured in terms of return on investment.
Could this become a cure for religion? I mean, if we know exactly how the brain works there is going to be a lot fewer gaps for God to hide in.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
"U$A patents human brain."
Even if it breaks even or a net loss, it is a way better investment than the billions spent on "defense".
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
They forgot to mention who are they competing against: http://www.humanbrainproject.eu/introduction.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21487016
Companies are, as you say, good at meeting "consumer demand.", but ONLY in the short-term. They are famous for having a 5 year outlook. They don't plan for longer than that because the CEO will be gone by then and won't make any money from profits that come more than 5 years away. Government can, or should be, looking for the long term. The space race is a case in point. The space race caused us to develop many, many, many spinoff that would NEVER have been considered worth developing by a company. The computer chip itself was developed as a by-product of the space race in order to save weight. Up till that time, although they had developed some multi-component chips, they had vever considered inplementing a computer on a chip. That caused home computers, cell-phones, Home video (As CDs, etc.) And that's just the computer chips (that consumers never demanded because they didn't know they COULD exist). There are many other spin-offs that were less earth shattering in scope, but important none the less to the US's bottom line.
Can some patent stuff from the this and make everyone pay a fee? have some kind of SCO like lawsuits?
Mr G rides the opportunistic tide of popularity.... Seems like before the labor pool was inedequate.
http://www.informationweek.com/microsoft-struggles-to-find-skilled-labo/161601274
Now there is money from Uncle Sam and the tune changes.
Maybe the reason no one wants an MS phone is that we are all tired of microsoft technology?
Might as well just keep em in the rear view mirror, and have a retirement party.
I wonder if they could ever figure out women or will the computers indefinitely crash.
I dare you to set C to zero.
OK.
*boom*
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
I'm sorry, but could somebody please FUCK ME RAW?
Because I'm serious, I need to be FUCKED RAW.
I'll buy pizza and cold beer, I just need to be FUCKE RAW.
- Jimmy Wales
If this were the real Jimmy Wales posting this; I'd LOVE to... rawr. Sexy sexy man.
Sadly, it's just a troll.
If the White House is involved, their motive would be more effective means of torture or the direct extraction of memories from the minds of those that are a threat to the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. If that seems outlandish, remember the only thing that really prevented 24/7 non-warranted surveillance was not morality nor the rule of law, merely ROI and effective data storage and retrieval.
Could some of the new push for the Brain Activity Map project be linked to the recent series of violent acts across the U.S.? Could this be part of a two-pronged approach in response to the recent violent gun acts committed by people with mental disorders in the U.S.:
1) propose new legislation to limit or ban semi-automatic firearms, and
2) invest in research about the brain to identify and understand mental disorders so they can be better treated or cured in the future