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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
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...
The companies will try, contractors will try to try, subcontractors will try to try to try
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 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.
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?
I dare you to set C to zero.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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.
Never underestimate Moon Shots. without the Manhattan project, we probably would have never got the fission reactor, and our knowledge of nuclear technology would not be where it is right now. Without the space program, we wouldn't have satellites, the GPS network, a global communication network, Geospatial imaging, and more goodies then I can fit here. The human Genome project was a fed funded project and it revolutionized Genetics and made gene therapy possible.
The mapping of the Human brain will finally let us understand what makes the human brain tick, which will allow us to do great things with degenerative illnesses, Brain machine interfaces, augmentation, Mental Illness, Artificial Intelligence, and other thinks we can't even fathom yet.
If you seriously think government funded research projects are bad, go back to your Amish colony, and not bother using any technology developed in the last 60 years.
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.
Good job, never let historical fact mess with your ideology.
The last sentence is a particular peach. Sometimes things are not entirely about money, is that a concept you can grasp? It's hard to compete with that, but I'll try:
The Taj Mahal was a failure measured in terms of return on investment.
The Mona Lisa is pretty pathetic when measured in terms of luminosity per square inch, he should have painted it white.
Faberge eggs are pretty useless as crash helmets for chickens.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
You do realise that both the Internet and WWW were created by the evil wasteful government don't you? Do you think it would be anything like as free and open if it had been created by Microsoft or Apple?
Apparently, it runs on both windows and mac courtesy of Gog. Definitely one of my favorite games of all time. http://www.gog.com/gamecard/sid_meiers_alpha_centauri
i'm sure if we spend a few trillion more dollars we can go to mars and get all sorts of spinoffs from that too
money + R&D will always = spinoffs
the question is, how much money are you willing to spend for said spinoffs?
Faberge eggs are pretty useless as crash helmets for chickens.
[Citation needed]
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
I dare you to set C to zero.
OK.
*boom*
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun