Greenough showed the effects of enriched and deprived environments on cortical connectivity and thickness in a series of studies. This is one of his early studies:
Science. 1972 Jun 30;176(4042):1445-7.
Rearing complexity affects branching of dendrites in the visual cortex of the rat.
Volkmar FR, Greenough WT.
"Higher-order dendritic branching is considerably greater in Golgistained neurons from the occipital cortex of rats reared in groups in a complex environment than in similar neurons of littermates reared individually in laboratory cages have intermediate amounts of branching, while lower-order branching did not appear to be affected by any rearing environment."
Lobby your local city and county officials to support the installation of fiber infrastructure. Along the Wasatch Front we have the excellent UTOPIA project, which brings fiber to the home. Local cities used bonds to support setting up the infrastructure, and home owners pay for the connection from the street to their house. The fiber infrastructure is treated like a utility and any ISP can compete for your business. I have a symmetric 100 MB connection for about about 1/3 less than Comcast was charging me for a 15 MB connection, and I get MUCH better service.
Along the Wasatch Front we have the excellent UTOPIA project, which brings fiber to the home. The fiber infrastructure is treated like a utility and any ISP can compete for your business - Keeping costs down. It was a great day when I had my symmetric 100 MB connection installed and was able to say goodbye to Comcast.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Biomedical Engineering is one of the fastest growing occupations and has a median income of over $80,000. I think that this NIH study, which was run mainly by people in academia, doesn't fully account for the jobs in industry.
Most researchers will think about this for about 2 seconds and then publish in the journal with the most prestige and highest impact factor that they can. Publishing in high impact journals is a major factor in promotion and tenure for professors, so until universities adapt their policies on promotion and tenure, professors will continue to published in prestigious and expensive closed access journals. When reviewing someone for promotion or tenure, high-level administrators don't have time to read all the journal articles a professor has published, so they really heavily on g-indices and/or h-indices that are based upon journal impact factor scores.
Pretty amazing surgery, but watching the videos shows limited restoration of function. The key is getting the transplanted/regenerating nerves to make the proper connections. The surgery is not going to re-wire the incredible number of connections made during development. Neural prostheses currently offer better dexterity and restoration of function than the nerve transplant. However, it is likely only a matter of time (maybe sever decades) before the neural re-wiring problem is solved.
Telsa is planning on an ~$30,000 model in the next few years. If they achieve this price point and maintain the quality of their current models, I think that they will have an all electric car that many people will want
Any wired solution, electrical or optical, must cross the skin therefore presenting a big infection risk. The whole idea behind using wireless devices in neural prostheses is to remove this risk of infection.
Two shows: "The Daily Show" and the "The Colbert Report".
This is a good litmus test. Would Chavez allow these shows, or their equivalent, to be broadcast?
They are very popular in America, and attack the flaws in our politicians and political systems with "news" reports.
Every free and open country should have shows like this.
Nothing! On the other hand, it would be a pretty foolish person who tried to do that -- if you made the data you're likely the only one who truly understands it. Other threads in this discussion talk about that problem in the context of elementary particles. For solar observations it is similar -- there are plenty of "gotchas" in every data set, and you'd better be working with the instrument team if you want to make a fool of yourself.
This is exactly why this system is likely to fail. No scientist is going to spend millions of dollars and years of effort just to put their data on a server where someone else can analyze it, publish the results, and therefore get most of the credit and reward. The end result of this process is the person actually collecting the data doesn't get tenure and ends up shutting down their lab.
In terms of understanding the data and "gotchas", we alway have meta-data to explain the details of the experiment and the data. Through collaborations with specific individuals in which publications authorship is discussed up front, I have allowed other to analyzed my data.
We design and build our instrumentation ourselves, or have in built at an outside contractor. In either case we always validate every piece of experimental equipment. So I think it is safe to say that we are cognizant of the subtleties of our data.
Another angle: if you really do deserve tenure, then your problem is probably the opposite: you've got too many interesting ideas to explore and data sets to analyze, and you're likely never to get around to doing some of the necessary-but-more-tedious analyses of your back data. If you hold on to the data, it will never get analyzed by anyone.
Its not a case of deserving tenure or not. You need to have peer-reviewed documentation of scientific productivity and standing. This is why I have graduate students and postdocs. Typically, a senior graduate student or a postdoc ends up being first author on a paper, while I am last author. And this is what tenure review committees look at - How may first and last author papers do you have. Having a lot of papers with my students/postdocs as first author demonstrates that I am being a good mentor and advancing the careers of my the people in my lab. Having a lot of last author publications demonstrates that my lab is in general being productive. They also factor in the quality and prestige of the journals where the work is published.
As I stated earlier, after my lab has gotten a few publications out of a data set, I would be OK with publishing in an open database. However, I would still insist on having some control over how future publications are credited.
In Neuroscience, Neural Engineering, Biomedical Engineering... The first author is the person who did the most work and wrote the paper. The Last author is typically the Principle Investigator (PI), i.e. the lab/project supervisor who wrote the grant that funded the project. While the PI is usually the person who does the least of the day-to-day work, they are often the person who makes the most intellectual contribution in terms of experimental design and problem solving. Other authors are typically listed in the order in which they contributed, either intellectually or actual work, to the project.
20th century or not, the fact is that if I don't publish papers with my name as first or last author I don't get tenure. I'd be happy to have people publish papers using my data as long as I have already gotten a few first author papers out of it. Of couse, that would only apply to my data that is several years old. Also, what is to stop someome from publishing using my data and not having me as an author at all? The TOS to access the data are going to be very important.
As a neural engineering researcher who routinely generates terabyte size datasets, I have to say that I both like this idea and think it is unlikely to succeed. I would love to have a place to store large datasets and access them from wherever I am at. However, since these datasets will be open sourced, I will be extremely unlikely to put any dataset on google until I am certain I have extracted all of the publishable findings from it. I think that most researchers after putting in years of effort and a lot money into acquiring a dataset will also think twice about open sourcing their data. If the TOS where to include some means for controlling publications which resulted from analysis of the data, then it might be more likely to succeed.
Don't confuse the description of reality (i.e. the equation) for reality itself. Just because an equation doesn't have an upper bound doesn't mean that in reality some factor not accounted for by the equation will place a limit on temperature. In other words, there is no substitute for experimentation.
The signals in the nerve can be detected directly, but the are very small, and it is harder to get a micro-electrode array in the nerve. The muscle acts like a bio-amplifier, so that the small impulses from the nerve are measured as larger electro-myographic signals (EMG). I am a neural engineer on f the team at the Univ. of Utah that is working on using the signals in the nerve directly. We can already decode the movement signals from the nerve directly and are investigating how to provide sensory feedback. We have been discussing with Todd Kuiken using our array to map out the sensory and motor fibers in the nerve prior to his surgery, so that he can achieve better separation of the signals. That is, he'll know which nerve fibers carry which signals prior to implanting them on the muscle. We and other universities (Caltech, Brown, U. Pitt...) are also looking into using signals straight from the cerebral cortex to control prosthetic limbs.
The article summary is completely wrong. I am a member of the Univ. of Utah team working on the neural control part of the DARPA revolutionizing prosthetics project. I can tell you definitively that this project is solely aimed at helping injured veterans. They have made a point of having the scientists and engineers working on this project meet people who have lost limbs while serving their country. It was very moving and motivational to meet these soldiers in person. I am pretty sure that the technology will also be made available to civilian amputees.
I am a member of the Univ. of Utah team working on the neural control part of the DARPA revolutionizing prosthetics projects. I can tell you definitively that this project is solely aimed at helping injured veterans. They have made a point of having the scientists and engineers working on this project meet people who have lost limbs while serving their country. It was very moving and motivational to meet these soldiers in person. I am pretty sure that the technology will also be made available to civilian amputees. The people I have met from the Pentagon do care a great deal about the lives and welfare of the people serving in the military, as well as all people in general.
If you go to jkrowling.com, click on the eraser and you will be taken to a room you'll see a window, a door and a mirror. In the mirror, you'll see a hallway. Click on the farthest doorknob and look for the Christmas tree. They click on the center of the door next to the mirror and a wreath appears. Then click on the top of the mirror and you'll see a garland. Look for a cobweb next to the door. Click on it, and it will disappear. Now, look at the chimes in the window. Click on the second chime to the right, and hold it down. The chime will turn into the key, which opens the door. Click on the wrapped gift behind the door, then click on it again and figure out the title yourself by playing a game of hangman.
If you fall into the generalization that "all muslims" are insane because of a few crazy people, well we could generalize all day, about a lot of things. Why haven't the muslim nations attacked the West conventionally? Or refused to sell them oil? Those would be insane things to do.
No actually I believe they have acted in quite a sane manner because they've brought their political differences (right or wrong - pick a side) to the world's attention, shaken the entire United States, and NO ONE has been able to do ANYTHING to stop it. Insane?
And I'm not even Muslim. Fancy that. This is going to go on until people learn to RESPECT their differences and TRUST one another.
"Muslims" appear insane to me mostly not because of their reaction to the Israel or the US, but rather because of their apparent hatred of one another - and this appears to involve more than a "a few crazy people". I am much more concerned about a nuclear incident occurring between Islamic states (or between two factions within the same country) than I am about a nuclear attack against the US. I think that you are correct that we will continue to see strife and conflict in the Islamic world until people learn to respect their differences and trust on another, but this also and perhaps more importantly applies to groups within the Muslim world (Sunni - Shia, Men - Women, Arab - Persian,...).
The though of my octogenarian grandmother (who has been know to hit people with her cane when angered) in possession of one of these exo-skeletons fills me with horror
The US doesn't use all of the weapons at its desposal because it would result in the massive lose of civilian life. Otherwise both the Vietnam and Iraq wars would have been over in about 24 hours.
The Vietnam war was abandon because of a lack of political will to see it through. The Iraq war will only be be lost because of a similar lack.
Now lets look at countries where the US desisively won wars - former west Germany, South Korea, and Japan and compare them to former east Gemany (or any other soviet block country) and North Korea. Where would you rather live? See any pattern here?
Freedom and Democracy actually are noble causes, and more importanly countries that embrace them tend to prosper enormously.
As for US imperialism clearly the "losers" in past wars e.g. Germany and Japan have no trouble telling the US where to get off.
So in order to relates this in some fashion back to the original topic. The developement of new non-lethal weaponry allows for the advancement of political objectives in the face of an enemy who's world-view is still somewhat mediveal without having to kill everyone is sight.
The parent topic and this post should both really be modded "Offtopic".
Slashdot Mirror
Greenough showed the effects of enriched and deprived environments on cortical connectivity and thickness in a series of studies. This is one of his early studies:
Science. 1972 Jun 30;176(4042):1445-7. Rearing complexity affects branching of dendrites in the visual cortex of the rat. Volkmar FR, Greenough WT.
"Higher-order dendritic branching is considerably greater in Golgistained neurons from the occipital cortex of rats reared in groups in a complex environment than in similar neurons of littermates reared individually in laboratory cages have intermediate amounts of branching, while lower-order branching did not appear to be affected by any rearing environment."
Lobby your local city and county officials to support the installation of fiber infrastructure. Along the Wasatch Front we have the excellent UTOPIA project, which brings fiber to the home. Local cities used bonds to support setting up the infrastructure, and home owners pay for the connection from the street to their house. The fiber infrastructure is treated like a utility and any ISP can compete for your business. I have a symmetric 100 MB connection for about about 1/3 less than Comcast was charging me for a 15 MB connection, and I get MUCH better service.
Along the Wasatch Front we have the excellent UTOPIA project, which brings fiber to the home. The fiber infrastructure is treated like a utility and any ISP can compete for your business - Keeping costs down. It was a great day when I had my symmetric 100 MB connection installed and was able to say goodbye to Comcast.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Biomedical Engineering is one of the fastest growing occupations and has a median income of over $80,000. I think that this NIH study, which was run mainly by people in academia, doesn't fully account for the jobs in industry.
Most researchers will think about this for about 2 seconds and then publish in the journal with the most prestige and highest impact factor that they can. Publishing in high impact journals is a major factor in promotion and tenure for professors, so until universities adapt their policies on promotion and tenure, professors will continue to published in prestigious and expensive closed access journals. When reviewing someone for promotion or tenure, high-level administrators don't have time to read all the journal articles a professor has published, so they really heavily on g-indices and/or h-indices that are based upon journal impact factor scores.
Pretty amazing surgery, but watching the videos shows limited restoration of function. The key is getting the transplanted/regenerating nerves to make the proper connections. The surgery is not going to re-wire the incredible number of connections made during development. Neural prostheses currently offer better dexterity and restoration of function than the nerve transplant. However, it is likely only a matter of time (maybe sever decades) before the neural re-wiring problem is solved.
Tesla Motors
Telsa is planning on an ~$30,000 model in the next few years. If they achieve this price point and maintain the quality of their current models, I think that they will have an all electric car that many people will want
Any wired solution, electrical or optical, must cross the skin therefore presenting a big infection risk. The whole idea behind using wireless devices in neural prostheses is to remove this risk of infection.
Two shows: "The Daily Show" and the "The Colbert Report". This is a good litmus test. Would Chavez allow these shows, or their equivalent, to be broadcast? They are very popular in America, and attack the flaws in our politicians and political systems with "news" reports. Every free and open country should have shows like this.
Good video at 60 minutes about the bionic arms being developed by DARPA for this project.
This is exactly why this system is likely to fail. No scientist is going to spend millions of dollars and years of effort just to put their data on a server where someone else can analyze it, publish the results, and therefore get most of the credit and reward. The end result of this process is the person actually collecting the data doesn't get tenure and ends up shutting down their lab.
In terms of understanding the data and "gotchas", we alway have meta-data to explain the details of the experiment and the data. Through collaborations with specific individuals in which publications authorship is discussed up front, I have allowed other to analyzed my data.
We design and build our instrumentation ourselves, or have in built at an outside contractor. In either case we always validate every piece of experimental equipment. So I think it is safe to say that we are cognizant of the subtleties of our data.
Its not a case of deserving tenure or not. You need to have peer-reviewed documentation of scientific productivity and standing. This is why I have graduate students and postdocs. Typically, a senior graduate student or a postdoc ends up being first author on a paper, while I am last author. And this is what tenure review committees look at - How may first and last author papers do you have. Having a lot of papers with my students/postdocs as first author demonstrates that I am being a good mentor and advancing the careers of my the people in my lab. Having a lot of last author publications demonstrates that my lab is in general being productive. They also factor in the quality and prestige of the journals where the work is published.
As I stated earlier, after my lab has gotten a few publications out of a data set, I would be OK with publishing in an open database. However, I would still insist on having some control over how future publications are credited.
In Neuroscience, Neural Engineering, Biomedical Engineering... The first author is the person who did the most work and wrote the paper. The Last author is typically the Principle Investigator (PI), i.e. the lab/project supervisor who wrote the grant that funded the project. While the PI is usually the person who does the least of the day-to-day work, they are often the person who makes the most intellectual contribution in terms of experimental design and problem solving. Other authors are typically listed in the order in which they contributed, either intellectually or actual work, to the project.
20th century or not, the fact is that if I don't publish papers with my name as first or last author I don't get tenure. I'd be happy to have people publish papers using my data as long as I have already gotten a few first author papers out of it. Of couse, that would only apply to my data that is several years old. Also, what is to stop someome from publishing using my data and not having me as an author at all? The TOS to access the data are going to be very important.
As a neural engineering researcher who routinely generates terabyte size datasets, I have to say that I both like this idea and think it is unlikely to succeed. I would love to have a place to store large datasets and access them from wherever I am at. However, since these datasets will be open sourced, I will be extremely unlikely to put any dataset on google until I am certain I have extracted all of the publishable findings from it. I think that most researchers after putting in years of effort and a lot money into acquiring a dataset will also think twice about open sourcing their data. If the TOS where to include some means for controlling publications which resulted from analysis of the data, then it might be more likely to succeed.
Don't confuse the description of reality (i.e. the equation) for reality itself. Just because an equation doesn't have an upper bound doesn't mean that in reality some factor not accounted for by the equation will place a limit on temperature. In other words, there is no substitute for experimentation.
The signals in the nerve can be detected directly, but the are very small, and it is harder to get a micro-electrode array in the nerve. The muscle acts like a bio-amplifier, so that the small impulses from the nerve are measured as larger electro-myographic signals (EMG). I am a neural engineer on f the team at the Univ. of Utah that is working on using the signals in the nerve directly. We can already decode the movement signals from the nerve directly and are investigating how to provide sensory feedback. We have been discussing with Todd Kuiken using our array to map out the sensory and motor fibers in the nerve prior to his surgery, so that he can achieve better separation of the signals. That is, he'll know which nerve fibers carry which signals prior to implanting them on the muscle. We and other universities (Caltech, Brown, U. Pitt...) are also looking into using signals straight from the cerebral cortex to control prosthetic limbs.
The article summary is completely wrong. I am a member of the Univ. of Utah team working on the neural control part of the DARPA revolutionizing prosthetics project. I can tell you definitively that this project is solely aimed at helping injured veterans. They have made a point of having the scientists and engineers working on this project meet people who have lost limbs while serving their country. It was very moving and motivational to meet these soldiers in person. I am pretty sure that the technology will also be made available to civilian amputees.
I am a member of the Univ. of Utah team working on the neural control part of the DARPA revolutionizing prosthetics projects. I can tell you definitively that this project is solely aimed at helping injured veterans. They have made a point of having the scientists and engineers working on this project meet people who have lost limbs while serving their country. It was very moving and motivational to meet these soldiers in person. I am pretty sure that the technology will also be made available to civilian amputees. The people I have met from the Pentagon do care a great deal about the lives and welfare of the people serving in the military, as well as all people in general.
If you go to jkrowling.com, click on the eraser and you will be taken to a room you'll see a window, a door and a mirror. In the mirror, you'll see a hallway. Click on the farthest doorknob and look for the Christmas tree. They click on the center of the door next to the mirror and a wreath appears. Then click on the top of the mirror and you'll see a garland. Look for a cobweb next to the door. Click on it, and it will disappear. Now, look at the chimes in the window. Click on the second chime to the right, and hold it down. The chime will turn into the key, which opens the door. Click on the wrapped gift behind the door, then click on it again and figure out the title yourself by playing a game of hangman.
from hecklerspray.com
Israel hasn't sworn to the destruction of any other states or ethnic groups.
s /2004/05/28/476115.html
I CLE_ID=41229
2
And who has exactly?
How about this:
http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/LondonFreePress/New
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ART
http://www.poe-news.com/stories.php?poeurlid=4157
If you fall into the generalization that "all muslims" are insane because of a few crazy people, well we could generalize all day, about a lot of things. Why haven't the muslim nations attacked the West conventionally? Or refused to sell them oil? Those would be insane things to do.
...).
No actually I believe they have acted in quite a sane manner because they've brought their political differences (right or wrong - pick a side) to the world's attention, shaken the entire United States, and NO ONE has been able to do ANYTHING to stop it. Insane?
And I'm not even Muslim. Fancy that. This is going to go on until people learn to RESPECT their differences and TRUST one another.
"Muslims" appear insane to me mostly not because of their reaction to the Israel or the US, but rather because of their apparent hatred of one another - and this appears to involve more than a "a few crazy people". I am much more concerned about a nuclear incident occurring between Islamic states (or between two factions within the same country) than I am about a nuclear attack against the US. I think that you are correct that we will continue to see strife and conflict in the Islamic world until people learn to respect their differences and trust on another, but this also and perhaps more importantly applies to groups within the Muslim world (Sunni - Shia, Men - Women, Arab - Persian,
The though of my octogenarian grandmother (who has been know to hit people with her cane when angered) in possession of one of these exo-skeletons fills me with horror
can it play mp3s???
The US doesn't use all of the weapons at its desposal because it would result in the massive lose of civilian life. Otherwise both the Vietnam and Iraq wars would have been over in about 24 hours.
The Vietnam war was abandon because of a lack of political will to see it through. The Iraq war will only be be lost because of a similar lack.
Now lets look at countries where the US desisively won wars - former west Germany, South Korea, and Japan and compare them to former east Gemany (or any other soviet block country) and North Korea. Where would you rather live? See any pattern here?
Freedom and Democracy actually are noble causes, and more importanly countries that embrace them tend to prosper enormously.
As for US imperialism clearly the "losers" in past wars e.g. Germany and Japan have no trouble telling the US where to get off.
So in order to relates this in some fashion back to the original topic. The developement of new non-lethal weaponry allows for the advancement of political objectives in the face of an enemy who's world-view is still somewhat mediveal without having to kill everyone is sight.
The parent topic and this post should both really be modded "Offtopic".
So much has made of Einstein's (admittedly great) discoveries for so long I am beginning to place him in the same mental catagory as Elvis...
"Yet another Einstein sighting, nothing to see here, move along."
Anyone else feel the same?