I'm a grad student at Tech who TA's an undergrad programming course. The course is a senior-level design based course that typically has 15 people or so. Even with such a small number, it typically takes me a full 10 hours to grade homework assignments. For a 100-200 person introductory course, this work has to be spread out over multiple TA's. Hence Johnny Apple may copy Suzy Zebra's assignment, but it would never show up on anyone's radar. Using a program to check for similarities across assignments is extremely useful as a first level of cheating detection, and I see no problem as long as the final "this person was cheating" decision falls to a real person (which it does at GA Tech, there's an appeals process and everything).
Homer: Hey, look! Those frogs are eating all their crops.
[everyone starts laughing]
Lisa: Well, that's what happens when you introduce foreign species into an ecosystem that can't handle them.
[everyone laughs more]
[a lone koala holds onto the helicopter with determination]
Please don't misrepresent my research
on
Working Nerve Chip
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· Score: 1
I'm the guy who "linked up a couple of leach (spelled leech neurons to silicon". We do use a chip, its a custom-designed analog circuit that replicates neural function. Our interface is very different, however, so maybe this is why you thought we don't use a chip.
The article you are discussing is a step up in the number of neurons being used, but not the complexity. The signals recorded through extracellular recording techniques are nowhere near what you get through intracellular (what we use with our chip). Basically all that can be determined from extracellular is "a spike happened", and I believe that this is not enough to understand the nuance that makes neural processing so powerful. Additionally, extracellular stimulation is incredibly heavy-handed, and does not even begin to approximate synaptic input to a cell. Shocking a neuron into firing is not what I would call complex.
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I'm a grad student at Tech who TA's an undergrad programming course. The course is a senior-level design based course that typically has 15 people or so. Even with such a small number, it typically takes me a full 10 hours to grade homework assignments. For a 100-200 person introductory course, this work has to be spread out over multiple TA's. Hence Johnny Apple may copy Suzy Zebra's assignment, but it would never show up on anyone's radar. Using a program to check for similarities across assignments is extremely useful as a first level of cheating detection, and I see no problem as long as the final "this person was cheating" decision falls to a real person (which it does at GA Tech, there's an appeals process and everything).
Homer: Hey, look! Those frogs are eating all their crops.
[everyone starts laughing]
Lisa: Well, that's what happens when you introduce foreign species into an ecosystem that can't handle them.
[everyone laughs more]
[a lone koala holds onto the helicopter with determination]
I'm the guy who "linked up a couple of leach (spelled leech neurons to silicon". We do use a chip, its a custom-designed analog circuit that replicates neural function. Our interface is very different, however, so maybe this is why you thought we don't use a chip. The article you are discussing is a step up in the number of neurons being used, but not the complexity. The signals recorded through extracellular recording techniques are nowhere near what you get through intracellular (what we use with our chip). Basically all that can be determined from extracellular is "a spike happened", and I believe that this is not enough to understand the nuance that makes neural processing so powerful. Additionally, extracellular stimulation is incredibly heavy-handed, and does not even begin to approximate synaptic input to a cell. Shocking a neuron into firing is not what I would call complex.