In my experience, what happens is that a scanner is bought for a hospital and/or research dept, costing around 3million (c. $5 million). To claw this money back, the number of hours of function that the scanner will likely achieve in its lifetime is estimated, and this is how much you charge per hour for its use.
Certainly where I was doing my research, the scanner sat empty and unused for at least one quarter of the time. It seems that it's harder to get money to do the research you want (I was looking at about 200 [$300?) an hour) than it is to find a free slot.
Incidentally, lots of potentially really useful medical work could be done using techniques like this, but the cost is just plain prohibitive: a large scale study = 30+ participants probably taking up the scanner/resources for an hour each + staff time (that's for a radiologist to oversee it all + radiography staff, and the latter may have to spend quite a lot of time downloading and backing up images from the scanner) + image processing + post-processing... you need a lot of people to make fMRI research happen.
Firstly, you can't have a "stronger" or "higher" or "larger" fMRI response - the most you can have is a larger probability that the signal you are reading in a particular region of the brain is not due to chance but to manipulation of your experimental variable (in this case, the drink being drunk). A comparison between two such probabalistic values (in the article, the degree of 'activation' in the ventral putamen) is pretty much meaningless.
The experiment also doesn't control for the possibility that more people in the sample just prefer Coke (at least, from the information given in the article, this is the implication).
One of my supervisors was approached a couple of years ago by a film distributor, who wanted to show fMRI pictures of someone just sitting, versus someone reading a book, versus someone watching a film - the desired effect being, of course, to show that films recruit more of the brain. Duh! It would have worked, and been a legitimate thing to do - but they wanted it in a matter of days (and with pretty pictures too!) - this stuff takes time, at least with our facilities it does. So, no deal.
In terms of whether fMRI and similar techniques tell you anything... hmm. Kinda. But results are consistently over-interpreted by many in the scientific community, and as has been pointed out in other posts, fMRI measures local blood flow, not neuronal activity (blood flow, by the way, can be influenced by a variety of factors, such as caffeine, which is a vasodilator... so if either Coke or Pepsi contained more caffeine than the other, that could partially account, potentially, for differential fMRI results)
And don't even start me on using functional imaging techniques as "lie-detectors"...
There's a long way to go, and anyone who says different really IS selling something.
Oh, I know! On a personal level I (a European) am friends with many Americans as well as hoping to work with some of them someday.
While scientifically, polite and friendly international collaborations are - thankfully - very common, IMO political rivalries can tip over into the workplace and are ever-present in the public consciousness.
Don't tell me there wouldn't be jubilation and some slightly nasty nose-thumbing on one side or other of the Atlantic if one space agency scored a major 'first'... I suspect the current political climate would reinforce that. Social psychology also suggests that the second you give someone a 'team' identity, they will discriminate against people who do not belong to that team.
Call me cynical but we'll all work together until there's a possibility for victory/Nobel Prizes/being first at something big, and then it's us against them, full-tilt, 'cause we can't let "the other guys" win.
... then surely it would be an advantage for the stricken space-program to have the other party to fall back on?
I'm thinking particularly of in-space rescues where the other program may have the resources ready to launch a rescue-mission, but there are probably other scenarios from which both NASA and ESA would benefit.
Plus, competition will mean that the science thrives, particularly in the current political climate (don't kid yourself - the US and Europe are *not* friends right now).
Thanks - interesting - I appreciate the clarification even if YANAL;-)
And yeah, if the contract says it's all theirs, you are out of luck. I don't play online RPGs so this was more of an academic argument for me, but since some people seem to take it very seriously indeed I guess it matters a whole lot to them...
I think there is precedent for virtual property in the patent business.
What you register, when you register a patent, is an idea - intellectual property, if you like (even if it describes a device - IANAL though so maybe these are very different concepts in law). The patent documentation serves as written proof of this - a certificate that your creativity is recognised as unique and non-copyable.
Thus if someone has a character, or other online 'item' that they have created, doesn't it make sense that as long as that character or item is documented in some way (code on the server?) then that character/item is 'owned' by its creater?
One obvious difference here would be that people don't typically sell their patents, though I'm sure it's not unheard of. Perhaps a better analogy would be domain-names?
The creativity required for problem-solving, I believe, must far exceed one's ability at logic if one is to be any good at most puzzles. Lateral thinking and the ability to make great leaps of inference (rather than plug away logically attempting a linear solution) is often what makes a great thinker - Einstein, for example. People who are able to make leaps - bypassing linear solutions - are surely the ones who will solve the most difficult puzzles?
From a more computational point of view, think of the linear approach to problem-solving as a serial-exhaustive search; think of the boggling number of possibilities to be searched. Now think of letting your brain (computer) freewheel for a minute and suddenly, without realising why, BAM! You have a "eureka moment" and the solution appears to you.
Studies looking at problem-solving often consider the solutions to anagrams or chess-problems, where a series of choices (letter/chess move selection) can very quickly lead up to a staggeringly large total number of possibilities if one were to solve the problem linearly by repeated trial and error.
Of course this is not to say that humans cannot use a linear framework to solve many puzzles, just that often we seem to arrive more quickly at a solution by relying on insight.
FWIW, my drug of (un-)choice was Chloroquine (it was for travel to the Caribbean). Don't fancy THAT again. Saying that, they weren't inclined to prescribe me mefloquine for the reasons you state, even though I have no history of mental illness (figuring, I guess, that people are better safe than sorry).
On the contrary, perhaps the vaccine will _prevent_ us from having to take malaria tablets in future.
I too suffered horrendous nightmares and sleep disturbances for a month when I took a course of malaria tablets. It left me feeling totally drained and fed up during the daytime and apprehensive as hell about going to bed, because I knew what a rough ride the night would be.
But then I figure, what's a month's sleep disturbance compared to a recurring parasitic infection that can wreck your whole life?
I say bring it on, IF it can be proved sufficiently safe (there's a nasty precedent of using third-world populations for clinical trials, and that's something we _definitely_ don't want).
Why do people live there? They have to!
on
Surviving Tornadoes
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
What is it that draws you people to live there, why do you not move from such an obviously inhospitible place to live
There was a documentary about Tornado Alley on Channel 5 last week, which showed horrific devastation from past tornadoes that seemed mainly to hit trailer-parks and cheap housing in places like Oklahoma.
I infer from this that many/most people who live in those areas of the US are not able to move elsewhere, because they are simply too poor to do so.
(not a Troll, by the way, I'm sure there are plenty of affluent people in OK too - but the rural community really isn't well-off, as I understand it)
I was thinking of other papers I've read about, one where after brain injury (a stroke? can't remember) the patient - who had suffered damage to the angular gyrus - lost all mathematical ability except the ability to subtract. But this is only one case study....
I have done some fMRI studies (as the experimenter rather than as the patient!) and I've gotta tell you, there is no way that fMRI is going to shrink to tiny. You have to put the person's head inside the magnetic field and the electromagnet which generates the necessary field (remember this is anything between 1.5 - 4.5 Tesla, which is an IMMENSELY large magnetic field).
Yes, fMRI is much too slow (depending as it does on changes in blood flow taking 3-4 seconds to peak) to pick up transient changes in brain activation. MEG (magnetoencephalography), OTOH, is extremely time-sensitive, but the equipment (a supercooled magnetic induction coil that surrounds the head) is also extremely big and bulky and unlikely to become much smaller.
It's not about the current state of these technologies that they are bulky/slow/crap, it's endemic to the methods used - unless someone comes up with a new one (EEG is too ambiguous to interpret and doesn't localise function in the brain below the immediate surface) then I don't see these being used on the fly, but under very tightly controlled laboratory conditions.
But it's all so SPECULATIVE
on
Brain Privacy
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· Score: 1
Most of the quotes on there from scientists are *very* cagey. Sure, you can interpret them in the spirit of the article (OMG, Big Brother lives!), but if you go back and read the scientists' quotes (Michael Gazzaniga's in particular) and look objectively at what they are actually saying, it's all very "well, we'll wait and see".
Already been used in court
on
Brain Privacy
·
· Score: 1
I believe this sort of technology is/was being used in a legal case in Florida (trying to find reference but no luck so far).
I have already posted my reservations about using the technology as a lie-detector, but that won't necessarily stop people from doing it if they think it can "prevent terrorism".
Which means we're all stuffed, because there is no such thing as reliable brain-reading.
What's really interesting about this story (IMO) is that the angular gyrus (the area of the brain implicated by the study as being involved in metaphor) is also involved in basic mathematical functions such as addition/subtraction/multiplication, etc. Injury to this part of the brain can result in loss of mathematical ability (sometimes even specifically, eg. retention of multiplication but loss of the ability to subtract)
What would be really interesting would be if they can find a patient or two who *used* to have synaesthesia but then suffered a stroke (or other, similar brain injury) to either the colour area in primary visual cortex (V4?), or to the angular gyrys, and now can no longer 'feel' colour...
So although games as some posters have said, are not really suited for teaching some things like facts and information (that schools teach) they can be useful in teaching other things that require practice and not data crunching.
I think that games are capable of teaching kids/adults both factual and skill-type stuff. No, I don't see a market for Dealing With Divorce 3.0, but I think you can learn a lot about the facts and about the process from some kind of computer-aided teaching-tool.
For example, computer simulations are commonly used to teach undergraduate science students, particularly where practical demonstrations would be expensive/time-consuming/ethically questionable to set up (I'm thinking nanoelectronics or physiology animal dissections, but insert your own here). Admittedly these are not games as such (not yet anyway) but they do offer a limited range of tools, a clearly-defined goal, and the opportunity to make mistakes and repeat the task over again in a relatively secure environment.
Personally although I think games might be very useful for learning certain things (vocabulary for foreign languages; what things need to be done in what order to keep a patient alive who has a collapsed lung; etc), I am reluctant to adopt any teaching technique that is unlikely to increase:
(a) independent thought (admittedly, some games actually promote initiative, but there is often something very "tunnel-vision" about the search for a solution, and what one needs to do to finish the game is often rather too obvious, unlike in real-life problem-solving)
or
(b) literacy (as it is, today's MTV kids arrive at university barely able to spell, still less able to form a coherent written sentence; learning that depends even less on producing written stuff for assessment will NOT improve matters).
This was a great game for PC (maybe 3 years ago?), based on the arcade shoot-em-up House Of The Dead. Instead of shooting, though, it would flash words up at you and you had to type them as fast as possible with as few errors as possible. The faster and more accurate, the more you shot the zombies coming for you. It was hilarious (in fact sometimes it was really hard to type for laughing), but also made for great practice at typing. Mavis Beacon it ain't.
Slashdot Mirror
In my experience, what happens is that a scanner is bought for a hospital and/or research dept, costing around 3million (c. $5 million). To claw this money back, the number of hours of function that the scanner will likely achieve in its lifetime is estimated, and this is how much you charge per hour for its use.
... you need a lot of people to make fMRI research happen.
Certainly where I was doing my research, the scanner sat empty and unused for at least one quarter of the time. It seems that it's harder to get money to do the research you want (I was looking at about 200 [$300?) an hour) than it is to find a free slot.
Incidentally, lots of potentially really useful medical work could be done using techniques like this, but the cost is just plain prohibitive: a large scale study = 30+ participants probably taking up the scanner/resources for an hour each + staff time (that's for a radiologist to oversee it all + radiography staff, and the latter may have to spend quite a lot of time downloading and backing up images from the scanner) + image processing + post-processing
Firstly, you can't have a "stronger" or "higher" or "larger" fMRI response - the most you can have is a larger probability that the signal you are reading in a particular region of the brain is not due to chance but to manipulation of your experimental variable (in this case, the drink being drunk). A comparison between two such probabalistic values (in the article, the degree of 'activation' in the ventral putamen) is pretty much meaningless. The experiment also doesn't control for the possibility that more people in the sample just prefer Coke (at least, from the information given in the article, this is the implication). One of my supervisors was approached a couple of years ago by a film distributor, who wanted to show fMRI pictures of someone just sitting, versus someone reading a book, versus someone watching a film - the desired effect being, of course, to show that films recruit more of the brain. Duh! It would have worked, and been a legitimate thing to do - but they wanted it in a matter of days (and with pretty pictures too!) - this stuff takes time, at least with our facilities it does. So, no deal. In terms of whether fMRI and similar techniques tell you anything ... hmm. Kinda. But results are consistently over-interpreted by many in the scientific community, and as has been pointed out in other posts, fMRI measures local blood flow, not neuronal activity (blood flow, by the way, can be influenced by a variety of factors, such as caffeine, which is a vasodilator ... so if either Coke or Pepsi contained more caffeine than the other, that could partially account, potentially, for differential fMRI results)
And don't even start me on using functional imaging techniques as "lie-detectors" ...
There's a long way to go, and anyone who says different really IS selling something.
Yeah, because the UK being killed 100x over by the US would be so much more degrading than for the US, who would just be killed once by the UK...?
...
Does *nobody* remember the 1980s?? Jeez, you'd think *someone* would have learned something
Oh, I know! On a personal level I (a European) am friends with many Americans as well as hoping to work with some of them someday.
While scientifically, polite and friendly international collaborations are - thankfully - very common, IMO political rivalries can tip over into the workplace and are ever-present in the public consciousness.
Don't tell me there wouldn't be jubilation and some slightly nasty nose-thumbing on one side or other of the Atlantic if one space agency scored a major 'first'... I suspect the current political climate would reinforce that. Social psychology also suggests that the second you give someone a 'team' identity, they will discriminate against people who do not belong to that team.
Call me cynical but we'll all work together until there's a possibility for victory/Nobel Prizes/being first at something big, and then it's us against them, full-tilt, 'cause we can't let "the other guys" win.
... then surely it would be an advantage for the stricken space-program to have the other party to fall back on?
I'm thinking particularly of in-space rescues where the other program may have the resources ready to launch a rescue-mission, but there are probably other scenarios from which both NASA and ESA would benefit.
Plus, competition will mean that the science thrives, particularly in the current political climate (don't kid yourself - the US and Europe are *not* friends right now).
Actually MRI stands for Magnetic Resonance Imaging. It's _done_ in a really really big (electro)magnet.
[/pedant]
Thanks - interesting - I appreciate the clarification even if YANAL ;-)
...
And yeah, if the contract says it's all theirs, you are out of luck. I don't play online RPGs so this was more of an academic argument for me, but since some people seem to take it very seriously indeed I guess it matters a whole lot to them
... if people are willing to exchange it for money (and evidently this is the case).
Your values are not my values, but value is in the eye of the purchaser (or in cases of extortion, the vendor...?)
Having said that, I think it's nuts that people exchange money for this sort of thing.
I think there is precedent for virtual property in the patent business.
What you register, when you register a patent, is an idea - intellectual property, if you like (even if it describes a device - IANAL though so maybe these are very different concepts in law). The patent documentation serves as written proof of this - a certificate that your creativity is recognised as unique and non-copyable.
Thus if someone has a character, or other online 'item' that they have created, doesn't it make sense that as long as that character or item is documented in some way (code on the server?) then that character/item is 'owned' by its creater?
One obvious difference here would be that people don't typically sell their patents, though I'm sure it's not unheard of. Perhaps a better analogy would be domain-names?
I too read that and pondered.
The creativity required for problem-solving, I believe, must far exceed one's ability at logic if one is to be any good at most puzzles. Lateral thinking and the ability to make great leaps of inference (rather than plug away logically attempting a linear solution) is often what makes a great thinker - Einstein, for example. People who are able to make leaps - bypassing linear solutions - are surely the ones who will solve the most difficult puzzles?
From a more computational point of view, think of the linear approach to problem-solving as a serial-exhaustive search; think of the boggling number of possibilities to be searched. Now think of letting your brain (computer) freewheel for a minute and suddenly, without realising why, BAM! You have a "eureka moment" and the solution appears to you.
Studies looking at problem-solving often consider the solutions to anagrams or chess-problems, where a series of choices (letter/chess move selection) can very quickly lead up to a staggeringly large total number of possibilities if one were to solve the problem linearly by repeated trial and error.
Of course this is not to say that humans cannot use a linear framework to solve many puzzles, just that often we seem to arrive more quickly at a solution by relying on insight.
FWIW, my drug of (un-)choice was Chloroquine (it was for travel to the Caribbean). Don't fancy THAT again. Saying that, they weren't inclined to prescribe me mefloquine for the reasons you state, even though I have no history of mental illness (figuring, I guess, that people are better safe than sorry).
Durr ... sorry!
... guess they'd bust you if you repeatedly asked for prescriptions then never travelled anywhere ;-)
I guess I was so fed up after my experience that I applied my own little message-interpreation-filter to what you wrote.
Happy malarial-zone travel
On the contrary, perhaps the vaccine will _prevent_ us from having to take malaria tablets in future.
I too suffered horrendous nightmares and sleep disturbances for a month when I took a course of malaria tablets. It left me feeling totally drained and fed up during the daytime and apprehensive as hell about going to bed, because I knew what a rough ride the night would be.
But then I figure, what's a month's sleep disturbance compared to a recurring parasitic infection that can wreck your whole life?
I say bring it on, IF it can be proved sufficiently safe (there's a nasty precedent of using third-world populations for clinical trials, and that's something we _definitely_ don't want).
What is it that draws you people to live there, why do you not move from such an obviously inhospitible place to live
There was a documentary about Tornado Alley on Channel 5 last week, which showed horrific devastation from past tornadoes that seemed mainly to hit trailer-parks and cheap housing in places like Oklahoma.
I infer from this that many/most people who live in those areas of the US are not able to move elsewhere, because they are simply too poor to do so.
(not a Troll, by the way, I'm sure there are plenty of affluent people in OK too - but the rural community really isn't well-off, as I understand it)
I would think you wouldn't want to be near porcelain at a time like that...
I'd be wishing I was near porcelain, since the alternatives involve begging rescue-workers for a clean pair of pants...
I was thinking of other papers I've read about, one where after brain injury (a stroke? can't remember) the patient - who had suffered damage to the angular gyrus - lost all mathematical ability except the ability to subtract. But this is only one case study....
I have done some fMRI studies (as the experimenter rather than as the patient!) and I've gotta tell you, there is no way that fMRI is going to shrink to tiny. You have to put the person's head inside the magnetic field and the electromagnet which generates the necessary field (remember this is anything between 1.5 - 4.5 Tesla, which is an IMMENSELY large magnetic field).
Yes, fMRI is much too slow (depending as it does on changes in blood flow taking 3-4 seconds to peak) to pick up transient changes in brain activation. MEG (magnetoencephalography), OTOH, is extremely time-sensitive, but the equipment (a supercooled magnetic induction coil that surrounds the head) is also extremely big and bulky and unlikely to become much smaller.
It's not about the current state of these technologies that they are bulky/slow/crap, it's endemic to the methods used - unless someone comes up with a new one (EEG is too ambiguous to interpret and doesn't localise function in the brain below the immediate surface) then I don't see these being used on the fly, but under very tightly controlled laboratory conditions.
Most of the quotes on there from scientists are *very* cagey. Sure, you can interpret them in the spirit of the article (OMG, Big Brother lives!), but if you go back and read the scientists' quotes (Michael Gazzaniga's in particular) and look objectively at what they are actually saying, it's all very "well, we'll wait and see".
I believe this sort of technology is/was being used in a legal case in Florida (trying to find reference but no luck so far).
I have already posted my reservations about using the technology as a lie-detector, but that won't necessarily stop people from doing it if they think it can "prevent terrorism".
Which means we're all stuffed, because there is no such thing as reliable brain-reading.
What's really interesting about this story (IMO) is that the angular gyrus (the area of the brain implicated by the study as being involved in metaphor) is also involved in basic mathematical functions such as addition/subtraction/multiplication, etc. Injury to this part of the brain can result in loss of mathematical ability (sometimes even specifically, eg. retention of multiplication but loss of the ability to subtract)
What would be really interesting would be if they can find a patient or two who *used* to have synaesthesia but then suffered a stroke (or other, similar brain injury) to either the colour area in primary visual cortex (V4?), or to the angular gyrys, and now can no longer 'feel' colour...
And no, I'm not trolling.
Please don't fall into the trap of believing that all Iraqis are necessarily tribal, tent-dwelling folk - Iraq has a sizeable, educated, (and often relatively westernised) middle class.
Remember, they had running water until the US and UK bombed them.
I think you'll find that sanction can mean "authorise" as well as "block". Weird, huh?
So although games as some posters have said, are not really suited for teaching some things like facts and information (that schools teach) they can be useful in teaching other things that require practice and not data crunching.
I think that games are capable of teaching kids/adults both factual and skill-type stuff. No, I don't see a market for Dealing With Divorce 3.0, but I think you can learn a lot about the facts and about the process from some kind of computer-aided teaching-tool.
For example, computer simulations are commonly used to teach undergraduate science students, particularly where practical demonstrations would be expensive/time-consuming/ethically questionable to set up (I'm thinking nanoelectronics or physiology animal dissections, but insert your own here). Admittedly these are not games as such (not yet anyway) but they do offer a limited range of tools, a clearly-defined goal, and the opportunity to make mistakes and repeat the task over again in a relatively secure environment.
Personally although I think games might be very useful for learning certain things (vocabulary for foreign languages; what things need to be done in what order to keep a patient alive who has a collapsed lung; etc), I am reluctant to adopt any teaching technique that is unlikely to increase:
(a) independent thought (admittedly, some games actually promote initiative, but there is often something very "tunnel-vision" about the search for a solution, and what one needs to do to finish the game is often rather too obvious, unlike in real-life problem-solving)
or
(b) literacy (as it is, today's MTV kids arrive at university barely able to spell, still less able to form a coherent written sentence; learning that depends even less on producing written stuff for assessment will NOT improve matters).
Yeah, you read that right ;o)
This was a great game for PC (maybe 3 years ago?), based on the arcade shoot-em-up House Of The Dead. Instead of shooting, though, it would flash words up at you and you had to type them as fast as possible with as few errors as possible. The faster and more accurate, the more you shot the zombies coming for you. It was hilarious (in fact sometimes it was really hard to type for laughing), but also made for great practice at typing. Mavis Beacon it ain't.
More of this sort of thing would be good.
Oh, I'm sorry, was it a competition?