The program displays fiber tracks computed from the diffusion tensor images. This involves more than just fusioning images from different modalities (fiber tracking is far from obvious). Also, some images are 3D surfaces reconstructed from 2D slices.
This being said, it has been possible to make and manipulate this kind of images for a while with the (freely available) program "anatomist/brainvisa" (cf. www.brainvisa.info).
The author of the post postulates that there is a "heavily negative bias in the perception of Microsoft".
That is he assumes that the perception is worse than reality.
I would rather argue that the bias in perception towards Microsoft is *positive*.
A vast majority of people do not see the damage caused by Microsoft and believe that what they do is not that bad.
(Several of my younger colleagues believe that Microsoft invented Spreadsheet and Word Processing software (or the best of them), designed a nice browser for the Internet...).
Even some random data (e.g. texts produced by Monkeys typing on a keyboard) follow Zipf law.
Mandelbrot showed in the 50s that if you take a message where each letter is randomly produced, and one symbol is arbitrarily chosen as 'space' then frequency of words (defined as strings between spaces) is related to their rank according to a slighly generalized Zipf law.
This is higly nonintuitive, but true.
It is very easy to check by writing a
program that generate random text.
Zipf law does not carry any implication for human languages. I am very surprised (yet, maybe I should not) that such a paper made it to Nature.
Christophe Pallier
I study adults who have been adopted from a foreign country at an average age of 5.5.
Both behavioral and brain imaging data suggest that they have indeed completely forgotten their first language.For more info, one can read the paper (to be published in Cerebral Cortex) at:
http://www.unicog.org/publications/Pallier_forgott enlanguage.pdf
Though I don't have any hard data about odors and smell, anecdotal evidence suggests that the adoptees who go back to their country of origin recognize some of them.
Christophe Pallier
Slashdot Mirror
The program displays fiber tracks computed from the diffusion tensor images. This involves more than just fusioning images from different modalities (fiber tracking is far from obvious). Also, some images are 3D surfaces reconstructed from 2D slices. This being said, it has been possible to make and manipulate this kind of images for a while with the (freely available) program "anatomist/brainvisa" (cf. www.brainvisa.info).
The author of the post postulates that there is a "heavily negative bias in the perception of Microsoft". That is he assumes that the perception is worse than reality. I would rather argue that the bias in perception towards Microsoft is *positive*. A vast majority of people do not see the damage caused by Microsoft and believe that what they do is not that bad. (Several of my younger colleagues believe that Microsoft invented Spreadsheet and Word Processing software (or the best of them), designed a nice browser for the Internet...).
Even some random data (e.g. texts produced by Monkeys typing on a keyboard) follow Zipf law. Mandelbrot showed in the 50s that if you take a message where each letter is randomly produced, and one symbol is arbitrarily chosen as 'space' then frequency of words (defined as strings between spaces) is related to their rank according to a slighly generalized Zipf law. This is higly nonintuitive, but true. It is very easy to check by writing a program that generate random text. Zipf law does not carry any implication for human languages. I am very surprised (yet, maybe I should not) that such a paper made it to Nature. Christophe Pallier
I study adults who have been adopted from a foreign country at an average age of 5.5. Both behavioral and brain imaging data suggest that they have indeed completely forgotten their first language.For more info, one can read the paper (to be published in Cerebral Cortex) at: http://www.unicog.org/publications/Pallier_forgott enlanguage.pdf
Though I don't have any hard data about odors and smell, anecdotal evidence suggests that the adoptees who go back to their country of origin recognize some of them.
Christophe Pallier