I suggest we put the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce in charge of developing a REAL moonbase.
Coincidentally, Bigelow Aerospace (a company based in Las Vegas) has recently announced their business plans for privately-operated space bases. The initial outposts will be in orbit, but Bigelow has also discussed his future plans for lunar bases.
But, is the "World Economic Forum" just another one of those USA hating jack-off organizations? I read TFA, as far as I can tell, they are just making this stuff up as they go.
I wouldn't go that far, but it does seem a little hokey. From Wikipedia:
While once thought of as a serious endeavor, the WEF has been increasingly criticized by economists for moving away from serious economics and instead becoming a large media circus that lets celebrities and politicians have feel-good discussions on a panoply of political causes while accomplishing little of substance. For example, many question the extensive involvement of NGOs that have little or no expertise in economics. Instead of a discussion on the world economy with knowledgable experts alongside key business and political players, Davos now features the top media political causes of the day (such as global climate change and AIDS in Africa), with participants such as U2 rock star Bono. The second type of discussion has its place (and the issues are important), but calling it a World Economic Forum is a misnomer in the eyes of some critics.
I'm not against space ports. But if Virgin Galactic wants a facility then Virgin Galactic should foot the bill for it.
How do you feel about the many commercial airports which receive government funding (in many cases orders of magnitude more money than this spaceport is getting)?
According to an (unofficial) post by Kimbal Musk in 2005, "The highest winds we want to launch in is 24 knots [~27.6 mph]." I don't know if that's still there policy, but current wind speed is just around 15 mph.
For anybody looking for more frequently-updated sources of info and don't feel like watching the entire webcase, here's some other useful sources of info:
* SpaceFlight Now's Mission Status Center: According to the status center, they're having some problems with remotely-monitoring the telemetry stream, which may end up postponing the launch.
* Kimbal Musk's "Kwajalein Atoll and Rockets" blog: Kimbal is Elon Musk's brother, and often posts interesting (and highly unofficial) updates from the launch site. He sometimes goes into liveblogging mode, but hasn't done this yet today.
Should the US government be using private launch vehicles? Might be a good way to jump start private investment though.
Should the government use private aircraft or private automobiles? There are of course certain situations where private industry is unable to provide what government needs, but the government should never be in direct competition with private industry.
For those who come after me, there was originally a typo in the headline.
The funny thing is, my original submission had a completely different headline, so the typo was added by the editors. Here's my original:
Cooling Vacuum Glove Fights Fatigue
Wired reports on a glove developed by Stanford researchers Dennis Grahn and Craig Heller which combines a cooling system with a vacuum in order to chill blood vessels and drastically reduce fatigue. Besides the obvious military and athletics applications, the technology is also potentially useful for firefighters, stroke victims, and people with multiple sclerosis. The Wired article also describes a number of other human enhancement projects, many of which were opposed by the President's Council on Bioethics.
"And because the atmosphere is less dense at higher altitudes, the debris is likely to stay in space a long time because it will not be slowed down by friction with the atmosphere, which causes it to lose energy and burn up more quickly. Debris created during the Chinese test is thought to have reached lower altitudes - about 4000 km - but is expected to stay in space for hundreds of thousands of years."
The line is unsourced, but IME, New Scientist is good enough with the facts to be usable.
Can anybody find sources other than the Indian Express reporting on this? If the article is accurate, my overall impression of Google will be substantially decreased, but I'd like to make sure the information is solid. Right now the only sources I can find are the Indian Express or other sources re-reporting it.
As was reported on slashdot a few days ago, Kotaku was "blackballed" by Sony for reporting on rumors about Sony Home. Even though Sony and Kotaku are back on speaking terms now, the following is quite amusing:
There was this moment, just seconds after I sat down between Phil Harrison and David Karraker, when the entire table of bloggers, PR people and developers at Sony's Blogger Congress were quiet.
Then Dylan Jobe, Warhawk game director for Incognito, spoke up.
"Before we get started, I have something for Brian."
I noticed Jobe had a small box on the table in front of him. He is a big fan of Kotaku and was impressed with what the site did last week over the whole Sony Home dealio.
So he said he wanted to give me a present to thank me. Opening the box he revealed: A set of brass balls.
The fuel has to come from somewhere. Repairing satellites is one thing. Refueling them is something else entirely.
Huh? If anything, refueling is easier than repairing. Refueling is a process which can be potentially automated and can be standardized. Repairing almost certainly requires human intervention, and every repair problem has a different solution.
Which is more expensive: A) Build the satellite correctly the first time around B) Build the satellite cheaply & then pay to get it fixed in orbit
I'm not so sure things are as clear as you're suggesting. Extreme redundancy and quality assurance costs a lot. I'm sure there are many circumstances where option B is cheaper.
Most "grand-scale theories of brain operation", in fact, fail to make claims that can be tested, at least not in the foreseeable future.
To Hawkins' credit, near the end of the book he explicitly lists several claims his theory makes, and also suggests studies which would validate or invalidate his claims.
The full text requires a subscription, but I've pasted the abstract below:
Reading Hidden Intentions in the Human Brain
When humans are engaged in goal-related processing, activity in prefrontal cortex is increased [1, 2]. However, it has remained unclear whether this prefrontal activity encodes a subject's current intention [3]. Instead, increased levels of activity could reflect preparation of motor responses [4, 5], holding in mind a set of potential choices [6], tracking the memory of previous responses [7], or general processes related to establishing a new task set. Here we study subjects who freely decided which of two tasks to perform and covertly held onto an intention during a variable delay. Only after this delay did they perform the chosen task and indicate which task they had prepared. We demonstrate that during the delay, it is possible to decode from activity in medial and lateral regions of prefrontal cortex which of two tasks the subjects were covertly intending to perform. This suggests that covert goals can be represented by distributed patterns of activity in the prefrontal cortex, thereby providing a potential neural substrate for prospective memory [8, 9, 10]. During task execution, most information could be decoded from a more posterior region of prefrontal cortex, suggesting that different brain regions encode goals during task preparation and task execution. Decoding of intentions was most robust from the medial prefrontal cortex, which is consistent with a specific role of this region when subjects reflect on their own mental states.
Also, the final paragraph from the conclusion, which discusses where they'd like to go with this in the future:
Taken together, our results extend previous studies on the processing of goals in prefrontal cortex in several important ways. They reveal for the first time that spatial response patterns in medial and lateral prefrontal cortex encode a subject's covert intentions in a highly specific fashion. They also demonstrate a functional separation in medial prefrontal cortex, where more anterior regions encode the intention prior to its execution and more posterior regions encode the intention during task execution. These findings have important implications not only for the neural models of executive control, but also for technical and clinical applications, such as the further development of brain-computer interfaces, that might now be able to decode intentions that go beyond simple movements and extend to high-level cognitive processes.
Coincidentally, last month there was an interview with Robert Bigelow where he discussed his plans for constructing an inflatable station which would be constructed at L1, and then transported to the lunar surface. He also apparently has some plans for how to use the lunar regolith for insulation, which he'll be testing this year. From his current schedule, it's looking like he may very well have his base up and running long before NASA's. Some snippets from the article:
Once the moon base has been set down, dirt would be piled on top, using a technique that Bigelow plans to start testing later this year at his Las Vegas headquarters. The moon dirt, more technically known as regolith, would serve to shield the base's occupants from the harsh radiation hitting the lunar surface.
Bigelow is not alone in thinking about ways to do all this. In fact, Bigelow Aerospace arranged the interview in response to last month's story about NASA's plans for building infrastructure on the moon after 2020. At the time, NASA's Larry Toups had mentioned that the space agency was discussing its options with Bigelow as well as other aerospace companies, such as ILC Dover (which has its own inflatable-module project), Lockheed Martin and the Boeing Co....
Yes, our concept of lunar base construction would be to assemble various modules and propulsion/power buses in L1, and that would constitute the base. Those propulsion systems are full of fuel, and they are integrated into the overall structure in such a way that the entire structure lands as a unified base - which essentially was once a spaceship in L1, but is landed on the surface of the moon.
This way, you avoid the significant issues that surround having to gang modules together on the lunar surface on topographical surfaces that are not perfectly even. You avoid having to connect the air locks of modules that maybe weren't able to be brought close enough together. You avoid having to transport modules across the lunar surface, even if they were only a matter of a few hundred yards apart, and assembling them so that you have an airlock-to-airlock connection.
One module really isn't the issue. It's a matter of how you get three or five or seven down as one overall complex. Our architecture addresses that as a potential solution, using a combination of our propulsion buses and these expandable systems. The propulsion buses would have stanchions on them that act as the rigid points, to be able to deal with uneven topographical surfaces. The expandable systems themselves don't mind at all being set upon a solid surface because of the shields that they have and the durability of the overall system. The rigidity of the system is such that they don't mind at all. Even under a 1-g influence on Earth, there's no problem - so under one-sixth it would be much less.
They come equipped with their own insulation, by the way, for space debris in low Earth orbit, and to a certain extent for micrometeoroids. So they're already better insulated than the international space station is currently. Of course, the regolith is a significant additive that would be a great enhancement of the protection....
Our Job One is to take care of our business in low Earth orbit and try to perfect our spacecraft through these Pathfinder launches. Then try to launch our Sundancer spacecraft in 2010, our Galaxy spacecraft in '08 - and perfect our propulsion buses and our power systems, and start assembly of our first commercial space complex in 2010, 2011, 2012. By 2012, we should have two habitable modules in orbit, and one large propulsion and power system.
That will constitute the beginning of our opportunity. If we can do that, I would say that's an exercise that's applicable to the L1 scenario.
A what? Can you describe what that would look like, and/or give an example? Google doesn't seem to return much.
Oh, sorry. One example would be showing random noise immediately following the presentation of the stimulus image, instead of just showing a uniform field.
The Neurophysiology of Response Competition: Motor Cortex Activation and Inhibition following Subliminal Response Priming Peter Praamstra and Ellen Seiss
University of Birmingham, UK
Some widely used tasks in cognitive neuroscience depend on the induction of a response conflict between choice alternatives, involving partial activation of the incorrect response before the correct response is emitted. Although such "conflict tasks" are often used to investigate frontal-lobe-based conflict-monitoring processes, it is not known how response competition evolves in the motor cortex. To investigate the dynamics of motor cortex activation during response competition, we used a subliminal priming task that induced response competition while bypassing preresponse stage processing conflict. Analyses of movement-related EEG potentials supported an interaction between competing responses characterized by reciprocal inhibition. Inhibitory interactions between response channels contribute to the resolution of response conflict. However, the reciprocal inhibition at motor cortex level seemed to operate independent of higher level conflict-monitoring processes, which were relatively insensitive to response conflict induced by subliminal priming. These results elucidate how response conflict causes interference as well as the conditions under which frontal-lobe-based interference control processes are engaged.
Psychologists have long reported that words that are made invisible by forward and backward masking can nevertheless cause behavioral priming effects. Functional neuroimaging can now be used to explore the neural bases of masked priming. Subliminal priming causes reduced activation in multiple areas (fusiform gyrus, intraparietal sulcus, and motor cortex), in direct correspondence with behavioral manifestations of priming at the orthographic, semantic, and motor level. This implies that a whole stream of processors can operate unconsciously. The neural code in each area can be assessed by varying prime-target relations. A simple mathematical framework is proposed that tentatively relates priming at the voxel level with the shape of the tuning curves of single neurons in the underlying tissue. Priming thus provides a general method to study the fine microcode in each brain region (the 'priming method').
Coincidentally, I did my undergrad at Carnegie Mellon, where I studied computer science and cognitive science. I'm now pursuing my PhD at Caltech doing computational-neuro-stuff.
IMHO, Carnegie Mellon, Caltech, and MIT are all fine schools. If I were to choose all over again though, I probably still would've wanted to go to Carnegie Mellon for my undergrad, as it's a more well-rounded school. I'm not too familiar with MIT, but Caltech is very much focused on science and technology. This is great for grad school, but I think you should have a more well-rounded education as an undergrad, with exposure to many different fields. Not just exposure to different fields, but people in those fields. Some of my best memories from college were late-night discussions about life, the universe, and everything with art and philosophy majors. Plus, Carnegie Mellon has women. It sounds like a flippant remark, but consider that -many- people meet their future spouse in college.
Also, if you're interested in CS or electrical engineering, Carnegie Mellon is on the same level as MIT/Caltech, and better in some specific areas. If you want to do robotics, the power of Christ compels you to go to Carnegie Mellon.
That said though, Caltech's undergrad populace also has this unique "frenzied" quality to it which I only found in a small sub-population at Carnegie Mellon. I like the frenzy, but some people don't. If you get a chance to visit Caltech, I definitely recommend interacting as much as possible with the undergrads to see if you jive well with them.
On a random note though, I don't know if you're into this, but Caltech and MIT both have active ballroom dance teams, which are pretty much non-existent at Carnegie Mellon. Of course, I didn't do dancing at all while I was an undergrad, but it's something I'm pretty into now.
Here are the current hardware sales in the land of the rising sun for the week of February 4th to the 11th.
* Nintendo DS Lite - 201,177
* Wii - 78,550
* PSP - 32,175
* PLAYSTATION 3 - 23,431
* PlayStation 2 - 16,033
* Xbox 360 - 4,811
* Game Boy Advance SP - 980
* Game Boy micro - 884
I rather like the comment which noted the following:
Slashdot Mirror
I suggest we put the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce in charge of developing a REAL moonbase.
Coincidentally, Bigelow Aerospace (a company based in Las Vegas) has recently announced their business plans for privately-operated space bases. The initial outposts will be in orbit, but Bigelow has also discussed his future plans for lunar bases.
> its a freaking game!!!
Are you talking about real-life casinos, Second Life casinos, or both?
Personally, I think it's absurd for gaming in either physical casinos or virtual casinos to be illegal.
But, is the "World Economic Forum" just another one of those USA hating jack-off organizations? I read TFA, as far as I can tell, they are just making this stuff up as they go.
# Criticism
I wouldn't go that far, but it does seem a little hokey. From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Economic_Forum
While once thought of as a serious endeavor, the WEF has been increasingly criticized by economists for moving away from serious economics and instead becoming a large media circus that lets celebrities and politicians have feel-good discussions on a panoply of political causes while accomplishing little of substance. For example, many question the extensive involvement of NGOs that have little or no expertise in economics. Instead of a discussion on the world economy with knowledgable experts alongside key business and political players, Davos now features the top media political causes of the day (such as global climate change and AIDS in Africa), with participants such as U2 rock star Bono. The second type of discussion has its place (and the issues are important), but calling it a World Economic Forum is a misnomer in the eyes of some critics.
I'm not against space ports. But if Virgin Galactic wants a facility then Virgin Galactic should foot the bill for it.
How do you feel about the many commercial airports which receive government funding (in many cases orders of magnitude more money than this spaceport is getting)?
According to an (unofficial) post by Kimbal Musk in 2005, "The highest winds we want to launch in is 24 knots [~27.6 mph]." I don't know if that's still there policy, but current wind speed is just around 15 mph.
For anybody looking for more frequently-updated sources of info and don't feel like watching the entire webcase, here's some other useful sources of info:
* SpaceFlight Now's Mission Status Center: According to the status center, they're having some problems with remotely-monitoring the telemetry stream, which may end up postponing the launch.
* Kimbal Musk's "Kwajalein Atoll and Rockets" blog: Kimbal is Elon Musk's brother, and often posts interesting (and highly unofficial) updates from the launch site. He sometimes goes into liveblogging mode, but hasn't done this yet today.
Is this in any way a space vehicle, or is this just another "single stage to balloon height" effort ?
Um, it's delivering a payload into orbit.
Should the US government be using private launch vehicles? Might be a good way to jump start private investment though.
Should the government use private aircraft or private automobiles? There are of course certain situations where private industry is unable to provide what government needs, but the government should never be in direct competition with private industry.
For those who come after me, there was originally a typo in the headline.
The funny thing is, my original submission had a completely different headline, so the typo was added by the editors. Here's my original:
Cooling Vacuum Glove Fights Fatigue
Wired reports on a glove developed by Stanford researchers Dennis Grahn and Craig Heller which combines a cooling system with a vacuum in order to chill blood vessels and drastically reduce fatigue. Besides the obvious military and athletics applications, the technology is also potentially useful for firefighters, stroke victims, and people with multiple sclerosis. The Wired article also describes a number of other human enhancement projects, many of which were opposed by the President's Council on Bioethics.
I can already envision Mario banging his shoe on the podium at the next E3.
"Wii will bury you!"
Sorry.
"And because the atmosphere is less dense at higher altitudes, the debris is likely to stay in space a long time because it will not be slowed down by friction with the atmosphere, which causes it to lose energy and burn up more quickly. Debris created during the Chinese test is thought to have reached lower altitudes - about 4000 km - but is expected to stay in space for hundreds of thousands of years."
a _to_save_new_scientist.html
The line is unsourced, but IME, New Scientist is good enough with the facts to be usable.
Eek... New Scientist isn't exactly a reliable source of information. It's possible the estimate may be accurate, but it would be good to have a different source: http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2006/09/a_ple
Can anybody find sources other than the Indian Express reporting on this? If the article is accurate, my overall impression of Google will be substantially decreased, but I'd like to make sure the information is solid. Right now the only sources I can find are the Indian Express or other sources re-reporting it.
Debris from the Chinese test is expected to remain in orbit for thousands of years.
Do you have a source for that claim?
As was reported on slashdot a few days ago, Kotaku was "blackballed" by Sony for reporting on rumors about Sony Home. Even though Sony and Kotaku are back on speaking terms now, the following is quite amusing:
e v-hands-me-my-balls-242974.php
http://kotaku.com/gaming/oddities/gdc07-warhawk-d
GDC07: Warhawk Dev Hands Me My Balls
There was this moment, just seconds after I sat down between Phil Harrison and David Karraker, when the entire table of bloggers, PR people and developers at Sony's Blogger Congress were quiet.
Then Dylan Jobe, Warhawk game director for Incognito, spoke up.
"Before we get started, I have something for Brian."
I noticed Jobe had a small box on the table in front of him. He is a big fan of Kotaku and was impressed with what the site did last week over the whole Sony Home dealio.
So he said he wanted to give me a present to thank me. Opening the box he revealed: A set of brass balls.
The fuel has to come from somewhere. Repairing satellites is one thing. Refueling them is something else entirely.
Huh? If anything, refueling is easier than repairing. Refueling is a process which can be potentially automated and can be standardized. Repairing almost certainly requires human intervention, and every repair problem has a different solution.
Which is more expensive:
A) Build the satellite correctly the first time around
B) Build the satellite cheaply & then pay to get it fixed in orbit
I'm not so sure things are as clear as you're suggesting. Extreme redundancy and quality assurance costs a lot. I'm sure there are many circumstances where option B is cheaper.
I was skimming the comments on kotaku, and found the following description from somebody at GDC:
- nintendo-242670.php
http://kotaku.com/gaming/gdc07/gdc07-liveblogging
[Sony exec] Phil Harrison is sitting in the front row
[President of Nintendo of America] Reggie is standing off consulting with people, posing for pictures, etc.
A kid in the front row shouted at Reggie "REGGIE! You gotta kick some ass and take some names!"
"Like who?!" Reggie shouted back
"Phil Harrison, FRONT ROW!" The kid says
"I think we already did that" Says Reggie
The nearby crowd laughs, as is appropriate.
Most "grand-scale theories of brain operation", in fact, fail to make claims that can be tested, at least not in the foreseeable future.
To Hawkins' credit, near the end of the book he explicitly lists several claims his theory makes, and also suggests studies which would validate or invalidate his claims.
As usual, the linked artice is sparse on actual details. Here's a link to the actual article in Current Biology:
s tract?uid=PIIS0960982206026583&highlight=haynes
http://www.current-biology.com/content/article/ab
The full text requires a subscription, but I've pasted the abstract below:
Reading Hidden Intentions in the Human Brain
When humans are engaged in goal-related processing, activity in prefrontal cortex is increased [1, 2]. However, it has remained unclear whether this prefrontal activity encodes a subject's current intention [3]. Instead, increased levels of activity could reflect preparation of motor responses [4, 5], holding in mind a set of potential choices [6], tracking the memory of previous responses [7], or general processes related to establishing a new task set. Here we study subjects who freely decided which of two tasks to perform and covertly held onto an intention during a variable delay. Only after this delay did they perform the chosen task and indicate which task they had prepared. We demonstrate that during the delay, it is possible to decode from activity in medial and lateral regions of prefrontal cortex which of two tasks the subjects were covertly intending to perform. This suggests that covert goals can be represented by distributed patterns of activity in the prefrontal cortex, thereby providing a potential neural substrate for prospective memory [8, 9, 10]. During task execution, most information could be decoded from a more posterior region of prefrontal cortex, suggesting that different brain regions encode goals during task preparation and task execution. Decoding of intentions was most robust from the medial prefrontal cortex, which is consistent with a specific role of this region when subjects reflect on their own mental states.
Also, the final paragraph from the conclusion, which discusses where they'd like to go with this in the future:
Taken together, our results extend previous studies on the processing of goals in prefrontal cortex in several important ways. They reveal for the first time that spatial response patterns in medial and lateral prefrontal cortex encode a subject's covert intentions in a highly specific fashion. They also demonstrate a functional separation in medial prefrontal cortex, where more anterior regions encode the intention prior to its execution and more posterior regions encode the intention during task execution. These findings have important implications not only for the neural models of executive control, but also for technical and clinical applications, such as the further development of brain-computer interfaces, that might now be able to decode intentions that go beyond simple movements and extend to high-level cognitive processes.
Coincidentally, last month there was an interview with Robert Bigelow where he discussed his plans for constructing an inflatable station which would be constructed at L1, and then transported to the lunar surface. He also apparently has some plans for how to use the lunar regolith for insulation, which he'll be testing this year. From his current schedule, it's looking like he may very well have his base up and running long before NASA's. Some snippets from the article:
/ 65477.aspx
...
...
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/02/22
Once the moon base has been set down, dirt would be piled on top, using a technique that Bigelow plans to start testing later this year at his Las Vegas headquarters. The moon dirt, more technically known as regolith, would serve to shield the base's occupants from the harsh radiation hitting the lunar surface.
Bigelow is not alone in thinking about ways to do all this. In fact, Bigelow Aerospace arranged the interview in response to last month's story about NASA's plans for building infrastructure on the moon after 2020. At the time, NASA's Larry Toups had mentioned that the space agency was discussing its options with Bigelow as well as other aerospace companies, such as ILC Dover (which has its own inflatable-module project), Lockheed Martin and the Boeing Co.
Yes, our concept of lunar base construction would be to assemble various modules and propulsion/power buses in L1, and that would constitute the base. Those propulsion systems are full of fuel, and they are integrated into the overall structure in such a way that the entire structure lands as a unified base - which essentially was once a spaceship in L1, but is landed on the surface of the moon.
This way, you avoid the significant issues that surround having to gang modules together on the lunar surface on topographical surfaces that are not perfectly even. You avoid having to connect the air locks of modules that maybe weren't able to be brought close enough together. You avoid having to transport modules across the lunar surface, even if they were only a matter of a few hundred yards apart, and assembling them so that you have an airlock-to-airlock connection.
One module really isn't the issue. It's a matter of how you get three or five or seven down as one overall complex. Our architecture addresses that as a potential solution, using a combination of our propulsion buses and these expandable systems. The propulsion buses would have stanchions on them that act as the rigid points, to be able to deal with uneven topographical surfaces. The expandable systems themselves don't mind at all being set upon a solid surface because of the shields that they have and the durability of the overall system. The rigidity of the system is such that they don't mind at all. Even under a 1-g influence on Earth, there's no problem - so under one-sixth it would be much less.
They come equipped with their own insulation, by the way, for space debris in low Earth orbit, and to a certain extent for micrometeoroids. So they're already better insulated than the international space station is currently. Of course, the regolith is a significant additive that would be a great enhancement of the protection.
Our Job One is to take care of our business in low Earth orbit and try to perfect our spacecraft through these Pathfinder launches. Then try to launch our Sundancer spacecraft in 2010, our Galaxy spacecraft in '08 - and perfect our propulsion buses and our power systems, and start assembly of our first commercial space complex in 2010, 2011, 2012. By 2012, we should have two habitable modules in orbit, and one large propulsion and power system.
That will constitute the beginning of our opportunity. If we can do that, I would say that's an exercise that's applicable to the L1 scenario.
post-stimulus mask
A what? Can you describe what that would look like, and/or give an example? Google doesn't seem to return much.
Oh, sorry. One example would be showing random noise immediately following the presentation of the stimulus image, instead of just showing a uniform field.
Huh? I can readily detect the existance of images flashed for 1/30th of a second (a single de-interlaced TV frame)
Most people can do that if there's a blank screen or neutral stimulus afterwards, but can you do that even if a post-stimulus mask is applied?
So if you flash jackpot unconsciously you might have a similar but subdued reaction.
n g=r&q=motor+subliminal
3 /483
i nalPriming_A&P2002.pdf
This has been proven to be fiction.
I'm not sure what you're getting at, but certain subliminal effects are quite real.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&scori
http://jocn.mitpress.org/cgi/content/abstract/17/
The Neurophysiology of Response Competition: Motor Cortex Activation and Inhibition following Subliminal Response Priming
Peter Praamstra and Ellen Seiss
University of Birmingham, UK
Some widely used tasks in cognitive neuroscience depend on the induction of a response conflict between choice alternatives, involving partial activation of the incorrect response before the correct response is emitted. Although such "conflict tasks" are often used to investigate frontal-lobe-based conflict-monitoring processes, it is not known how response competition evolves in the motor cortex. To investigate the dynamics of motor cortex activation during response competition, we used a subliminal priming task that induced response competition while bypassing preresponse stage processing conflict. Analyses of movement-related EEG potentials supported an interaction between competing responses characterized by reciprocal inhibition. Inhibitory interactions between response channels contribute to the resolution of response conflict. However, the reciprocal inhibition at motor cortex level seemed to operate independent of higher level conflict-monitoring processes, which were relatively insensitive to response conflict induced by subliminal priming. These results elucidate how response conflict causes interference as well as the conditions under which frontal-lobe-based interference control processes are engaged.
http://www.unicog.org/publications/Dehaene_Sublim
The neural bases of subliminal priming
Stanislas Dehaene
Psychologists have long reported that words that are made invisible by forward and
backward masking can nevertheless cause behavioral priming effects. Functional
neuroimaging can now be used to explore the neural bases of masked priming. Subliminal
priming causes reduced activation in multiple areas (fusiform gyrus, intraparietal sulcus, and
motor cortex), in direct correspondence with behavioral manifestations of priming at the
orthographic, semantic, and motor level. This implies that a whole stream of processors can
operate unconsciously. The neural code in each area can be assessed by varying prime-target
relations. A simple mathematical framework is proposed that tentatively relates priming at the
voxel level with the shape of the tuning curves of single neurons in the underlying tissue.
Priming thus provides a general method to study the fine microcode in each brain region (the
'priming method').
Coincidentally, I did my undergrad at Carnegie Mellon, where I studied computer science and cognitive science. I'm now pursuing my PhD at Caltech doing computational-neuro-stuff.
IMHO, Carnegie Mellon, Caltech, and MIT are all fine schools. If I were to choose all over again though, I probably still would've wanted to go to Carnegie Mellon for my undergrad, as it's a more well-rounded school. I'm not too familiar with MIT, but Caltech is very much focused on science and technology. This is great for grad school, but I think you should have a more well-rounded education as an undergrad, with exposure to many different fields. Not just exposure to different fields, but people in those fields. Some of my best memories from college were late-night discussions about life, the universe, and everything with art and philosophy majors. Plus, Carnegie Mellon has women. It sounds like a flippant remark, but consider that -many- people meet their future spouse in college.
Also, if you're interested in CS or electrical engineering, Carnegie Mellon is on the same level as MIT/Caltech, and better in some specific areas. If you want to do robotics, the power of Christ compels you to go to Carnegie Mellon.
That said though, Caltech's undergrad populace also has this unique "frenzied" quality to it which I only found in a small sub-population at Carnegie Mellon. I like the frenzy, but some people don't. If you get a chance to visit Caltech, I definitely recommend interacting as much as possible with the undergrads to see if you jive well with them.
On a random note though, I don't know if you're into this, but Caltech and MIT both have active ballroom dance teams, which are pretty much non-existent at Carnegie Mellon. Of course, I didn't do dancing at all while I was an undergrad, but it's something I'm pretty into now.
From Kotaku:
s -wii-continue-to-print-yen-237481.php
http://kotaku.com/gaming/nintendo/hardware-wars-d
Here are the current hardware sales in the land of the rising sun for the week of February 4th to the 11th.
* Nintendo DS Lite - 201,177
* Wii - 78,550
* PSP - 32,175
* PLAYSTATION 3 - 23,431
* PlayStation 2 - 16,033
* Xbox 360 - 4,811
* Game Boy Advance SP - 980
* Game Boy micro - 884
I rather like the comment which noted the following:
Wii Sales > PSP sales + PS3 sales + PS2 sales + 360 sales + GBA sales + Micro sales
DS Sales > Wii Sales + PSP sales + PS3 sales + PS2 sales + 360 sales + GBA sales + Micro sales