Thanks for the reference. I think there are a handful of papers in which they have extracted information about what someone is seeing from visual cortex, I've just never seen one in the motor domain...but maybe you will produce a ref for that as well.:)
Alas, I don't happen to have such a reference handy.;)
Using the freedom of design that metamaterials provide, we show how electromagnetic fields can be redirected at will and propose a design strategy. The conserved fields--electric displacement field D, magnetic induction field B, and Poynting vector S--are all displaced in a consistent manner. A simple illustration is given of the cloaking of a proscribed volume of space to exclude completely all electromagnetic fields. Our work has relevance to exotic lens design and to the cloaking of objects from electromagnetic fields.
An invisibility device should guide light around an object as if nothing were there, regardless of where the light comes from. Ideal invisibility devices are impossible due to the wave nature of light. This paper develops a general recipe for the design of media that create perfect invisibility within the accuracy of geometrical optics. The imperfections of invisibility can be made arbitrarily small to hide objects that are much larger than the wavelength. Using modern metamaterials, practical demonstrations of such devices may be possible. The method developed here can be also applied to escape detection by other electromagnetic waves or sound.
Unfortunately, I don't seem to have access to the full papers.
I noticed in your URL that you're in BU's CNS department. How do you like it there? I almost decided to go there myself for grad school.
It is quite likely that the BOLD signal and neural spiking are related. Everybody believes it, myself included. But there is still not that much evidence of the connection.
What are your thoughts on the experiments by Nikos Logothetis where he did electrophysiological recordings of neurons and fMRI simultaneously (certainly not an easy feat). In his study he showed that the BOLD signal (at least in V1) is actually related more to dendritic inputs and intracortical processing than axonal spikes. Here's the abstract:
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is widely used to study the operational organization of the human brain, but the exact relationship between the measured fMRI signal and the underlying neural activity is unclear. Here we present simultaneous intracortical recordings of neural signals and fMRI responses. We compared local field potentials (LFPs), single- and multi-unit spiking activity with highly spatio-temporally resolved blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI responses from the visual cortex of monkeys. The largest magnitude changes were observed in LFPs, which at recording sites characterized by transient responses were the only signal that significantly correlated with the haemodynamic response. Linear systems analysis on a trial-by-trial basis showed that the impulse response of the neurovascular system is both animal- and site-specific, and that LFPs yield a better estimate of BOLD responses than the multi-unit responses. These findings suggest that the BOLD contrast mechanism reflects the input and intracortical processing of a given area rather than its spiking output.
For gross things, it can be quite obvious what the person is doing. I can tell by looking at the activations in your brain if you are looking at something versus hearing something. But looking at a duck versus looking at a cow? Much harder. Making a V-sign versus making a fist? I've never seen a paper where someone reported being able to do this. It is theoretically possible, but difficult with a blurry MRI signal that aggregates over populations of neurons.
I think this research is a follow-up to a study Kamitani & Tong published last year in Nature Neuroscience, where they decoded the orientation of edges a subject was looking at. Here's the abstract:
Decoding the visual and subjective contents of the human brain
The potential for human neuroimaging to read out the detailed contents of a person's mental state has yet to be fully explored. We investigated whether the perception of edge orientation, a fundamental visual feature, can be decoded from human brain activity measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Using statistical algorithms to classify brain states, we found that ensemble fMRI signals in early visual areas could reliably predict on individual trials which of eight stimulus orientations the subject was seeing. Moreover, when subjects had to attend to one of two overlapping orthogonal gratings, feature-based attention strongly biased ensemble activity toward the attended orientation. These results demonstrate that fMRI activity patterns in early visual areas, including primary visual cortex (V1), contain detailed orientation information that can reliably predict subjective perception. Our approach provides a framework for the readout of fine-tuned representations in the human brain and their subjective contents.
calm down buddy, we're not talking about universal evil or selfishness, we're talking about a specific issue that it has become very apparent is the responsibility of the bush administration.
It's a specific issue which is a symptom of a much larger problem.
How about firing the whole lot of politicians and PHBs and hire visionaries, pioneers, and engineers? Folks such as Burt Rutan, for example.
Although not quite as extreme as your proposal, NASA is currently hoping to have some of the same results with its Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program. A number of private companies, including the Rutan-affiliated t/Space, are competing for contracts to deliver cargo and crew to the International Space Station. If this is successful, hopefully funding for the program will increase and NASA will rely more on private enterprise in the future.
Of course, this is assuming that Boeing and Lockheed Martin don't feel threatened and apply pressure to have the program cancelled.
Another neat idea would be if something like Orbiter, World Wind, or Google Earth got regularly updated telemetry data for NASA spacecraft and probes, so you could explore them in 3D and real-time. It'd be really cool if you could track the estimated position of a probe as it entered orbit, watch a playback of a spacecraft docking with the ISS, or could explore a model of the area around the Mars rovers.
But it would kill the thing that - for me - is the biggest archivement of NASA: space science. Forget probes to the solar system, cosmology using satellites or the origins program, because that doesn't produce money.
Question: Why should space science be funded separately from the National Science Foundation?
If comanies would exist for the benefit of all, you'd be right. But they aren't, they exist primarily for making money.
Fortunately, we also have non-profits like the Planetary Society and Mars Society.
It has everything to do with technology. Yes, what we have is adequate to get into space, but at an ENORMOUS COST that simply does not justify itself in any way shape or form.
I'm curious: What cost would you consider acceptable? Would $35 million for a SpaceX Falcon 9 plus another few million for a Dragon capsule carrying 7 people be acceptable?
The general consensus in the media, popular culture, and commentary on places like slashdot seems to be that the conflict in Iraq is totally lost, but despite Bush's dumbassery, I'm still not convinced that's the case. There's an interesting article ("The Real Iraq") I was reading today by Amir Taheri, about how the realities he finds in Iraq are different from what the media portrays. He also discusses a number of signs which cause him to believe conditions in Iraq are getting progressively better (especially compared to what they were pre-war).
I'm still not entirely certain I agree, but it's an interesting read nonetheless. A quote:
Since my first encounter with Iraq almost 40 years ago, I have relied on several broad measures of social and economic health to assess the countrys condition. Through good times and bad, these signs have proved remarkably accurateas accurate, that is, as is possible in human affairs. For some time now, all have been pointing in an unequivocally positive direction.
The first sign is refugees. When things have been truly desperate in Iraqin 1959, 1969, 1971, 1973, 1980, 1988, and 1990long queues of Iraqis have formed at the Turkish and Iranian frontiers, hoping to escape. In 1973, for example, when Saddam Hussein decided to expel all those whose ancestors had not been Ottoman citizens before Iraqs creation as a state, some 1.2 million Iraqis left their homes in the space of just six weeks. This was not the temporary exile of a small group of middle-class professionals and intellectuals, which is a common enough phenomenon in most Arab countries. Rather, it was a departure en masse, affecting people both in small villages and in big cities, and it was a scene regularly repeated under Saddam Hussein.
Since the toppling of Saddam in 2003, this is one highly damaging image we have not seen on our television setsand we can be sure that we would be seeing it if it were there to be shown. To the contrary, Iraqis, far from fleeing, have been returning home. By the end of 2005, in the most conservative estimate, the number of returnees topped the 1.2-million mark. Many of the camps set up for fleeing Iraqis in Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia since 1959 have now closed down. The oldest such center, at Ashrafiayh in southwest Iran, was formally shut when its last Iraqi guests returned home in 2004.
For a solution which is somewhat in-between, there's organizations which provide low-interest microfinance loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries, helping them towards econmic independence. One neat-looking organization is Kiva.org, which enables individuals to make such loans. Worldchanging has a neat article on organizations like Kiva and how they're helping things in the developing world.
A relevant item from Kiva's FAQ:
Why loans and not (just) donations? Over the last three decades, microfinance has proven to be an effective tool in raising the standard of living in impoverished communities. Up to now, there has not existed a way for individuals in developed countries to participate directly in this exciting movement. Kiva believes individuals in developed countries will find loaning to be a more rewarding and sustainable form of involvement in international development than traditional giving. In other words, when you receive your original loan amount back, you are more likely to loan again than if you simply made a donation.
An artificial neural network would be the way to go on something like this.
FYI, in the machine learning community ANNs have mostly been phased out in favor of things like support vector machines, which tend to be much less prone to overfitting problems. There's a number of sources of available code, as well as variants of SVMs specialized for linguistics-style problems. I'd heartily suggest checking them out.
What I always found interesting about the Star Trek universe was the concept of a 'replicator'. You press a button and speak your order (e.g. Tea, Earl Grey, Hot) and get your order instantiated out of seemingly nothing. What would the consequences of such a device be if we could replicate anything at no cost? Not just information, but physical objects like cars and houses too.
Not only that, but what about using such a device to create items which are considered dangerous? What do gun control laws mean if anybody can get an AK-47 at the push of a button? What about producing infectious diseases like anthrax or ebola, or even creating a nuclear weapon? Does anyone know if Star Trek (or other sci-fi) ever analyzed such issues?
Finally, if replicators can easily create new replicators, how can anybody possibly hope to keep such things from becoming widespread?
So why did they only use women in their perception sample group? Sheesh.
Because the researchers have finite resources, and doubling the number of subjects isn't always feasible. I'm sure they're planning on doing similar experiments with males in the near future, though.
Of course, the effect of testosterone also tends to be very different depending on one's sex.
The summary (and the linked articles) are so sensationalised it is ridiculous.
The BBC have a slightly better written article
Better yet, here's the actual research abstract and article published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The article seems to be accessible without an institutional subscription, but just in case, here's the abstract text:
Reading men's faces: women's mate attractiveness judgments track men's testosterone and interest in infants
James R. Roney, Katherine N. Hanson, Kristina M. Durante, Dario Maestripieri
This study investigated whether women track possible cues of paternal and genetic quality in men's faces and then map perception of those cues onto mate attractiveness judgments. Men's testosterone concentrations served as a proxy for genetic quality given evidence that this hormone signals immunocompetence, and men's scores on an interest in infants test were chosen as prima facie markers of paternal quality. Women's perceptions of facial photographs of these men were in fact sensitive to these two variables: men's scores on the interest in infants test significantly predicted women's ratings of the photos for how much the men like children, and men's testosterone concentrations significantly predicted women's ratings of the men's faces for masculinity. Furthermore, men's actual and perceived affinity for children predicted women's long-term mate attractiveness judgments, while men's testosterone and perceived masculinity predicted women's short-term mate attractiveness judgments. These results suggest that women can detect facial cues of men's hormone concentrations and affinity for children, and that women use perception of these cues to form mate attractiveness judgments.
On a related note, this reminds me of research previously done linking finger-length ratios with things like testosterone levels, sexual orientation, and male aggressiveness.
Do you try to pronounce this PNAS as a word or always have to spell it out? In conversation, I mean.
Usually I hear people just say it as a word, or occasionally say the entire "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences". I guess you just get used to it after a while, although it can get you some strange looks from passerby. "Could you tell me more about your submission to pee-nas"?
I've noticed something similar for Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), one of the most important computational neuroscience and machine learning conferences. I've never heard somebody pronounce it N-I-P-S.
Personally, I'm planning on toying around with NIPS this summer (The deadline's just a month from now! why am I posting to slashdot?), but I have no intention of trying PNAS.
I wonder how much of a factor evolution might be in the resistance of these animals (in addition to the overall decrease in radioactivity after the accident). For example, the article mentions that the first generation or two after the accident tended to have deformities, but current generations don't. Perhaps only the animals which were resistant to deformities were able to reproduce and pass on their radiation-resistant genes to the next generation?
One could test this by seeing if "control" animals from outside the Chernobyl area experience any problems in the area. If there are indeed strains with genetic resistance to radiation, it could be interesting to study, and could be useful knowledge for more futuristic things like genetically modifying radiation-resistant organisms for off-world food sources and terraforming.
We're running a simulation of what the surgeon is doing by having the subject wear goggles with a s-video input (it's those fancy expensive goggles to watch movies or to game on). Similar to the article, a camera is attached to the front of the goggles. The input feeds into the computer, chugs through my code, and displays an image meant to simulate varying amounts of electrodes (4x4, 16x16, 64x64) in various configurations (wide screen vision anyone?). All this goes on while the subject tries to accomplish tasks (writing a check, discerning between a fork and knife, etc).
Oh, heh... I was actually once considering doing something similar to this. Do you find that your subjects do "supersampling" by shifting their head around as they look at something, as some neuroprosthetic patients reportedly do? Do you have a sense for how much more effective their vision is when using such supersampling techniques?
I first heard about this guy when reverting some additions of links to his sites on a Wikipedia page. He seems to be on every available internet corner:)
Interestingly, I tried to create a wikipedia article on him a couple of years ago, but it was too difficult to keep reverting the article after Arthur T. Murray repeatedly vandalized it to proclaim the glories of his work, so the article ended up being deleted. One of these days I hope to recreate the article, as Wikipedia seems to be better equipped to deal with vandals nowadays.
At around the same time he also tried to work-over the Wikipedia article on artificial intelligence. You can see the discussion about that here:
Hm... I originally included a couple of links which show how the technology works, but they were unfortunately removed from the submission. (Also, in retrospect I really should have made the title "Next-gen Robot Toys Smart Enough to Fetch Beer," as it probably would have increased the level of discussion a little more.) I'll go ahead and add them here...
The first bit of technology Evolution Robotics will probably be contributing is their ViPR (Visual Pattern Recognition) tech, which allows for real-time recognition of objects in the environment. It's really quite impressive to see it in action -- it can learn how an object looks using just a single training example, has a high recognition rate, is resilient to occlusion/rotation/scale, and can operate at 15fps on an ordinary computer. It works by efficiently extracting a few hundred SIFT (scale-invariant feature transform) features from an image, and then learns what affine arrangement of them indicate an object. A downloadable demo is available on the ViPR page.
Their SIFT-based ViPR techniques work -very- well on rigid objects, like labels, signs, furniture, cups, and pretty much any sort of static pattern. They tend to work less well on deformable objects, like faces and people.
The other piece of technology is NorthStar, used for indoor navigation. This uses a projector to shine some IR light spots on the ceiling. An IR-sensitive camera on the robot can see where the light spots are, allowing it to easily determine its location relative to the projector, so it can basically create a map of its environment using projector-relative coordinates.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the reference. I think there are a handful of papers in which they have extracted information about what someone is seeing from visual cortex, I've just never seen one in the motor domain...but maybe you will produce a ref for that as well. :)
;)
Alas, I don't happen to have such a reference handy.
The BBC article mentions a couple of articles in the current issue of Science. Here's the text from their research abstracts:
Controlling Electromagnetic Fields
J. B. Pendry, D. Schurig, D. R. Smith
Using the freedom of design that metamaterials provide, we show how electromagnetic fields can be redirected at will and propose a design strategy. The conserved fields--electric displacement field D, magnetic induction field B, and Poynting vector S--are all displaced in a consistent manner. A simple illustration is given of the cloaking of a proscribed volume of space to exclude completely all electromagnetic fields. Our work has relevance to exotic lens design and to the cloaking of objects from electromagnetic fields.
Optical Conformal Mapping
Ulf Leonhardt
An invisibility device should guide light around an object as if nothing were there, regardless of where the light comes from. Ideal invisibility devices are impossible due to the wave nature of light. This paper develops a general recipe for the design of media that create perfect invisibility within the accuracy of geometrical optics. The imperfections of invisibility can be made arbitrarily small to hide objects that are much larger than the wavelength. Using modern metamaterials, practical demonstrations of such devices may be possible. The method developed here can be also applied to escape detection by other electromagnetic waves or sound.
Unfortunately, I don't seem to have access to the full papers.
I noticed in your URL that you're in BU's CNS department. How do you like it there? I almost decided to go there myself for grad school.
It is quite likely that the BOLD signal and neural spiking are related. Everybody believes it, myself included. But there is still not that much evidence of the connection.
What are your thoughts on the experiments by Nikos Logothetis where he did electrophysiological recordings of neurons and fMRI simultaneously (certainly not an easy feat). In his study he showed that the BOLD signal (at least in V1) is actually related more to dendritic inputs and intracortical processing than axonal spikes. Here's the abstract:
Neurophysiological investigation of the basis of the fMRI signal
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is widely used to study the operational organization of the human brain, but the exact relationship between the measured fMRI signal and the underlying neural activity is unclear. Here we present simultaneous intracortical recordings of neural signals and fMRI responses. We compared local field potentials (LFPs), single- and multi-unit spiking activity with highly spatio-temporally resolved blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI responses from the visual cortex of monkeys. The largest magnitude changes were observed in LFPs, which at recording sites characterized by transient responses were the only signal that significantly correlated with the haemodynamic response. Linear systems analysis on a trial-by-trial basis showed that the impulse response of the neurovascular system is both animal- and site-specific, and that LFPs yield a better estimate of BOLD responses than the multi-unit responses. These findings suggest that the BOLD contrast mechanism reflects the input and intracortical processing of a given area rather than its spiking output.
For gross things, it can be quite obvious what the person is doing. I can tell by looking at the activations in your brain if you are looking at something versus hearing something. But looking at a duck versus looking at a cow? Much harder. Making a V-sign versus making a fist? I've never seen a paper where someone reported being able to do this. It is theoretically possible, but difficult with a blurry MRI signal that aggregates over populations of neurons.
I think this research is a follow-up to a study Kamitani & Tong published last year in Nature Neuroscience, where they decoded the orientation of edges a subject was looking at. Here's the abstract:
Decoding the visual and subjective contents of the human brain
The potential for human neuroimaging to read out the detailed contents of a person's mental state has yet to be fully explored. We investigated whether the perception of edge orientation, a fundamental visual feature, can be decoded from human brain activity measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Using statistical algorithms to classify brain states, we found that ensemble fMRI signals in early visual areas could reliably predict on individual trials which of eight stimulus orientations the subject was seeing. Moreover, when subjects had to attend to one of two overlapping orthogonal gratings, feature-based attention strongly biased ensemble activity toward the attended orientation. These results demonstrate that fMRI activity patterns in early visual areas, including primary visual cortex (V1), contain detailed orientation information that can reliably predict subjective perception. Our approach provides a framework for the readout of fine-tuned representations in the human brain and their subjective contents.
calm down buddy, we're not talking about universal evil or selfishness, we're talking about a specific issue that it has become very apparent is the responsibility of the bush administration.
It's a specific issue which is a symptom of a much larger problem.
Government is needed for society.
That's a popular axiom, but not necessarily a true one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism
I heard that in the newer version it'll scream like a little girl when you toss it down a chute.
How about firing the whole lot of politicians and PHBs and hire visionaries, pioneers, and engineers? Folks such as Burt Rutan, for example.
Although not quite as extreme as your proposal, NASA is currently hoping to have some of the same results with its Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program. A number of private companies, including the Rutan-affiliated t/Space, are competing for contracts to deliver cargo and crew to the International Space Station. If this is successful, hopefully funding for the program will increase and NASA will rely more on private enterprise in the future.
Of course, this is assuming that Boeing and Lockheed Martin don't feel threatened and apply pressure to have the program cancelled.
Another neat idea would be if something like Orbiter, World Wind, or Google Earth got regularly updated telemetry data for NASA spacecraft and probes, so you could explore them in 3D and real-time. It'd be really cool if you could track the estimated position of a probe as it entered orbit, watch a playback of a spacecraft docking with the ISS, or could explore a model of the area around the Mars rovers.
But it would kill the thing that - for me - is the biggest archivement of NASA: space science. Forget probes to the solar system, cosmology using satellites or the origins program, because that doesn't produce money.
Question: Why should space science be funded separately from the National Science Foundation?
If comanies would exist for the benefit of all, you'd be right. But they aren't, they exist primarily for making money.
Fortunately, we also have non-profits like the Planetary Society and Mars Society.
It has everything to do with technology. Yes, what we have is adequate to get into space, but at an ENORMOUS COST that simply does not justify itself in any way shape or form.
I'm curious: What cost would you consider acceptable? Would $35 million for a SpaceX Falcon 9 plus another few million for a Dragon capsule carrying 7 people be acceptable?
The general consensus in the media, popular culture, and commentary on places like slashdot seems to be that the conflict in Iraq is totally lost, but despite Bush's dumbassery, I'm still not convinced that's the case. There's an interesting article ("The Real Iraq") I was reading today by Amir Taheri, about how the realities he finds in Iraq are different from what the media portrays. He also discusses a number of signs which cause him to believe conditions in Iraq are getting progressively better (especially compared to what they were pre-war).
I'm still not entirely certain I agree, but it's an interesting read nonetheless. A quote:
Since my first encounter with Iraq almost 40 years ago, I have relied on several broad measures of social and economic health to assess the countrys condition. Through good times and bad, these signs have proved remarkably accurateas accurate, that is, as is possible in human affairs. For some time now, all have been pointing in an unequivocally positive direction.
The first sign is refugees. When things have been truly desperate in Iraqin 1959, 1969, 1971, 1973, 1980, 1988, and 1990long queues of Iraqis have formed at the Turkish and Iranian frontiers, hoping to escape. In 1973, for example, when Saddam Hussein decided to expel all those whose ancestors had not been Ottoman citizens before Iraqs creation as a state, some 1.2 million Iraqis left their homes in the space of just six weeks. This was not the temporary exile of a small group of middle-class professionals and intellectuals, which is a common enough phenomenon in most Arab countries. Rather, it was a departure en masse, affecting people both in small villages and in big cities, and it was a scene regularly repeated under Saddam Hussein.
Since the toppling of Saddam in 2003, this is one highly damaging image we have not seen on our television setsand we can be sure that we would be seeing it if it were there to be shown. To the contrary, Iraqis, far from fleeing, have been returning home. By the end of 2005, in the most conservative estimate, the number of returnees topped the 1.2-million mark. Many of the camps set up for fleeing Iraqis in Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia since 1959 have now closed down. The oldest such center, at Ashrafiayh in southwest Iran, was formally shut when its last Iraqi guests returned home in 2004.
Hey, why lend when you can give?
For a solution which is somewhat in-between, there's organizations which provide low-interest microfinance loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries, helping them towards econmic independence. One neat-looking organization is Kiva.org, which enables individuals to make such loans. Worldchanging has a neat article on organizations like Kiva and how they're helping things in the developing world.
A relevant item from Kiva's FAQ:
Why loans and not (just) donations?
Over the last three decades, microfinance has proven to be an effective tool in raising the standard of living in impoverished communities. Up to now, there has not existed a way for individuals in developed countries to participate directly in this exciting movement. Kiva believes individuals in developed countries will find loaning to be a more rewarding and sustainable form of involvement in international development than traditional giving. In other words, when you receive your original loan amount back, you are more likely to loan again than if you simply made a donation.
An artificial neural network would be the way to go on something like this.
FYI, in the machine learning community ANNs have mostly been phased out in favor of things like support vector machines, which tend to be much less prone to overfitting problems. There's a number of sources of available code, as well as variants of SVMs specialized for linguistics-style problems. I'd heartily suggest checking them out.
What I always found interesting about the Star Trek universe was the concept of a 'replicator'. You press a button and speak your order (e.g. Tea, Earl Grey, Hot) and get your order instantiated out of seemingly nothing. What would the consequences of such a device be if we could replicate anything at no cost? Not just information, but physical objects like cars and houses too.
Not only that, but what about using such a device to create items which are considered dangerous? What do gun control laws mean if anybody can get an AK-47 at the push of a button? What about producing infectious diseases like anthrax or ebola, or even creating a nuclear weapon? Does anyone know if Star Trek (or other sci-fi) ever analyzed such issues?
Finally, if replicators can easily create new replicators, how can anybody possibly hope to keep such things from becoming widespread?
But the 650 still has major problems. The browser sucks really badly.
Have you tried using Opera Mini? I've been using it on my Treo 600, and have been quite happy with it.
Now we'll never know what kind of mystical skills and powers it had.
Indeed. We can assume that it was bred for its skils in magic, but was the magic divine, arcane, or perhaps even psionic?
So why did they only use women in their perception sample group? Sheesh.
Because the researchers have finite resources, and doubling the number of subjects isn't always feasible. I'm sure they're planning on doing similar experiments with males in the near future, though.
Of course, the effect of testosterone also tends to be very different depending on one's sex.
How about using a proper source for this study?
The summary (and the linked articles) are so sensationalised it is ridiculous.
The BBC have a slightly better written article
Better yet, here's the actual research abstract and article published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The article seems to be accessible without an institutional subscription, but just in case, here's the abstract text:
Reading men's faces: women's mate attractiveness judgments track men's testosterone and interest in infants
James R. Roney, Katherine N. Hanson, Kristina M. Durante, Dario Maestripieri
This study investigated whether women track possible cues of paternal and genetic quality in men's faces and then map perception of those cues onto mate attractiveness judgments. Men's testosterone concentrations served as a proxy for genetic quality given evidence that this hormone signals immunocompetence, and men's scores on an interest in infants test were chosen as prima facie markers of paternal quality. Women's perceptions of facial photographs of these men were in fact sensitive to these two variables: men's scores on the interest in infants test significantly predicted women's ratings of the photos for how much the men like children, and men's testosterone concentrations significantly predicted women's ratings of the men's faces for masculinity. Furthermore, men's actual and perceived affinity for children predicted women's long-term mate attractiveness judgments, while men's testosterone and perceived masculinity predicted women's short-term mate attractiveness judgments. These results suggest that women can detect facial cues of men's hormone concentrations and affinity for children, and that women use perception of these cues to form mate attractiveness judgments.
On a related note, this reminds me of research previously done linking finger-length ratios with things like testosterone levels, sexual orientation, and male aggressiveness.
Do you try to pronounce this PNAS as a word or always have to spell it out? In conversation, I mean.
Usually I hear people just say it as a word, or occasionally say the entire "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences". I guess you just get used to it after a while, although it can get you some strange looks from passerby. "Could you tell me more about your submission to pee-nas"?
I've noticed something similar for Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), one of the most important computational neuroscience and machine learning conferences. I've never heard somebody pronounce it N-I-P-S.
Personally, I'm planning on toying around with NIPS this summer (The deadline's just a month from now! why am I posting to slashdot?), but I have no intention of trying PNAS.
I wonder how much of a factor evolution might be in the resistance of these animals (in addition to the overall decrease in radioactivity after the accident). For example, the article mentions that the first generation or two after the accident tended to have deformities, but current generations don't. Perhaps only the animals which were resistant to deformities were able to reproduce and pass on their radiation-resistant genes to the next generation?
One could test this by seeing if "control" animals from outside the Chernobyl area experience any problems in the area. If there are indeed strains with genetic resistance to radiation, it could be interesting to study, and could be useful knowledge for more futuristic things like genetically modifying radiation-resistant organisms for off-world food sources and terraforming.
We're running a simulation of what the surgeon is doing by having the subject wear goggles with a s-video input (it's those fancy expensive goggles to watch movies or to game on). Similar to the article, a camera is attached to the front of the goggles. The input feeds into the computer, chugs through my code, and displays an image meant to simulate varying amounts of electrodes (4x4, 16x16, 64x64) in various configurations (wide screen vision anyone?). All this goes on while the subject tries to accomplish tasks (writing a check, discerning between a fork and knife, etc).
Oh, heh... I was actually once considering doing something similar to this. Do you find that your subjects do "supersampling" by shifting their head around as they look at something, as some neuroprosthetic patients reportedly do? Do you have a sense for how much more effective their vision is when using such supersampling techniques?
Gen 2.5 will offer wireless communication between the earbuds, and third will offer in the canal units.
Or one could go all-out and directly stimulate neurons in the cochlea, like cochlear implants do.
I first heard about this guy when reverting some additions of links to his sites on a Wikipedia page. He seems to be on every available internet corner :)
l ligence/Archive01#Arthur_T._Murray
Interestingly, I tried to create a wikipedia article on him a couple of years ago, but it was too difficult to keep reverting the article after Arthur T. Murray repeatedly vandalized it to proclaim the glories of his work, so the article ended up being deleted. One of these days I hope to recreate the article, as Wikipedia seems to be better equipped to deal with vandals nowadays.
At around the same time he also tried to work-over the Wikipedia article on artificial intelligence. You can see the discussion about that here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Artificial_inte
Hm... I originally included a couple of links which show how the technology works, but they were unfortunately removed from the submission. (Also, in retrospect I really should have made the title "Next-gen Robot Toys Smart Enough to Fetch Beer," as it probably would have increased the level of discussion a little more.) I'll go ahead and add them here...
The first bit of technology Evolution Robotics will probably be contributing is their ViPR (Visual Pattern Recognition) tech, which allows for real-time recognition of objects in the environment. It's really quite impressive to see it in action -- it can learn how an object looks using just a single training example, has a high recognition rate, is resilient to occlusion/rotation/scale, and can operate at 15fps on an ordinary computer. It works by efficiently extracting a few hundred SIFT (scale-invariant feature transform) features from an image, and then learns what affine arrangement of them indicate an object. A downloadable demo is available on the ViPR page.
Their SIFT-based ViPR techniques work -very- well on rigid objects, like labels, signs, furniture, cups, and pretty much any sort of static pattern. They tend to work less well on deformable objects, like faces and people.
The other piece of technology is NorthStar, used for indoor navigation. This uses a projector to shine some IR light spots on the ceiling. An IR-sensitive camera on the robot can see where the light spots are, allowing it to easily determine its location relative to the projector, so it can basically create a map of its environment using projector-relative coordinates.