A simple prize criterion would be for the first program producing a major natural language text corpus, with the size of the program being less than 1.3 bits per character of the produced corpus. Smaller intermediate prizes would help spur broader interest.
It may be better to pattern such a prize after the Methuselah mouse prize, where beating the old record would net you a portion of the prize proportional to how much the old record was beaten by. The size of the prize pot grows as donators add more money to it, and shrinks whenever a new text compression record is broken.
# After a poor Hollywood experience in the early-'90s, Frank Miller refused to relinquish the movie rights to any of his comic works, "Sin City" in particular. Robert Rodriguez, a longtime fan of the comic, filmed his own "audition" for the director's spot in secret. The footage, shot in early 2004, featured Josh Hartnett and Marley Shelton acting out the "Sin City" short-story "The Customer is Always Right". He presented the finished footage to Miller with the proclamation: "If you like this, this will be the opening to the movie. If not, you'll have your own short film to show your friends." Miller approved of the footage and the film was underway. Rodriguez also screened the footage for each of the actors he wanted to cast in the film - all of whom are reported to have been instantly amazed.
# Rodriguez, who credits Miller's visual style in the comic as relevant as his own in the film, insisted that Miller receive a "co-director" credit with him. The Directors' Guild of America would not allow it. As a result, Rodriguez resigned from the DGA, saying "It was easier for me to quietly resign before shooting because otherwise I'd be forced to make compromises I was unwilling to make or set a precedent that might hurt the guild later on." Unfortunately, by resigning from the DGA, Rodriguez was also forced to relinquish his director's seat on the film John Carter of Mars (2006) (at the time "A Princess of Mars" after the book on which it was based) for Paramount. Rodriguez had already signed-on and been announced as director of that film when the DGA situation took place, planning to begin filming soon after wrapping this film.
It took some searching around, but I managed to find the research page for Dileep George, one of the co-founders and chief engineers. His page has links to source code for his visual recognition system, although I haven't had a chance to evaluate it yet.
A Hierarchical Bayesian Model of Invariant Pattern Recognition in the Visual Cortex
Dileep George and Jeff Hawkins, Stanford University and Redwood Neuroscience Institute Accepted for publication in the proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks. (IJCNN 05)
We describe a hierarchical model of invariant visual pattern recognition in the visual cortex. In this model, the knowledge of how patterns change when objects move is learned and encapsulated in terms of high probability sequences at each level of the hierarchy. Configuration of object parts is captured by the patterns of coincident high probability sequences. This knowledge is then encoded in a highly efficient Bayesian Network structure. The learning algorithm uses a temporal stability criterion to discover object concepts and movement patterns. We show that the architecture and algorithms are biologically plausible. The large scale architecture of the system matches the large scale organization of the cortex and the micro-circuits derived from the local computations match the anatomical data on cortical circuits. The system exhibits invariance across a wide variety of transformations and is robust in the presence of noise. Moreover, the model also offers alternative explanations for various known cortical phenomena.
Sure, sort of like how the subsequent licensing of SpaceShipOne to Richard Branson was worth much more than the X Prize itself. If anything, winning this contest will be worth more for the publicity than the actual money.
I submitted this story a couple of times yesterday, but it sadly wasn't accepted. Maybe it was too long or had too many links? In any case, here's a copy, which has a little additional info:
MSNBC, Space.com, and Wired report that NASA, in collaboration with the non-profit Spaceward Foundation, has announced its first two Centennial Challenges. The Centennial Challenges, inspired by the Ansari X Prize and DARPA Grand Challenge, are prize contests seeking to stimulate private industry development of technologies relevant to space exploration. One contest is the Tether Challenge, for building the sort of super-strong tether needed to make a space elevator feasible. The other is the Beam Power Challenge, for creating a wirelessly-powered ribbon-climbing robot capable of lifting as large a payload as possible within a limited timeframe. The initial set of challenges in 2005 will award $50K to the winners of each contest. A second set of challenges in 2006 will award first, second, and third place prizes worth $100K, $40K, and $10K. It's hoped that these contests will further space elevator technology and help eliminate the 'giggle factor' surrounding them. Additional contests will be announced in the coming weeks, although Congress currently restricts NASA from awarding prizes of more than $250K; the agency is lobbying to try to get this limit raised to $40 million for future prizes.
Just think about the fact that you can easily recognize 2 random objects if you are shown them for as little as a second. In this second, there is only enough time for about 100 of your neurons firing.
I suspect you may have misinterpreted whatever you read that said this. This is actually often cited as evidence in favor of massive parallelization. It doesn't indicate that "100 of your neurons" had to fire in this time, but that a 100-step sequence of neurons (with who-knows-how-many neurons involved in each step) fired in that time frame. Computing complex operations in so few time steps requires oodles of parallelization.
As the submission noted, this work will be building on what Hawkins wrote about in his recent book, On Intelligence. The companion web site for the book is here:
The agenda for this book is ambitious. It describes a comprehensive theory of how the brain works. It describes what intelligence is and how your brain creates it. The theory I present is not a completely new one. Many of the individual ideas you are about to read have existed in some form or another before, but not together in a coherent fashion. This should be expected. It is said that "new ideas" are often old ideas repackaged and reinterpreted. That certainly applies to the theory proposed here, but packaging and interpretation can make a world of difference, the difference between a mass of details and a satisfying theory. I hope it strikes you the way it does many people. A typical reaction I hear is, "It makes sense. I wouldn't have thought of intelligence this way, but now that you describe it to me I can see how it all fits together." With this knowledge most people start to see themselves a little differently. You start to observe your own behavior saying, "I understand what just happened in my head." Hopefully when you have finished this book, you will have new insight into why you think what you think and why you behave the way you behave. I also hope that some readers will be inspired to focus their careers on building intelligent machines based on the principles outlined in these pages....
Weren't neural networks supposed to lead to intelligent machines? Of course the brain is made from a network of neurons, but without first understanding what the brain does, simple neural networks will be no more successful at creating intelligent machines than computer programs have been.
Why has it been so hard to figure out how the brain works? Most scientists say that because the brain is so complicated, it will take a very long time for us to understand it. I disagree. Complexity is a symptom of confusion, not a cause. Instead, I argue we have a few intuitive but incorrect assumptions that mislead us. The biggest mistake is the belief that intelligence is defined by intelligent behavior.
What is intelligence if it isn't defined by behavior? The brain uses vast amounts of memory to create a model of the world. Everything you know and have learned is stored in this model. The brain uses this memory-based model to make continuous predictions of future events. It is the ability to make predictions about the future that is the crux of intelligence. I will describe the brain's predictive ability in depth; it is the core idea in the book.
How does the brain work? The seat of intelligence is the neocortex. Even though it has a great number of abilities and powerful flexibility, the neocortex is surprisingly regular in its structural details. The different parts of the neocortex, whether they are responsible for vision, hearing, touch, or language, all work on the same principles. The key to understanding the neocortex is understanding these common principles and, in particular, its hierarchical structure. We will examine the neocortex in sufficient detail to show how its structure captures the structure of the world. This will b
1.2 Who is Arthur T. Murray and who or what is "Mentifex"?
Arthur T. Murray, a.k.a. Mentifex, is a notorious kook who makes heavy use of the Internet to promote his theory of artificial intelligence (AI). His writing is characterized by illeism, name-dropping, frequent use of foreign expressions, crude ASCII diagrams, and what has been termed "obfuscatory technobabble".
Murray is the author of software which he claims has produced an "artificial mind" and has "solved AI". He has also produced a vanity-published book which he touts as a textbook for teaching AI.
1.3 What are Arthur T. Murray's AI credentials?
None of which to speak.
Murray claims to have received a Bachelor's degree in Greek and Latin from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1968 [24]. He has no formal training in computer science, cognitive science, neuroscience, linguistics, nor any other field of study even tangentially related to AI or cognition. He works as a night auditor at a small Seattle hotel [3, p. 25] and is not affiliated with any university or recognized research institution; he therefore styles himself an "independent scholar". Murray claims that his knowledge of AI comes from reading science fiction novels [39].
1.4 What does Arthur T. Murray do?
Murray is notorious for posting thousands of messages to Usenet promoting his AI software, book, websites, and theory. Most of these messages are massively cross-posted to off-topic newsgroups. Murray takes the mere mention of anything vaguely AI-related as an invitation to post a follow-up directing readers to his own work (e. g., [45]). He claims that people are "crying out" for repetition of his message [46].
Murray also heavily promotes himself on public forums on the web. Message boards, private guestbooks, and collaborative encyclopedias are all considered fair game for the showcasing of Murray's ideas. Murray terms this activity "meme insertion"; most everyone else considers it to be spamming.
Before he had regular access to the Internet, Murray used the US postal system to spread his ideas by mass-mailing prominent AI researchers, computing authors, and sometimes even entire university departments. He boasts that he mailed seven thousand letters in 1989 alone [14].
Murray has also been known to cause disruptions in person. In one notable example, he picketed the 2001 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence [34, 35].
Yeah, Nye is pretty neat. Since he's giving a talk about germs, I'm probably going to try to get him to sign my plush rhinovirus.
A few months ago he was also at a Planetary Society event, on the eve of the Huygens landing. I have a bowler hat which I collect signatures in, and I got him to sign mine! He remarked that he has a bowler hat as well.:)
That brought the list of signatures in my hat to the following (in order of signing):
Kevin Mitnick (at a CMU talk; almost got Stephen Wozniak as well right after, but had given the pen to someone else)
Neal Stephenson (also at a CMU talk)
Brian Binnie (X Prize pilot, at Caltech talk)
John Rhys-Davies (also at Planetary Society event)
Bill Nye the Science Guy
My mission is to have the geekiest hat on the planet.
One of the things I really like about PLoS (Public Library of Science) is that they don't just make their articles free to access, they actually release them all under the Creative Commons license. You can do pretty much anything you want with released content, including derivative works and commercial use, so long as you give the original author credit.
Hopefully the new repository that the Wellcome Trust is setting up will use something similar.
If you'd like, I'd be more than happy to try looking at Caltech's online archives to see if the articles are there. If it isn't already online I can also try getting a scan of them, although that might take a little longer.
If you don't want to post the article info here, feel free to email it to neuronexmachina, at gmail dot com.
I mean seriously, I disagree with it but that doesn't stop it from being insightful. This modding down of posts because you disagree with them is getting silly.
There's a News@Nature.com about Wikipedia, which includes an interview with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. For those who aren't familiar with it, Nature is pretty much the most widely-read scholarly research journal out there.
College of Nursing, Department of Psychology, Rutgers, State University of New Jersey, Newark, New Jersey, USA.
Our recent research provides evidence that women with complete spinal cord injury (SCI) at the midthoracic level show perceptual responses to vaginal and/or cervical self-stimulation (for example, pain suppression and sexual response, including orgasm). On the basis of studies in laboratory rats, we hypothesized that the vagus nerves provide a sensory pathway from the vagina, cervix, and uterus directly to the brain in women. To test this hypothesis, we performed a PET-MRI study on two women with complete SCI and 1 woman with no injuries. Whereas control foot stimulation of the women with SCI did not activate the somatosensory thalamus, cervical self-stimulation increased activity in the region of the nucleus of the solitary tract, which is the brainstem nucleus to which the vagus nerves project. These preliminary findings suggest that the vagus nerves can convey genital sensory input directly to the brain in women, completely bypassing SCI at any level.
Last year there was an ABC News article about the "Orgasmatron," where a researcher accidentally discovered that electrode stimulation of the sacral nerve caused women to instantaneously orgasm. From the article:
While Dr. Stuart Meloy was working on a new device to treat chronic pain, he was surprised to discover it could also bring pleasure to his female patients.
While Meloy, an anesthesiologist and pain specialist in Winston-Salem, was putting an electrode into the spine of a female patient with chronic back pain, the woman reported a decrease in her pain and a delightful, but very unexpected, side effect.
"When we turned on the power in this case, she let out a moan and began hyperventilating," Meloy said on ABC News' Good Morning America. "Of course we cut the power and I looked around the drapes and asked her what was going on. Once she caught her breath, she said 'you're gonna have to teach my husband how to do that!' "
This google scholar search turns up a surprising number of results:
The functional organization of lateral prefrontal cortex is not well understood, and there is debate as to whether the dorsal and ventral aspects mediate distinct spatial and non-spatial functions, respectively. We show for the first time that recordings from human ventrolateral prefrontal cortex show spatial selectivity, supporting the idea that ventrolateral prefrontal cortex is involved in spatial processing. Our results also indicate that prefrontal cortex may be a source of control signals for neuroprosthetic applications.
For an overview of the neural prosthetics work in Richard Andersen's lab at Caltech, this presentation is handy.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging--fMRI--opens a window onto the brain at work. By tracking changes in cerebral blood flow as a subject performs a mental task, fMRI shows which brain regions "light up" when making a movement, thinking of a loved one, or telling a lie. Its ability to reveal function, not merely structure, distinguishes fMRI from static neuroimaging techniques such as CT scanning, and its capacity to highlight the neural substrates of decisions, emotions, and deceptions has propelled fMRI into the popular consciousness. Discussions of the future of fMRI have conjured visions of mind-reading devices used everywhere from the front door at the airport terminal to the back room of the corporate personnel office. At least one "neuromarketing" research firm is already trying to use fMRI to probe what consumers "really" think about their clients' products.
But will fMRI's utility in the real world ever match the power we currently imagine for it? Is fMRI likely to leave the clinic for widespread use in the courtroom or the boardroom? Are there neuroethical nightmares just around the corner? Or are all these vivid specters really just idle speculations that will never come to pass?
If we could find the mechanical outcome of what we think when we listen to music.
There was actually Nature paper a few days ago about that very topic:
Musical imagery: Sound of silence activates auditory cortex
Auditory imagery occurs when one mentally rehearses telephone numbers or has a song 'on the brain' -- it is the subjective experience of hearing in the absence of auditory stimulation, and is useful for investigating aspects of human cognition1. Here we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify and characterize the neural substrates that support unprompted auditory imagery and find that auditory and visual imagery seem to obey similar basic neural principles.
"We played music in the scanner (FMRI) and then we hit a virtual "mute' button," said David Kraemer, a graduate student in Dartmouth's Psychological and Brain Sciences Department and author of the study, published recently in the journal Nature.
With familiar songs, "we found that people couldn't help continuing the song in their heads, and when they did this, the auditory cortex remained active even though the music had stopped," Kraemer said.
The researchers said the findings extend previous research that showed sensory-specific memories are stored in the brain regions that first experienced those events.
"It's fascinating that although the ear isn't actually hearing the song, the brain is perceptually hearing it," said co-author William Kelley, assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences.
Slashdot Mirror
A simple prize criterion would be for the first program producing a major natural language text corpus, with the size of the program being less than 1.3 bits per character of the produced corpus. Smaller intermediate prizes would help spur broader interest.
It may be better to pattern such a prize after the Methuselah mouse prize, where beating the old record would net you a portion of the prize proportional to how much the old record was beaten by. The size of the prize pot grows as donators add more money to it, and shrinks whenever a new text compression record is broken.
Indeed. Here are some pretty good Wikipedia articles on the topic:
a rity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singul
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularitarianism
Indeed. And they would wave hello, but they have no hands.
I found this trivia from IMDB quite refreshing:
# After a poor Hollywood experience in the early-'90s, Frank Miller refused to relinquish the movie rights to any of his comic works, "Sin City" in particular. Robert Rodriguez, a longtime fan of the comic, filmed his own "audition" for the director's spot in secret. The footage, shot in early 2004, featured Josh Hartnett and Marley Shelton acting out the "Sin City" short-story "The Customer is Always Right". He presented the finished footage to Miller with the proclamation: "If you like this, this will be the opening to the movie. If not, you'll have your own short film to show your friends." Miller approved of the footage and the film was underway. Rodriguez also screened the footage for each of the actors he wanted to cast in the film - all of whom are reported to have been instantly amazed.
# Rodriguez, who credits Miller's visual style in the comic as relevant as his own in the film, insisted that Miller receive a "co-director" credit with him. The Directors' Guild of America would not allow it. As a result, Rodriguez resigned from the DGA, saying "It was easier for me to quietly resign before shooting because otherwise I'd be forced to make compromises I was unwilling to make or set a precedent that might hurt the guild later on." Unfortunately, by resigning from the DGA, Rodriguez was also forced to relinquish his director's seat on the film John Carter of Mars (2006) (at the time "A Princess of Mars" after the book on which it was based) for Paramount. Rodriguez had already signed-on and been announced as director of that film when the DGA situation took place, planning to begin filming soon after wrapping this film.
See this post I made elsewhere in the thread. They have a peer-reviewed publication available, as well as a Matlab demo.
Foldiak is cited in Dileep George and Jeff Hawkins's research paper.
It took some searching around, but I managed to find the research page for Dileep George, one of the co-founders and chief engineers. His page has links to source code for his visual recognition system, although I haven't had a chance to evaluate it yet.
G eorgeHawkinsIJCNN05.pdf
He organized a workshop on invariant representations in vision last weekend at Cosyne, one of the major computational neuroscience conferences.
George and Hawkins are also publishing a paper in the proceedings of an upcoming neural network conference. Here's the relevant info:
http://www.stanford.edu/~dil/invariance/Download/
A Hierarchical Bayesian Model of Invariant Pattern Recognition in the Visual Cortex
Dileep George and Jeff Hawkins, Stanford University and Redwood Neuroscience Institute
Accepted for publication in the proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks. (IJCNN 05)
We describe a hierarchical model of invariant visual pattern recognition in the visual cortex. In this model, the knowledge of how patterns change when objects move is learned and encapsulated in terms of high probability sequences at each level of the hierarchy. Configuration of object parts is captured by the patterns of coincident high probability sequences. This knowledge is then encoded in a highly efficient Bayesian Network structure. The learning algorithm uses a temporal stability criterion to discover object concepts and movement patterns. We show that the architecture and algorithms are biologically plausible. The large scale architecture of the system matches the large scale organization of the cortex and the micro-circuits derived from the local computations match the anatomical data on cortical circuits. The system exhibits invariance across a wide variety of transformations and is robust in the presence of noise. Moreover, the model also offers alternative explanations for various known cortical phenomena.
Sure, sort of like how the subsequent licensing of SpaceShipOne to Richard Branson was worth much more than the X Prize itself. If anything, winning this contest will be worth more for the publicity than the actual money.
I submitted this story a couple of times yesterday, but it sadly wasn't accepted. Maybe it was too long or had too many links? In any case, here's a copy, which has a little additional info:
MSNBC, Space.com, and Wired report that NASA, in collaboration with the non-profit Spaceward Foundation, has announced its first two Centennial Challenges. The Centennial Challenges, inspired by the Ansari X Prize and DARPA Grand Challenge, are prize contests seeking to stimulate private industry development of technologies relevant to space exploration. One contest is the Tether Challenge, for building the sort of super-strong tether needed to make a space elevator feasible. The other is the Beam Power Challenge, for creating a wirelessly-powered ribbon-climbing robot capable of lifting as large a payload as possible within a limited timeframe. The initial set of challenges in 2005 will award $50K to the winners of each contest. A second set of challenges in 2006 will award first, second, and third place prizes worth $100K, $40K, and $10K. It's hoped that these contests will further space elevator technology and help eliminate the 'giggle factor' surrounding them. Additional contests will be announced in the coming weeks, although Congress currently restricts NASA from awarding prizes of more than $250K; the agency is lobbying to try to get this limit raised to $40 million for future prizes.
With the exception of Murray, are any of the old kooks still active? The only other one I can think of off-hand is Gene Ray (the Time Cube guy).
Just think about the fact that you can easily recognize 2 random objects if you are shown them for as little as a second. In this second, there is only enough time for about 100 of your neurons firing.
I suspect you may have misinterpreted whatever you read that said this. This is actually often cited as evidence in favor of massive parallelization. It doesn't indicate that "100 of your neurons" had to fire in this time, but that a 100-step sequence of neurons (with who-knows-how-many neurons involved in each step) fired in that time frame. Computing complex operations in so few time steps requires oodles of parallelization.
As the submission noted, this work will be building on what Hawkins wrote about in his recent book, On Intelligence. The companion web site for the book is here:
...
There are also a some reviews of the book:
http://blogger.iftf.org/Future/000605.html
http://www.computer.org/computer/homepage/0105/ran dom/index.htm
(By Bob Colwell, who was Intel's chief IA32 architect)
http://www.techcentralstation.com/112204B.html
http://www.corante.com/brainwaves/archives/026649. html
A quote from his book:
The agenda for this book is ambitious. It describes a comprehensive theory of how the brain works. It describes what intelligence is and how your brain creates it. The theory I present is not a completely new one. Many of the individual ideas you are about to read have existed in some form or another before, but not together in a coherent fashion. This should be expected. It is said that "new ideas" are often old ideas repackaged and reinterpreted. That certainly applies to the theory proposed here, but packaging and interpretation can make a world of difference, the difference between a mass of details and a satisfying theory. I hope it strikes you the way it does many people. A typical reaction I hear is, "It makes sense. I wouldn't have thought of intelligence this way, but now that you describe it to me I can see how it all fits together." With this knowledge most people start to see themselves a little differently. You start to observe your own behavior saying, "I understand what just happened in my head." Hopefully when you have finished this book, you will have new insight into why you think what you think and why you behave the way you behave. I also hope that some readers will be inspired to focus their careers on building intelligent machines based on the principles outlined in these pages.
Weren't neural networks supposed to lead to intelligent machines?
Of course the brain is made from a network of neurons, but without first understanding what the brain does, simple neural networks will be no more successful at creating intelligent machines than computer programs have been.
Why has it been so hard to figure out how the brain works?
Most scientists say that because the brain is so complicated, it will take a very long time for us to understand it. I disagree. Complexity is a symptom of confusion, not a cause. Instead, I argue we have a few intuitive but incorrect assumptions that mislead us. The biggest mistake is the belief that intelligence is defined by intelligent behavior.
What is intelligence if it isn't defined by behavior?
The brain uses vast amounts of memory to create a model of the world. Everything you know and have learned is stored in this model. The brain uses this memory-based model to make continuous predictions of future events. It is the ability to make predictions about the future that is the crux of intelligence. I will describe the brain's predictive ability in depth; it is the core idea in the book.
How does the brain work?
The seat of intelligence is the neocortex. Even though it has a great number of abilities and powerful flexibility, the neocortex is surprisingly regular in its structural details. The different parts of the neocortex, whether they are responsible for vision, hearing, touch, or language, all work on the same principles. The key to understanding the neocortex is understanding these common principles and, in particular, its hierarchical structure. We will examine the neocortex in sufficient detail to show how its structure captures the structure of the world. This will b
Yeah, I'm quite surprised that the editors managed to get rid of all the links Mentifex undoubtedly made to his AI4U project, or whatever it is.
For those unfamiliar with him, check out the The Arthur T. Murray/Mentifex FAQ. This guy is one of the kook legends.
From the FAQ:
1.2 Who is Arthur T. Murray and who or what is "Mentifex"?
Arthur T. Murray, a.k.a. Mentifex, is a notorious kook who makes heavy use of the Internet to promote his theory of artificial intelligence (AI). His writing is characterized by illeism, name-dropping, frequent use of foreign expressions, crude ASCII diagrams, and what has been termed "obfuscatory technobabble".
Murray is the author of software which he claims has produced an "artificial mind" and has "solved AI". He has also produced a vanity-published book which he touts as a textbook for teaching AI.
1.3 What are Arthur T. Murray's AI credentials?
None of which to speak.
Murray claims to have received a Bachelor's degree in Greek and Latin from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1968 [24]. He has no formal training in computer science, cognitive science, neuroscience, linguistics, nor any other field of study even tangentially related to AI or cognition. He works as a night auditor at a small Seattle hotel [3, p. 25] and is not affiliated with any university or recognized research institution; he therefore styles himself an "independent scholar". Murray claims that his knowledge of AI comes from reading science fiction novels [39].
1.4 What does Arthur T. Murray do?
Murray is notorious for posting thousands of messages to Usenet promoting his AI software, book, websites, and theory. Most of these messages are massively cross-posted to off-topic newsgroups. Murray takes the mere mention of anything vaguely AI-related as an invitation to post a follow-up directing readers to his own work (e. g., [45]). He claims that people are "crying out" for repetition of his message [46].
Murray also heavily promotes himself on public forums on the web. Message boards, private guestbooks, and collaborative encyclopedias are all considered fair game for the showcasing of Murray's ideas. Murray terms this activity "meme insertion"; most everyone else considers it to be spamming.
Before he had regular access to the Internet, Murray used the US postal system to spread his ideas by mass-mailing prominent AI researchers, computing authors, and sometimes even entire university departments. He boasts that he mailed seven thousand letters in 1989 alone [14].
Murray has also been known to cause disruptions in person. In one notable example, he picketed the 2001 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence [34, 35].
A few months ago he was also at a Planetary Society event, on the eve of the Huygens landing. I have a bowler hat which I collect signatures in, and I got him to sign mine! He remarked that he has a bowler hat as well.
That brought the list of signatures in my hat to the following (in order of signing):
Kevin Mitnick (at a CMU talk; almost got Stephen Wozniak as well right after, but had given the pen to someone else)
Neal Stephenson (also at a CMU talk)
Brian Binnie (X Prize pilot, at Caltech talk)
John Rhys-Davies (also at Planetary Society event)
Bill Nye the Science Guy
My mission is to have the geekiest hat on the planet.
One of the things I really like about PLoS (Public Library of Science) is that they don't just make their articles free to access, they actually release them all under the Creative Commons license. You can do pretty much anything you want with released content, including derivative works and commercial use, so long as you give the original author credit.
Hopefully the new repository that the Wellcome Trust is setting up will use something similar.
If you'd like, I'd be more than happy to try looking at Caltech's online archives to see if the articles are there. If it isn't already online I can also try getting a scan of them, although that might take a little longer.
If you don't want to post the article info here, feel free to email it to neuronexmachina, at gmail dot com.
Mod parent up!
I mean seriously, I disagree with it but that doesn't stop it from being insightful. This modding down of posts because you disagree with them is getting silly.
I think my favorite of the links was the Doom 3 Voodoo 2 screenshots. They impressed and horrified me.
Things that every home needs I feel really should be government run, because companies are stupid.
And politicians are bastions of wisdom and goodness, of course.
There's a News@Nature.com about Wikipedia, which includes an interview with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. For those who aren't familiar with it, Nature is pretty much the most widely-read scholarly research journal out there.
Brain (PET) responses to vaginal-cervical self-stimulation in women with complete spinal cord injury: preliminary findings.
Whipple B, Komisaruk BR.
College of Nursing, Department of Psychology, Rutgers, State University of New Jersey, Newark, New Jersey, USA.
Our recent research provides evidence that women with complete spinal cord injury (SCI) at the midthoracic level show perceptual responses to vaginal and/or cervical self-stimulation (for example, pain suppression and sexual response, including orgasm). On the basis of studies in laboratory rats, we hypothesized that the vagus nerves provide a sensory pathway from the vagina, cervix, and uterus directly to the brain in women. To test this hypothesis, we performed a PET-MRI study on two women with complete SCI and 1 woman with no injuries. Whereas control foot stimulation of the women with SCI did not activate the somatosensory thalamus, cervical self-stimulation increased activity in the region of the nucleus of the solitary tract, which is the brainstem nucleus to which the vagus nerves project. These preliminary findings suggest that the vagus nerves can convey genital sensory input directly to the brain in women, completely bypassing SCI at any level.
Last year there was an ABC News article about the "Orgasmatron," where a researcher accidentally discovered that electrode stimulation of the sacral nerve caused women to instantaneously orgasm. From the article:
This google scholar search turns up a surprising number of results:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?&q=brain+orgasm
Here's a link to the actual research paper (and abstract) describing the work:
Rizzuto, DS, Mamelak, AN, Sutherling, WW, Fineman, I and Andersen, RA (2005) Spatial selectivity in human ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. In press at Nature Neuroscience.
The functional organization of lateral prefrontal cortex is not well understood, and there is debate as to whether the dorsal and ventral aspects mediate distinct spatial and non-spatial functions, respectively. We show for the first time that recordings from human ventrolateral prefrontal cortex show spatial selectivity, supporting the idea that ventrolateral prefrontal cortex is involved in spatial processing. Our results also indicate that prefrontal cortex may be a source of control signals for neuroprosthetic applications.
For an overview of the neural prosthetics work in Richard Andersen's lab at Caltech, this presentation is handy.
PLoS Biology had a very neat article on using fMRI in courtrooms last year, fMRI Beyond the Clinic: Will It Ever Be Ready for Prime Time?. The first couple of paragraphs:
Functional magnetic resonance imaging--fMRI--opens a window onto the brain at work. By tracking changes in cerebral blood flow as a subject performs a mental task, fMRI shows which brain regions "light up" when making a movement, thinking of a loved one, or telling a lie. Its ability to reveal function, not merely structure, distinguishes fMRI from static neuroimaging techniques such as CT scanning, and its capacity to highlight the neural substrates of decisions, emotions, and deceptions has propelled fMRI into the popular consciousness. Discussions of the future of fMRI have conjured visions of mind-reading devices used everywhere from the front door at the airport terminal to the back room of the corporate personnel office. At least one "neuromarketing" research firm is already trying to use fMRI to probe what consumers "really" think about their clients' products.
But will fMRI's utility in the real world ever match the power we currently imagine for it? Is fMRI likely to leave the clinic for widespread use in the courtroom or the boardroom? Are there neuroethical nightmares just around the corner? Or are all these vivid specters really just idle speculations that will never come to pass?
If we could find the mechanical outcome of what we think when we listen to music.
There was actually Nature paper a few days ago about that very topic:
Musical imagery: Sound of silence activates auditory cortex
Auditory imagery occurs when one mentally rehearses telephone numbers or has a song 'on the brain' -- it is the subjective experience of hearing in the absence of auditory stimulation, and is useful for investigating aspects of human cognition1. Here we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify and characterize the neural substrates that support unprompted auditory imagery and find that auditory and visual imagery seem to obey similar basic neural principles.
Here's a popular press article.
"We played music in the scanner (FMRI) and then we hit a virtual "mute' button," said David Kraemer, a graduate student in Dartmouth's Psychological and Brain Sciences Department and author of the study, published recently in the journal Nature.
With familiar songs, "we found that people couldn't help continuing the song in their heads, and when they did this, the auditory cortex remained active even though the music had stopped," Kraemer said.
The researchers said the findings extend previous research that showed sensory-specific memories are stored in the brain regions that first experienced those events.
"It's fascinating that although the ear isn't actually hearing the song, the brain is perceptually hearing it," said co-author William Kelley, assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences.
Anarcho-capitalists would argue that the combination of anarchism and capitalism is the most powerful possible medium for innovation. ;)