Well, this is a nice letter and all, but I have a feeling the only people with the patience to read through the whole thing are already convinced of its content...
The FFA, if I remember the work of Gauthier, Tarr, and others correctly, is better thought of as the site of visual shape knowledge. Of course, faces are one class of shapes for which we are all experts, and that is why the FFA activates when normal college sophmores participate in face recognition experiments. But you also get FFA activation if you train people to be experts on novel shape classes (e.g., "greebles").
Yep, but it's still an open question I think. For example, in a recent Nature Neuroscience article Grill-Spector Knouf & Kanwisher found FFA to be face specific, even in car-experts looking at cars.
Grill-Spector, K., Knouf, N., Kanwisher, N. (2004). The fusiform face area subserves face perception, not generic within-category identification. Nature Neuroscience, 7, pp. 555-562.
Actually, more relevant than Capgras is prosopagnosia, the selective inability to recognize faces. Capgras seems to result from a kind of emotional disconnection from the recognition - it looks like my mother by doesn't feel like looking at her. Prosopagnosics really cannot tell faces apart.
Your critique is too strong. It's true that some have found activations in the "fusiform face area" in reponse to other kinds of visual expertise, but that doesn't mean it isn't involved in face perception. There's good evidence that it plays a role in determining facial identity. I've seen my own fusiform lighting up in reponse to faces but not other objects.
The results in the story article are not new really, although it is nice to have it all together in one experiment.
Actually, there are 128 electrode arrays, which are used quite frequently in cognitive neuroscience research. (see here for example.) However, they take longer to put on (you have to make sure each electrode makes a good connection with the scalp) and the increased spatial resolution (which is minimal since signal is quite smoothed by going through the skull) is not necessary for an application like this one.
This is not new, by the way. There were some studies done back in the early 90s using only two electrodes where people learned to move a cursor around on a screen. Just one on the left hemisphere and one on the right, and you hook it up so that different relationships between the activity at the two sights controls the different parameters of movement on the screen.
See Wolpaw, JR., McFarland DJ, Neat GW, Forneris CA. An EEG-based brain-computer interface for cursor control. Electroencephalogr Clin Neurophysiol. 1991 Mar;78(3):252-9
So this is a little bit about what the artists believe the effect of filesharing has been on them, but I'm sure it's hard for anyone to really know. This doesn't tell us too much about what the actual effect of filesharing is on the artist. So many factors change over time how could you attribute your increased/decreased success to any one factor confidently?
The issue isn't the squalor they live in, for some of those people they don't see it as squalor. Many live as those who lived before them and it is by OUR standards that their living standards are not acceptable
Your comment may apply to many rural villages where a simple yet poor life has continued for generations. However, there is also real squalor as well. Overpopulation combined with poor sanitation and rampant disease plague the sprawling slums of bombay, calcutta, etc. About 150 million people live in slums in India, and it hasn't always been like this. Bombay alone has over 4 million,/a>. That's why organizations like this one exist.
There are other connections besides the corpus callosum and anterior commisure in a normal brain. There is also the hippocampal commissure, as well as the massa intermedia connecting the thalami (although not everybody has this). But it's important to keep in mind that while the corpus callosum and anterior commissure connect the cerebral cortex on both sides, subcortically the brain is unified, and information can transfer down there, say at the level of the midbrain. Also, people born with callosal agenesis are not all that bad at transfering information from one hemisphere to another (compared with someone who has their CC cut later in life) suggesting they use these other channels more efficiently.
We also cannot conclude that there is NOT a causal relationship. Futhermore, although it seems absurd on the surface, we should be open to the possibility that there is some interesting relationship here. For example, the mood in Washington may be related to who is going to win the election, which affects the general crowd noise in the stadium, which affects the play on the field, etc....
If you didn't catch this from the nuclear elephant article, he's got a reward pot going for anyone who can provide a hack to enable OBEX on the phone. I think this is a great idea... I would love to see Verizon lose control of this thing. I almost bought one of these things just to be able to sync my address book with bluetooth, and at the last minute my intuition (or experience with Verizon/Moto) saved me.
Jay Moore - Marketing Director for GarageGames
Jay's wildly diverse background includes serving as Marketing Director for a computer magazine publishing company, Sales and Marketing Director for a K-12 educational software distributor, and President of a small advertising design firm. Jay started his gaming career with "The Even More Incredible Machine!" when he took the game into the classroom. Jay worked to bring all the Sierra educational games into the educational channel. Then worked with Dynamix in 1997 to successfully launch category-creator "Driver's Education." Jay joined GarageGames in July of this year. He has a BS is Biblical Studies and lives in Eugene, Oregon.
I am one of the researchers involved in this fMRI project.
I think one thing you've got to do is distinguish between science and science journalism. The news coverage of this project has been quite extensive and it's been really interesting to see what makes the news, how science is interpreted by the public, etc.
The goal of this project is not to explain why some people are democrats or republicans, conservative or liberal, etc. It is to understand a little bit about the neural processes that underlie certain kinds of emotional and cognitive processes that happen when people think about politics. If the NYT article gives the impression that we are providing one of these circular explanations for why people think the way they do, it is the failure of the journalist, not of the science.
Perhaps now that the scammers have crossed this line they will get the attention of law enforcement. Sending a death threat is illegal, is it not? I realize that scamming people out of money is also illegal, but in this case it seems like the initial email is already crossing the line...
Doesn't look like this is going to be a reality any time soon:
Texas Instruments expects to have samples of these new chips available in the second half of next year. The first generation of products using Texas Instruments' chips will likely be introduced sometime in 2006.
It's probably something like this. A friend of mine has one. Apparently it's not much use for understanding your dog, but the bark recording features can be useful for learning about your dog's vocal habits while you're away.
So what?
Mac OS X can have trojans. Mac OS X can have viruses. Mac OS X can have security issues.
Yes, of course we all know that OS X can have viruses, the point is that until now it basically hasn't had any. At least nothing that I've heard of or had to worry about. Now I will have to think twice about opening random mp3 files which somehow appear on my hard drive (?).
Actually I spent some time in Bhutan and I can testify to the happiness of the people there. They live simply, peacefully, and spiritually since they have an intact mythology. Although as things become more westernized (they just got TV a few years ago) things will get more complicated.
I agree. Contrast the US government's concerns with that of Bhutan, where the king has said "gross national happiness is more important than gross national product" because "happiness takes precedence over economic prosperity in our national development process."
The practical limitation with this kind of thing is that electrical activity recorded at the scalp is noisy and diffuse. If you could implant an electrode, or a chip with wireless transmitter then you can use the actual neural signals themselves to control something external. This has been done in monkeys.
But at this point I bet most people are not going to want one of these implanted in their parietal lobe just to play a video game.
On the other hand, you can do a lot better with EEG than these guys have done. It's not all that impressive, considering moderate success with this thing has been acheived with neurofeedback without having people look at a visual stimulus. For example, you can train people to move a cursor around a screen by controlling the relative amount of alpha activity over each hemisphere (or something like that, I can't remember the details.) It seems to me like these guys are just eliciting visual cortex activity at a particular frequency with these checkerboards and then reading it off with their electrodes.
Sure there is. The following is from "synopsis" at www.irobotmovie.com:
Will Smith stars in this action thriller suggested by the classic short story collection by Isaac Asimov, and brought to the big screen by dynamic and visionary director Alex Proyas ("Dark City," "The Crow"). In the year 2035, robots are an everyday household item, and everyone trusts them, except one, slightly paranoid detective (Smith) investigating what he alone believes is a crime perpetrated by a robot. The case leads him to discover a far more frightening threat to the human race. "I, ROBOT" uses a spectacular, state-of-the-art visual effects technique to bring a world of robots to life.
IANAE (entomologist), but I have heard that one explanation is that the cidada is basically avoiding predators that have a 2 and 3 year life cycle. Emerging during prime years you would avoid meeting a predator that was ready to eat you every two or three years since the prime is not divisible...
First, they say that this won't actually affect our search results:
Yahoo said that although sites would be able to pay to be in the index, its computer system would still pick the most relevant site for each search, without regard to payment status."What our users care about is the relevancy of results, not whether the source paid to participate," said Tim Cadogan, a vice president in Yahoo's search unit.
And then later on:
Mr. Cadogan said that the purpose of the program was simply to offer Yahoo users more relevant information.
The study notes that the response rate was 32.8%, meaning that the vast majority of people who were called refused to participate in the survey. This is a potential source of bias in the sample. I can certainly see those who are more eager about their internet use being more likely to participate in the study to brag about their contributions to the internet. The numbers do seem kind of high to me.
There's nothing wrong with "auto-mind-control"; in fact it may be one of the gems of evolution. We all practice self-mind-control all day long, directing our thoughts to what it most important, monitoring our progress and allocating mental resources. We also do things like drink caffeine to self-regulate our arousal and some practice meditation to affect their mental functioning. I certainly use music to either help me focus on my work when its time to do that or to help me forget it when its time for that. Thank goodness for the prefrontal cortex!
Slashdot Mirror
Well, this is a nice letter and all, but I have a feeling the only people with the patience to read through the whole thing are already convinced of its content...
The FFA, if I remember the work of Gauthier, Tarr, and others correctly, is better thought of as the site of visual shape knowledge. Of course, faces are one class of shapes for which we are all experts, and that is why the FFA activates when normal college sophmores participate in face recognition experiments. But you also get FFA activation if you train people to be experts on novel shape classes (e.g., "greebles").
Yep, but it's still an open question I think. For example, in a recent Nature Neuroscience article Grill-Spector Knouf & Kanwisher found FFA to be face specific, even in car-experts looking at cars.
Grill-Spector, K., Knouf, N., Kanwisher, N. (2004). The fusiform face area subserves face perception, not generic within-category identification. Nature Neuroscience, 7, pp. 555-562.
Actually, more relevant than Capgras is prosopagnosia, the selective inability to recognize faces. Capgras seems to result from a kind of emotional disconnection from the recognition - it looks like my mother by doesn't feel like looking at her. Prosopagnosics really cannot tell faces apart.
I also do fMRI.
Your critique is too strong. It's true that some have found activations in the "fusiform face area" in reponse to other kinds of visual expertise, but that doesn't mean it isn't involved in face perception. There's good evidence that it plays a role in determining facial identity. I've seen my own fusiform lighting up in reponse to faces but not other objects.
The results in the story article are not new really, although it is nice to have it all together in one experiment.
Actually, there are 128 electrode arrays, which are used quite frequently in cognitive neuroscience research. (see here for example.) However, they take longer to put on (you have to make sure each electrode makes a good connection with the scalp) and the increased spatial resolution (which is minimal since signal is quite smoothed by going through the skull) is not necessary for an application like this one.
This is not new, by the way. There were some studies done back in the early 90s using only two electrodes where people learned to move a cursor around on a screen. Just one on the left hemisphere and one on the right, and you hook it up so that different relationships between the activity at the two sights controls the different parameters of movement on the screen.
See Wolpaw, JR., McFarland DJ, Neat GW, Forneris CA. An EEG-based brain-computer interface for cursor control. Electroencephalogr Clin Neurophysiol. 1991 Mar;78(3):252-9
So this is a little bit about what the artists believe the effect of filesharing has been on them, but I'm sure it's hard for anyone to really know. This doesn't tell us too much about what the actual effect of filesharing is on the artist. So many factors change over time how could you attribute your increased/decreased success to any one factor confidently?
The issue isn't the squalor they live in, for some of those people they don't see it as squalor. Many live as those who lived before them and it is by OUR standards that their living standards are not acceptable
Your comment may apply to many rural villages where a simple yet poor life has continued for generations. However, there is also real squalor as well. Overpopulation combined with poor sanitation and rampant disease plague the sprawling slums of bombay, calcutta, etc. About 150 million people live in slums in India, and it hasn't always been like this. Bombay alone has over 4 million,/a>. That's why organizations like this one exist.
There are other connections besides the corpus callosum and anterior commisure in a normal brain. There is also the hippocampal commissure, as well as the massa intermedia connecting the thalami (although not everybody has this). But it's important to keep in mind that while the corpus callosum and anterior commissure connect the cerebral cortex on both sides, subcortically the brain is unified, and information can transfer down there, say at the level of the midbrain. Also, people born with callosal agenesis are not all that bad at transfering information from one hemisphere to another (compared with someone who has their CC cut later in life) suggesting they use these other channels more efficiently.
We also cannot conclude that there is NOT a causal relationship. Futhermore, although it seems absurd on the surface, we should be open to the possibility that there is some interesting relationship here. For example, the mood in Washington may be related to who is going to win the election, which affects the general crowd noise in the stadium, which affects the play on the field, etc....
War of the War of the Worlds.
If you didn't catch this from the nuclear elephant article, he's got a reward pot going for anyone who can provide a hack to enable OBEX on the phone. I think this is a great idea... I would love to see Verizon lose control of this thing. I almost bought one of these things just to be able to sync my address book with bluetooth, and at the last minute my intuition (or experience with Verizon/Moto) saved me.
Actually, I think he did.
This is from an interview with Jay Moore.
Jay Moore - Marketing Director for GarageGames Jay's wildly diverse background includes serving as Marketing Director for a computer magazine publishing company, Sales and Marketing Director for a K-12 educational software distributor, and President of a small advertising design firm. Jay started his gaming career with "The Even More Incredible Machine!" when he took the game into the classroom. Jay worked to bring all the Sierra educational games into the educational channel. Then worked with Dynamix in 1997 to successfully launch category-creator "Driver's Education." Jay joined GarageGames in July of this year. He has a BS is Biblical Studies and lives in Eugene, Oregon.
I am one of the researchers involved in this fMRI project. I think one thing you've got to do is distinguish between science and science journalism. The news coverage of this project has been quite extensive and it's been really interesting to see what makes the news, how science is interpreted by the public, etc. The goal of this project is not to explain why some people are democrats or republicans, conservative or liberal, etc. It is to understand a little bit about the neural processes that underlie certain kinds of emotional and cognitive processes that happen when people think about politics. If the NYT article gives the impression that we are providing one of these circular explanations for why people think the way they do, it is the failure of the journalist, not of the science.
Perhaps now that the scammers have crossed this line they will get the attention of law enforcement. Sending a death threat is illegal, is it not? I realize that scamming people out of money is also illegal, but in this case it seems like the initial email is already crossing the line...
Doesn't look like this is going to be a reality any time soon:
Texas Instruments expects to have samples of these new chips available in the second half of next year.
The first generation of products using Texas Instruments' chips will likely be introduced sometime in 2006.
It's probably something like this. A friend of mine has one. Apparently it's not much use for understanding your dog, but the bark recording features can be useful for learning about your dog's vocal habits while you're away.
So what? Mac OS X can have trojans. Mac OS X can have viruses. Mac OS X can have security issues.
Yes, of course we all know that OS X can have viruses, the point is that until now it basically hasn't had any. At least nothing that I've heard of or had to worry about. Now I will have to think twice about opening random mp3 files which somehow appear on my hard drive (?).
Actually I spent some time in Bhutan and I can testify to the happiness of the people there. They live simply, peacefully, and spiritually since they have an intact mythology. Although as things become more westernized (they just got TV a few years ago) things will get more complicated.
I agree. Contrast the US government's concerns with that of Bhutan, where the king has said "gross national happiness is more important than gross national product" because "happiness takes precedence over economic prosperity in our national development process."
The practical limitation with this kind of thing is that electrical activity recorded at the scalp is noisy and diffuse. If you could implant an electrode, or a chip with wireless transmitter then you can use the actual neural signals themselves to control something external. This has been done in monkeys.
But at this point I bet most people are not going to want one of these implanted in their parietal lobe just to play a video game.
On the other hand, you can do a lot better with EEG than these guys have done. It's not all that impressive, considering moderate success with this thing has been acheived with neurofeedback without having people look at a visual stimulus. For example, you can train people to move a cursor around a screen by controlling the relative amount of alpha activity over each hemisphere (or something like that, I can't remember the details.) It seems to me like these guys are just eliciting visual cortex activity at a particular frequency with these checkerboards and then reading it off with their electrodes.
Sure there is. The following is from "synopsis" at www.irobotmovie.com:
Will Smith stars in this action thriller suggested by the classic short story collection by Isaac Asimov, and brought to the big screen by dynamic and visionary director Alex Proyas ("Dark City," "The Crow"). In the year 2035, robots are an everyday household item, and everyone trusts them, except one, slightly paranoid detective (Smith) investigating what he alone believes is a crime perpetrated by a robot. The case leads him to discover a far more frightening threat to the human race. "I, ROBOT" uses a spectacular, state-of-the-art visual effects technique to bring a world of robots to life.
IANAE (entomologist), but I have heard that one explanation is that the cidada is basically avoiding predators that have a 2 and 3 year life cycle. Emerging during prime years you would avoid meeting a predator that was ready to eat you every two or three years since the prime is not divisible...
First, they say that this won't actually affect our search results:
Yahoo said that although sites would be able to pay to be in the index, its computer system would still pick the most relevant site for each search, without regard to payment status."What our users care about is the relevancy of results, not whether the source paid to participate," said Tim Cadogan, a vice president in Yahoo's search unit.
And then later on:
Mr. Cadogan said that the purpose of the program was simply to offer Yahoo users more relevant information.
Huh?
The study notes that the response rate was 32.8%, meaning that the vast majority of people who were called refused to participate in the survey. This is a potential source of bias in the sample. I can certainly see those who are more eager about their internet use being more likely to participate in the study to brag about their contributions to the internet. The numbers do seem kind of high to me.
Auto-mind-control. That is friggin' sad.
There's nothing wrong with "auto-mind-control"; in fact it may be one of the gems of evolution. We all practice self-mind-control all day long, directing our thoughts to what it most important, monitoring our progress and allocating mental resources. We also do things like drink caffeine to self-regulate our arousal and some practice meditation to affect their mental functioning. I certainly use music to either help me focus on my work when its time to do that or to help me forget it when its time for that. Thank goodness for the prefrontal cortex!