Talk nerdy to me

Drooool...

"The.. theory of ADHD suggests that dopamne hypofunction changes basic learning mechanisms by producing a narrower time window for the association of preceding stimuli, behavior, and its consequences.. This results in altered reinforcement processes.. that are described by an abnormally steep and short delay-of-reinforcement gradient, and slower extinction of inefficient responses. Such deficits will result in a slower establishment of long integrated behavioral chains under proper stimulus control; partly due to slower chaining of behavioral elements and partly due to intrusion of inefficient and inadequate responses into the stream of behavior due to an inefficient extinction. The resulting behavior may be described as overactive, impulsive, inattentive, and varable." - Johansen et al, November 2007

Who said science can't be poetry? Not least because the above applies to almost everyone: the optimal steepness of one's delay-of-reinforcement gradient &co depends on one's dreams and desires, and most of us are far far from what we would consider optimum. etc.

In other news,

Aubrey de Gray's latest googletechtalk. Yes, watching this 1hr lecture requires a strong interest either in mitochondria or defeating aging, but if you've got both it's well worth it. Slow in the middle but there's a real kicker towards the end. He's made more of these Google talks, including one on cancer.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announces the launch of a transparent, open-source search engine to rival Google and Yahoo. Bout time.

Finally, in San Francisco escaped tiger eats man...

My Christmas present to you: two videos worth watching

Via Brandon's blog. Made by Johnny Chung Lee.


Via Adrian's blog. Based on the short story "They're made out of meat" by Terry Bisson. Offers a sobering perspective on George Dvorsky's potentially award-winning blog entry on the Fermi Paradox :)

Santa day

Woke up at 4am and couldn't go back to sleep. Gave up at 5 and got up to carry on working on the online stuff. Some scattered news and links: Sciencence Magazine's top 10 scientific breakthrough's of 2007, the year in technology, and very basic HTML guide. I normally get FrontPage to write my HTML but after installing the trial version of its younger sibling Microsoft Expression Web a few days ago FrontPage decided to die on me, and I'm too lazy or busy to actually learn Expression Web, and one of the ideas that kept me from going back to sleep just now was maybe there's an OpenOffice FrontPage clone? Installing OpenOffice now...

(1hr later)

Weell.. it's not FrontPage but I guess it's not bad. No shortcuts, no preview, no tabs and I have to close the HTML files before I can upload them, but it's still easier to use than Aptana and I managed a much needed itemization/simplification of the overview section. Time to make some more coffee and sort out this blog header. I wonder how Eminem celebrates Christmas.

(1hr later)

Hmm... the header looks ok in Windows but on the Mac the background colors don't match, not sure why. Anyway, enough of that. Word just joined the Office strike, hope the OpenOffice alternative is good.

Complex enough for a soul?

Dad is writing a presentation for an ethics council he's in. He came in just now and asked me if there's room in neuroscience for talking about something truly valuable and unique emerging at the global level in the human brain, at the top, where the many networks of the brain pool their power. I said neuroscientists speak of complexity; of neurons, each containing billions of years of information, forming networks that are irreducible to their individual components, such that the full force of the 10^11 neurons in any one human brain is something that the science of many years to come can only dream of modelling.

But the intuition I keep coming back to is that materialism - a genuine acceptance of a completely mechanical reality - leads to a world-view that is absurd. When, as Laura writes "the human mind is no longer a mystery", we loose our innosence, and if, to quote Vonnegut, "all persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental", then the situation is simply unacceptable, and the sacrifices we will make to escape the human condition will become ever more severe. Very few people take this challange seriously, Richard Dawkins and his fellow God-bashers certainly don't.

This post will seem more relevant when the Chinese start growing spare organs and experimenting on fetuses on a mass scale.

13:36

Reading the FAQ section on William Gibson's blog. No need to keep *email Gibson on my to-do list it seems, and I've heard he's stopped blogging. Things to keep in mind though: rent New Rose Hotel asap and buy his early collection of short stories. Look up Jack Womack.

So much free time

Stumbled onto Pete Mandik's blog and found this fantastic video, all courtesy of something called Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

Transhumanism

I've always avoided transhumanism because it's so mycket snack och lite verkstad as we say here on the north pole, pretentious basically, but on recomendation from my supervisor I joined the BetterHumans network to advertise the iPlant. Was surprised to find that wikiing betterhumans took me to an entry that was almost exclusively on George Dvorsky, whose blog Sentient Developments I'd been planning to start reading anyway. Encouraged I started browsing the network.. a decent news section (incl an article on human genetic variation), articles, videos, blogs, and a forum. In the Mind section of the Improve Yourself forum I find myself writing thusly:

Here's a brain implant that will let you program yourself:

Let's define an iPlant as eight arrays of stimulating electrodes that give their user control over the release of dopamine and serotonin in his or her brain (specifically, by regulating electrical activity in the VTA, SNc, dorsal and medial raphe nuclei). As you may know, dopamine determines what we consider important and rewarding, and thus what we feel motivated to do, whereas serotonin has a strong influence on our mood and our ability to re-evaluate.

The idea isn't all that far-fetched - deep brain stimulation has been routine treatment for Parkinson’s disease, essential tremor and dystonia for many years now and modifications of the technique for treating epilepsy, cluster headaches, Tourette’s syndrome, minimally conscious states, obsessive compulsive disorder and depression are currently in clinical trials (Kringelbach et al, 2007; Perlmutter & Mink, 2006). Rats with electrodes stimulating their dopaminergic neurons can be programmed to exercise heavily for hours, simply by giving them pulses of dopamine ("reward") whenever they run on a treadmill (Burgess et al, 1991) or lift weights (Garner et al, 1991). Hundreds of papers on this technique have been published and you may have read that DARPA is using it to remote-control rats (Talwar, 2002).

In humans, the technique could be used to treat, say, morbid obesity (by using trainers with sensors in the soles that reward their user with a pulse of dopamine for every step during running), but the possibilities are endless. Learning programs could be designed, in which users are rewarded for every correct answer on a test, thus becoming motivated to carry on learning. The iPlant could be used as a more dynamic replacement for Ritalin and antidepressants, which simply increase concentrations of dopamine and serotonin in the brain. Distributed research programs could be formulated, in which scientifically unskilled volunteers can contribute to critical research problems like cancer, HIV, renewable energy and SENS, by using their iPlants to motivate themselves to learn and perform the physical and mental operations of scientific research protocols.

There’s a lot more information about all this on http://www.iPlant.eu, but I need more input, please let me know what you think.

Hmm... ah well, let's see if anyone responds. Now for going to what is agruably the best Korean restaurant in town.

Edit: Excellent! Got a decent-sized email within 10 minutes of posting :)

Winter

Sweden in December. Red and pink twilight from 2 to 5. Frost and cold. High-speed internet. Getting hold of a beer requires some actual calculation.

Today's online gems: One Laptop Per Child NEWS site, How To Get Into Grad School article (poor but probably useful), TechnologyReview's SENS competition leaves us none the wiser, The US federal trade commision approves the heavily cricitizised Google/DoubleClick deal, hope it goes well.

Finally, via gapingvoid I came across this blog entry on midlife crisis and the death of dreams. I don't know that we need to give in like that but it's a good entry.

Links and global warming

EPIC 2014 (8 min clip, every blogger needs to see this), Richard Feynman playing bongo drums (youtube clip), Are we training too many scientists? (article), NIH neuroscience webcasts, Phidgets, Inc. (lego for your USB port:), Future Scanner, Bill Gates & Steve Jobs interview (first of 10 youtube clips, really good stuff)

Also, am I right in assuming that the reason the US still resists limits on greenhouse emission isn't just greed, but also a belief that it's a bad idea to halt economical/technological progress for the sake of reductions in greenhouse emissions that won't have much of an effect anyway. They want us to put our faith, money and effort into finding alternative, super-science solutions? Can we stop throwing shit on the US for a day or two and discuss what this option really means?

Did it

Robert Wright interviews Daniel Dennett
Robert Wright interviews John Maynard SmithPretty interesting googletechtalk on mobile phones on the developing world
Computers reading scientific articles (googletechtalk)

Godbitar

Excellent talk on gender and IT by Cornelia Brunner (googletech)
Somewhat interesting introduction to Second Life (googletech)
Luis von Ahn on how to use online games to harness human computing powers (e.g. image classification, common sense) (googletech)
Robert Wright interviews Andrew Newberg on the neuroscience of spiritual experience (NOT a god-basher:)
HUGO info (googletech)
Facebook dodges Google's OpenSocial bullet by going open source, nice move (cnet.com)
More Facebook

Last day of living on campus

TED talk about the physical universe by Murray Gell-Mann. Particularly interesting mention of life, mind and chemical bonds as emergent properties at the end: "you don't need something more to get something more".

Another TED talk, this time by Larry Brilliant about optimism and global warming. Includes a computer simulation of what rising sea-levels will do to Bangladesh even in a best-case scenario.

Saturday in bed

Three things on today's to-do list:

1. write coverletters for two jobs
2. write emails for labs re PhD research
3. write an entry on implant technology on iPlant.eu

But first, two fantastic talks I watched yesterday on googletechtalks: Ivan Krstic describing the One-Laptop-Per-Child laptop in great detail (amazing info so just ignore the accent) and Ben Goertzel talking about a canidae artificial intelligence his company is training - in second life (this time the accent's a treat, sounds almost like Philip Seymour Hoffman in Mission Impossible 3, but the volume is poor during the first 7½ minutes).

Another afternoon in the lab

The new NIE report on Iran. Why are there no proper comments by Iranian officials and what does Iran stand to loose by cooperating fully with the IAEA?

Great talk by Andrew Keen (blog) on why the UGC web revolution (web 2.0) is bad. I don't agree with him, mainly because I don't think that highly of traditional media or worry that it's being replaced by UGC, but it's a good argument presented in an excellent, very british way.

Different uses of the word iPlant: awesome 2006 graphic project by CorporateJesus.com, paper by Rich Jorgensen on 21st century plant biology, crappy 2005 sci-fiish article by Ion Zwitter

Finally, is it just me, or is Beowulf the most entertaining film of the year (tied with American Gangster of course)? Gotta love Crispin Glover and his golden mum.