Meeting of the Mind

Analysis of “Facebook revolutions”

Brad Gulliford — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:16:10 +0000

Somewhat off-topic, but lacking anywhere else to post it:

User-generated discontent: dissent and social media: presentation by Jack Bratich, faculty of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. Analysis of “Facebook revolutions” in terms of sovereign power vs. people power, and how social media are tools.

Training causes brain restructuring

Brad Gulliford — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:59:08 +0000

Article in Slashdot (“news for nerds, stuff that matters”): You really are what you know: “There has been research for some time showing that London cab driver brains differ from other people’s, with considerable enlargement of those areas dealing with spacial relationships and navigation. Follow-up work showed it wasn’t simply a product of driving a lot (PDF). However, up until now it has been disputed as to whether the brain structure led people to become London cabbies or whether the brain structure changed as a result of their intensive training (which requires rote memorization of essentially the entire street map of one of the largest and least-organized cities in the world). Well, this latest study answers that. MRI scans before and after the training show that the regions of the brain substantially grow as a result of the training, and they’re quite normal beforehand. The practical upshot of this research is that — even for adult brains, which aren’t supposed to change much — what you learn structurally changes your brain. Significantly.”

The first comment is worth following the link to the main article.

Electronic mimicking of plasticity

Brad Gulliford — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 19:41:45 +0000

MIT researchers, as reported through CogNet, have devised a multi-transistor chip that re-creates neural activity through opening and closing of ion channels creating a gradient like a neuronal action potential. Action potentials have been simulated before, but this artificial creation of one is the key discovery. It should bring a whole new dimension to devices based on neural nets. The next step probably is scaling up to many multiples of the one synapse. Higher cognition is based on thousands of such connections, and large numbers of these silicon emulations would be necessary to address most cognitive neuroscience questions relevant to higher endeavors.

Connecting research questions to Ten Things That Humanities Researchers Want

Brad Gulliford — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 17:26:53 +0000

The summer meet-up of the New England Chapter of ASIS&T (NEASIST) discussed Research Information Network, “Reinventing research? Information practices in the humanities,” summarized as “10 things that humanities researchers want.” Beyond “make it easy to use” (the perpetual demand for computers to read minds and divine complex concepts from simple short inputs), there is an expressed desire for ways to visualize collections: “exploring and conceptualising a collection through features such as maps, timelines and word lists.” This would seem to point to non-verbal information retrieval interfaces, which are still in the primitive stages after all these years.

Online gamers crack AIDS enzyme puzzle

Brad Gulliford — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 14:01:35 +0000

Publicized in Plugged In, a division of games.yahoo.com, (original paper in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology [ Crystal structure of a monomeric retroviral protease solved by protein folding game players by F. Khatib et al., 18 Sep. 2011 doi:10.1038/nsmb.2119 ]), the work is noteworthy for collaboration on several levels: biochemists (at the University of Washington) reaching outside not only their academic discipline (not uncommon) but outside scholarship to the gamer community; and the inherently cooperative nature of (most) gaming.

Brain scan to text

Brad Gulliford — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 17:54:25 +0000

Thanks to “Matching Images of Brain Activity with Complex thought,” a post in Science debate where we discuss science, which points to a PDF in Frontiers in human neuroscience, we have a report of Princeton psychology researchers generating one-word text from fMRIs of subjects reading words representing concrete items (e.g., “door,” “window,” “apartment.”) Given the predilection of the developing brain for single-word concrete expressions, this would seem an appropriate occasion in developing research. Given the predilection of library patrons for single-word searches, perhaps a neuropsychological library application is not that far off.

Reconstructing images from brain scans of the viewer is approached with a “coding” model at the Gallant Lab at the University of California at Berkeley (the “Research” section is a good “about” page, but their publications are of course more detailed.) Instead of trying to extend the interpretation process from brain scan to text, these researchers show subjects a movie clip, and then see what sense they can make of the fMRI scan. This seems more “honest” about the capabilities of the technology than trying to discern words from the process of subjects’ reading. Their Web site points out that fMRI measures hemodynamic, not neural, activity, so detailed reading seems unlikely. There is a YouTube video of an example of the lab’s work.

As we buzz around in the hive mind, do we care about whose stuff is whose?

Brad Gulliford — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 16:20:44 +0000

A digital humanist is drawn *towards* increased citation behavior in online collaboration activities (Redefining collaboration through citation in HASTAC (which is worth a look in its own right), posted 12 April 2011). That might be against a new trend of just throwing oneself (up to a point) into the cloud; certainly stopping to trace attribution of every thought (title searching for intellectual property) would be burdensome.

Breakthrough myth crumbles away, revealing Blue Horizons

Brad Gulliford — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 16:53:39 +0000

Col. Ted Hailes (U.S. Air Force, retired), at a presentation to the Arlington Technology Association [slides] on the Air Force Blue Horizons program, made a powerful statement: the greatest impact on technological progress comes from the synergy of underlying disciplines, not prioritizing and defunding particular technologies. In other words, advances are made by a lot of agents working together (intentionally or unintentionally), not attention-grabbing revolutionary Next Big Things. Those do occur occasionally, but whether innovation is disruptive or not may depend on the scope of the analysis.

This is echoed in “Clive Thompson on The Breakthrough Myth,” an essay in the August 2001 Wired by Clive Thompson (who blogs at Collision Detection). He credits Bill Buxton, “a pioneer in computer graphics who is now a principal researcher at Microsoft, with the “long nose theory” of innovation: “Big ideas poke their noses into the world very slowly, easing gradually into view.” Essentially, ideas that are good but insignificant can catch on, often in other domains, after a period of time. Thus they have “surprising obviousness.” In other words, upon the arrival of a novel idea or product, the evidence has been there. To predict the future, Buxton recommends “prospecting and mining” fields of endeavor. That word, “mining,” immediately suggests data mining, a technology only starting to be exploited–we see only the tip of the nose, so far.

The Blue Horizons model bears some resemblance to the decentralized structure of human brain processing: there is some degree of localization, but scans of cognition representing the greatest human achievement show almost the whole cortex lighting up–a large neural network, which actually has high efficiency.

Wikify the Web (commercialized already)

Brad Gulliford — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 16:50:33 +0000

Raising the question of how well the “marketplace of ideas” works when it follows actual commercialism, the concept of enhancing context (a valuable entity in the world of information, as pointed out by Susan Dumais as keynote speaker at the 2006 annual meeing of ASIST), there is now a call to wikify the Web, and a commercial startup, iGlue, to do just that. It’s too new to have much to report yet.

The filter bubble: Collective building of knowledge meets “it depends on the crowd”

Brad Gulliford — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 16:17:01 +0000

Of course CBOK is influenced by the collective, and there have been concerns about what “search engines” doing a lot more than impartial retrieval. There is now a new wave of raising the issue, under the name of “the filter bubble“.

There is a new book (entitled The Filter Bubble) out about it.

A wise possibly-related comment about searching appeared on Slashdot: “The lesson is that the existence of information and the ease with which it may be looked up are two different things. Dirt is just too easy to find, for the same reasons that gold is too hard: search engines’ evaluation of “importance” or “relevance” doesn’t always match any sane human’s.”