New computer chip models how neurons communicate with each other at synapses.

Fabricated analog very-large-scale integration (VLSI) chip used to mimic neuronal processes involved in memory and learning. Image: Guy Rachmuth

For decades, scientists have dreamed of building computer systems that could replicate the human brain’s talent for learning new tasks.

MIT researchers have now taken a major step toward that goal by designing a computer chip that mimics how the brain’s neurons adapt in response to new information. This phenomenon, known as plasticity, is believed to underlie many brain functions, including learning and memory.

Read rest of article by Anne Turner here:

http://www.machineslikeus.com/news/mimicking-brain-silicon

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A milestone in description of complex processes - measuring the distance of processes - #stationarity #mathematics #stats

A milestone in the description of complex processes -- for example the ups and downs of share prices -- has been reached by mathematicians at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Researchers led by Prof. Dr. Holger Dette (stochastics) have developed a new method in spectral analysis, which allows a classical mathematical model assumption, so-called stationarity, to be precisely measured and determined for the first time. 

The approach also makes it possible to construct statistical tests that are considerably better and more accurate than previous methods. 

The researchers report on their results in the Journal of the American Statistical Association.

Read the full eScience article here:

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2011/10/28/measuring.distance.processes

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Answers could be in your #dreams when true inspiration can strike - #consciousness #creativity

When you fall asleep, you enter an alternative state of consciousness—a time when true inspiration can strike

From Scientific American Magazine By DeirdreBarrett 

 | October 20, 2011

Image: Photoillustration by Aaron Goodman

In Brief

1. The act of dreaming is simply thinking about our usual concerns in a different state of consciousness.
2. Dreams can be especially helpful for problems that require creativity or visualization to solve.
3. By thinking about specific dilemmas before bed, we can increase our chances that we will dream a solution.

As a young mathematician in the 1950s, Don Newman taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology alongside rising star and Nobel-laureate-to-be John Nash. Newman had been struggling to solve a particular math problem: “I was ... trying to get somewhere with it, and I couldn’t and I couldn’t and I couldn’t,” he recalled.

One night Newman dreamed that he was reflecting on the problem when Nash appeared. The sleeping Newman related the details of the conundrum to Nash and asked if he knew the solution. Nash explained how to solve it. Newman awoke realizing he had the answer! 

He spent the next several weeks turning the insight into a formal paper, which was then published in a mathematics journal.

Get the Rest of the Article

Read article from Scientific American:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=answers-in-your-dreams

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SpyPhone: Do not put smart phone near computer - #hackers use it to #spy - no more #privacy

It's a pattern that no doubt repeats itself daily in hundreds of millions of offices around the world: People sit down, turn on their computers, set their mobile phones on their desks and begin to work. 

What if a hacker could use that phone to track what the person was typing on the keyboard just inches away?

SpyPhone picks up keystrokes, vibrations & more...

Read the whole story:

http://www.machineslikeus.com/news/iphone-turns-spiphone

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Scientists trace #typhoid routes with genetic #biotech & #GPS

Google Earth typhoid maps reveal secrets of disease outbreaks

In the mid-nineteenth century, John Snow mapped cases of cholera in Soho, London, and traced the source of the outbreak to a contaminated water pump. Now, in a twenty-first century equivalent, scientists funded by the Wellcome Trust working in Kathmandu, Nepal, have combined the latest in gene sequencing technology and global positioning system (GPS) case localisation to map the spread of typhoid and trace its source.

Read the article:

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2011/10/16/google.earth.typhoid.maps.reveal.secrets.disease.outbreaks

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#Psychopathic killers: Computerized text analysis uncovers the #word #patterns of a #predator - #criminal #behaviour unmasked

Fascinating. Pay attention.

As words can be the soul's window, scientists are learning to peer through it: Computerized text analysis shows that psychopathic killers make identifiable word choices – beyond conscious control – when talking about their crimes.

This research could lead to new tools for diagnosis and treatment, and have implications law enforcement and social media.

The words of psychopathic murderers match their personalities, which reflect selfishness, detachment from their crimes and emotional flatness, says Jeff Hancock, Cornell professor of computing and information science, and colleagues at the University of British Columbia in the journal Legal and Criminological Psychology.

Hancock and his colleagues analyzed stories told by 14 psychopathic male murderers held in Canadian prisons and compared them with 38 convicted murderers who were not diagnosed as psychopathic. Each subject was asked to describe his crime in detail. Their stories were taped, transcribed and subjected to computer analysis.

Psychopaths used more conjunctions like "because," "since" or "so that," implying that the crime "had to be done" to obtain a particular goal. They used twice as many words relating to physical needs, such as food, sex or money, while non-psychopaths used more words about social needs, including family, religion and spirituality. Unveiling their predatory nature in their own description, the psychopaths often included details of what they had to eat on the day of their crime.

Past as prologue: Psychopaths were more likely to use the past tense, suggesting a detachment from their crimes, say the researchers. They tended to be less fluent in their speech, using more "ums" and "uhs." The exact reason for this is not clear, but the researchers speculate that the psychopath is trying harder to make a positive impression, needing to use more mental effort to frame the story.

"Previous work has looked at how psychopaths use language," Hancock said. "Our paper is the first to show that you can use automated tools to detect the distinct speech patterns of psychopaths." This can be valuable to clinical psychologists, he said, because the approach to treatment of psychopaths can be very different.

More information: "Hungry like the wolf: A word-pattern analysis of the language of psychopaths," Legal and Criminological Psychology (online Sept. 14, 2011)

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-10-psychopathic-killers-computerized-text-analysis.html

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Celebrating with @sierdo - 1st copies of our #book Quick Start Guide to Making Choices from the printer @MediaDok - #read ! #yam

Both versions of The Quick Start Guide to Making Choices - in English and in het Nederlands (Dutch) - in our hands this afternoon. Of course, they are the proofs, yet we are so excited. Dancing and drinking champagne! Thank you @sierdo ;oP

sent from Colby's iPhone

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Scary new #drugs #law passed in USA with #global impact on positive actions in other countries. #yam

The USA House Judiciary Committee passed a bill yesterday that would make it a federal crime for USA residents to discuss or plan activities on foreign soil that, if carried out in the USA, would violate the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). 

Even if the planned activities are legal - and further scientic reserach or government policy - in the countries where they're carried out, participants would be arrested and put in prison like convicts. 

USA will now legally impose their short-sighted moral & cultural preferences on rest of the world in this new drug law - making dangerous felons of planners, researchers, academics & others for any participation in advice. 

Where does the USA get funding to do this when it is beyond broke and so deep in debt - and has 6 million homeless children that require funding for health, education and welfare?

Read this article to understand the global impact of setting a law like this in place. 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/blackberry/p.html?id=998993 

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iSad. Steve Jobs leaves the world a much more inspired place. His Ted Talk: How to live before you die

The TED Talk: Steve Jobs - How to Live Before You Die by Steve Jobs, produced by Stanford University and available on TED.com http://goo.gl/y3m4

"Your time is limited so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary." ~ Steve Jobs Thank you, Steve Jobs.

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Wow Fascinating > Scientists Reconstruct #Brains Visions Into Digital Video In Historic Experiment

SCIENCE

Scientists Reconstruct Brains' Visions Into Digital Video In Historic Experiment

By Jesus Diaz

, Sep 22, 2011 9:40 PM

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UC Berkeley scientists have developed a system to capture visual activity in human brains and reconstruct it as digital video clips. Eventually, this process will allow you to record and reconstruct your own dreams on a computer screen.

I just can't believe this is happening for real, but according to Professor Jack Gallant—UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the research published today in the journal Current Biology—"this is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery. We are opening a window into the movies in our minds."

Indeed, it's mindblowing. I'm simultaneously excited and terrified. This is how it works:

They used three different subjects for the experiments—incidentally, they were part of the research team because it requires being inside a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging system for hours at a time. The subjects were exposed to two different groups of Hollywood movie trailers as the fMRI system recorded the brain's blood flow through their brains' visual cortex.

The readings were fed into a computer program in which they were divided into three-dimensional pixels units called voxels (volumetric pixels). This process effectively decodes the brain signals generated by moving pictures, connecting the shape and motion information from the movies to specific brain actions. As the sessions progressed, the computer learned more and more about how the visual activity presented on the screen corresponded to the brain activity.

An 18-million-second picture palette

After recording this information, another group of clips was used to reconstruct the videos shown to the subjects. The computer analyzed 18 million seconds of random YouTube video, building a database of potential brain activity for each clip. From all these videos, the software picked the one hundred clips that caused a brain activity more similar to the ones the subject watched, combining them into one final movie. Although the resulting video is low resolution and blurry, it clearly matched the actual clips watched by the subjects.

Think about those 18 million seconds of random videos as a painter's color palette. A painter sees a red rose in real life and tries to reproduce the color using the different kinds of reds available in his palette, combining them to match what he's seeing. The software is the painter and the 18 million seconds of random video is its color palette. It analyzes how the brain reacts to certain stimuli, compares it to the brain reactions to the 18-million-second palette, and picks what more closely matches those brain reactions. Then it combines the clips into a new one that duplicates what the subject was seeing. Notice that the 18 million seconds of motion video are not what the subject is seeing. They are random bits used just to compose the brain image.

Given a big enough database of video material and enough computing power, the system would be able to re-create any images in your brain.

In this other video you can see how this process worked in the three experimental targets. On the top left square you can see the movie the subjects were watching while they were in the fMRI machine. Right below you can see the movie "extracted" from their brain activity. It shows that this technique gives consistent results independent of what's being watched—or who's watching. The three lines of clips next to the left column show the random movies that the computer program used to reconstruct the visual information.

Right now, the resulting quality is not good, but the potential is enormous. Lead research author—and one of the lab test bunnies—Shinji Nishimoto thinks this is the first step to tap directly into what our brain sees and imagines:

Our natural visual experience is like watching a movie. In order for this technology to have wide applicability, we must understand how the brain processes these dynamic visual experiences.

The brain recorders of the future

Imagine that. Capturing your visual memories, your dreams, the wild ramblings of your imagination into a video that you and others can watch with your own eyes.

This is the first time in history that we have been able to decode brain activity and reconstruct motion pictures in a computer screen. The path that this research opens boggles the mind. It reminds me of Brainstorm, the cult movie in which a group of scientists lead by Christopher Walken develops a machine capable of recording the five senses of a human being and then play them back into the brain itself.

This new development brings us closer to that goal which, I have no doubt, will happen at one point. Given the exponential increase in computing power and our understanding of human biology, I think this will arrive sooner than most mortals expect. Perhaps one day you would be able to go to sleep wearing a flexible band labeled Sony Dreamcam around your skull. [UC Berkeley]

---

YOU CAN KEEP UP WITH JESUS DIAZ THE AUTHOR OF THIS POST, ON TWITTER OR FACEBOOK.

http://m.gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct-video-clips-from-brain-activity

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Elizabeth Warren tells USA biz why they should pay taxes - #social #responsibility

When we take and take and feel entitled, we have lost our purpose. We are then no longer contributing members of society.

If companies build their shareholder value based on community and government support and protection, don't you think they should do the socially responsible thing and pay taxes to share in the collective wellness of the country and its people? 

Elizabeth Warren captured the situation in a beautiful statement of facts and truth. 

The reason for Warren's newfound Internet stardom is simple. She was able to articulate -- in a few words -- what the Democratic Party has been unable to communicate for years:

"There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.

You built a factory out there? Good for you. 

But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. 

You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. 

But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along." 

Read the rest of the statement & the story: http://goo.gl/dLuxS

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#NASA #moon mission in final preparations for September launch > 9 months in #space !

NASA's Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission to study the moon is in final launch preparations for a scheduled Sept. 8 launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. 

GRAIL's twin spacecraft are tasked for a nine-month mission to explore Earth's nearest neighbor in unprecedented detail. They will determine the structure of the lunar interior from crust to core and advance our understanding of the thermal evolution of the moon.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110827191646.htm?#

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Climate cycles are driving wars, says study

(click to enlarge)

Courtesy Hsiang et al./Nature

Trevor Snapp

In the first study of its kind, researchers have linked a natural global climate cycle to periodic increases in warfare. The arrival of El Niño, which every three to seven years boosts temperatures and cuts rainfall, doubles the risk of civil wars across 90 affected tropical countries, and may help account for a fifth of worldwide conflicts during the past half-century, say the authors. The paper, written by an interdisciplinary team at Columbia University's Earth Institute, appears in the current issue of the leading scientific journal Nature.

In recent years, historians and climatologists have built evidence that past societies suffered and fell due in connection with heat or droughts that damaged agriculture and shook governments. This is the first study to make the case for such destabilization in the present day, using statistics to link global weather observations and well-documented outbreaks of violence. The study does not blame specific wars on El Niño, nor does it directly address the issue of long-term climate change. However, it raises potent questions, as many scientists think natural weather cycles will become more extreme with warming climate, and some suggest ongoing chaos in places like Somalia are already being stoked by warming climate.

Read rest of article from eScience News:

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2011/08/24/climate.cycles.are.driving.wars.says.study

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Handsome annual reports cause investors to value company higher - #design #PR #branding

As firms begin the 2011 annual report process, which many do at this time of year, they may want to pay closer attention to the way those reports look. A recent study out of the University of Miami School of Business Administration found that investors, regardless of their experience, place a higher value on firms with attractive annual reports than they do on those that produce less attractive reports. 

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2011/08/23/handsome.annual.reports.cause.investors.value.company.higher

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Gamification: Why Playing #Games Could Be the Next Big Thing for #Business

Gamification -- the application of online game design techniques in non-game settings -- has been quickly gaining the attention of leaders in business, education, policy and even terrorist communities. But gamification also has plenty of critics, and the debate over its future could become an epic battle in the same vein of many online game favorites. 

This special report includes coverage of a recent Wharton conference titled, "For the Win: Serious Gamification," in addition to interviews with conference participants who discuss the use of gamification in business, government and other arenas.

Published: August 17, 2011 in Knowledge@Wharton

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2832

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How the #Internet #architecture got its hourglass shape and what that means for the #future #web

(click to enlarge)

(Credit: Constantine Dovrolis)

(Credit: Constantine Dovrolis)

In the natural world, species that share the same ecosystem often compete for resources, resulting in the extinction of weaker competitors. A new computer model that describes the evolution of the Internet's architecture suggests something similar has happened among the layers of protocols that have survived -- and become extinct -- on the worldwide network. 

Understanding this evolutionary process may help computer scientists as they develop protocols to help the Internet accommodate new uses and protect it from a wide range of threats. But the model suggests that unless the new Internet avoids such competition, it will evolve an hourglass shape much like today's Internet.

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2011/08/15/how.internet.architecture.got.its.hourglass.shape.and.what.means.future

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#Designers, create a #web site with no code - #Adobe #Muse now in beta

Adobe Muse, now in beta, is a new tool for traditional designers to create HTML websites without having to deal with code. 

If you spend more time in InDesign and Photoshop than you do on the Internet, Muse (the code name for Adobe’s soon-to-be-officially-launched new product) might be a godsend for you. And if you feel marginally more competent in the aforementioned tools than in a code editor, Muse is still something you’ll want to check out for yourself. 

Read more:

http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/15/adobe-muse/?

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New #science discovery > #DNA found in meteorites - adding more to story of #life on #Earth

"The components of DNA have now been confirmed to exist in extraterrestrial meteorites. Meteorites hold a record of the chemicals that existed in the early Solar System and that may have been a crucial source of the organic compounds that gave rise to life on Earth. Since the 1960s, scientists have been trying to find proof that nucleobases, the building blocks of our genetic material, came to Earth on meteorites.

<a href "http://www.dailygalaxy.com/.a/6a00d8341bf7f753ef0153908ce56a970b-pi"/>

New research, published next week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicates that certain nucleobases do reach the Earth from extraterrestrial sources, by way of certain meteorites, and in greater diversity and quantity than previously thought."

Read rest of article here:

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/08/meteorites-molecular-tool-kits-that-provided-the-building-blocks-for-life-on-earth.html

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In the future #data will be transferred to laptops with help of light #LED's. #innovation

Just imagine the following scenario: four people are comfortably ensconced in a room. Each one of them can watch a film from the Internet on his or her laptop, in HD quality. 

This is made possible thanks to optical WLAN. Light from the LEDs in the overhead lights serves as the transfer medium. 

For a long time, this was just a vision for the future. However, since scientists from the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich Hertz Institute HHI in Berlin, Germany, have developed this possibility into reality. 

Read the article:

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2011/08/02/data.are.traveling.light

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The role of relaxation in #consumer #behavior

States of relaxation consistently increase the monetary valuations of products, actually inflating these valuations by about 10 percent. 

This phenomenon is demonstrated in six experiments involving two different methods of inducing relaxation, a large number of products of different types, and various methods of assessing monetary valuation. 

In all six experiments, participants who were put into a relaxed affective state reported higher monetary valuations than participants who were put into an equally pleasant but less relaxed state. 

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2011/07/28/the.role.relaxation.consumer.behavior

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#Brains of people who have practiced #meditation for long time have more grey matter. Why?

Is meditation "push-ups" for the brain?

photostock / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Two years ago, researchers at UCLA found that specific regions in the brains of long-term meditators were larger and had more gray matter than the brains of individuals in a control group. This suggested that meditation may indeed be good for all of us since, alas, our brains shrink naturally with age.

Read about the full article from Machines Like Us here:

http://www.machineslikeus.com/news/meditation-push-brain

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Spectacular view from Artesa Winery in Napa Valley

sent from Colby's iPhone

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#Social transmission - Why we share stories, news, and information with others. #emotion #arousal

(Medical Xpress) -- People often share stories, news, and information with the people around them. We forward online articles to our friends, share stories with our co-workers at the water cooler, and pass along rumors to our neighbors. Such social transmission has been going on for thousands of years, and the advent of social technologies like texting, Facebook, and other social media sites has only made it faster and easier to share content with others. But why is certain content shared more than others and what drives people to share?

 

Well, according to Jonah Berger, the author of a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the sharing of stories or information may be driven in part by arousal. When people are physiologically aroused, whether due to emotional stimuli or otherwise, the autonomic nervous is activated, which then boosts social transmission. Simply put, evoking certain emotions can help increase the chance a message is shared.

“In a prior paper, we found that emotion plays a big role in which New York Times articles make the most emailed list. But interestingly, we found that while articles evoking more positive emotions were generally more viral, some negative emotions like anxiety and anger actually increased transmission while others like sadness decreased it. In trying to understand why, it seemed like arousal might be a key factor,” says Berger, the Joseph G. Campbell Jr. Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Pennsylvania.

Read the rest of the article here:  http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-06-stories-news.html

Provided by Association for Psychological Science (news : web)

 

 

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#Aging population expanding faster than the younger #generation & very quickly

I wanted to reference this again after speaking at the Global Innovation Forum Silicon Valley a couple of weeks ago about Innovation & The Millennials.  There are so many opportunities to create situations for older and younger to work together to shape the future, starting immediately. This cross-generational sharing could transform our communities and work places.  Visiting the USA, I notice more and more older people working in stores - we never see that in The Netherlands.

My mother just started her 89th year on this planet. She has also just started a new career - sharing her experience on suffering, loss and grief with others who are struggling with those issues. This makes her feel valuable, worthy and keeps her feeling vital. Inspiration for others.

The following is an article from the New York Times 14 October 2010  http://nyti.ms/9FyKny

As Populations Age, a Chance for Younger Nations

 

Marvin Orellana/The New York Times

 

By TED C. FISHMAN

Published: October 14, 2010

" YOU MAY KNOW that the world’s population is aging — that the number of older people is expanding faster than the number of young — but you probably don’t realize how fast this is happening. Right now, the world is evenly divided between those under 28 and those over 28. By midcentury, the median age will have risen to 40. Demographers also use another measure, in addition to median age, to determine whether populations are aging: “elder share.” If the share, or proportion, of people over 60 (or sometimes 65) is growing, the population is aging. By that yardstick too, the world is quickly becoming older.

 

Pick any age cohort above the median age of 28 and you’ll find its share of the global population rising faster than that of any segment below the median. By 2018, 65-year-olds, for example, will outnumber those under 5 — a historic first. In 2050, developed countries are on track to have half as many people under 15 as they do over 60. In short, the age mix of the world is turning upside down and at unprecedented rates. "

 

To read the rest of the article, go to  http://nyti.ms/9FyKny

 

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