Advanced Studies

Shout out to The Cellular Scale Blog

2012-01-30T10:08:00.001-05:00

It's here and it's spectacular. It's also the handiwork of one of our star doctoral students in neuroscience here at Mason. Congrats to her on a really great addition to the neuroscience on-line community.

FT's Lucy Kellaway and aging in place

2012-01-30T09:34:00.000-05:00

The Financial Times, Lucy Kellaway has always been a must read for me, particularly her Martin Lukes series, which sadly ended with his fictional death in a parachute jump.

In today's regular Monday column, here, she takes on a much more serious issue: the rampant unemployment among young highly educated people due to a finite supply of jobs and baby boomers hanging on.

For me, the operative question is to what extent is this state-of-affairs true for academics (generally) and for science (specifically).

There are certainly "aging superstars" to quote from Lucy and she agrees, they should be kept on. The question she is really raising concerns the question of what is best for society: scarce positions for those who are younger and hence command smaller salaries (we could hire more of of them), or viewing experience as "added value", something to be monetized in the academic labor market.

It's a very complicated question--at least in academia, less so in professional sports.

Opposing reports on US Shale gas supplies

2012-01-29T09:59:00.000-05:00

In today's NY Times here.

Money quote:

In private discussions, some federal energy officials have raised questions about the way oil and gas companies may be inflating estimates of the amount of recoverable gas.
“The variability of shale gas well performance is crucial to any assessment of the resource potential of a shale play,” Philip Budzik, an Energy Information Administration research analyst, wrote in an e-mail to an industry analyst last April.

It's larger than that actually. My guess it it's the same competing political agendas that have complicated the Keystone Pipeline debate and the environmental safety of fracking technologies. That debate is playing out on many levels simultaneously and its outcome will no doubt be important to US Energy policy as it plays out (or doesn't) over the next decade.

Cost sharing

2012-01-27T09:53:00.000-05:00

It's a requirement of many federal grants and potentially is a deal killer for younger institutions which may not have the resources to pull it off. The upshot of this problem is that institutions which may win awards on pure merit may have to forego competing for new awards with significant cost share. At the same time, institutions with much more massive resource pools, available to be deployed as cost share, have less competition for scarce federal grants. Merit becomes less important as a criterion while institutional resource base becomes more important. The rich get richer.

Now, I'm not saying that rich institutions don't deserve a lot of grant support purely based on scientific merit. That's clear; they do. But I'm also worried that newer institutions will have a much more difficult time getting up to speed, as a result of grant cost-share requirements.

It's time to rethink grant cost share so that newer places have a chance to compete purely on the merits of the science.

Kudos to one of our own: Professor Giorgio Ascoli

2012-01-25T09:42:00.001-05:00

Today it was announced that Giorgio Ascoli, already known as a research superstar is also one of Virginia's best top faculty! The announcement is here.

Giorgio has the title of University Professor at Mason, reserved for the very top faculty and is a member of the Molecular Neuroscience Department here at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study.

It's an honor to count him as a colleague and a friend. Congratulations Professor Giorgio Ascoli!

First day of classes Spring Semester...

2012-01-23T13:08:00.000-05:00

It may be foggy and cold here in Washington, but it's also a day full of anticipation as we begin the Spring (yes that's the operative word, Spring!) semester here at Mason.

Tomorrow is my first day of teaching in a bit. I'll be teaching 50 undergraduates in a cellular neuroscience core course. I'm very much looking forward to trying out some new pedagogical ideas....

In the meantime, the first snowdrop blooms are out in our neighborhood. If the winter continues to be as mild as it's been so far, we should have crocuses within a couple of weeks.

This semester will also be one of transition here at Mason as we salute Alan Merten for a job well-done and welcome Angel Cabrera as our new President on July 1. Change is part of life, no less within the academy. It will be interesting to watch this marvelous place continue to evolve and grow.

Murray's WSJ essay: Fishtown versus Belmont

2012-01-21T13:25:00.001-05:00

In today's WSJ, a google link is here. The central notion is a new cultural divide and the main statistical results are striking--De Toqueville wouldn't recognize current America I think. On the other hand, I sure recognize "Belmont".

Here's Murray's money quote:

Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions.

The question is what to do about it? Murray and I agree, doing nothing isn't a reasonable option. Where we disagree is whether voluntary behavioral changes from members of his "new upper class" will improve things. I don't think so because the feedback loops that are driving "Fishtown" down are endogenous to Fishtown (as he points out, there isn't a lot of mobility).

Am inclined to take a really hard look at educational reform (writ large) instead. The work is with the younger generation of Fishtowners.

More art at the Institute....

2012-01-20T14:56:00.002-05:00

The latest additions to the Institute's art exhibits...as part of an exchange between Mason and Sichuan Normal University in China. These wood cuts are the work of Professor Silou Xiang....

I am particularly struck by the way these human faces convey emotion, cognition and the process of aging...all relevant to the scientific programs of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study.

For those readers who visit the Washington DC area, please do come by and see these new works up close.

Fermi Paradox Discussion continued....

2012-01-20T10:38:00.000-05:00

Started yesterday between Tyler and myself by email, now over at Marginal Revolution.

To continue: if we are not in a simulation, then the question of "why the silence"?

Until recently, one idea was that the step from prokariyot (bacteria for example) to eukaryote (us and other complicated plants and animals) was the big filter, but the most recent evidence doesn't support this notion.

I still think the filter idea might be operative, but at a much later point--when intelligent civilizations acquire the keys to thermonuclear reactions (aka, the bomb). Now we've been lucky for about 60 years, but that's the blink of an eye in cosmological time. I'm not at all convinced that our luck will hold out.

It's been said that a "Day After Tomorrow" full out nuclear exchange is no longer in the cards, but I recall seeing a Rand study (pdf), that indicated even a single nuclear blast in LA Harbor would be enough to bring down the US through follow on consequences across the economy and geopolitical sectors.

Note added in correction: A reader reminded me that the movie I'm referring to is The Day After...for which I am grateful.

Thinking of the US as an OPEC member?

2012-01-19T09:20:00.001-05:00

Here's the story, in today's FT.

I think this is an extremely big deal. The US foreign policy mindset hasn't yet grokked this yet, but when it does, it may be parsimonious with the massive DOD recalibration that appears to be coming. It may also help stabilize the US debt issues over the long run.

The World on your White Board....(Krasnow Edition)

2012-01-17T11:56:00.000-05:00

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan's "The View from your Window" series. Here's more from a Krasnow white board, late night labbie edition:

I didn't see this one yesterday when I was giving a tour of the Institute for one of our visitors, so I'm guessing it went up over night. I leave it to readers to interpret the PhD student mind....

Susan Cain on Group Think in today's NYT

2012-01-15T10:28:00.000-05:00

The piece is here. Note that in spite of the main case being for creative solitude, Cain acknowledges:

Indeed, recent studies suggest that influential academic work is increasingly conducted by teams rather than by individuals. (Although teams whose members collaborate remotely, from separate universities, appear to be the most influential of all.) The problems we face in science, economics and many other fields are more complex than ever before, and we’ll need to stand on one another’s shoulders if we can possibly hope to solve them.

An institute for advanced study: what purpose?

2012-01-13T13:20:00.000-05:00

In the short time before the Spring semester commences, it's perhaps worthwhile to step back and consider the question of: why an institute for advanced study?

There are quite a few such institutes these days, and not just here in the States, but the granddaddy of them all is the one at Princeton, where Albert Einstein spent the War years in the 1940's. That Institute has as its key mission "to encourage and support fundamental research in the sciences and humanities – the original, often speculative, thinking that produces advances in knowledge that change the way we understand the world."

Note the idea of producing advances that "change the way we understand the world". That idea of course echos Thomas Kuhn's notion of a paradigm shift. Not all research does this; most findings are incremental in nature. To aim for paradigm shifts is bold and fraught with risk.

Which brings to mind this commentary on venture capitalists, which appeared on my twitter feed today. Here the operative meme is that VC's are too cautious these days. That like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, they should take bigger risks:

VC firms must behave more like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which funds radical scientific innovations over long periods of time - and less like the National Institutes of Health, which prefers incremental, almost-sure advances.

I would argue that it is in institutes for advanced studies that such science takes place, often with great collective purpose and across seemingly vastly different domains of knowledge. It is certainly what we are about at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study.

I'll close with this quote, lifted from our web site, that captures Krasnow nicely:

In the end, we believe that there is no substitute for recruiting the very best people and turning them loose to explore the fascinating world of thought somehow emergent from our biological nature and evolution as Homo sapiens.

Santa Fe Institute, Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study...

2012-01-12T12:16:00.000-05:00

Our two day symposium in May, here in Washington. Preliminary program speakers here.

What appears to be good news for Virginia higher ed

2012-01-11T09:23:00.002-05:00

It's here from the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Today is the first day of the General Assembly session, so we'll watch carefully what gets enacted.

Back from Research Triangle

2012-01-10T11:01:00.001-05:00

In spite of challenging weather, I had a most interesting visit to Burroughs Wellcome Fund yesterday. I learned about some very interesting STEM education approaches and a very similar interest in success stories in Finland and Singapore.

It's clear to me that the education puzzle is central to future US economic prosperity. My sense is that there is even national consensus on this. The devil is in the details in this case and learning what has worked for other countries is an excellent first step towards reform here.

In Finland, for example, the requirement for all K-12 teachers to earn a masters degree with a mix of pedagogy and research is admirable. But that's for a population of 5.4 million. That simply may not be possible here in the US with a population of 300+ million. But the underlying idea of attracting the very best and the brightest to education does make sense.

So good first steps. It will be interesting to see what evolves here in the US.

Richard Thaler's advice for Congress and the President...

2012-01-08T09:43:00.000-05:00

It's in today's NY Times business section here. With lots of references to Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling. All of this in the context of Obama's recess appointments and what happens with Sequestration after the general election.

Most interesting new book review...

2012-01-07T09:03:00.000-05:00

It's here in today's FT: Sir Crispen Tickell's review of Rupert Sheldrake's new book, The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry published in the UK by Coronet (I'll need to check whether it's available as an e-book).

Starts off with the premise that there are certain dogmas in present day scientific thought that may not be true and then goes off into the world of self-organization and complexity, and his theory of "morphic resonance".

P.S. Sheldrake's views on science are to say the least quite controversial. In fact, there are some who say it's pseudoscience since, the argument goes, his theories are unfalsifiable.

Macro changes in the Federal R&D funding world...

2012-01-06T15:54:00.001-05:00

They are beginning to manifest themselves in seemingly small ways. Today, we see new rules on using NIH grants to support faculty salaries. For those readers with a Chronicle subscription see here. For those, without access, the bottom line is that there will be a salary cap of $179,700 for NIH grants used to support faculty...potentially a huge problem, especially at academic medical centers where faculty researchers may also be seeing patients.

My prediction: we'll be seeing a whole lot more of this kind of stuff coming down the pike.

At Cru Cafe in Charleston SC

2012-01-06T12:48:00.000-05:00

The annual Biological Bulletin Editorial Board dinner. Hosted by the Journal and SICB Secretary Lou Burnett. At the terrific Cru Cafe in balmy Charleston. Around the table from the left going counterclockwise: Managing editor Carol Schachinger, editor emeritus, Michael Greenberg, Charles Derby, Karen Burnett, Bill Kier, Lou Burnett and yours truly.

The editorial board meeting earlier in the afternoon was a great success. And I enjoyed viewing some excellent posters at SICB itself.

But above and beyond, I learned a new skill: manning the exhibition booth! In all honesty, it was a blast. The line of graduate students to take advantage of our swag and subscription promotions was incredible. And it was a real delight to confess, as folks perused the gorgeous hard copy issues of the Journal that I was actually the editor.

In the meantime, I'm back in DC and the nice weather followed me north. The leaves may be off the trees here at Krasnow, but it feels like the Spring weather is just around the corner.

SICB in Charleston

2012-01-03T12:21:00.001-05:00

That's the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology and their annual meeting begins today in Charleston, South Carolina. I'll be there later in the week to chair our editorial board meeting and to hopefully see some interesting presentations.

Happy 2012...and now for the bad news

2012-01-01T11:01:00.000-05:00

Daniel Baird's piece on the history of impending doom memes is here. Meanwhile, the debate surrounding the Dantesque planet Venus as a warning for what could happen here on planet Earth is here.

In the meantime, here's hoping that we science helps us make it through 2012 more or less intact.

Happy New Year!

Looking towards 2012

2011-12-31T10:00:00.000-05:00

As we close out 2011, I'm looking forward to an incredibly exciting 2012 for the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study. During the new year, we will be celebrating the 10th anniversary of our Center for Social Complexity this next year, one of the real gems in the Institute's science portfolio. At the same time, we will be launching our unique symposium with the Santa Fe Institute on The Science of Complexity: Understanding the Global Financial Crisis. Finally, we will be welcoming a new University President, Angel Cabrera on July 1.

NSF Picks Lockheed for Huge Antarctic Support Contract

2011-12-30T13:30:00.000-05:00

NSF Picks Lockheed for Huge Antarctic Support Contract

Notable in that NSF changed contractor again. Also in that Lockheed has the Sandia National Laboratory contract.

Hauser Redux

2011-12-27T14:57:00.000-05:00

My father's colleague, Charles Gross of Princeton, has written a superb piece in The Nation about the Marc Hauser case. It's here.

Besides a discussion of the facts of the now famous scientific misconduct case, there is an excellent general discussion of scientific misconduct and a beautiful description of a typical lab ecosystem.

Publishing a scientific paper....

2011-12-27T12:08:00.000-05:00

A new model by Kravitz and Baker is here. Bradley Voytek's blog entry on it is here (by the way, he's an accomplished young neuroscientist and you can read his recent papers here).

So back to the new idea: basically the notion is that all submissions get published, but they go through pre-publication and post-publication review, ranking and discussion (think Faculty of 1000). Journal editors like me are obsolete, only managing editors survive--along with elected editorial boards. I guess all made possible by the wonders of technology.

My main concern is this (for those readers who are in the life sciences). Think about all those posters at the largest meeting you attend. Actually think about all those non-peer reviewed posters at the Society for Neuroscience meeting: thousands and thousands of them. Now, think about (even w. a ranking system) having to find the jewels among them.

But wait you say, you can use the ranking and computational tools to just view the very best....and I say, why then would you ever publish the very worst?

And what would it mean for promotion and tenure when any person could have 1000 first authorship papers---in Neuron?

So I remain skeptical.

H5N1 Flu papers

2011-12-26T08:44:00.000-05:00

As you've probably heard, there are two of them out there drawing a great deal of controversy because they purport to show how to molecularly engineer this deadly flu virus to be more transmissible. Recall, that the global threat from a given flu virus is a function of both mortality rate and transmissibility rate

Now, the US Biosecurity Panel is calling for a second "Asilomar" to consider how to handle such manuscripts in the future, with a publishing moratorium of "perhaps three months". ScienceInsider has the story here.

As a journal editor, I have a huge stake in how this is handled. On the one hand, open science, is essential to scientific progress. We need to have sufficient information in the manuscript for independent replication of the results, particularly if they are consequential. On the other hand, we don't want to give the recipe for global catastrophe to an individual (or group) with ill intent.

Ideas that are out there right now converge around the lines of publishing results and holding methods for those parties who are properly vetted (perhaps by the CDC or WHO). But I'm not sure that would work, because the methods of molecular biology are really well-known (see biohackers), and in this case, the results alone, might provide the essential "launch" key.

Richard Florida is wrong-headed

2011-12-24T13:04:00.000-05:00

At least according to Mario Polèse here in City Journal.

Money quote:

The conclusion to draw from all this isn’t that cities can do nothing to promote economic development. It’s that they should avoid academic fads and quick fixes, which are no substitute for obvious policy goals like competently providing mandated services at reasonable cost, keeping streets safe, and not taxing and regulating away businesses—good governance, in sum, and even that comes with no guarantee to work.

Holidays in DC

2011-12-22T11:12:00.002-05:00

As we head into Winter Break here at George Mason, there is a bit of time to sit back and reflect on the past semester: we saw the selection of a new President, the opening of some spectacular new campus facilities and an incredibly productive time for our science, both in terms of new research findings and teaching. I'm grateful to the entire faculty, staff and students at the Mason's Institute for Advanced Study for what they've accomplished this Fall and look forward to the Spring semester.

In the meantime, I'm pleased to report that the traffic seems to be getting a bit lighter here as folks leave town. The weather in DC has been relatively balmy lately--as a native Californian, I'd love to see that trend continue through January and February.

Martin Wolf on Tyler's TGS

2011-12-21T11:32:00.000-05:00

Colleague and friend, Tyler Cowen's book, The Great Stagnation, is reviewed by one of my favorite FT columnists here. I don't find TGS nearly as depressing as Martin Wolf: when the next version of the Industrial Revolution comes along, things will get better.

Those Apollo 11 Space Suits....

2011-12-20T13:30:00.001-05:00

Rosten Woo's terrific review of Nicholas de Monchaux's new book, Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo is here.

Spoiler: apparently no support for conspiracy theorists who think NASA staged the landing somewhere in Houston.

Publish in high "retraction rate journals"....

2011-12-19T10:27:00.000-05:00

From Bjorn Brembs via the London School of Economics site, here. Turns out that if you're encouraged to publish in high impact factor journals, you're also being encouraged to publish in high retraction rate journals.

Money quote:

This already looks like a much stronger correlation than the one between IF and citations. How do the critical values measure up? The regression is highly significant at p<0.000003, with a coefficient of determination at a whopping 0.77. Thus, at least with the current data, IF indeed seems to be a more reliable predictor of retractions than of actual citations. How can this be, given that the IF is supposed to be a measure of citation rate for each journal? There are many reasons why this argument falls flat, but here are the three most egregious ones:
The IF is negotiable and doesn’t reflect actual citation counts (source)
The IF cannot be reproduced, even if it reflected actual citations (source)
The IF is not statistically sound, even if it were reproducible and reflected actual citations (source)
In other words, all the organizations that require scientists to publish in ‘high-impact journals’ at the same time require them to publish in ‘high-retraction journals’. I wonder if requiring publication in high-retraction journals can be good for science?

The internet in your Fridge

2011-12-18T12:10:00.001-05:00

There's a Samsung ad out there along those lines.

Here's a piece from today's NY Times on how sensors married up with the Net are making for some pretty cool technology. I'm waiting for the sensor in the cat box to activate the cat box cleaning robot.

Christopher Hitchens RIP

2011-12-16T08:59:00.002-05:00

A really top notch writer and debater has passed. His Financial Times obit is here. Christopher Buckley's New Yorker obit is here. Over the years, I always admired his ability to use reasoned argument as a means to advance his views--as opposed to tired emotional screeds that are all too common, especially in the blogosphere. So we'll miss his voice.

Bright people those Mason neuroscience grad students...

2011-12-15T17:16:00.001-05:00

I got to watch two of our brightest doctoral students explain some pretty complicated electrophysiology to a VIP visitor today and it was a terrific sight. He was clearly impressed and I think they enjoyed themselves--although I saw they were really hoping he didn't nudge the prep as he leaned forward to look through the stereo-microscope.

Angel Cabrera

2011-12-15T09:19:00.001-05:00

George Mason's Board of Visitors announced the appointment of Dr. Angel Cabrera to be Mason's next President in the last hour. The photo is from the press conference that just ended a few minutes ago.

He brings both incredible dynamism and experience to Mason most recently as President of the Thunderbird School of Global Management.

Born in Spain, he trained in Madrid as an engineer and then went on to Georgia Tech to get his doctorate.

Here is a recent You Tube video in which his passion for education is abundantly clear:

Mason will clearly continue its tradition of innovation under dynamic leadership. Dr. Cabrera will take office on July 1 of next year.

Teasers

2011-12-14T16:34:00.000-05:00

We'll be commenting on some major news tomorrow, although after an early morning presser. And then, following an embargo, we'll reveal a major award to one of our faculty members here at Krasnow. So stay tuned.

Doctoral trainees soft-skills: the transatlantic perspective

2011-12-13T09:00:00.001-05:00

Yesterday there was a terrific conference put on by the Polish Presidency of the European Union at the headquarters of the American Association for Advancement of Science here in Washington.

I had the honor of speaking about a real concern of mine: namely the doctoral students are only trained in the soft-skills (e.g. grantsmanship) of the place where they are receiving their training. So, for example, a doctoral student in neuroscience being trained here in the US, typically doesn't learn anything about the European Research Council's "starter grants"--even if that student is European and actually planning to return to Europe post-PhD.
The reverse is also true. What I am advocating for is a plan to create a transatlantic soft-skills curriculum, whereby all doctoral trainees learn something about each system: Europe and the US.

And of course, this could be expanded usefully elsewhere around the world.

Cutting off the patient to save the limb?

2011-12-09T12:51:00.001-05:00

The UK will go its own way from the rest of Europe. The Financial Times story is here. Of course, the UK has always been outside the Eurozone, but today's news feels qualitatively different. The word of course is that David Cameron did this to please his Tory friends in London's City financial district. Whatever the reason, it strikes me as not particularly good news for those of us hoping for something that will stabilize the markets.

Reuter's story is here. Money quote:

Cameron's decision to stay out of the treaty-change camp could spell problems for Britain. Deeper integration on the continent could involve changes to the single market and financial regulation, both of which could have a profound impact on the British economy.
"Cameron was clumsy in his manoeuvring," a senior EU diplomat said. It may be possible that Britain will shift its position in the days ahead if it discovers that isolation really is not a viable course of action, diplomats said.

Higher Education and the Khan Academy

2011-12-07T15:59:00.001-05:00

Inside Higher Ed has the excellent story here. And, in case you've never watched any of the excellent video's, you might want to look here.

Bottom line: while you are learning, Kahn Academy is learning about your learning. Given his background at the hedge fund/tech interface, makes perfect sense to me.

Changes coming to Penn State Football?

2011-12-07T10:45:00.001-05:00

From the Chronicle on-line here. Money quote:

Rodney A. Erickson, told USA Today that he wanted to change Penn State’s identity “from a football factory to a ‘world-class research institution.’”

Back to the 1970's at Amherst College

2011-12-07T09:27:00.001-05:00

At my Alma Mater, typewriters are in! The Chronicle has the story here. What those students really need are those 70's hi-tech Smith-Coronas with the famous Coronamatic ribbon cartridges. As common then, as Apple gear is today.

Architecture in Washington DC

2011-12-06T12:50:00.001-05:00

Heard yesterday at the Embassy of Finland during the Finnish national holiday festivities:

The embassies have the only interesting architecture in Washington

An interesting comment that I'll need to think about. Personally, I find the monuments on the Mall quite strikingly beautiful in the right light (for example early morning), although I'm not sure if I would call them interesting.

However, without question, the Finnish Embassy is one of the most interesting and beautiful buildings in Washington--just opposite the Vice President's mansion on Massachusetts Avenue. According to the Ambassador, it's also green--although I'm not sure if she was referring to its sustainability or the patina of its copper exterior. Perhaps both.

The Original Krasnow Board

2011-12-05T13:31:00.001-05:00

Amazing what an iPhone camera can do with a bit of editing. The photo is of the Institute's governing board about the time of the turn of the century.

No, there were no iPhones at the time, but I did just take the picture of the photo because these were individuals who played a key role in the founding of the Institute.

Back Row (left to right): Alan Merten, Harold Morowitz, Bill Nitze, Ted Braithwaite, Mark Friedlander, Gene Samburg, George Johnson, Robert Gambino, Maurice Scherrens, John Burris and Tom Wise.

Front Row (left to right): myself, Katherine Wallman, Virginia Pomata, Patricia Kluge, Peter Stearns and Julius Axelrod.

Among those in the photo are: a Nobel laureate, three college presidents, a UN ambassador/RAF fighter pilot, three biologists, a psychiatrist, three political appointees, an author of over 100 books and a corporate CEO. Can you identify them?

Health Hackers

2011-12-04T16:46:00.001-05:00

From Saturday's WSJ, this essay on health hacking: at its most glorified, rolling your own molecular biology. I first heard about this back in 2008 at Scifoo. It's certainly taken off. The problem of course is that it's not science without sufficient statistical power. Although, it certainly wouldn't require any statistics to detect an unlucky SNP.

Publics in Distress

2011-12-01T10:21:00.001-05:00

America's big public research universities are having a tough time of it lately, and it's not just in their athletic programs. Fundamentally, they are being squeezed by the Great Recession hitting state budgets and parents' tuition savings accounts at the same time. Whether sequestration happens or not, Federal R&D is likely to trend downwards for some time, and this will have an enormous effect on the economic engine of research that Vannevar Bush envisioned, and subsequently architected, mid-20th century.

Fundraising is being hurt, not only because of some very high profile PR disasters, but also simply because donors are holding on to their money in times of uncertainty. While the elite privates can count on enormous endowments to carry them through, the publics are, to a large extent (and with some notable exceptions) much more dependent on state support and tuition.

What to do? Who is the lender of last resort for America's public research universities?

Increasingly the answer to that question is either out of state or overseas. Out of state students pay "full freight" or even premium rates and their recruitment potentially can subsidize the publics as they are being squeezed within their states. Of course, without growth, those are classroom seats that are no longer available for in state students. Which brings up the question of the core purpose of public education: to provide quality higher education for in state students. Or is it: to conduct excellent sponsored research? Or some mixture of both?

We live in very interesting times.

Seeking Alpha's compendium of imaginative Eurozone saves...

2011-11-30T11:51:00.001-05:00

Hat tip to Tyler Cowen. The link is here.

I'd love to know what our readers think of the idea of the Fed funding a Euro quantitative easing!

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny?

2011-11-30T10:02:00.001-05:00

Monkey midbrain structures are early stand-ins for neocortex, here.

Our new collaboration with the Santa Fe Institute

2011-11-29T12:18:00.001-05:00

Next May....the initial website is here. The Science of Complexity: Understanding the Global Financial Crisis...

Among the confirmed speakers, Gillian Tett, U.S. managing editor of the Financial Times.

Art at the Krasnow Institute continued....

2011-11-29T10:24:00.001-05:00

Is art conducive to good science? I think so. There is something about artistic expression which intuitively hooks into the process of scientific creativity.

At some crucial point, a scientist takes a leap of faith, with a hypothesis, that sets up a trajectory of experiments, data gathering and assumed risk. To my mind, this isn't so different from the gamble that an artist takes in conceptualizing a piece.

One of the nice aspects of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study is the interplay between natural beauty, science and art. Today the forest outside my office window is denuded of leaves; the trees look, of course, like neuronal dendrites.

While inside our cellular imaging core, our researchers are imaging neuronal dendrites--real ones using confocal microscopy.

In the meantime, 20 km away in downtown DC, Krasnow PI Paul So's Hamiltonian Gallery is an another example of how inspired physics (Paul is a professor in the Physics department here at Mason) and art can interplay off one another.

Singapore's approach to housing

2011-11-28T11:17:00.001-05:00

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan (again), the piece is here. HDB buildings are ubiquitous in Singapore.

Read all the comments--it's hard to imagine this as a viable approach in the US, although it might well be in other places around the globe.

Lynn Margulis, RIP

2011-11-28T08:55:00.001-05:00

Lynn, of course, was a giant in biology. She was also a dedicated member of the editorial board of The Biological Bulletin. Her Washington Post obituary is here.

On her visits to the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, it was clear to all that she was a truly great scientist. We'll miss her.

Krugman on Finland versus Sweden

2011-11-27T15:24:00.001-05:00

Blogpost is here.

Of course Finland is in the Eurozone and Sweden isn't. Look at the divergence of bond rates.

Avian Flu Mechanics

2011-11-26T07:50:00.001-05:00

From ScienceInsider, here. The key question: where is the line in scientific publishing where the knowledge could lead to global catastrophe?

In this case, what molecular changes in the avian flu genome would make it as transmissible (to humans) as it is virulent?

I'm sure Oppenheimer and his colleagues on that mesa in New Mexico were having similar thoughts in June of 1945--not in terms of publishing, but rather demonstrating an atomic bomb.

Yale's Robert Shiller on Neuroeconomics

2011-11-22T15:04:00.001-05:00

Shiller was a keynote speaker at the recent Society for Neuroscience meeting in DC. Here he talked about the Neuroeconomics Revolution and a new book by Paul Glimcher, Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis.

Money quote:

In particular, Glimcher wants to identify brain structures that process key elements of utility theory when people face uncertainty: “(1) subjective value, (2) probability, (3) the product of subjective value and probability (expected subjective value), and (4) a neuro-computational mechanism that selects the element from the choice set that has the highest ‘expected subjective value’…”

Duke's Cathy Davidson's Open Letter to University Presidents

2011-11-22T12:48:00.001-05:00

Is in the Chronicle, here. To my mind, it has perfect pitch.

Power supply for new Mars mission is nuclear

2011-11-22T12:28:00.001-05:00

Here's a good update on CNET. As you'll recall, the last two rovers while incredibly successful, had constant issues with their solar batteries. On the other hand, this thing is powered by Plutonium. I sure hope they have an uneventful launch.

Thanksgiving week at Krasnow

2011-11-21T09:06:00.001-05:00

The leaves are mostly off the trees as you can see. It's been strangely warm and some of the famous DC cherry trees are blooming out of presumed confusion. The Redskins have lost their six straight, this time to the hated Cowboys. And the Congressional Super-comittee seems headed for failure.

Amidst all of this, there is much to be thankful for: the Krasnow Institute is thriving. Our work is consequential, not incremental. Our trainees clearly enjoy doing science. And our faculty continue to amaze me.

George Mason, in contrast to many other research universities, continues to prosper, both as a growing center of excellence in scholarship, but also as a terrific place for learners and teachers alike.

And science writ large seems to be in rude health. From physics to neuroscience, really significant findings are making their way into publication. Last week's paper in Nature on the reality of the quantum wave function is but an example.

Tomorrow, this blog goes on Holiday in honor of the Thanksgiving holiday here in the States. We wish all of our readers the very best and we'll see you Saturday. Stay tuned...

Niall Ferguson's United States of Europe, 2021

2011-11-19T13:40:00.001-05:00

In today's Wall Street Journal, here. His view: the Euro will still exist, but not so much for the European Union....oh and that Brussels will be replaced by Vienna to make the Germans more comfortable.

It's an entertaining piece, but I'm pretty skeptical of such geopolitical forecasting, especially so far out. The world is far too much of a series of linked complex adaptive systems to make predictions that I'd be willing to actually bet on.

Nano-neurons in a nano-wasp...

2011-11-19T08:38:00.001-05:00

From NeuroDoJo here. Original report here.

Take home: wasps with roughly the same number of neurons as the worm, C. elegans...only these neurons....don't have nucleii!

Confirming results for supraluminary nutrinos

2011-11-19T07:53:00.001-05:00

Here is the story in London's Daily Telegraph. And here is the CERN press release. And for my colleagues, here is the journal paper.

Shakespeare luncheon

2011-11-18T10:44:00.001-05:00

I'm in DC today to attend a luncheon here at the Cosmos Club on Shakespeare. I have a particular interest in Elizabethan England because it was a time when the beginnings of The Enlightenment were superimposed upon a society that was still very much into believing in the power of witchcraft--an interesting time indeed, with echos that apply I suppose to our own times. In any case, my idea is that there were, at the time, two parallel versions of explaining human mind: one that recognized the brain as the seat of consciousness and the other that became dualism (as exemplified by Decartes). What is most interesting to me is that the version closer to our own current theories of mind arising from the activity of brains, came out of the folk-wisdom (I think)--the same place that witchcraft was still thriving. And the dualism view--the version that while still accepted by many, is not the neuroscience consensus....the dualism view arose out of The Enlightenment.

Super Committee prognostication

2011-11-17T12:55:00.001-05:00

The following exercise might be useful for those interested in what may ahead, especially as far as Federal R&D: what agency portfolios might both the House GOP and the White House agree upon? My bet is that it's a very sparse matrix, but not empty either.

Society for Neuroscience Redux

2011-11-16T08:57:00.001-05:00

Thirty thousand plus neuroscientists will be leaving Washington today to head home. My sense is that it was an extraordinarily successful meeting in that there was a lot of serious new science to report.

The photo was taken just outside the DC convention center yesterday as neuroscientists headed towards China Town and its many restaurants. For those readers who enjoy my various complaints about Blackboard, you'll note its corporate headquarters (brown building to the left).

Today back at Krasnow we have an advisory board meeting that will take up the morning. The Board is a terrific group of distinguished individuals who have given enormously to the Institute over the years, both materially and in terms of collective wisdom.

For that we are very grateful. Over the next year, the Board will be entering a new phase, which I'll put out as a teaser. I hope to write more about that soon.

In the meantime, we're looking forward to a very busy remainder of the week, and a Thanksgiving holiday that's not too far off.

Erin Shuman steals the SFN11 show today

2011-11-14T17:41:00.001-05:00

With an absolutely spectacular talk about her work on local control of protein synthesis and degradation in neurons. More here.

I thought the most provocative idea she put forward was the notion of local control of protein synthesis in axons as well as dendrites...and that these local loci may be a lot more important than just governing plasticity.

It's great to see neuroscience taking the next steps towards becoming a mature field.

Neurolaw #SFN11

2011-11-13T07:07:00.001-05:00

Yesterday's big show was the Neuroscience and the Law symposium. Here is a good summary. Most interesting work was Abigail Baird's--she's at Vassar College: teenagers apparently get themselves in trouble by too much engagement of their prefrontal cortex rather than trusting their gut (amygdala and insula). That's completely counter-intuitive to me because I have always viewed the prefrontal cortex as pretty much the last part of the brain to "get wired up" during human development. Her thesis: too much analytic/executive engagement of prefrontal cortex leads to potentially flawed logical decisions (perhaps especially when we haven't had a lot of experiences) and too much sensitivity to peer pressure.

Technologies and asking scientific questions

2011-11-12T10:52:00.001-05:00

It's very interesting to me that with each wave of new technological innovation there is a corresponding wave of deployment into scientific instrumentation. And that new wave of scientific instrumentation makes possible a whole slew of new zeroth order questions for investigators to ask.

The key is to recognize the new waves when they happen and then to figure out what basic new questions they allow us to ask at the laboratory bench.

What will be the next follow on to fMRI in functional brain imaging?

A tree is like a neuron--especially after the leaves come down...

2011-11-11T14:06:00.001-05:00

The wind is really blowing hard today and the leaves are flying off the limbs. Looking out my office window I already see lots of bare limbs, which day by day, take on the look and feel of apical pyramidal cell dendrites--this is appropriate for SFN11 week here in DC.

I feel bad for the 40,000 neuroscientists who are streaming in to DC as I write these words, only to find that Metro is on a weekend schedule because of Veterans Day (20 minutes between trains). Hope they all brought coats. It's cold.

Some suggestions for our students, for whom this may well be their first meeting:

Concentrate on the poster sessions and focus with laser attention on the subset in your own area of work. This task alone, will, if done properly, take up the bulk of your working time at the meeting.

Tag along with your mentor, as much as she or he, will allow and observe how networking happens. If you're lucky, you may end up being introduced to your next boss!

When socializing, especially early in the evening, don't party too hearty. You don't want to wake up to your picture on Facebook. And you don't want to fall into your soup.

Time Running out for the Super Committee

2011-11-11T09:12:00.001-05:00

The effects on science and technology funding here in the States could be devastating. Here is the latest from Science Magazine.

My own take is that the Committee will, in fact, probably fail. But the mandatory cuts wont go into effect until Fiscal Year 2013, after the general election. With a new Congress and potentially a new Administration, the law certainly can be rewritten and probably would be.

The central point here is that science funding falls into the category known as discretionary (I know, Beltway-ese). Cuts in discretionary funding wont really do anything substantive to the budget deficit issues. For cuts to be meaningful, as far as the national debt and the deficit, they would need to be in the category called mandatory. Medicare and Medicaid are in this category--and health care is the elephant in the room.

Thanks to our Veterans...

2011-11-11T09:08:00.001-05:00

To each and everyone, but especially our own here at the Krasnow Institute. Thank you for your service.

The Chronicle weighs in on Penn State...

2011-11-10T08:52:00.001-05:00

With an excellent in-depth article on governance and the danger of insularity. It's here. The money quote comes at the end from an emeritus professor:

"I'm not surprised Penn State has a tendency to cover things up," he said. "We almost never fire anybody here. We just change their job descriptions."

MASON

2011-11-09T09:00:00.001-05:00

This time not referring to the University, but rather to our own homegrown and widely used java-based simulator for agent based modeling. You can find it here. The link has great simulation demonstrations that you can watch in your browser.

What does MASON stand for as an acronym?

From the web site:
" Multi-Agent Simulator Of Neighborhoods... or Networks... or something... "

Saturation of neuro news

2011-11-08T14:30:00.000-05:00

In this week's run up to the Society for Neuroscience meetings here in Washington, the twitter feeds and blogosphere are saturated with the latest, greatest neuroscience findings. It's really exciting, but loyal readers are going to be able to find those nuggets with ease.

If I see a real hidden gem at the meeting, I'll report on it of course.

In the meantime, perhaps this is the week for Advanced Studies to turn its attention to other fields of scientific endeavor. From the West Coast comes the news that West Hollywood will become the first US city to ban the sale of fur. You can read about it here.

On Crocodile Brains....

2011-11-08T09:19:00.000-05:00

Michael Pritz of Indiana University School of Medicine gave yesterday's regular Monday Krasnow seminar and it was fascinating. The basic questions were at the intersection of evolution and development (in biology we call this "Evo-Devo") and basically got to the question of what are the points in the development of a brain that evolution can act upon through selection to produce new species with new brain capabilities.

Pritz's experimental animal is the croc. Turns out crocodiles are very closely related phylogenetically to birds and....birds have remarkable cognitive capabilities with brains that have a radically different architecture from our own mammalian variety.

Evolution remains central to the scientific explorations at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study. Our impressive brains --the human ones in our heads--are themselves the product of evolution and hence, for all their amazing capabilities, have plenty of bugs. They weren't engineered after all.

Creative Commons License: Advanced Studies

2011-11-07T15:25:00.002-05:00

Advanced Studies by James L. Olds is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at krasnow.blogspot.com.

The opinions in Advanced Studies do not represent the official positions of George Mason University.

George Pierson's M-Factor in American History

2011-11-07T10:54:00.000-05:00

The famous Yale historian proposed it a half-century ago: movement, migration and mobility. He saw it as key to the American character. Now we see all the atrophying of all three during this Great Recession.

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan, here's a paper from The Hamilton Project that proposes a "mobility bank" to assist Americans in moving--as they once did routinely to find better opportunities.

Money quote:

Whereas those with college degrees and savings are much more likely to move in response to job loss and to improve their job market outcomes, those with less skills and no savings may have difficulty financing such transitions. The government should target mobility bank loans toward displaced, unemployed, and underemployed people in depressed areas of the country and should help to insure people against job-outcome uncertainty by making repayment terms contingent on the borrower’s post-move employment and income.

Society for Neuroscience meeting here in DC

2011-11-07T09:00:00.001-05:00

The great gathering of neuroscientists occurs this week, starting Saturday. This year, here in Washington D.C. An occasion when the excited young crowd on your Metro train are mostly carrying those cylindrical scientific poster containers that loop over the shoulder. Such a contrast from the usual dour look of our commuters as they anticipate the escalators being out of service wherever they are going.

I'm looking forward to seeing some new science, old friends and new instrumentation.

And I do hope that the escalators will work for once....

The State of the American University

2011-11-05T10:00:00.001-04:00

Anthony Grafton in the New York Review of Books reviews eight serious books on the current state of US higher education here.

Money quote:

Yet American universities also attract ferocious criticism, much of it from professors and from journalists who know them well, and that’s entirely reasonable too. Every coin has its other side, every virtue its corresponding vice—and practically every university its festering sores. At the most prestigious medical schools, professors publish the work of paid flacks for pharmaceutical companies under their own names. At many state universities and more than a few private ones, head football and basketball coaches earn millions and their assistants hundreds of thousands for running semiprofessional teams. Few of these teams earn much money for the universities that sponsor them, and some brutally exploit their players.

Nevertheless, aspirants from the entire world still gravitate here. Why? I'd like to think it's because US colleges still offer a combination of the potential for real upward mobility along with the ability to chart one's own curricular course.

Pakistan's nukes

2011-11-04T11:26:00.001-04:00

The Atlantic and National Journal collaborated on an excellent piece of investigative journalism. Here's a link to National Journal, although possibly behind a pay-wall.

Bottom-line: a very detailed description of what de-nuking Pakistan might entail.

What our graduate students are watching....

2011-11-04T09:53:00.002-04:00

Kudos to the film location, Caltech, where I was a faculty brat and got to watch this play out in real life!

MICKI--Microscopy Imaging Core of the Krasnow Institute

2011-11-04T09:46:00.002-04:00

Just opened in our new space. Our cellular imaging core. The facility is already being used extensively by several of our neuroscience labs, but it's available for other interested investigators in the Washington D.C. area and includes confocal microscopy.

Cellular imaging is a complement to our existing non-invasive human brain imaging capabilities here at Krasnow. In my own research, I've used confocal microscopy to image in vivo, the translocation of protein kinase C following sea urchin egg fertilization. Here at Krasnow, cellular imaging is used for a variety of neuroscience models ranging from drosophila (fruit fly) to mouse.

For those interested in using MICKI, please just drop me a line.

The difficulties of the Eurozone...

2011-11-03T12:15:00.000-04:00

The current challenges in the Eurozone have the potential to reach far out into global science, certainly beyond Greece and even beyond the EU. The reason is simple: Europe plays a central role in many "big science" initiatives (the obvious ones of course in particle physics and astronomy). But the EU also supports an enormous amount of very high caliber research in the life sciences through its Framework funding initiatives.

Above and beyond the funding of science, there's also a critical mass of top notch scientists in Europe and the tendrils of their collaborations reach around the globe.

So we wish our colleagues across the Atlantic the best. All of science has a vested interest in the current Eurozone crisis being resolved positively and promptly.

Cultural neuroscience

2011-11-02T12:26:00.002-04:00

This is a potentially very controversial term that I first learned about in Singapore, about a year ago. The notion is that culture has the ability to affect our neurobiology. This is not so far off from the question Nicholas Carr as asking a bit back--can Google make us stupid? Clearly, there's a valid line of research on adult brain plasticity driven by our environment. My own research and that of many other colleagues completely supports this idea.

The above intriguing idea is whether a culture, in the anthropological sense, has the ability to influence brain connectivity above the between- and within-subject variability of a population?

Putting it another way, given the fact that any two of us (from the same culture) have differently wired brains, can our shared culture influence both of our brains in some measurable way that rises above the threshold of natural variance in the cultural group to which we both belong?

My gut sense is no. But as far as I can tell, there is no data out there to make a scientific case upon, one way or the other.

Note above all, that this is not the same question of whether population genetics can influence brains. Although without a doubt culture is an emergent of many brains, and the instruction manual for constructing those brains is in our genes.

But to learn more, next June in Ann Arbor....

Another terrific piece of Science from the Mosers

2011-11-02T09:15:00.000-04:00

In the October 13 issue of Nature, here is the abstract. If you don't have access to behind the firewall, the basic finding is a flickering of place field representation in the hippocampus when the spatial environment of the animal is shifted (teleported to use their word) instantly. This supports the notion that the collection of place field representations connected with a particular spatial environment represent neuronal attractors.

Enjoy!

Where are you?

2011-11-01T09:22:00.001-04:00

Here's a map from Google analytics on where you are. A lot of our readers are, of course, here in the United States but you are also in Russia, China, Europe, Canada and Iran! Thanks for your continuing interest in Advanced Studies and the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason.

David Barash on Chalmer's Hard Problem...

2011-10-30T12:08:00.001-04:00

He's a professor of evolutionary biology and psychology at the University of Washington. You can find his take on where we stand with current neuroscience here.

Overall, I agree with him.

No, we're not yet at Mind Reading

2011-10-30T10:20:00.002-04:00

This perhaps overly excited piece in the Economist got my attention. At it's root are a series of studies that have come out over the past several years where machine learning has been used to "recognize" the signatures of concepts (like nouns) from many fMRI scans. Tom Mitchell's work at Carnegie Mellon comes to mind.

While these are indeed exciting studies, the notion that we're somehow at the threshold of ubiquitous "mind reading" and deception detection strikes me as far fetched. As an example, the concept of "banana" can surely be found in either an individual's ground truth or a lie. While we might be able to pick out the brain activity signature of banana in both, we'd really have a great deal of difficulty figuring out which context was the lie.

Mentoring students in science soft skills

2011-10-28T09:42:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I mentioned how European and North American science are joined at the hip. To walk around the Krasnow Institute, this is clear. Our students and faculty are truly international. And yes, that includes the rest of the world besides the EU, Canada and the United States. But I'd like to focus on one lacuna in how we handle advanced scientific training, both here and abroad:

Part and parcel of doctoral education here at Mason is training in the "soft skills" necessary to professionally succeed in science as it's practiced here in the US. This includes grantsmanship aimed at US funding agencies such as NSF or the NIH. Crucially, we don't, in general offer such soft skills for the European system (e.g. Framework 7).

By the same token, in my visits to Europe, I've noticed a complementary absence of such soft skill training for US sponsored research sources.

None of this would make much of a difference except for the fact that both here and in Europe, the trainee pool includes doctoral students and postdocs from everywhere. Hence, the New Yorker, I met briefly on one of my recent trips to Europe, will have a difficult time applying for her first NIH RO1 if she returns to the US. And our European trainees, while adept at preparing specific aims, intellectual merit and broader impacts (hallmarks of US NIH and NSF grant applications), will be in the dark as far as applying for EU support from Brussels.

This problem is even more acute for students from places other than the EU and North America. Simply put, we must train our students to succeed as scientists where ever they chose to put down roots.

Funding science: imagining the future

2011-10-27T12:31:00.001-04:00

One of the problems with modern scientific inquiry is that it's inherently costly, both in terms of labor and instrumentation (to say nothing of consumables like reagents). What that means in terms of the modern global economy is that cutting edge science, as it is currently funded, is difficult to sustain during times of economic crisis. Societies have a tough enough time taking care of basic needs. The fuzzy promises of science, where deliverables are really never honestly predictable, take second seat to jobs, food, energy and defense--even though all of these basic needs really depend on science and technology.

Really this problem is another version of humankind's difficulty with the "discount curve". I'd rather have my loaf of bread today than two loafs one year from now.

Nevertheless, long term human success as defined by access to basic needs, economic success, and having a high quality of life are quite constrained by our scientific success. For example, until we find a cure for Alzheimer's disease, we will be spending an increasingly larger piece of the pie on chronic long term health care as we live longer. Those are resources that could be deployed quite usefully in other areas.

Similarly, with 7 billion human inhabitants of Earth, and the probable need to adapt our agriculture to climate change, we will need something beyond the "green revolutions" of the 1960's to supply food, even at the current levels. To get the multitudes in developing nations out of poverty is an even greater challenge. Those advances will need to come from science.

Some major scientific challenges are currently internationally funded. These include large scale physics and astronomy, antarctic research and some energy projects.

In contrast, certain areas of science are not only underfunded (for example given the sheer size of the potential loss from global economic collapse, economics as a field is clearly underfunded), they are also funded in national isolation, with one country potentially duplicating the research activities of another.

Given how closely tied European science is to North American, it's often quite astounding to me how many barriers exist to pooling funding resources across the Atlantic. These barriers are fractal in nature because they have similar characteristics at the very large scale all the way to the micro-level where individual university PI's collaborate (or try to).

We have the WTO, IMF and World Bank to handle the challenges of globalism as far as trade and finance go. We have nothing comparable in firepower (size of the bazooka to use the current terminology) for international science--particularly as far as biomedical, and small-scale basic science is concerned.

We need it.

How might it be funded? Recently the notion of a Tobin, or transaction tax, has been floated as a way to avoid another Lehman Brothers Fall (referring to Fall 2008, but also a mighty economic fall). I'd prefer to see something like a global Tobin tax to fund science, across the globe. Not only might such a financial transactions tax reduce global volatility. It might also provide the bazooka to sustain science stably in an increasingly multipolar, unstable world.

Informal seminars

2011-10-26T09:55:00.001-04:00

One of the very nice aspects of our scientific life at the Krasnow Institute are the informal talks that occur pretty much every day. I took this late afternoon photo yesterday. It looks like our Adaptive Systems Laboratory group under Professor Ken De Jong are getting together.

As Director, one of the great joys of my job is to learn a bit about all of the research that goes on here. And it's quite a span, ranging from origin of life to origin of the 2008 financial crisis.

Sometimes a great seminar

2011-10-25T08:03:00.000-04:00

Krasnow celebrated the 400th Monday seminar talk yesterday with one of the best I've ever seen: Elly Nedivi from MIT presented some of her terrific chronic in vivo imaging of individual neuron dynamics and showed pretty clearly what modern neuroscience can achieve.

One of her key enabling collaborators, Peter So is the brother of our own Krasnow faculty member, Paul So--small world networks!

A new web site for the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study

2011-10-24T11:15:00.001-04:00

It's here. Enjoy!

Paul Allen Smackdown of the Singularity

2011-10-23T16:07:00.002-04:00

From Technology Review, hat tip Andrew Sullivan: here. Bottom-line, the "complexity brake" will arrest our acceleration towards Kurzweil's Singularity.

And the argument has as its basis, the complexity problem as far as a general theory of neuroscience is concerned.

Since I don't share Kurzweil's rosy vision of his Singularity, I'm pleased. In addition, this should keep us neuroscientists employed well into the future.

Daniel Kahneman's cautionary tale in today's NYT Magazine

2011-10-23T12:13:00.000-04:00

The 2002 Nobel Laureate warns us to be wary of over-confident experts bearing advice, here.

Proposed merger of University of Maryland campuses

2011-10-23T09:42:00.000-04:00

The proposal to merge the College Park campus with the Law School and Medical School in Baltimore is reported in the Chronicle here. It's being strongly opposed by Baltimore City interests, but it certainly would increase the prestige of the university. It also makes sense thinking in the longer term about whether Mason or Maryland will be the dominant public research university in the National Capital Area.

So, as an ardent Mason supporter, here's hoping that the folks in Baltimore are successful.

Berkeley Earth Project Papers on-line

2011-10-21T09:51:00.000-04:00

This is the group of scientists who have approached the question of Global Warming de novo. Their papers have been submitted for peer-review and are on-line (physics style in pre-print fashion). The conclusions are here.

The four papers are on-line here.

I have yet to read them, but I will....stay tuned.

Stuxnet II is out there....

2011-10-20T13:43:00.002-04:00

From Wired Magazine, this excellent portrait of DuQu. Bottom line: it's doing active reconnaissance on cyber systems and it's as sophisticated as Stuxnet. The implication of the article seems to be the DuQu is setting up for a future cyber attack, learning about specific systems architectures and transmitting that information...somewhere.

Inder Verma chosen as the new editor of PNAS

2011-10-20T10:38:00.000-04:00

Here's the press release from the National Academy of Sciences. He's an excellent choice in my opinion, both fair and scientifically credible. One of the nation's premier scientific journals remains in good hands.

Difficult times ahead in Bethesda...

2011-10-19T12:16:00.001-04:00

For the NIH I mean. The ScienceInsider blog entry is here. The key point? NIH is considering the way it does business on its main investigator-initiated RO1 grants to deal with anticipated cuts.

Special Teaching Deals Being Called Off...

2011-10-19T09:15:00.001-04:00

From today's Chronicle here. My colleague, Jorge Haddock, dean of our School of Management, is part of the story:

Some administrators are beginning to make changes, sometimes by giving professors a choice in the process. At George Mason University, professors who agreed to chair one of five "areas," or departments, within the university's School of Management had always taught just one course a year, compared with the usual faculty load of four courses per year. When Jorge Haddock took over as dean of the management school two and a half years ago, he thought the course release for area chairs was too generous. So he offered them a new deal: They could teach two courses a year, with pay for one month during the summer, or teach three courses a year with pay for two summer months. While the university pays more, Mr. Haddock says it's worth it to make faculty workloads more equitable across the board and to get full-time professors back into the classroom.