Title of the Week!

"The Effect of Criticism on Functional Brain Connectivity and Associations with Neuroticism" by Michelle Nadine Servaas, Harriëtte Riese, Remco Jan Renken, Jan-Bernard Cornelis Marsman, Johan Lambregs, Johan Ormel, and André Aleman, appears in the journal PLOS ONE.

Title of the Week!

"Strobing Brain Thunders: Functional Correlation of Extreme Activity Events" by F. Lombardi, D.R. Chialvo, H.J. Herrmann, and L. de Arcangelis, appears in the journal "Chaos, Solitons & Fractals."

Headline of the Week!

The article "Dairy Finds a Way to Let Cows Power Trucks" appears in today's New York Times.

Understatement of the Week?

"In setting the nation on a course to map the active human brain, President Obama may have picked a challenge even more daunting than ending the war in Afghanistan or finding common ground with his Republican opponents."

–The opening sentence of the article "Connecting the Neural Dots" by John Markoff in today's New York Times.

"Today, our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer’s."

"Now, if we want to make the best products, we also have to invest in the best ideas. Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy – every dollar. Today, our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer’s. They’re developing drugs to regenerate damaged organs; devising new material to make batteries 10 times more powerful. Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation. Now is the time to reach a level of research and development not seen since the height of the Space Race. We need to make those investments."

-Remarks by the President in yesterday's State of the Union Address.

"Disruption is overrated."

"'Disruption is overrated,' [Stone] said. 'If you tell good stories, the platforms are sort of beside the point. We made the most analog thing you can think of, a play at the Eugene O’Neill Theater, and it worked out as well as anything we have ever done.'"

-Matt Stone, quoted by David Carr today in the NewYork Times.

Title of the week!

"Of Toasters and Molecular Ticker Tapes" by Dr. Konrad P. Kording appears in the journal PLoS Computational Biology.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16!

The New York Times obituary of Dr. Lynn Margulis (1938 - 2011) notes that her groundbreaking 1967 paper proposing the endosymbiotic theory of the origin of eukaryotes had been rejected by fifteen journals before its eventual publication.

"Discovering things is actually pretty easy..."

"Discovering things is actually pretty easy; understanding them is really hard."

- Prof. Peter Agre (2003 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry), this morning at Pathology Ground Rounds in Hurd Hall, Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Not recommended.

NeuroCooking cannot recommend the "reef playa cerveza" sandals, with a bottle opener built into the sole:

Because, to us, it's about the beer – and just before you put it in your mouth, do you really want to rub it on the bottom of your shoe?

Click the shutter, & your photo is online.

Thom Hogan and others have been calling for camera makers to make "social cameras". The idea being that since your cellphone can take snapshots and upload them to facebook, why would you want to carry a point-and-shoot camera that can't, but that instead requires messing with memory cards and cables, etc.?

Well, the "social camera" is here: It's any camera (that takes an SD card), with an Eye-Fi card loaded in place of a normal SD card.

Remarkable and revolutionary. We've tried it, and we can report that it really works.

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[Use of trademarks & product names is by fair use and does not imply endorsement or sponsorship.]

"... I took black coffee ..."

"For fifteen days I struggled to prove that no functions analogous to those I have since called Fuchsian functions could exist; I was then very ignorant. Every day I sat down at my work table where I spent an hour or two; I tried a great number of combinations and arrived at no result. One evening, contrary to my custom, I took black coffee; I could not go to sleep; ideas swarmed up in clouds; I sensed them clashing until, to put it so, a pair would hook together to form a stable combination. By morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions, those derived from the hypergeometric series. I had only to write up the results which took me a few hours."

- Jules Henri Poincaré (1854 – 1912), excerpted from "Science et Methode" (1908)

Inversion as a good.

In the 1940's, Jerry Cornfield & Wassily Leontief invented econometrics. In one of their first studies on the "sectors" of the American economy, they used economic data to arrive at a 24 x 24 matrix that they then needed to invert. Inverting that 24 x 24 matrix by hand, would, they calculated, take several centuries.

Harvard University's IBM "Mark I" electro-mechanical computer, developed for the war effort, was in principle available to perform this calculation, but the work would have to be paid for, and Cornfield & Leontif's bosses at the Bureau of Labor Statistics refused to approve such an expenditure, because, according to policy, the government would pay for goods, but not for services – after all, so many experts were on the government payroll that they saw no need to pay for services.

In the end, the bureau issued a purchase order, for "one matrix, inverted" from Harvard.

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Source: "The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century" by David Salsburg, 2001 (chapter 17).

A hot rod that you power yourself.

"Inspired by the original Factory Lightweight muscle cars that came out of Detroit in the 60's", Independent Fabrications, of Somerville, Massachusetts, has produced a sub-14 lb. "Titanium Factory Lightweight" bicycle.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall...

MIT graduate student Ming-Zher Poh has developed a mirror that reads your pulse rate:

Everyday time dilation.

Einstein showed that time is relative. Maybe you've heard of the twin paradox? That is a thought experiment, in which someone who goes on a high-speed rocket journey returns to Earth younger than their stay-behind twin.

Well, time dilation has been well-demonstrated, but generally only at fairly high speeds; we've never thought of it as something that's relevant or detectable in everyday experience (for those of us who don't ride rocket-ships).

But.

In a recent paper in Science, researchers at NIST used novel "optical clocks" to detect time dilation at everyday speeds, and, perhaps most spectacularly, due to one foot of elevation: They showed that their clocks can be used to detect the difference in the rate of passage of time due to a change in one foot in elevation with respect to the gravitational field of the earth!

"recombobulation"

Only in Milwaukee:

http://www.google.com/search?q=recombobulation+area

"bar soap", "conventional oven", "film camera", and now, "task-fMRI"

"A 'retronym' is a new name for an object or concept to differentiate the original form or version of it from a more recent form or version."

Examples include "acoustic guitar" & "analog watch".

At the recent resting-state conference in Milwaukee, a new acronym was proposed: "T-fMRI", for task-fMRI, as distinguished from R-fMRI, for resting fMRI.

size vs. shape

Scientists studying brain anatomy know that size ain't everything, because shape matters, too. And so there is a growing literature on the shape of brain structures.

Recently, a similar realization, regarding a different aspect of human anatomy, appears to have occurred to the good people at Levi's.

Some data are better.

We've written about the need to repeat measurements in order to determine the uncertainty in an estimate.

Today I want to address a related question: What is the best estimate?

Let's say I want to know how high my desk is. So, I take a tape measure, and measure the desk ten times. The best estimate is the average of those ten measurements.

Now let's say that I ask one hundred people to measure the height of the desk ten times each. Now I have one thousand measurements (one hundred people, times ten measurements per person) of the height of the desk. What is the best estimate? Is it the average of those one thousand measurements?

No, it is not.

Because, someone whose ten measurements vary more than average, is probably a sloppy measurer; their results should be understood to have more uncertainty than other peoples' measurements, and should be somehow discounted.

And, someone whose measurements are significantly different from the group average, is probably an odd measurer – maybe their problem is optical parallax, or not knowing how to use a tape measure – so their results should be somehow discounted.

This insight – that some data are better than others – is what allowed Drs. Joern Diedrichsen & Reza Shadmehr to develop an approach to improve brain activation estimates from functional MRI data that contain artifacts.