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October 26, 2006
i was DEFINATELY not aware of this
I was enlightened today: At U.S. Borders, Laptops have no right to privacy. Apparently when you arrive in the US, customs and immigration have the right to browse through all the files on your computer, and even seize it. this applies to anyone - They don’t need probable cause to perform these searches under the current law. They can do it without suspicion or without really revealing their motivations.
Yeah, not so cool. I mean, not only are they prying into whatever you might have on your computer, but they can actually just take your computer and not tell you when you're getting it back. One lady said she has been waiting for a year to get her laptop and its contents back. That is simply unacceptable. Luckily, people and groups are working to get the law changed so that seizing and searching must be based at a minimum, on a reasonable suspicion..
hrmph.
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Posted by lara at 01:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 25, 2006
a layman's cognitive science experiment
ok, so this is seriously cool. I have never heard of Spasmodic Dysphonia, but apparently it is a condition in which the parts of your brain that control speech just shut down. The cause is really not known, and there is no cure. Scott Adams (the dude who writes Dilbert) has been suffering from this for the past 18 months, but decided to try and cure himself. He took the knowledge that the condition only affects certain parts of the brain, and the knowledge that different types of speech (singing, public speaking, talking to a friend, etc) are controlled by different parts of the brain, and started testing. It turns out he could sing, and speak in public, but when it came to everyday conversation, all he could muster was occasional weak whispering.
His idea was to try and remap his brain - try and get a part of his brain that handles singing, to take over the functionality of the damaged part of his brain. Remapping is a familiar phenomenon - stroke patients benefit from remapping when they recover certain functionality because new parts of the brain can be trained to e.g. move a leg, blink, etc. Conversely, it has been shown with imaging techniques that the parts of the brain that were dominant in processing sensation and movement in limbs that have been amputated.
OK, enough cogsci stuff. The point is that Scott Adams succeeded: Scott Adams' Good News.
He managed (at least temporarily) to regain his speech after repeating a simple rhyme. It seems that through this process of repeating, the part of his brain that controls speech in rhyme was able to take over controlling normal speech.
This is awesome. Really cool. I hope for his sake, and for everyone else who suffers from this, that this turns out to be a long-term "fix". Yay cognitive science : )
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October 19, 2006
rediscovering an author
I read Malcom Gladwell's Blink a year or two ago and was slightly disappointed, as it seemed to me the book offered more anecdotes than scientific argument, hypothesis or proof. I have been toying with the idea of reading his previous book, The Tipping Point, but a combination of less interest in the topic and the aforementioned slight disappointment the first time around has resulted in it remaining an idea.
I recently stumbled across an article he wrote for The New Yorker, and was intrigued by the title and subtitle: The Formula: What if you built a machine to predict hit movies?. Like Blink, this article touches on cognitive science, which always grabs my attention. In this article, Gladwell reviews a product developed using artificial neural networks, that predicts the box-office success of movies based on a number of key features such as locale, character, genre etc.
A lengthy read (i had to print it out to get through it), but once again my appetite for this author has been whetted. Perhaps reading the rest of his articles in The New Yorker will be an idea that i actually follow through on...
Posted by lara at 12:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 17, 2006
let's get rich..
so who wants the skinny on a quick and painless way of making a ton of money?
well, i don't have that secret, and neither does Paul, but he does have a simple (e.g. not easy), foolproof method of accumulating a lot of wealth over the span of a decade or two. So if your goal is to be in the top 5% [of wealth holders] or higher then check out his article The easiest way to get rich. It's a good read, and will leave you thinking a lot about just how important those last 20% of your salary are...(even when you're not earning $100K+).
Posted by lara at 09:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 06, 2006
He makes it sound so easy...
V.S.Ramachandran has a seemingly concise and simple solution to the problem of how to understand the human consciousness. However, a small amount of insight into the current status of cognitive/neuro/bio-sciences will clue you in to the fact that his solution - Find out how [the inferior parietal lobule, Wernicke's language comprehension area and the anterior cingulate cortex] perform their job and we will have figured out what it means to be a conscious human being - is a bit harder than it may seem : )
still, it's the briefest piece on human consciousness that i've read in a long time...
On My Mind, by V.S. Ramachandran
Posted by lara at 12:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
