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Scalino
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Open Source Watch

Hi dudes,

Alex, I know you're busy, and you probably know about it already, but if you have another 5 minutes, have a look to this, it seems pretty neat:

http://knol.google.com/k/plos/plos-curr … e4w/46%23#

this is the url of the 'tree of life' branch of the PLOS (Public Library Of Science, www.plos.org), which is apparently hosted - I don't know why - on the knol.google.com domain...

See ya,

Scalino


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Alex
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Re: Open Source Watch

Hi dude,

I've only just found time for a quick trot through some of the videos & articles recommended lately. Here's some feedback:

The Tree of Life open source data site
http://knol.google.com/k/plos/plos-curr … e4w/46%23#
is a great idea that helps free up information from other people's contexts, enabling us to access raw facts rather than other peoples' conclusions about them.

Richard Dawkins seems to improve with age. Here at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHoxZF3Z … mp;index=1
is during his phase of choosing unfortunate semantics (like 'random chance'), that a lot of people misunderstood; I found him much more lucid here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid … 216231786#
...where he explains that random chance is in fact not random, but relies on selection. There are some beautifully clear arguments here.

The 'aging reversal' article:
news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/11/ … d-in-mice/
...is it my imagination or does this story appear to start halfway through a sentence?
I didn't understand the following result:
“The telomerase boost also lengthened the rodents’ life spans compared to their untreated counterparts — but they did not live longer than normal mice, said the researchers.”

...I wish they had given more details on what the treated mice died of, and whether they had shorter lifespans than normal mice or equivalent?

Unfortunately, I'm getting a 'page not found' on this one:
http://nationalcybersecurity.com/?p=44472

...and a message saying 'unable to play the video requested' on this one:
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/78
...maybe I'm having a bad link day...

The SciAm Biotech review:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic … ve-forever
...seems to spend a lot of time pointing out how eccentric/weird certain singularitarians are and not so much time discussing biotech. The sections introducing Chalmers and Kurtzweil read more like biology field notes that a review. With one exception, the author doesn't tell us WHAT researchers were visited who refuted Kurtzweil's ideas, or reference any papers telling us who they might be or what their arguments are. Kurtzweil is accused of using 'shaky evidence' with no explanation as to what it was or why it was 'shaky'. The results from a group study of females are extrapolated to an individual male with a completely different physiology and lifestyle. There is some interesting info about some ongoing projects but on the whole, this is not good science.

This is good science:
http://iopscience.iop.org/1741-2552/8/4 … 046017.pdf
...and one of the most exciting things to happen recently!
I have a copy of the paper in case it becomes unavailable or pay only.
Best,
AR


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Scalino
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Re: Open Source Watch

Hi dude,

The TED one is a real treet, try this one:

http://www.ted.com/talks/al_seckel_says … wired.html

for the other broken one, I can do nothing more...

one thing, when you post urls in the forum area, it's better to stick them between "urls tags", so that they won't be truncated.

I'll show you in next post

Scalino


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Scalino
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Re: Open Source Watch

like this:

{url}http://www.ted.com/talks/al_seckel_says_our_brains_are_mis_wired.html{/url}

but instead of '{}' brackets, you use '[]' ones.


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Alex
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Re: Open Source Watch

WOH! Dudes!
Fucking excellent short documentary on epigenetics!

If anyone doubts the power of input control, check this out right away. Clear, concise, and I only found myself wishing there was a great deal more of it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBtApxIk … re=related

...perhaps not intended to be open source, but it is now anyway  :  )

Worth following up wirh:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE6lWGzO_7A

watch out for the slight cock-up at the end (you'll spot it).
enjoy,
AR


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Alex
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Re: Open Source Watch

Another excellent TED vid. This dude really knows how to play  :  )

http://www.ted.com/talks/charlie_todd_t … rdity.html

AR


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Re: Open Source Watch

Google Search Engine Design Flaws:
  - Potential for Invasion of Privacy (e.g. ads custom made based on your search modus operandi);
  - Potential for Censorship;
  - Potentially Biased results (e.g. SOE, conflict of interests, etc);
  - Single Point of Failure Weakness (1 corporation)

Solution:
  - Decentralized, Peer-to-Peer, Open-Source Network of Indexes

http://yacy.net/en/

00010111
  MM800


PS.: Should this go in the Mainstream watch? I would suppose it would refer to TE BS, but there seem to be good stuff there too (e.g. AI research)? However this here alludes to "homeworld" -- which this post isn't (unless the definition of such is loosened) -- but also got posts not exactly on it (again, depending on definitions). Since here is less crowded, there is lower possibility of disrupting current conversations, ergo here it is. =)

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Alex
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Re: Open Source Watch

Beautiful free slide show. Enjoy  :  )
http://www.cell.com/cell_picture_show-brainbow


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Alex
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Re: Open Source Watch

AI & game-programming fans:  This dude is trying to copy the way the brain does things...and he's doing very well  :  )


computing beyond turing/ jeff hawkins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCdbZqI … 2D6FF57787

Numenta software is here: http://www.numenta.com
http://www.numenta.com/archives/software.php

Enjoy  :  )
AR


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sirhinojo
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Re: Open Source Watch

alex, do you plan on using HTM for something?  amazing speech by the way!


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Alex
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Re: Open Source Watch

Hi dude,
Re: alex, do you plan on using HTM for something?

No, but I plan on keeping an eye on Hawkins. He's the closest to cracking AI from all projects that I know of. He goes off on tangents but seems to come back to the point.

The current model for HTM from my pov is one such tangent, but I predict :  ) that he'll use the prediction factor and get more into internal model construction and graphic representation. Basically he just needs to grasp the central position of the imagination process in the same way he's grasped memory, and perception in the way that he's grasped prediction, and he's cracked it.
Him grasping that depends on his own CPU  :  )

Best,
AR


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Alex
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Re: Open Source Watch

Found this entirely by accident:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr … ults_video

Very, very funny and a great explanation of where most folks get their ideas from  :  )
Enjoy
AR


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Alex
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Re: Open Source Watch

University of California adopts open-access policy for research papers
August 5th, 2013 in Other Sciences / Other

The University of California (UC)—the biggest public research university in the world, has decided to adopt a university wide open-access policy for research papers produced by its faculty. The move marks a major victory for open-access proponents and a blow to professional journals who publish research papers behind a pay wall.

Open access, as described by Creative Commons licensing agreements, essentially provide free access to anyone with an Internet connection. Going forward, all faculty at the university will be encouraged to post their research papers to the university's eScholarship web site. Under the agreement, posters will have to grant the University a non-exclusive license to their papers (per Creative Commons guidelines) and promise that their papers have been peer reviewed. The change doesn't force faculty to post to the university site rather than submit their papers to professional publications such as Nature, or Science, instead it provides a platform for publishing to an open-access site should the authors wish to go that route.

In its announcement, officials with UC indicated that the move to open-access was meant to send a message to the rest of the research community—that open-access to research material is vital to "the future of research."

UC is not the first research organization to institute an open-access policy—various reports suggest that as many as 175 other universities have done so as well, perhaps most famously, MIT. The movement gained momentum after the White House issued a statement earlier this year announcing that all research papers that come about due to federal funds will be made available for free to the public within one year of being published in another journal.

Critics argue that the move to open-access publishing isn't what it would appear at all. They suggest that researchers will still want to publish in well known journals—the wide readership and established reputations make them the gold standard—plus there is the issue of peer review. Professional journals spend a lot of money to ensure papers are thoroughly reviewed before they are published—money they recoup by restricting access to the paper to only those willing to pay for it. Papers that are published on open-access sites, on the other hand, may or may not be as thoroughly reviewed.

© 2013 Phys.org

"University of California adopts open-access policy for research papers." August 5th, 2013. http://phys.org/news/2013-08-university … apers.html


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Alex
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Rescuing neuroscience from its data deluge
August 8th, 2013 in Neuroscience

Before the digital age, neuroscientists got their information in the library like the rest of us. But the field's explosion has created nearly 2 million papers—more data than any researcher can read and absorb in a lifetime.

That's why a UCLA team has invented research maps. Equipped with an online app, the maps help neuroscientists quickly scan what is already known and plan their next study. The Aug. 8 edition of Neuron describes the findings.

"Information overload is the elephant in the room that most neuroscientists pretend to ignore," explained principal investigator Alcino Silva, a professor of neurobiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and of psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. "Without a way to organize the literature, we risk missing key discoveries and duplicating earlier experiments. Research maps will enable neuroscientists to quickly clarify what ground has already been covered and to fully grasp its meaning for future studies."

Silva collaborated with Anthony Landreth, a former UCLA postdoctoral fellow, to create maps offering simplified, interactive and unbiased summaries of findings designed to help neuroscientists in choosing what to study next. As a testing ground for their maps, the team focused on findings in molecular and cellular cognition.

UCLA programmer Darin Gilbert Nee also created a web-based app to help scientists expand and interact with their field's map.

"We founded research maps on a crowd-sourcing strategy in which individual scientists add papers that interest them to a growing map of their fields," explained Silva, who started working on the problem nearly 30 years ago as a graduate student, and coauthored with Landreth an upcoming Oxford Press book on the subject. "Each map is interactive and searchable; scientists see as much of the map as they query, much like an online search."

According to Silva, the map allows scientists to zero in and out of areas that interest them. By tracking published findings, researchers can determine what's missing and pinpoint worthwhile experiments to pursue.

"Just as a GPS map offers different levels of zoom, a research map would allow a scientist to survey a specific research area at different levels of resolution –from coarse summaries to fine-grained accounts of experimental results," said Silva. "The map would display no more and no less detail than is necessary for the researcher's purposes."

Each map encodes information by classifying it into categories and scoring the weight of its evidence based on key criteria, such as reproducibility and convergence, when different experiments point to a single conclusion.

The team's next step will be to automate the map creation process. As scientists publish papers, their findings will automatically be added to the research map representing their field.

According to Silva, automation could be achieved by using journals' existing publication process to divide an article's findings into smaller chapters to build nano-publications. Publishers would use a software plug-in to render future papers machine-readable.

A more direct approach would add special fields into the templates for journal article submission. The data resulting from these fields could be published to a public database, which would provide the foundation for research maps.

"Western societies invest an enormous amount into science, and research maps will optimize that investment," observed Silva. "One day, we will look back on the pre-map era of experiment planning with the same incredulity we now reserve for research conducted prior to statistics."

Provided by University of California, Los Angeles
"Rescuing neuroscience from its data deluge." August 8th, 2013. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-08-n … eluge.html


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Alex
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Neurobiology online course to attempt world's largest memory experiment
April 23rd, 2014 in Neuroscience

A free, massively open online course (MOOC) on Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life will begin Monday, April 28, and will include what may become the world's largest memory experiment.

The University of Chicago is offering the course through MOOC provider Coursera. UChicago launched its first two MOOCs last fall, on Asset Pricing and Global Warming. The MOOCs being offered are free and not-for-credit.

Peggy Mason, professor of neurobiology, will lead Understanding the Brain. Mason designed the 10-week course for people from all walks of life who are interested in the workings of the brain and the nervous system. In fact, the conductor on her commuter train has signed up for the course.
"If I'm going to get Jeff to watch this course when he gets home, it better be bloody interesting,"

Mason said. "I better have a reason why I talk about what I talk about. It better engage people. It better make a difference to them."

Mason had never heard of a MOOC until she was invited to give one. But after reading about them for one entire night, she became fascinated by the concept's potential to fuel widespread curiosity in how the human mind works.

"Learning is the way forward for the world," Mason said. "It's an amazing thing that we can make learning available to people regardless of geography, regardless of ability to pay, regardless of ability to take some entry test; they just want to learn.

Neuroevangelism
"The MOOC is an amazing platform for me as a neuro-evangelist," Mason said. "When I wake up in the morning, I see neurobiology around me all the time. To be able to take the mystery out of the nervous system for the general public is a major opportunity for me."

Mason is the author of a textbook, Medical Neurobiology (Oxford University Press, 2011), which introduces medical students to the fundamentals of the nervous system as it relates to the practice of medicine and human health. She also writes a blog, The Brain is Sooooo Cool!, in which she explains how the brain operates, and tweets about related matters via @neuroMOOC.

The course primarily will cover neuroanatomy, neural communication and neural systems. Mason will supplement her online lectures with discussions of the underlying neurology of topics that her students select from current events or YouTube videos.

Enrollment for Mason's course has reached 27,000 and climbing. Her MOOC students will be able to participate in the memory experiment, which will begin with the second 5-minute segment of the course.
"I anticipate that we will get it credited as the largest memory experiment ever performed," Mason said, referring to the Guinness Book of World Records. "It's very simple. People just have to listen to one 5-minute segment and then answer an e-mail." No further participation in the course is required. "In that way the students can contribute to human knowledge. We're going to learn something from that experiment."

Understanding the Brain follows two other UChicago MOOCs that got off to a strong start. John Cochrane, the AQR Capital Management Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at UChicago's Booth School of Business, taught Asset Pricing, which attracted 41,000 enrollees last fall.

The enrollees included employees at financial firms and faculty members at other institutions who wanted to brush up on the topic. "The kind of people who could not normally come and take a class here can get the material this way," Cochrane said.

The digital materials from UChicago's MOOCs are used to enrich on-campus learning. The students of Cochrane's concurrent course in Asset Pricing viewed the weekly lecture videos independently. Class time emphasized engagement.

"You have to interact with the material," Cochrane said. "If the classroom can be one of discussion, working on problems, working around the material, as opposed to just watching equations flow, I think that'll make the learning experience here much better."

Cochrane's students used the provided online forums to organize study groups in Singapore, London, Taipei and New York City. Online, language-specific study groups also formed, highlighting the international consumption of MOOCs.

International MOOCs
"A recent survey across all Coursera courses showed that a majority of MOOC participants are international, so we are excited by the opportunity these courses represent to share University of Chicago scholarship with a global audience," said Ian Solomon, vice president for global engagement.
Global Warming attracted 15,000 enrollees last fall in a market that includes many other online courses offered by other institutions on the same topic. David Archer, professor in geophysical sciences, taught the course. Archer is offering Global Warming again in an eight-week sequence that began March 31, concurrently with his residential course.

Archer, Cochrane and Mason have all penned textbooks that their students use, both in their for-credit courses and for the online offerings. Archer said of online education, "In some senses it's revolutionary, and in another sense it's just a different medium."
More information: www.coursera.org/course/neurobio

Provided by University of Chicago
"Neurobiology online course to attempt world's largest memory experiment." April 23rd, 2014. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-04-n … emory.html


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