Thursday, December 31, 2009

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Meow: IBM takes a (feline) step toward thinking machines

SAN FRANCISCO - Scientists say they've made a breakthrough in their pursuit of computers that "think" like a living thing's brain — an effort that tests the limits of technology.
Even the world's most powerful supercomputers can't replicate basic aspects of the human mind. The machines can't imagine a wall painted a different color, for instance, or picture a person's face and connect that to an emotion.

If researchers can make computers operate more like a brain thinks — by reasoning and dealing with abstractions, among other things — they could unleash tremendous insights in such diverse fields as medicine and economics.

A computer with the power of a human brain is not yet near. But this week researchers from IBM Corp. are reporting that they've simulated a cat's cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer. The computer has 147,456 processors (most modern PCs have just one or two processors) and 144 terabytes of main memory — 100,000 times as much as your computer has.

The scientists had previously simulated 40 percent of a mouse's brain in 2006, a rat's full brain in 2007, and 1 percent of a human's cerebral cortex this year, using progressively bigger supercomputers.

The latest feat, being presented at a supercomputing conference in Portland, Ore., doesn't mean the computer thinks like a cat, or that it is the progenitor of a race of robo-cats.

The simulation, which runs 100 times slower than an actual cat's brain, is more about watching how thoughts are formed in the brain and how the roughly 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses in a cat's brain work together.

The researchers created a program that told the supercomputer, which is in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, to behave how a brain is believed to behave. The computer was shown images of corporate logos, including IBM's, and scientists watched as different parts of the simulated brain worked together to figure out what the image was.
Dharmendra Modha, manager of cognitive computing for IBM Research and senior author of the paper, called it a "truly unprecedented scale of simulation."

Thursday, November 05, 2009

Outrage over wall blocking free U2 Berlin concert

From Yahoo Music News:

Fans hoping to glimpse U2's free concert celebrating 20 years since the Berlin Wall fell were outraged Thursday to find that a 12-foot (3.6-meter) metal barrier was installed to block the view for those without tickets.
Both Berliners and tourists alike saw the irony in building a wall around a concert dedicated to the wall that has already come down.
"It's completely ridiculous that they are blocking the view," said Louis-Pierre Boily, 23, who came to Berlin even though he failed to get U2 tickets. "I thought it's a free show, but MTV probably wants people to watch it on TV to get their ratings up."

Monday, November 02, 2009

Monkeys in mourning

From the New York Post:

Farewell, old friend.
More than a dozen grief-stricken chimpanzees joined in an extraordinary expression of mourning as an elder in their family was laid to rest at a West African animal sanctuary.
Dorothy was in her late 40s, which is well into retirement age for a chimp, when she succumbed to heart failure.
As caregivers at the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center bore her by wheelbarrow for burial, the typically boisterous apes rushed to the edge of their wired enclosure and fell silent.
They stood -- wrapping arms around one another, resting on each other's shoulder and not making a sound -- as Dorothy's female keeper adjusted her head in preparation for a final farewell.

Monica Szczupider

PAYING RESPECTS: Chimps watch in pained silence as Dorothy, who was in her 40s, is wheeled past them and prepared for burial at a sanctuary in Cameroon. The amazing story is featured in National Geographic.
The remarkable photo, which appears in the November issue of National Geographic magazine, was snapped by Monica Szczupider, who was working at the rescue center in eastern Cameroon.
She said Dorothy was a "prominent figure" among the extended family of about 25 chimps at Sanaga-Yong, and the sanctuary's caregivers made sure the other apes witnessed her last rites.
Get more on this story at NationalGeographic.com
"We brought her by wheelbarrow to let the others see," she told the British newspaper The Sun.
The chimps, united in mourning, remained there as they watched Dorothy's keeper give her a final, loving stroke on her forehead and then lowered her into the ground.
"It was unbelievably emotional. We were all struck," Szczupider, 30, said.

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/international/monkeys_in_mourning_HZ86SGLBhngUmIUrAkzWWJ#ixzz0VlQrTjQ4

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

The Great Debate - Is Yeshua Who He Said He Is?

Who is Jesus? Debate - Rabbi Blumofe & Dr Brown from RealMessiah.com on Vimeo.

Girl's 'Notes Left Behind' Made Into Book

Elena Desserich Left Parents Notes Before She Died

From WLWT:

CINCINNATI -- Brooke and Keith Desserich say they never intended to write a book about their daughter.It started as a parent's personal journal to their younger daughter Gracie, so she would be able to remember her 6-year-old sister, Elena, who was diagnosed with pediatric brain cancer.
Elena Desserich

"They told us at the very beginning that she had 135 days to live," Keith Desserich said.

Though her parents didn't want her to know the severity of her cancer, they feel that she must have known what was happening.

The tumor slowly took away her ability to talk.

Images: Notes Left Behind

But Elena was still able to write.

"That was her way to letting us know everything would be OK," Brooke Desserich said.

After Elena passed away, her parents discovered that their daughter had left a message behind for them -- a lot of messages, actually.

"We started to pull out notes and they would be in between CDs or between books on our bookshelf," Keith Desserich said.Then the couple started finding them everywhere.

"We started to collect them and they would all say 'I love you Mom, Dad and Grace.' We kept finding them, and still to this day, we keep finding them," Keith Desserich said. "Literally, there are hundreds of notes that we found.

"Elena’s parents each hold onto a sealed note they've never opened.

"We always want to know that there’s one more note that we haven't read yet," Keith Desserich said.

The Desserich family initially didn’t want the story published, but in the end, they decided they would if all the money went to their cancer foundation, The Cure Starts Now, dedicated to finding "home run" cures for all cancers.

Friday, September 25, 2009

Scientists See Numbers Inside Peoples Heads

From Yahoo News:

By carefully analyzing brain activity, scientists can tell what number a person has just seen, research now reveals.
They can similarly tell how many dots a person was presented with.
Past investigations had uncovered brain cells in monkeys that were linked with numbers. Although scientists had found brain regions linked with numerical tasks in humans - the frontal and parietal lobes, to be exact - until now patterns of brain activity linked with specific numbers had proven elusive.
Scientists had 10 volunteers watch either numerals or dots on a screen while a part of their brain known as the intraparietal cortex was scanned - it's a region of the parietal lobe especially linked with numbers. They next rigorously analyzed brain activity to decipher which patterns might be linked with the numbers the volunteers had observed.
When it came to small numbers of dots, the researchers found that brain activity patterns changed gradually in a way that reflected the ordered nature of the numbers. For example, one might be able to conclude that the pattern for six is between that for five and seven.
In the case of the numerals, the researchers could not detect this same gradual change. This suggests their methods simply might not be sensitive enough to detect this progression yet, or that these symbols are in fact coded as more precise, discrete entities in the brain.
"Activation patterns for numbers of dots seem to be stronger - are more easily discriminated - than those for digits, suggesting that maybe still more neurons encode specifically numbers of objects - the evolutionary older representation - than abstract symbolic numbers," said researcher Evelyn Eger at the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay, France.
Given that numbers "are in principle infinite, it is very unlikely that the brain can have, or we can detect, a signature for each number," Eger noted. "There is some hint in our data that smaller numbers have a clearer signature, which may be related to their frequency of occurrence in daily life, but further work would be needed to say something more definite about this and about how the brain deals with larger numbers."
The methods employed in this research could ultimately help unlock how the brain makes sophisticated calculations and how the brain changes as people learn math, the researchers said.
"We are only beginning to access the most basic building blocks that symbolic math probably relies on," Eger said. "We still have no clear idea of how these number representations interact and are combined in mathematical operations, but the fact that we can resolve them in humans gives hope that at some point we can come up with paradigms that let us address this."
The scientists detailed their findings online September 24 in the journal Current Biology.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Indian Lunar Mission Finds Water On The Moon

From the London Times:

Dreams of establishing a manned Moon base could become reality within two decades after India’s first lunar mission found evidence of large quantities of water on its surface.
Data from Chandrayaan-1 also suggests that water is still being formed on the Moon. Scientists said the breakthrough — to be announced by Nasa at a press conference today — would change the face of lunar exploration.
The discovery is a significant boost for India in its space race against China. Dr Mylswamy Annadurai, the mission’s project director at the Indian Space Research Organisation in Bangalore, said: “It’s very satisfying.”
The search for water was one of the mission’s main objectives, but it was a surprise nonetheless, scientists said.The unmanned craft was equipped with Nasa’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper, designed specifically to search for water by picking up the electromagnetic radiation emitted by minerals. The M3 also made the unexpected discovery that water may still be forming on the surface of the Moon, according to scientists familiar with the mission.

There are two reasons I post this.

One, I think it's interesting, and two, I think it's a chance to promote the greatest unheralded Rock n' Roll band in history; the Bell Rays. After all, if there is water on the moon, there can also be Fire On The Moon:

More Bell Rays. Here they are on the Craig Ferguson Show.

CUANAS