Scientists extract images directly from brain

Friday, December 12th, 2008

Scientists extract images directly from brain:

Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.

The scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the researchers first mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex as subjects viewed various images held in front of their eyes. Subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. While the fMRI machine monitored the changes in brain activity, a computer crunched the data and learned to associate the various changes in brain activity with the different image designs.

Then, when the test subjects were shown a completely new set of images, such as the letters N-E-U-R-O-N, the system was able to reconstruct and display what the test subjects were viewing based solely on their brain activity.

(Hat tip to Mike.)

Their music for video games depends on play

Friday, December 12th, 2008

Their music for video games depends on play:

In a few short years, as the visual effects and realism of video games have evolved, so too have their soundtracks — from comical bleeps and annoying loops of ear candy to lush, epic soundtracks that instantly adapt to fit whatever a player decides to do. With an expected $50 billion in global sales this year, video games have turned into such a big business that established composers from film and television are signing on to create the sweeping scores and intricate sounds that help guide players through their missions.

Harry Gregson-Williams, who scored Shrek, created the music for the action game Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Steve Jablonsky, the composer for Transformers, wrote music for the Sims and Gears of War 2. Danny Elfman, whose theme music for the 1989 Batman movie won him a Grammy Award, scored the role-playing adventure game series Fable.

The gigs pay well: Composers can receive as much as $2,000 for each minute of music they write, with a typical game requiring 60 to 90 minutes of music. Including the allowance for hiring musicians, renting recording studios and post-production work, the music budgets for top-notch games can reach as high as half a million dollars.

Santa Needs a Bailout, Too

Friday, December 12th, 2008

Santa Needs a Bailout, Too, so k are selling their old toys to raise cash for new ones:

The number of postings in the “games/toys for sale” category at craigslist more than doubled to 396,197 last month from 190,157 a year earlier. Many of this year’s listings include the phrases “my son is selling” or “my daughter is selling,” for items ranging from Bratz dolls to the Game Boy Advance.

On eBay, more than 3,600 used toys were available on Dec. 2, and more than 2,000 were sold for an average of $30.21 in the previous week. “Kids are smart, and when their parents are telling them ‘No,’ they are looking for other ways to make it happen,” says Cat Schwartz, eBay’s gadget and toy director.

By late last week, a quarter of the 500 mothers of 8- to 12-year-olds surveyed by the research and strategy firm Just Kid Inc. said their children had considered selling old toys and games to help pay for gifts this holiday season; 11% said their children had already done so and 6% said their children had sold more this year. In many cases, respondents said their children wanted to buy something for themselves.

Pop Psychology

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

In Pop Psychology, Virginia Postrel looks at the psychology of financial bubbles:

For more than two decades, economists have been running versions of the same experiment. They take a bunch of volunteers, usually undergraduates but sometimes businesspeople or graduate students; divide them into experimental groups of roughly a dozen; give each person money and shares to trade with; and pay dividends of 24 cents at the end of each of 15 rounds, each lasting a few minutes. (Sometimes the 24 cents is a flat amount; more often there’s an equal chance of getting 0, 8, 28, or 60 cents, which averages out to 24 cents.) All participants are given the same information, but they can’t talk to one another and they interact only through their trading screens. Then the researchers watch what happens, repeating the same experiment with different small groups to get a larger picture.

The great thing about a laboratory experiment is that you can control the environment. Wall Street securities carry uncertainties — more, lately, than many people expected — but this experimental security is a sure thing. “The fundamental value is unambiguously defined,” says the economist Charles Noussair, a professor at Tilburg University, in the Netherlands, who has run many of these experiments. “It’s the expected value of the future dividend stream at any given time”: 15 times 24 cents, or $3.60 at the end of the first round; 14 times 24 cents, or $3.36 at the end of the second; $3.12 at the end of the third; and so on down to zero. Participants don’t even have to do the math. They can see the total expected dividends on their computer screens.

Here, finally, is a security with security — no doubt about its true value, no hidden risks, no crazy ups and downs, no bubbles and panics. The trading price should stick close to the expected value.

At least that’s what economists would have thought before Vernon Smith, who won a 2002 Nobel Prize for developing experimental economics, first ran the test in the mid-1980s. But that’s not what happens. Again and again, in experiment after experiment, the trading price runs up way above fundamental value. Then, as the 15th round nears, it crashes. The problem doesn’t seem to be that participants are bored and fooling around. The difference between a good trading performance and a bad one is about $80 for a three-hour session, enough to motivate cash-strapped students to do their best. Besides, Noussair emphasizes, “you don’t just get random noise. You get bubbles and crashes.” Ninety percent of the time.

Read the whole thing.

Like a Twig

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

When I first saw the 6’4″, 155-lb Corey Hill (then 0-0, now 2-2) on The Ultimate Fighter, I thought, That guy’s built like a twig! He’s going to snap in two!

I had no idea how terrifyingly accurate that thought would be. At last night’s Fight for the Troops, Corey Hill shattered his shin against Dale Hartt’s:

Just two fights into the UFC Fight for the Troops benefit show on Wednesday night in Fayetteville, N.C., and the show quickly took a downhill turn.

After Justin McCully opened the show by rebounding from a UFC 86 loss to Gabriel Gonzaga, by decisioning Eddie Sanchez, Dale Hartt nabbed his first win in the Octagon. Winning the way that he did, however, probably couldn’t have been any worse for Hartt, unless he was his opponent, Corey Hill.

MMAWeekly.com had Hill winning the opening round of the fight. But during the second stanza, Hill threw a leg kick that Hartt checked with his shin. As Hartt checked the kick, Hill’s leg broke in a rather grotesque manner, leaving the crowd in a stunned silence as Hill crumbled to the mat.

Obama: Don’t stock up on guns

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

When Obama says, Don't stock up on guns, “bitter” gun nuts understandably buy even more guns to “cling” to:

As gun sales shoot up around the country, President-elect Barack Obama said Sunday that gun-owning Americans do not need to rush out and stock up before he is sworn in next month.

“I believe in common-sense gun safety laws, and I believe in the second amendment,” Obama said at a news conference. “Lawful gun owners have nothing to fear. I said that throughout the campaign. I haven’t indicated anything different during the transition. I think people can take me at my word.”

I suspect that we don’t all agree on what constitutes a common-sense gun safety law.

How far up are gun sales?

Nationally, background checks for gun purchases jumped nearly 49 percent during the week Obama was elected, compared with the same time period last year, according to the FBI’s National Instant Background Check System.

Hitler was the perfect boss

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised that 'Hitler was the perfect boss', according to his pre-war maid:

Rosa went into Hitler’s service at the age of 15 in 1932 when she was Rosa Krautenbacher. Her sister Anni had worked as a cook at Hitler’s Berchtesgaden retreat since the late 1920s.

‘She said he needed a housemaid and I would fit the bill,’ Rosa recalled. ‘I remember so clearly the first day I spoke to him in the kitchen. I said I was Anni’s sister and that made him smile, because Anni was his favourite. I only ever knew Hitler as a kindly man who was good to me.’

His former housekeeper was Geli Raubal, with whom it was rumoured he had a love affair. ‘She shot herself in September 1931 and I was told as soon as I went to work for him that he was not to be approached on the anniversary of that day,’ said Rosa.

‘My sister and I shared a room that was directly over Hitler’s. We could hear him crying.’

For a long time she and Anni were the only servants in the home, known as Berghof.

Recalling her first direct request from her master, she said she was drying some porcelain cups when he came down the stairs.

‘Hello,’ he said softly. ‘Sorry to trouble you, but could you make me some coffee and bring some gingerbread biscuits to my study?’

Coming into such close proximity to Hitler made her feel faint, she said, but she soon became accustomed to life at Berghof.

‘I rose at 6am every day and put on a red-green dirndl with a white apron. My first task was to feed his dogs – he had three German shepherds at the beginning called Wolf, Muck and Blondi.

‘In those days, Hitler slept in his study. In it was an iron bed, one wardrobe, one table, two chairs and a shoebox. It was very modestly furnished. Beside the bed hung a picture of his mother.’

She added: ‘I didn’t have to be a Nazi party member or anything. After a while I relaxed a bit. Apparently it was Hitler’s orders that Anni and I be taken to church every Sunday because he thought this would be “good for us”.

‘Another time he came into the kitchen, saw me and said, “Ahh, I see our little one has grown a little plumper!”.’

Part of her duties involved sorting out the fan letters and presents that were delivered in their thousands to the house.

‘There were cigars, jars of jam, flowers, pictures,’ she recalled. ‘We gave most of them away to poorer peasant families nearby on Hitler’s orders.’

Her time in service also allowed her to see at close quarters the woman Hitler kept secret from his people throughout his rule – Eva Braun. ‘She was not so pretty close up,’ Rosa recalled.

‘Himmler was always there too, thinner than what he looked like in the photos, and Goebbels.

‘And Bormann, I didn’t like him at all. He was a dirty pig.’ By the end of 1934, the house was surrounded by minefields and SS checkpoints. Rosa said. ‘I felt like a prisoner instead of an employee.’

In 1935 she fell in love with local businessman Josef Amorts and handed in her notice. She was told she could leave immediately..

‘I only met Hitler once more, on December 10, 1936, when Anni married Herbert Doehring, manager of the Berghof. He came to the wedding and was nice to me, saying he missed me.’

In Face of Tragedy, ‘Whodunit’ Question Often Guides Moral Reasoning

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

Shankar Vedantam notes that, in the face of tragedy, the ‘Whodunit’ question often guides our moral reasoning:

When a tragedy occurs, we instantly ask who or what caused it. When we find a human hand behind the tragedy — such as terrorists, in the case of the Mumbai attacks — something clicks in our minds that makes the tragedy seem worse than if it had been caused by an act of nature, disease or even human apathy.

Comparing our “out of proportion” political reactions to the small numbers of deaths from highly visible terrorist attacks to our reactions to fires and car accidents may point out that we have a bad-guy bias — or it might simply point out an important difference between fighting thinking, human foes and fighting uncaring forces.

If you successfully defend against attacks, your enemies might choose not to mount more attacks.

Mismanagement at the Big Three

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

Ralph Reiland looks at Mismanagement at the Big Three Detroit automakers:

It was a dead heat. General Motors sold 9.37 million vehicles worldwide in 2007 and lost $38.7 billion. Toyota sold 9.37 million vehicles in 2007 and made $17.1 billion.

That was the second best sales total in GM’s 100-year history and the biggest loss ever for any automaker in the world.

For Toyota, that was roughly $1,800 in profit for every vehicle sold. For GM, it was an average loss of $4,100 for every vehicle sold.

Collectively, Detroit’s Big Three automakers are currently losing about $5 billion per month, with Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, respectively, burning through $2 billion, $2 billion and $1 billion in cash every 30 days.
[...]
Currently, UAW workers at Ford, GM and Chrysler earn an average of $28 per hour, plus benefits. At the Toyota and Honda non-union plants in the United States, the hourly rate, excluding benefits, is $26 and $24, respectively.

Add the cost of benefits for the current workforce and the cost of pensions and health care for retirees (benefit-collecting retirees outnumber current workers by three-to-one at GM, Ford and Chrysler) and the difference in labor cost between a Toyota plant in the US. and the plants of Detroit’s automakers jumps to $29 per hour.

More specifically, the hourly compensation cost for labor, including benefits and retirees’ costs, at the Big Three is $73 per hour, compared with $44 per hour at a Toyota factory with American workers in the U.S.

Further, it takes fewer hours of labor to produce a car in Toyota’s U.S. plants than at the plants of Detroit’s automakers.

With more flexible work rules, GM says it could save hundreds of dollars per vehicle. The company maintains, for instance, that a company-wide use on non-union janitors, earning $12 per hour, would cut costs and increase competitiveness by up to $500 million a year.

Similarly, health care costs at GM for active workers and retirees account for more than a quarter of total labor compensation, adding approximately $1,000 in cost to every GM vehicle, compared to $215 in health care costs in each Toyota produced in U.S. plants.

Under UAW contracts, additionally, laid off workers are transferred to a jobs bank and receive 95 percent of their full pay and benefits to not work. This year, the cost to the Big Three will be an estimated $478 million, about $70 million less than Honda spent to build a brand new factory in Indiana.

Somewhere along the line, both management and labor in Detroit forgot the good economic advice of UAW head Walter Reuter: “Getting more and more pay for less and less work is a dead end street.”

Nature vs Nurture: A Natural Experiment

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

David Friedman claims that it’s not just the religious right that rejects evolution but the left as well, because it refuses to accept the importance of heredity. In Nature vs Nurture: A Natural Experiment, he discusses a study that addresses some age-old questions:

From 1970-1980, a large number of Korean-American children were placed for adoption by an agency which assigned them at random to adoptive families. That meant that any correlation between characteristics of the families, such as maternal education, socio-economic status, or income, and characteristics of the children as adults, would be due to environment not genetics. By comparing the strength of the relation between characteristics of parents and adoptive children with the corresponding figure for parents and biological children raised by those parents, one can get at least some estimate of how much of the relation comes from which cause.

The conclusion is striking. An increase of one year in maternal education produces an increase of only .07 years in the education of an adoptive child but an effect four times as large on the education of a biological child. Similar results apply to a variety of other characteristics. It looks as though being brought up by well off or well education parents is indeed an advantage, but a considerably smaller advantage than being the biological child of such parents.

The lady’s not for spurning

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

In The lady's not for spurning, Theodore Dalrymple reviews Claire Berlinski’s There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters — and makes some of his own points about the Iron Lady:

Berlinski tells us that her economic reforms, perhaps unavoidably, created a large underclass, a mass of utterly hopeless, unskilled, uneducated, unemployable people of the kind who are to be seen in the centre of every British town and city on Friday and Saturday nights, obliterating themselves with drink and behaving generally like extras in a film about Sodom and Gomorrah. This, in my view, is a serious and deep misunderstanding.

These self-obliterators are not the underclass; such self-obliteration is beyond the means of the underclass, which obliterates itself in other ways closer to home. The people of whom Berlinski writes are actually the beneficiaries of the Thatcher revolution. They are the market; the market cannot be wrong; ergo, it is right to vomit in the gutter and pass out in public.

Thatcher believed, in a kind of mirror-image Marxist way, that the market automatically made men virtuous. Unfortunately, she did not so much restore a market economy as promote a consumer society, which is not quite the same thing. It was a society in which most of the really difficult aspects of existence in the modern world – education, health care, social security and many others – remained in the hands of the state. This meant that consumer choice was largely limited to matters of pocket money: whether to ruin Ibiza by your behaviour on holiday, or Crete. The resultant combination of consumer choice and deep irresponsibility was not an attractive one, to say the least. A large part of the population became selfish, egotistical, childish, petulant, demanding and whimsical.

Moreover, her belief that the idea of public service was always and everywhere but a mask for private rent-seeking, which could be avoided only by the introduction of the management techniques of the efficient private sector, paved the way for the grotesque corporatist corruption of Messrs. Blair’s and Brown’s Britain. In effect, she helped to create a new, and very large, class of apparatchiks posing as businessmen, who quickly learned how to loot the public purse mercilessly.

60 MPH, With a Gun and No Driver

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

The new Ripsaw MS1 goes 60 mph, with a gun and no driver:

This unmanned tank that tops 60 mph, can be fitted with a remote gun system and plows over concrete barriers like its a wall of foam.
[...]
Built by twin brothers, Geoff and Mike Howe of Barwick, Maine, the Ripsaw can careen at high speed over obstacles that would leave a vehicle’s crew dazed and bruised. It is operated by a driver in another vehicle using a modular crew station that can be unbolted and placed in a range of Army vehicles, including the Stryker and all the MRAP models.

A weaponised version, modified by the Army’s Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC) at Picatinny Arsenal, NJ, includes a remotely operated M240 machine gun. The gun is operated by a separate person using another modular station that can be put in a range of vehicles.

In addition to impressive firepower, the Ripsaw can carry a payload of 2,000 pounds. It is not armored and each track can be removed as a unit should it be damaged, according to Bhavanjot Singh, ARDEC project officer.

Spent Coffee Grounds as a Versatile Source of Green Energy

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

Narasimharao Kondamudi, Susanta K. Mohapatra, and Mano Misra examined Spent Coffee Grounds as a Versatile Source of Green Energy (PDF) and estimated that one could produce 2,920,000 gallons of biodiesel from the 210,000,000 pounds of coffee grounds Starbucks throws out each year, which would bring in $13,140,000 of revenue — assuming a price of $4.50 per gallon of biodiesel, which sounds like an after-tax retail price — for “just” $25,200,000 in operating costs.

What makes this whole thing look profitable is that one can still sell the non-biodiesel waste as fuel pellets — 89,150 tons for $20,080,000 — bringing the whole thing into the black, with profits of $8,020,000 per year.

I guess we have to ask, What portion of those operating costs go toward producing biodiesel versus fuel pellets?, and, Do those operating costs include the logistical costs of collecting all those coffee grounds?

EEGs show brain differences between poor and rich kids

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

EEGs show brain differences between poor and rich kids:

In a study recently accepted for publication by the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, scientists at UC Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and the School of Public Health report that normal 9- and 10-year-olds differing only in socioeconomic status have detectable differences in the response of their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is critical for problem solving and creativity.

I’d love to know what “differing only in SES” really means. Just what did they control for?

Here’s how the test worked:

Kishiyama, Knight, Boyce and their colleagues selected 26 children ages 9 and 10 from a group of children in the WINKS study. Half were from families with low incomes and half from families with high incomes. For each child, the researchers measured brain activity while he or she was engaged in a simple task: watching a sequence of triangles projected on a screen. The subjects were instructed to click a button when a slightly skewed triangle flashed on the screen.

The researchers were interested in the brain’s very early response — within as little as 200 milliseconds, or a fifth of a second — after a novel picture was flashed on the screen, such as a photo of a puppy or of Mickey and Minnie Mouse.

“An EEG allows us to measure very fast brain responses with millisecond accuracy,” Kishiyama said.

The researchers discovered a dramatic difference in the response of the prefrontal cortex not only when an unexpected image flashed on the screen, but also when children were merely watching the upright triangles waiting for a skewed triangle to appear. Those from low socioeconomic environments showed a lower response to the unexpected novel stimuli in the prefrontal cortex that was similar, Kishiyama said, to the response of people who have had a portion of their frontal lobe destroyed by a stroke.

“When paying attention to the triangles, the prefrontal cortex helps you process the visual stimuli better. And the prefrontal cortex is even more involved in detecting novelty, like the unexpected photographs,” he said. But in both cases, “the low socioeconomic kids were not detecting or processing the visual stimuli as well. They were not getting that extra boost from the prefrontal cortex.”

“These kids have no neural damage, no prenatal exposure to drugs and alcohol, no neurological damage,” Kishiyama said. “Yet, the prefrontal cortex is not functioning as efficiently as it should be. This difference may manifest itself in problem solving and school performance.”

Notice what the researchers don’t mention as a possible explanation:

The researchers suspect that stressful environments and cognitive impoverishment are to blame, since in animals, stress and environmental deprivation have been shown to affect the prefrontal cortex. UC Berkeley’s Marian Diamond, professor of integrative biology, showed nearly 20 years ago in rats that enrichment thickens the cerebral cortex as it improves test performance. And as Boyce noted, previous studies have shown that children from poor families hear 30 million fewer words by the time they are four than do kids from middle-class families.

“In work that we and others have done, it really looks like something as simple and easily done as talking to your kids” can boost prefrontal cortex performance, Boyce said.

“We are certainly not blaming lower socioeconomic families for not talking to their kids — there are probably a zillion reasons why that happens,” he said. “But changing developmental outcomes might involve something as accessible as helping parents to understand that it is important that kids sit down to dinner with their parents, and that over the course of that dinner it would be good for there to be a conversation and people saying things to each other.”

“The study is suggestive and a little bit frightening that environmental conditions have such a strong impact on brain development,” said Silvia Bunge, UC Berkeley assistant professor of psychology who is leading the intervention studies on prefrontal cortex development in teenagers by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Wouldn’t we expect the children of high-SES parents to have the traits of successful people? And wouldn’t we expect the children of low-SES parents to have the traits of unsuccessful people?

Crime in England and Wales

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

Civitas — an English “Institute for the Study of Civil Society” — looks at Crime in England and Wales, which has risen tremendously over the years:

The number of recorded crimes per 100,000 population in 1950 was 1,053 and in 1960 still only 1,610. By 1992 the figure reached 10,943. The latest figure for 2004/05 is 10,537, well over ten times the rate in the 1950s. [...] Contact crime, defined as robbery, sexual assault, and assault with force, was second highest in England and Wales (3.6% of those surveyed). The highest figure was for Australia, where it was 4.1%. The figure for the USA was 1.9% and for Japan, 0.4%.

Although crime is way up in the long term, it’s down in the short term, from a peak in the mid-1990s:

Why has crime fallen since then? The main reason is that more offenders are in prison. To claim that increasing the use of prison reduces crime is controversial. Between 1993 and 2001 the average number of people in prison rose from 45,633 to 66,300, an increase of over 45%.

What happened to crime over this period? According to the BCS crime fell from 19.1 million in 1995 to 12.6 million in 2001/02. Was it just a coincidence?

Even if no deterrent effect is assumed, the incapacitation effect of imprisoning on average another 20,000 criminals would have been substantial. How can we work out the incapacitation effect? The Home Office report, Making Punishments Work, estimated that the average offender carried out 140 offences per year.

We can make a rough calculation of the incapacitation effect of jailing 20,000 full-year equivalent offenders. If each prisoner carried out the average number of offences identified by the Home Office, then 2.8 million offences against the public would have been prevented by 12 months in jail.