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| + | -June |
| FYI |  From TED.com and MIT Media Lab MIT grad student David Merrill demos Siftables, which are block-sized, electronic computer tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands. These future-toys can do math, play music, and talk to their friends, too. Is this the next thing in hands-on learning? Siftables have piqued the interest of visuospatial learning neuropsychologists and developmental psychologists. And for good reason, imagine overturning a container of nuts and bolts, then looking through the resulting pile for a particular item. Or spreading photographs out on a tabletop and then beginning to sort them into piles. During these activities we interact with large numbers of small objects at the same time, and they utilize all of our fingers and both hands together. We humans are skilled at using our hands in these ways, and can effortlessly sift and sort - focusing on our higher level goals rather than the items themselves. Siftables aims to enable people to interact with information and media in physical, natural ways that approach interactions with physical objects in our everyday lives. As an interaction platform, Siftables applies technology and methodology from wireless sensor networks to tangible user interfaces. For more, visit TED.com |
| + | -June |
| FYI |  Finding the 10 most important research papers of all time! Every few decades a genius article is published that rend asunder everything we thought to understand about our universe. It creates a new field of science or revolutionizes a novel technology. Or maybe the most influential papers are those that are simple and straight forward, yet required the most tedious efforts. You know the type, everybody needs it, everybody cites it, but nobody wants to conduct one themselves. For this month, I propose we create a list of the top 10 most important research papers of all time.
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| + | -May |
| FYI |   The question of free will is whether, and in what sense, rational agents exercise control over their actions and decisions. Addressing this question requires understanding the relationship between freedom and cause, and determining whether the laws of nature are causally deterministic. The various philosophical positions taken differ on whether all events are determined or not — determinism vs. indeterminism — and also on whether freedom can coexist with determinism or not — compatibilism versus incompatibilism. So, for instance, 'hard determinists' argue that the universe is deterministic, and that this makes free will impossible. |
| + | -April |
| FYI |  This week from Nature Neuroscience Inhibition by an excitatory conductance: a paradox explained Ih is an excitatory inward current at subthreshold voltages, but enhancing Ih in CA1 pyramidal neurons leads to inhibition of action potential firing. A report in this issue suggests activation of the potassium current IM underlies this paradox. The interaction of Ih and IM in CA1 pyramidal neurons powerfully illustrates the unexpected complexity of voltage-dependent conductances active at the resting potential of many neurons. Although such currents typically amount to only a tiny fraction of those activated during the action potential, their voltage-dependence allows them to be strongly influenced by changes in voltage of only a few millivolts, leading to complicated interactions depending on the precise kinetics, voltage-dependence and ionic selectivity of each conductance. Combined with non-uniform expression of each conductance in dendrites, soma and axon initial segment, the resulting system has a truly remarkable complexity: a far cry from the textbook picture of passive membranes charged by synaptic currents until reaching a sharp threshold for spiking.
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| + | -April |
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| + | -May |
| FYI | The question of free will is whether, and in what sense, rational agents exercise control over their actions and decisions. Addressing this question requires understanding the relationship between freedom and cause, and determining whether the laws of nature are causally deterministic. The various philosophical positions taken differ on whether all events are determined or not — determinism vs. indeterminism — and also on whether freedom can coexist with determinism or not — compatibilism versus incompatibilism. So, for instance, 'hard determinists' argue that the universe is deterministic, and that this makes free will impossible. |
| + | -April |
| FYI | This week from Nature Neuroscience Inhibition by an excitatory conductance: a paradox explained Ih is an excitatory inward current at subthreshold voltages, but enhancing Ih in CA1 pyramidal neurons leads to inhibition of action potential firing. A report in this issue suggests activation of the potassium current IM underlies this paradox. The interaction of Ih and IM in CA1 pyramidal neurons powerfully illustrates the unexpected complexity of voltage-dependent conductances active at the resting potential of many neurons. Although such currents typically amount to only a tiny fraction of those activated during the action potential, their voltage-dependence allows them to be strongly influenced by changes in voltage of only a few millivolts, leading to complicated interactions depending on the precise kinetics, voltage-dependence and ionic selectivity of each conductance. Combined with non-uniform expression of each conductance in dendrites, soma and axon initial segment, the resulting system has a truly remarkable complexity: a far cry from the textbook picture of passive membranes charged by synaptic currents until reaching a sharp threshold for spiking.
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| + | -April |
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