Entries for October 2005
Michael Shadlen: Turing's enigma solution and the neurobiology of decision making
I'm a little late writing this one up, but last Thursday I went to my first Computer Science department seminar at UW. It's a bit misleading to stress that though, because it was actually someone from the physiology and biophysics department giving a talk that was partly a neuroscience primer for computer science people. The main part of the talk was about modelling probabilistic decision making, and I'll describe that part below the cut.
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Life is a cup of tea
I've been avoiding the evolution vs 'intelligent design' debate for the most part, because it seems like something that would need a significant input of time to approach in a way that's not pointlessly shallow. I think there are interesting questions to be asked about why 'intelligent design' has such traction with parts of the population, but others do this better than I can. Mano Singham in particular keeps coming back to the topic, and always has something worthwhile to say.
However, I read something this morning that I had to share. Last week's Economist had a report from the Dover PA court case in which the school board is being challenged over its decision to include ID in the curriculum. I was particularly taken with one quote, because I thought it an unusually succint way of explaining how a devout religious person need not have any difficulty accepting the idea of evolution. It was John Haught's analogy between different levels of explanation for life and different levels of explanation for his boiling kettle:
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My First Teleconference
Yesterday I had my first teleconference. The word teleconference
gives me an entirely inappropriate mental picture; some sort of super-hi-tech wizardry like the holograms at the Jedi Council. Sadly the reality is far less cool - I phone the lab, they put me on speaker and put the phone on the table between them.
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Martha Bosma - The reason for the rhythm: mechanisms for driving spontaneous activity in the developing mouse hindbrain
Today's field trip was to a biology department seminar at the UW. Martha Bosma presented some rather striking work on spontaneous neural activity in the mouse hindbrain; specifically an instance of it during fœtal development.
What constitutes learning?
Last week I went back to Cleveland, as I will keep doing every month or two, to meet my advisor and colleagues. It was a useful meeting, giving me some specific feedback, a bunch of useful ideas, and some questions to chew on while I work on things back here. There is one in particular that keeps coming up, because it's very important to address in order to keep my simulations relevant, and the answer is not obvious:
What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for an artificial system to be described as learning?