“These experiments were performed by Christian Ethier, a post-doctoral fellow, and Emily Oby, a graduate student in neuroscience, both at the Feinberg School of Medicine. The researchers gave the monkeys a local anesthetic to block nerve activity at the elbow, causing temporary, painless paralysis of the hand. With the help of the special devices in the brain and the arm – together called a neuroprosthesis — the monkeys’ brain signals were used to control tiny electric currents delivered in less than 40 milliseconds to their muscles, causing them to contract, and allowing the monkeys to pick up the ball and complete the task nearly as well as they did before. “The monkey won’t use his hand perfectly, but there is a process of motor learning that we think is very similar to the process you go through when you learn to use a new computer mouse or a different tennis racquet. Things are different and you learn to adjust to them,” said Miller, also a professor of physiology and of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Feinberg and a Sensory Motor Performance Program lab chief at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. Because the researchers computed the relationship between brain activity and muscle activity, the neuroprosthesis actually senses and interprets a variety of movements a monkey may want to make, theoretically enabling it to make a range of voluntary hand movements. “This gives the monkey voluntary control of his hand that is not possible with the current clinical prostheses,” Miller said.” Neuroscience News originally shared this post: New Brain-Machine Interface Moves a Paralyzed Hand New technology bypasses spinal cord and delivers electrical signals from brain directly to muscles. A new Northwestern Medicine brain-machine technology deli

h/t +Rebecca Spizzirri Kiki Sanford originally shared this post: Repetitive motor learning drives synaptic spine formation in a matter of days. “With their microscope, Zuo and her colleagues often observed one spine pop out of a dendrite on the first day of training and another spine pop up near it a few days later. In more than half the clusters, the first spine grew on the first training day and the second joined it by the fourth, and nearly all of the clusters in all the learning mice grew between the first and fourth days. These observations suggest that the clusters are one example of how practice physically manifests itself in the brain. The findings appear in the March issue of Nature.” http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/04/16/spine-tuning-finding-physical-evidence-of-how-practice-rewires-the-brain/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22343892 Spine Tuning: Finding Physical Evidence of How Practice Rewires the Brain | Observations, Scientific American Blog Network In kindergarten, several of my friends and I were very serious about learning to tie our shoes. I remember sitting on the edge of the playground, …

“Inspection functions ceaselessly. The gaze is alert everywhere: ‘A considerable body of militia, commanded by good officers and men of substance’, guards at the gates, at the town hall and in every quarter to ensure the prompt obedience of the people and the most absolute authority of the magistrates, ‘as also to observe all disorder, theft and extortion’. At each of the town gates there will be an observation post; at the end of each street sentinels. Every day, the intendant visits the quarter in his charge, inquires whether the syndics have carried out their tasks, whether the inhabitants have anything to complain of; they ‘observe their actions’. Every day, too, the syndic goes into the street for which he is responsible; stops before each house: gets all the inhabitants to appear at the windows (those who live overlooking the courtyard will be allocated a window looking onto the street at which no one but they may show themselves); he calls each of them by name; informs himself as to the state of each and every one of them – ‘in which respect the inhabitants will be compelled to speak the truth under pain of death’; if someone does not appear at the window, the syndic must ask why: ‘In this way he will find out easily enough whether dead or sick are being concealed.’ Everyone locked up in his cage, everyone at his window, answering to his name and showing himself when asked – it is the great review of the living and the dead.” Foucault, Panopticism http://foucault.info/documents/disciplineAndPunish/foucault.disciplineAndPunish.panOpticism.html _ More on the robot here: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/military-robots/robocops-now-guarding-south-korean-prisons World’s First Robot Prison Guard

Jürgen Hubert originally shared this post: I find this line to be especially noteworthy: “The geography of supply chains will change.” When you no longer need to import specialized parts from the other end of the globe but can print them out right here as long as you have the right blueprints… then yes, the changes are going to be massive. The third industrial revolution THE first industrial revolution began in Britain in the late 18th century, with the mechanisation of the textile industry.

In an interview with the Guardian, Berners-Lee said: “My computer has a great understanding of my state of fitness, of the things I’m eating, of the places I’m at. My phone understands from being in my pocket how much exercise I’ve been getting and how many stairs I’ve been walking up and so on.” Exploiting such data could provide hugely useful services to individuals, he said, but only if their computers had access to personal data held about them by web companies. “One of the issues of social networking silos is that they have the data and I don’t … There are no programmes that I can run on my computer which allow me to use all the data in each of the social networking systems that I use plus all the data in my calendar plus in my running map site, plus the data in my little fitness gadget and so on to really provide an excellent support to me.” Rebecca MacKinnon originally shared this post: Tim Berners-Lee: demand your data from Google and Facebook Exclusive: world wide web inventor says personal data held online could be used to usher in new era of personalised services

“Many broadly significant scientific questions, ranging from self-organization and information flow to systemic robustness, can now be properly formalized within the emerging theory of networks,” says Adilson E. Motter, professor of physics and astronomy. “I was thus humbled to be invited to write such a timely piece.” The authors argue that, as network research matures, there will be increasing opportunities to exploit network concepts to also engineer new systems with desirable properties that may not be readily available in existing ones. Drew Sowersby originally shared this post: Networks and the patterns they express #Networks #Patterns #Collaboration #Complexity They are just beginning to establish how to properly read patterns within networks. I found the following insight to mesh with my own intuition about how to proceed! “One such method mentioned in the article aims at resolving the internal structure of complex networks by organizing the nodes into groups that share something in common, even if researchers do not know a priori what that thing is.” Futurity.org – To control a network, find the pattern Research news from leading universities

” We all know that, for example, the iPad is assembled from lots of high tech suppliers. The piece below thinks about that in terms of the knowledge required to build an iPad. That knowledge is more than a single company can handle and it must be spread among a number of companies. In the early days, life was simple. We did important things like make spears and arrowheads. The amount of knowledge needed to make these items, however, was small enough that a single person could master their production. There was no need for a large division of labor and new knowledge was extremely precious. If you got new knowledge, you did not want to share it. After all, in a world where most knowledge can fit in someone’s head, stealing ideas is easy, and appropriating the value of the ideas you generate is hard. At some point, however, the amount of knowledge required to make things began to exceed the cognitive limit of a single human being. Things could only be done in teams, and sharing information among team members was required to build these complex items. Organizations were born as our social skills began to compensate for our limited cognitive skills. Society, however, kept on accruing more and more knowledge, and the cognitive limit of organizations, just like that of the spearmaker, was ultimately reached. … Today … most products are combinations of knowledge and intellectual property that resides in different organizations. Our world is less and less about the single pieces of intellectual property and more and more about the networks that help connect these pieces. The total stock of information used in these ecosystems exceeds the capacity of single organizations because doubling the size of huge organizations does not double the capacity of that organization […]

I wrote the following rant in +Michael Chui‘s thread. ______ There is nothing wrong with the entrepreneurial spirit. In the biological world they call entrepreneuralism “opportunism”, and being opportunistic is vital for evolutionary for success. The problem is that entrepreneurialism must exist within an incentive structure that encourages and incentivizes deplorable and inhumane acts, which has rapidly led to an overwhelming correlation between entrepreneurs and the most vile excess of capitalism. The article you post here is suggesting we discourage opportunism; I think this is a losing suggestion; it’s not the kind of thing that can will catch on. The far more promising solution is to change the incentive structure to stop encouraging inhumanity, instead of trying to force ourselves to make up for the deficiencies of our organizational schema. We can’t do it; it’s pretty clear by now that even our best efforts are promptly quashed by the crushing inertia of the existing order of things. I’ve seen at least a few posts over the last few days clearly describing the transition to a “cashless” economy. The universal presumption of all these articles is that the basic inventive of money will stay the same, and that the only change will be at the interface: instead of handling little pieces of paper, the flow of cash will all be digital. The small-mindedness of these articles frustrates me to no end. Obviously the transactions will be increasingly digital; they already are largely digital, and it isn’t hard to imagine the pieces of paper going away. Such a change would be about as interesting as announcing that they are painting all the money pink; its a completely superficial difference. But seriously, everyone, if we are going to make such a transition anyway, why not redesign the thing from scratch? With a little […]

These are awesome! Thanks, +Rebecca Spizzirri Mapping Great Debates: Can Computers Think? A set of 7 poster-sized argumentation maps that chart the entire history of the debate. The maps outline arguments put forth since 1950 by more than 380 cognitive scientists, philosophers, artificial intelligence researchers, mathematicians, and others. Every map presents 100 or more major claims, each of which is summarized succinctly and placed in visual relationship to the other arguments that it supports or disputes. The maps, thus, both show the intellectual history of this interdisciplinary debate and display its current status. Claims are further organized into more than 70 issue areas, or major branches of the arguments. http://www.macrovu.com/CCTGeneralInfo.html CCT General Information MacroVU, Inc. is a leader in visual language and information design books and training courses for business, science, and technology

Jeff Sayre originally shared this post: A Rare Look at Google’s Secret Networking Infrastructure This is a fascinating read! /by +Steven Levy\ for +WIRED #Google #InternetBackbone #networking #infrastructure Going With the Flow: Google’s Secret Switch to the Next Wave of Networking | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com Google treats its infrastructure like a state secret, so Google czar of infrastructure Urs Hölzle rarely ventures out into the public to speak about it. Today is one of those rare days. At the Open Ne…