Is science just about facts, or are theories and conceptualizations important too? Should we worry about having good theories, or do the facts pretty much give us everything we need to know. This article, entitled “Facts, concepts, and theories: The shape of psychology’s epistemic triangle“, discusses this issue for the field of Psychology, though its contents are also applicable to Neuroscience and AI.
Dear Members,
I am a prospective graduate student interested in taking up Neural Engineering under EE or Biomedical Engg for research. But I have a lot of concerns and need help from a person who knows about the field well.
1. I have studied VLSI, DSP, Image Processing, Wireless Communication, Control Systems and Embedded Systems as graduate and undergraduate courses and have some research interest in Neural Networks and Machine Learning(That’s how I got interested in Neural Engg and Prosthetics). Which of these subjects will be of help in Neural Engg/Prosthetics research. Which will be of most relevance. Please list them in the order of relevance(high->low).
2. What are the applications of the research ?
3. What is the research and JOB scope for this field? Are there any companies who recruit people with this specialisation? How is the job scene in academia? How many univs are doing research in this field in US? Please let me know about the career progression in academia, like how much time does it take to get full time academic position after PhD?
4. Especially, what are the applications of this research in Robotics?
5. What are the current problems and research themes in universities?
6. What imaging technologies are used in this research?
Though my queries may seem a bit ameteuristic, it is very important for me to get clarity on these doubts.
Hope my queries will be answered.
Thanking all of you in advance,
sudhi
The October 6th issue of Science is a special issue devoted to computational neuroscience. From the introduction to the special issue:
Computational neuroscience is now a mature field of research. In areas ranging from molecules to the highest brain functions, scientists use mathematical models and computer simulations to study and predict the behavior of the nervous system. Simulations are essential because the present experimental systems are too complex to allow collection of all the data. Modeling has become so powerful these days that there is no longer a one-way flow of scientific information. There is considerable intellectual exchange between modelers and experimentalists. The results produced in the simulation lab often lead to testable predictions and thus challenge other researchers to design new experiments or reanalyze their data as they try to confirm or falsify the hypotheses put forward. For this issue of Science, we invited leading computational neuroscientists, each of whom works at a different organizational level, to review the latest attempts of mathematical and computational modeling and to give us an outlook on what the future might hold in store.
Of particular interest is a review article by Randall O’Reilly on biologically based computational models. He focuses on models of the pre-frontal cortex.
A New Psychology resource, community built by psychologists and trainees, to unify the body of psychology information in one place:
http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
Check it out, and if it interests you, please contribute, or review it on your blog.
Tom Michael, Mostly Zen - site admin
Interesting developments — although, hard to know precisely how serious any of this is. Any thoughts from students, postdocs, others in the trenches at MIT (and willing to give perspective to the outside world)?
“The professors, in a letter to MIT’s president, Susan Hockfield , accuse professor Susumu Tonegawa of intimidating Alla Karpova , “a brilliant young scientist,” saying that he would not mentor, interact, or collaborate with her if she took the job and that members of his research group would not work with her.”
“In a letter responding to professors who wanted MIT to investigate the senior professor’s treatment of the job recruit, Hockfield said there are “ongoing tensions among MIT’s neuroscience entities” and suggested that the current situation “threatens ongoing disruption of the collegiality of our academic enterprise.” The letter, dated Monday, was obtained by the Globe.”
Online methods share insider tricks : Nature
This is such a good idea. It is always about the voodoo:
Perhaps more importantly, it is the subtle variations — the deftness of touch, the type of mixing tube, and a dash of hocus-pocus — that distinguish a successful experiment from a flop. But such details often exist only as scrawled footnotes or collective laboratory wisdom. “The art of the science really is not present in many of these protocols,” says geneticist Garry Nolan of Stanford University, California, who has put his protocols online. “They don’t tell people what the voodoo is.”
The websites could help share the voodoo. They are loosely based on the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, which lets users edit each other’s entries. Unlike the protocols already available online, the idea is to create a repository of experiments and the tricks needed to do them, and allow users to add their own.
PLoS Biology: Scientific Illiteracy and the Partisan Takeover of Biology
On evolution:
One-third of Americans think evolution is “definitely false”; over half lean one way or another or aren’t sure. Only 14% expressed unequivocal support for evolution—a result Miller calls “shocking.”
On literacy:
“When I first started asking about DNA,” he says, “I used an open-ended question that asks, ‘If you saw the term DNA in a newspaper, would you have a clear understanding of what that means, a general sense of what it means, or not much idea?’” If respondents said they had a clear understanding, they would be asked to define DNA in their own words. “I got things like the ‘Dow Jones News Association,’” Miller says, laughing. “If you don’t know what DNA is, you can’t follow the stem-cell debate.”
And perhaps most important:
The era of nonpartisan science is gone, says Miller, who urges scientists and science educators to learn the rules of this new game and get behind moderate Republicans as well as Democrats to protect the practice and teaching of sound science. Given the partisan attack on evolution and stem-cell research, he thinks scientists need to learn more about how the political process works. They need to be willing to run for the school board, write $500 or even $5,000 checks to support moderate candidates, and defeat Christian right-wing candidates. “Scientists need to become involved in partisan politics and to oppose candidates who reject evolution or attack scientific research,” he says. “It takes time, money, and paying attention to the issues.”
PLoS Biology: Economy of the Mind
A very nice, in-depth neuroecon review from PLoS Biology, includes Camerer, Glimcher, Schultz, DeWaal, Montague, and McCabe.
Last year, the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience moved from the Redwood Neuroscience Institute in Meno Park to the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at Berkeley. In October they held a symposium with several interesting speakers presenting on various topics within Theoretical Neuroscience.
The videos are now online for your perusal, or you can buy a DVD of the whole symposium for a paltry $5.
A forthcoming issue of the journal Neuroscience is devoted to an examination of multidisciplinary approaches to the study of working memory within the field of Cognitive Neuroscience. Although the issue will not be released until late April, a detailed press release is available from the University of Washington at St. Louis.
From the article:
“Multidisciplinary research within cognitive neuroscience has established itself as a promising approach to answering the question of how the mind emerges from the working of the brain” [...] “One of the fields that has gained substantially by successfully combining the theoretical frameworks, methodologies, empirical results and insights of the varied disciplines within cognitive neuroscience, is the study of working memory”
It goes on to describe a “pyramid approach” to multidisciplinary work in this area, which chiefly involves the merging of cognitive psychology, computational science, neuroscience, and cognitive neuropsychiatry.