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Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World

Saturday 19 October 2013

Stanford neuroscientist: ‘We’re now able to eavesdrop on the brain in real life’ -

Stanford neuroscientist: ‘We’re now able to eavesdrop on the brain in real life’ - 



Neuroscientists at Stanford University have made a major breakthrough with regards to how the human brain engages in quantitative thought, and some say it’s opening the door for being able to someday eavesdrop on the mind’s inner-workings.

A team at Stanford’s School of Medicine had their findings published this week in the journal Nature Communications, and their eye-catching result is being considered a big step to understanding how the brain operates, specifically in terms of numbers.

After monitoring the brain waves of three seizure patients, the scientists determined that a particular part of the mind became active when the subjects were asked to solve mathematical equations, but also when quantitative terms — such as “more than” or “an extra little bit” — were spoken during routine discussions.

Bruce Goldman wrote about the study for the Stanford School of Medicine website and said the team of scientists “collected the first solid evidence that the pattern of brain activity seen in someone performing a mathematical exercise under experimentally controlled conditions is very similar to that observed when the person engages in quantitative thought in the course of daily life.”

According to the scientists who conducted the study, however, it could be the start of something much more.

“We’re now able to eavesdrop on the brain in real life,” Dr. Josef Parvizi, the director of Stanford’s Human Intracranial Cognitive Electrophysiology Program and lead scientist behind the studio, said to Goldman.

To conduct the study, Parvizi and company monitored electrical activity in a region of the brain called the intraparietal sulcus which, according to earlier studies, has ties to numerosity, or the mathematical equivalent of literacy, as Goldman explained.

As expected, the Stanford scientists experienced a reaction occurring on that part of the brain when basic math was asked of the subjects. His team also compared those results with video recordings of the patients interacting with friends and family, and determined that just discussing quantitative concepts caused that part of the brain to become active.

“You are able to see how neurons within the human brain are working in a real life setting,” Parvizi told Time Magazine.

“The patient doesn’t need to talk to you. They can think about numbers and you can see that red mark (corresponding with activity in a particular brain region) go up,” he said to CNN.

As the team also learned, quantitative concepts cause similar reactions. When the subjects hear phrases such as “some more” and “many,” electrodes attached to the intraparietal sulcus alerted the doctors of activity. In one patient’s case, her intraparietal sulcus became active when she spoke over the phone about being given “some more Vicodin” and while discussing a “ten-to-fifteen minute seizure.”

Dr. Parvizi told Time that “[t]he only thing we can tell is that they were thinking about numbers,” and not specifics such as what integer in particular. As technology advances, though, new possibilities might someday emerge.

“This is exciting, and a little scary,” Henry Greely, the chair of Stanford’s Center for Biomedical Ethics, said in a statement. “It demonstrates, first, that we can see when someone’s dealing with numbers and, second, that we may conceivably someday be able to manipulate the brain to affect how someone deals with numbers.”

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GM got bailout, Can’t be profitable in the USA (Surprise!) Quietly shifts many operations to China -

GM got bailout, Can’t be profitable in the USA (Surprise!) Quietly shifts many operations to China - 

GM bailout cc

Saving General Motors from bankruptcy was among President Obama’s most frequently cited achievements when he ran for re-election last year. Democrats everywhere touted the company’s revival as proof of the 2009 bailout’s wisdom. That was then. Now, Obama has quietly released the auto manufacturer from a bailout requirement that it increase its production in the U.S. Instead, GM is spending billions of dollars building up its production capacity in ... China.

This is happening despite the fact that the Treasury Department has to date recovered just $36 billion of its original $51 billion loan to GM. By most analysts’ predictions, American taxpayers will be out approximately $10 billion when the remaining stock is sold off. Which is a long way of saying that it now appears that taxpayers paid $10 billion to make it easier for GM to accelerate its foreign outsourcing and send more manufacturing jobs to China.

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Here’s what happened: In exchange for the bailout in 2009, GM promised to meet certain domestic car production targets over the next four years. The obvious point of this stipulation was to ensure that GM jobs remained here at home and weren't shipped overseas. The production targets started at 1.8 million in 2010 and were supposed to rise to 2.26 million by 2014. GM repeatedly missed the targets, beginning with an 81,000-unit shortfall the first year. Production increased thereafter, but never quite enough to meet the targets. Last year, GM fell about 13,000 cars short of its 2 million target.

How did it do this year? GM refuses to say. But in February, GM announced in its annual report to shareholders that Treasury had agreed to “irrevocably waive certain of its rights” regarding the federal loan. These included “certain manufacturing volume requirements.” Guess what happened next? GM announced in June that it would stop releasing its North American production figures altogether. Its spokesman tried to justify this move with Orwellian doublespeak about how providing more information would result in “an incomplete data set to look at.”

The same month, GM announced it would boost its output from its China plants by 70 percent. It is not just selling Chinese-made cars to the Chinese, either. GM is nearly doubling its export production capacity there from 77,000 units to 130,000. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in economics to see what is really going on. GM cannot make the domestic production targets and still turn a profit. It wants to be spared the embarrassment of having everyone know that. Obama, who is in this as deep as anyone can be, doesn’t want the embarrassment, either. So both buried the news.

It is yet more proof that Mitt Romney was right in the 2012 presidential campaign: GM should have gone through a traditional bankruptcy instead of the politicized farce of a taxpayer-funded bailout and government managed “bankruptcy.” The TARP funds involved could have instead been used to provide liquidity for a managed sale to a private buyer that minimized the opportunities for political interference in the new GM’s operations.

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RFID Microchips to be Embedded in Breast Implants -

RFID Microchips to be Embedded in Breast Implants - 



A manufacturer of breast implants has announced that it will begin selling its products with an RFID microchip embedded in the implant, partnering with a company whose CEO previously tried to market the implantable microchip as a replacement for the credit card.
Breast augmentation is one of the most popular cosmetic surgery procedures, with a staggering 300,000 women in America alone receiving breast implants every year.
Establishment Labs, a major breast, body and facial aesthetic company which has offices in both Europe and America, recently announced that it has teamed up with VeriTeQ to produce breast implants, “with a radio frequency identification tag built in, with the goal of providing information about the implant to a patient long after the device has been inserted into her body.”
“EL’s Motiva Implant Matrix Ergonomix™ with VeriTeQ’s Q Inside Safety Technology is the world’s first externally identifiable breast implant,” reports Yahoo Finance, adding that the microchip, which can be read via external scanners, has already been approved by the FDA.
A leading chain of plastic surgery clinics in the UK, which has asked to remain anonymous for now, intends to announce it will begin implanting patients with the technology next month.
The use of implantable microchips to track pets has become common over the last decade, but their use in human beings has consistently faced hurdles due to Big Brother concerns about people being electronically tagged like animals, as well as the biblical idea of a “mark of the beast,” which some fear will eventually become a mandatory replacement for the credit card or even a universal form of identification.

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