Monthly Archive for September, 2006
J G Ballard knows about selling. As a young man he briefly peddled children’s encyclopaedias, working the psychological relationship between the middle-class hawker and the punter bent on self-improvement. “Selling is like wooing a girl,” says Ballard. Ballard “believed in” The Waverley because he had read it as a boy. Whenever he was bored his mother had told him, ”’Go and read The Eight Volumes.’ That was her name for them,” he chuckles. “It was the nearest thing to television.”
Ballard’s new novel, Kingdom Come (Fourth Estate, £15.99), puts his usual Cassandra-like spin on the dangers of retail therapy. In Brooklands, a Thames Valley motorway town dominated by its domed shopping mall, the most taxing moral decision is which washing machine to buy. But even the sedated want sensation. At night, the shoppers who flock to the Metro-Centre reincarnate as mobs of sports fans, parading their St George T-shirts and attacking immigrants.
Researchers at UC Berkeley are trying to discover how different regions of the brain operate in concert with each other, dispite no obvious lines of communication. Their results showe that the slow Theta waves in separate regions of the brain lock in phase, or synchronize. This Theta synchronization essentially “tunes in”, or manipulates the higher-frequency waves that transfer information, which allows for the coordination of their activity and orchestration of complex actions.
Acupuncture is used by an estimated 2% of adults each year for a range of conditions, including back pain. But the evidence is largely inconclusive and the best way to manage low back pain remains unclear.
So, researchers identified 241 adults aged 18 to 65 with persistent non-specific low back pain. The people were provided by members of the British Acupuncture Council. Patients were randomly assigned to either usual NHS care or up to 10 acupuncture treatment sessions. All patients remained under GP care.
Pain levels were measured at intervals during the two-year study period. Satisfaction with treatment and use of pain medication were also recorded.
At 12 months, patients in the acupuncture group showed a small benefit in pain scores compared to patients receiving usual care. Stronger evidence was observed for an increased benefit at 24 months.
At three months, patients in the acupuncture group were significantly more likely to be ‘very satisfied’ with their treatment compared with usual care, and with their overall care, but showed no such difference in satisfaction with information received.
The Air Force is investing in robots that will have to find their way into underground bunkers, map unknown facilities in three dimensions and identify what’s in them while avoiding detection—all without any human control.
This is well beyond the capability of any existing system, but the Air Force Research Laboratory, or AFRL, is putting its hopes on new software that lets robots learn, walk, see and interact far more intelligently than ever before.
It’s based on work by Stephen Thaler, who came to prominence 10 years ago with his brainchild the Creativity Machine. This is software for generating new ideas on the basis of existing ones, and it has already written music, designed soft drinks, and discovered novel minerals that may rival diamonds in hardness.
The software is a type of neural network with two special features. One introduces perturbations, or “noise,” into the network so that existing ideas get jumbled into new forms. The second is a filter that assesses the new ideas against existing knowledge and discards those that are unsuitable. Current applications range from detecting intruders in computer networks to developing new types of concrete and optimizing missile warheads.
IN HIS RECENT REVIEW of the Dalai Lama’s book, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality, George Johnson criticizes the Dalai Lama for opposing “physical explanations for consciousness, invoking instead the existence of some kind of irreducible mind stuff, an idea rejected long ago by mainstream science.” [1] While it is certainly true that mainstream science insists that there must be a physical explanation for consciousness, the empirical evidence supporting this view is tenuous. Since scientists have devised objective means of measuring all kinds of physical phenomena, it is remarkable that no scientific instruments can detect whether or not consciousness is present in inorganic matter (e.g., computers or robots), in plants (e.g., insect-eating plants), or in animals (e.g., single cells, insects, human fetuses, or normal human adults). Given that consciousness is invisible to all known means of scientific measurement-–unlike all other kinds of physical phenomena-–the burden of proof for the physical status of consciousness should be on those who make this assertion, not on those who question it.
Scientists have established that specific neural processes are necessary for producing specific conscious mental processes in humans and some other animals. In this way, correlations have been identified between brain and mind processes. Brain processes are detected with the third-person methods of biology, but mental processes are directly observed only by means of the first-person perspectives of individuals introspectively monitoring their own states of consciousness. This evidence proves that certain neural processes are necessary for producing specific mental events in humans, but not that they are sufficient causes of consciousness, nor does this indicate that consciousness itself is a physical phenomenon. Moreover, while many scientists believe that mental phenomena are emergent properties of brain, no one has ever objectively measured any mental event emerging from the brain, so that, too, remains an untested hypothesis that can be taken for the time being only on faith.
A Nasa satellite has documented startling changes in Arctic sea ice cover between 2004 and 2005.
The extent of “perennial” ice – thick ice which remains all year round – declined by 14%, losing an area the size of Pakistan or Turkey.
The last few decades have seen summer ice shrink by about 0.7% per year.
The Arctic is warming about twice as fast as the global average; and recent studies have shown that the area of the Arctic covered by ice each summer, and the ice thickness, have been shrinking.The research is reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
In another article on the topic, Jim Hansen, leading climatologist and director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, issues now-or-never warning: we only have a decade to save the planet.
Psychologists have launched a study to find out why some people who hear voices in their head consider it a positive experience while others find it distressing.
The University of Manchester investigation – announced on World Hearing Voices Day (Thursday, 14th September) – comes after Dutch researchers found that many healthy members of the population there regularly hear voices.
Although hearing voices has traditionally been viewed as ‘abnormal’ and a symptom of mental illness, the Dutch findings suggest it is more widespread than previously thought, estimating that about 4% of the population could be affected.
Researcher Aylish Campbell said: “We know that many members of the general population hear voices but have never felt the need to access mental health services; some experts even claim that more people hear voices and don’t seek psychiatric help than those who do.
“In fact, many of those affected describe their voices as being a positive influence in their lives, comforting or inspiring them as they go about their daily business. We’re now keen to investigate why some people respond in this way while others are distressed and seek outside help.”
Computer giant IBM will build the world’s most powerful supercomputer at a US government laboratory.
The machine, codenamed Roadrunner, could be four times more potent than the current fastest machine, BlueGene/L, also built by IBM.
The new computer is a “hybrid” design, using both conventional supercomputer processors and the new “cell” chip designed for Sony’s PlayStation 3.
Roadrunner will be installed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico.
The laboratory is owned by the US Department of Energy (DOE). Eventually the machine could be used for a programme that ensures the US nuclear weapons stockpile remains safe and reliable, the DOE said in a statement.
Using supercomputers to simulate how nuclear materials age negates arguments for the resumption of underground nuclear testing.
A patient in a vegetative state can communicate just through using her thoughts, according to research.
A UK/Belgian team studied a 23-year-old woman who had suffered a severe brain injury in a road accident, which left her apparently unable to communicate.
By scanning her brain, they discovered she could understand spoken commands and even imagine playing tennis.
They said their findings, published in Science, were “startling”, but cautioned this could be a one-off case.
Brain scans of nuns have revealed intricate neural circuits that flicker into life when they feel the presence of God.
The images suggest that feelings of profound joy and union with a higher being that accompany religious experiences are the culmination of ramped-up electrical activity in parts of the brain.
The scans were taken as nuns relived intense religious experiences. They showed a surge in neural activity in regions of the brain that govern feelings of peace, happiness and self-awareness. Psychologists at the University of Montreal say the research, which appears in the journal Neuroscience Letters, was not intended to confirm or deny the existence of God, but set out to examine how the brain behaves during profound religious experiences.
guardian uk
thanks to goldblatt
Web giant Google is further expanding its online empire with the launch of the Google News Archive Search.
The web-based tool allows users to explore existing digitised newspaper articles and more recent online content, spanning the last 200 years.
The battle by scientists against “irrational” beliefs such as creationism is ultimately futile, a leading experimental psychologist said today.
The work of Bruce Hood, a professor at Bristol University, suggests that magical and supernatural beliefs are hardwired into our brains from birth, and that religions are therefore tapping into a powerful psychological force.
“I think it is pointless to think that we can get people to abandon their belief systems because they are operating at such a fundamental level,” said Prof Hood. “No amount of rational evidence is going to be taken on board to get people to abandon those ideas.”
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