On neologisms

While coining a neologism, especially in science, but also generally, here is a checklist that one could adhere to:

1. It should sound less jargon-like than the jargons it is composed of: "Jargon added is jargon halved" effect.

2. It should be fresh, but not just frivolous and as far as possible, intuituve.

3. Once defined, it should have a greater sense of immediacy, and home-in on the concept faster than the definition itself. In that sense it should be focused. However, it should be more than focused in the following way. The definition should remain fresh, such that on re-reading the definition, and definitions of terms used in the definition (recursively), it should evoke a richer, diverse cloud of related ideas and thus contextually situate the neologism.

4. It should have a quality of being used by the 'in-crowd', in a manner that the anxious 'out-crowd' wants to understand what it means and start using it in sentences.

Building on the brain

I came across this piece in the latest issue of Neuron.

John P Eberhard. 2009. Applying Neuroscience to Architecture. Neuron 62:753-756.

Basically, it is a promo piece for the author's latest book Brain Landscape, which advocates architects to apply findings of brain imaging to their design of schools, hospitals, public spaces, old age homes and memorials. Eberhard is the founding President of the non-profit Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, established in 2003. You get the picture.

Why have ideas such as these and other low-hanging fruit (neuroeconomics, neurocinematics) become so popular these days, without anybody bothering to address how neuroscientific knowledge (such as: the prefrontal cortex is involved in decision making) is not completely superfluous to knowledge from conventional psychology and the behavioral sciences (such as: natural light improves class grades) as far as application domains (such as architecture) are concerned? Note that I do not dispute the fact that such neuro-marriages may be intellectually stimulating.

The saving grace is that it wasn't called neuroarchitecture (not to be confused with neuroarchitectonics: the beautiful and painstaking characterization of brain anatomy in terms of cell types, synapse densities, tissue properties, relative thickness of cortical layers, vasculature etc. etc. which early 20th century greats like Cajal and Brodmann pioneered).

I'm not arguing for traditionalism, I'm not arguing for scientists to be conservative with their imagination. On that contrary, I am disappointed that out-of-the-box thinking falls so dreadfully short of the mark. Why can't we be more original? It is not as though fresh insight and imagination cannot be applied to traditional stuff of the brain such as anatomy, hemodynamics, connectivity, learning, memory etc.

What next? Neuromusicology, neuromarketing, neuropublishing, neurojournalism, neurolaw, neuro-neuroscience? Up for grabs. Quick, before somebody else.

Soul aether poetry

In earnestly overdesigned, Randian, dystopic cities, ego depletes and the soul bleeds aether, one Merchant-of-Venetian fleshpound at a time. A giant gascloud of fecundity rarefies, almost imperceptibly, and the very creatability of comparative-comparative-history, that great recursive weapon of ideological warfare, set to take root in c. 3500 CE, stands threatened.

Contests for innovation

So, here's a simple (perhaps simplistic) idea to accelerate the development of innovative methods for neuromagnetic source separation.

1. Create a simulated dataset for benchmarking purposes with unknown number of sources. It should be hard to find the underlying sources. The hardness is engineered by placing sources in known blind spots of existing algorithms (eg. since we know that ICA cannot separate Gaussian sources, or MUSIC cannot separate correlated sources, we deliberately introduce them).

2. Release the benchmarking dataset online, provide a two-year time frame, and announce a small prize money like $50k [roughly, less than the cost of one grad student, without factoring in the resources needed to create a benchmarking dataset].

3. Provide a minimum set of rules for reporting the method and its results.

4. Incentivize journal editors to make a 'special issue' out of the contest solutions.

This would

a) force the already tiny 'neuroimaging methods' community to take each others' work into account more seriously than merely paying lip service.
b) incentivize the abolishment of 'idea embargoes' non-scientific in root.
c) avoid the repeated publication of existing solutions in lower tier journals ad infinitum.

and thus, save resources, and accelerate solutions.

Ancient Hinduism and Bayesian inference

What is common among the two?

1. Bayesian inference accommodates and absorbs other schools of inference, much like Hinduism did to invading tribes.

2. In both Bayesian thought and (some schools of orthodox) Hinduism, the underlying variable (fundamental truth) is non-deterministic.

Chaturashrama and political philosophy

There is no one universal political philosophy, just as there is no one universal personal philosophy. What do I mean by that? I am not postulating some new and improved universal brotherhood formula, rather, I am stressing that an optimal (defined in whatever sense, and hence, an absolute) strategy exists for each stage of life as described in Chaturashrama (four stages of life).

Along the same lines, varying political philosophies, that optimize different progress-indicators of a nation state can be adopted at varying stages of a nation's life. For instance, it may be argued that according to certain metrics, market economics was good for India when it happened and should stay that way for the near future, whereas the same cannot be said for a country that is not yet ready to receive competition from multinationals.

The problem of course comes with globalization where there is too much confrontation between nation states, and the diversity of needs (i.e. diversity of definitions of optimality) is staggering, the problem comes when identities of nation states and progress directions have to redefined as fast as they are being created.

Catcher in the rye and other escape professions

This is not a post about the book or the characters itself, just a lead in.

Why has Catcher in the rye appealed to young readers for many generations? The character is able to articulate his frustration with his surroundings in immediate terms. He is dripping with misanthropy largely because he feels something is glaringly wrong with the world. Most people go through this in the first few years of leaving home.

But perhaps the greatest reason the book is appealing is that it offers a dreamlike escape, or more accurately, it demonstrates the possibility that someone in the depths of misanthropy (of the 'society sucks man', kind) can conceive of an unadulterated world, thus articulating with dreamlike accuracy [1], the reasons of his disillusionment with the world. The character wants to be a 'catcher in the rye', someone who can see the sun cutting through the rye field on the edge of a cliff, making everything golden; there are kids running around and playing in the field; and the only job of the catcher is to catch these kids when they try to jump off the cliff.

Are there any other such appealing escape professions [2]?

Frame lifter

I remember when we hung out on the Dihing terrace, there was one idea (Nachiket, 2005). On an F1 circuit, the pitstop for refueling and tyre changes takes about 6 seconds. To maximize efficiency, a team of mechanics waiting in position. Once the car is parked, there is one person at the back who releases a lever and raises the frame of the car so that two persons at the sides can pull out the back tyres and replace them.

Coffee totaller.

The guy who makes the bill at a small town (eg. Karaikal) 'breakfast and meals' place, slightly larger than a shack or cart on the street, so as to warrant a separate' kanakku pillai' for dawn shift, when the town wakes up, and before the first beads of sweat tell of another blinding, treacherous, humid day.

[1] By dreamlike accuracy, I mean with great attention to the details of the scene, but missing obvious logical considerations such as what happens when the sun sets or the kids poop, or what about the annoying buzz of the cars on the F1 circuit?

[2] Escape profession summarized by this ex-NYC web 2.0 geek blogger

Note: Thanks to flickr and the diligent photographers