A Four Line Summary of Ogi and Sai's Plan of Action, and a Useful Comparison to Other Research

[neededalj]

So for anyone who doesn't want to wade through the entire history of SurveyFail, here is my four line summary of their plans (pulled from my comment to romaine24 here, and with apologies to the underpants gnomesOgi and Sai's Plan of Action

Comments

[slashpine]

the fact that Ogi and Sai got their PhDs from the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems is somewhat of an academic formality/designation. In lay terms, they were computer scientists or computer programmers.

YES. That was one of the first things I noticed. My own research university has a department called "Bioinformatics and Computational Biology." Sounds impressive, but it mainly is the same thing: computer scientists writing complicated programs to try to use models of complex data to predict things. Which could be in any field.

One PhD candidate I met had spent 4 years writing programs to model some piece of zebra fish fin function. Neural, yes. Earthshattering connections to humans? Hahaha no. Another guy, quite bright, modeled nerve cell functions in human muscles or joints as part of some big project to improve prostheses or who knows, build bionic humans or the Terminator or such. It had some (remote) value to human medicine and links to neuroscience (though not cognition). His degrees were really all CompSci though, and he went on to a research job for an electronic transportation control system manufacturer: ie., computer programming. A third grad (all of these are men, of course, and many are from India or Pakistan) wrote a hugely complex algorithm for "developing and validating bioinformatics tools in population genetics, systematic biology and microbial ecology." In short, testing the tools used in population data in order to select the model with the least risk of being wrong. He is now math faculty. His background is statistics and CompSci. He is very smart, but not personally a biologist or neurologist, just one who can write and refine their tools for data-crunching.

And data-mining. Most of the funding for their work seems to come from (a) Homeland Security, for increased surveillance of everyone on the planet, (b) military intellience-gathering and weapons design, for increased surveillance and destruction of everyone on the planet, and (c) healthcare industry research, for increased profit from development of new patents, products and procedures.

Ogi & Sai saw the money, I think... and read some of the recent articles on data-mining (no links, but they've been all over), and that's what Ogi had apparently been doing for Homeland Gestapo and then some private company. And thought oooh boy, fandom, WE CAN EXPLOIT THEIR DATA FOR PROFIT TOO with nothing more than a computer program and our male egos and our sciencefail brains.

It is truly unfortunate that BU gave this department such a grandiose and misleading title. OTOH, there may actually be *REAL* cognitive neuroscience researchers in BU-CNS, in which case I really hope they're reexamining their entrance requirements, not to mention their ethics training.

[neededalj]

I wonder if Ogi and Sai are now the laughingstock of the department. It's certainly possible; I knew of a department where a couple of grad students conducted some research in a stupid and embarrassing manner and the chair had to step in and apologize, and they were laughed at for weeks. Pretty sure their screw-up is a still a punchline there, and what they did was so very minor compared to this.

[slashpine]

Ah, too true. After all, Ogi is already famous there as a successful, but slightly wack game show winner. I mean, from some perspectives everyone in Comp Sci/Engineering/English (or any field, lol) is "wack", but I'll bet Ogi is a bit more out there than most.

Hmm. Fandom vs. academia. Who has longer memories??? WOAH THE EARTH IS NOT OLD ENUF YET TO EMPIRICALLY TEST THIS QUESTION.

*digs out perfect icon with TV, fandom + academia!*

[neededalj]

That icon *rocks*.