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Paging Mrs. Frisby
http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/neuro/making-smarter-rat
According to Science Daily, Hobbie-J was able to remember novel objects, such as a toy she played with, three times longer than the average Long Evans female rat, the smartest rat strain. ( Read more... ) -
Spam, Turing tests, and AI
I received a spam message that slipped right through my Gmail spam filter today:
( Text marginally NSFW ) -
Where'd I put my magnetic pulse generator?
"Prof Snyder has been able to artificially induce savant skills in people who do not have autism using the inhibiting influence of low frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to turn off that part of the brain which controls all our inbuilt expectations. " brain, intelligence, scienceChimps on ice
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/08/mental-health-6.html
I'm considerably impressed. The ability to learn a new and unfamiliar skill seems like a good proxy for intelligence.Monkeys doing abstract math
"Jordan and colleague Elizabeth Brannon, of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, US, trained two eight-year-old female macaques to equate beeps to dots on a computer screen. So if a monkey heard seven beeps, it knew to tap a square on the screen displaying seven dots.Read more... )Electronically-assisted telepathy?
Scientists conducted an experiment where they asked people in an MRI brain scanner to look at ten pictures of different tools and houses. Meanwhile, the researchers fed the data into a computer algorithm so that the program would learn to recognize the unique signature of electrical patterns produced by the objects in each subject's brain. ( Read more... )Race, racism and the pitfalls of scientific research
I posted a couple entries on genetics and race a few weeks back. I just came across a cautionary note ( Read more... )IQ, genetics, and prejudice.. in Japan
"A torrent of government investment has improved the buraku* so they are no longer slums. Yet average income for buraku families is still only about 60 percent of the national average, and social problems are proving to be far more persistent than discrimination. Buraku leaders acknowledge that alcoholism is a disproportionate problem in their ( Read more... )More fun with IQ tests
"Americans made massive IQ gains on the WISC [Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children] between 1947 and 2002 amounting to almost 18 points of Full Scale IQ. These gains ranged from only 2 points on the WISC subtest called Information to 24 points on the subtest called Similarites (what do dogs and rabbits have in common?), despite the fact that ( Read more... )Stupidity filter?
"The solution we're creating is simple: an open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English. This will be accomplished with weighted Bayesian analysis and some rules-based processing, similar to spam detection engines. http:// ( Read more... )