Cognitive Labs

this is from stamen-an SF-based design and information architecture firm

Play to your heart's content with Splatter, a Flash-powered 'exploration' of computer-based fingerpainting.

Try it.


Download the tarball , zipped with license. (If you don't understand, just follow the link above)

Here's another review...from the SJ Mercury News this is longer and goes into more detail about how if Woz hadn't wrecked his pinto, dropped out of Berkeley to make some money, and hadn't gone to work, maybe he wouldn't have gotten started

If you remember the beginning of the PC era, you might be interested in taking a look at Woz's (Steve Wozniak's) new book, iWoz.

He talks about the beginning of what has become a new way of life for people on this planet.

Digg Labs launches. This is where people can vote on content and stories.

They are working on an API so developers will be able to build 'visualizations' into their applications that incorporate the digg datastream, probably as an XML file that will make the JavaScript do something to act nifty on the client.

At Cognitive Labs we're always in a 'creative mode'

Just a couple of years ago, I sat with some of the principals of Handheld Entertainment in a VC's office on Alameda De Las Pulgas in Menlo Park.

That name means "Avenue of the Fleas"

The company went through its pitch but the VC's didn't really get it. Later on there was another meeting at the Beverly Hills Hotel, pretty much focused on retail distribution, and a few others.

And now, very recently the company, Handheld Entertainment, has moved to Nasdaq. This represents the health and vitality of ingenuity and capitalism at its finest.

It just goes to show you what happens when you put your brain to work.

On Sunday we had our biggest "add" day yet with more than 5,000 people signing up. So you can see a significant number of people came to the site. Of course there's still time to register or encourage friends through the numerous tell-a-friend features. Did you know that one person submitted 1,100 friends? Basically everyone in their address book needed a brain tune up.

We have some nifty AJAX stuff on the drawing board which will let you take a test and put it in your pocket, so to speak, just by clicking on a little avatar. Yummy.

Not sure about the ETA, as we'll need some unbroken coding time.

MySpace is worth $15 billion according to Jordan Rohan. Brad was right I guess

The home page has changed into a large wave...symbolic of a brain wave or maybe, the film point break.

Computer-assisted MRI detects water distribution in the brain

A new analysis technique may help spot early signs of Alzheimer's disease, according to recently completed research at UC-Irvine.

As Alzheimer's disease progresses, cells in the brain may become damaged, which allows water molecules to move throughout the brain more freely.

This process of cellular damage causes an increase in the "apparent diffusion coefficient," or ADC, which is a measurement used to study the distribution of water in the brain.

A new study included in the October issue of Radiology looked at 13 elderly people with mild cognitive impairment -- a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease -- and 13 people without mild cognitive impairment.

The participants underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain and performed memory-recall tasks.

The MRIs used a new computer-aided analysis program to measure ADC values in different regions of the brain.

The University of California, Irvine researchers found that the participants with mild cognitive impairment had increased water content in certain regions of the brain, including white-matter areas, the hippocampus, temporal lobe gray matter and the corpus callosum.

The ADC values in the hippocampus were associated with worse memory-performance scores.

The new computer mapping technology may allow researchers to learn how Alzheimer's disease develops in the brain and come up with new strategies for treating the disease.

"Our methods may enable earlier diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, allowing earlier intervention to slow down disease progression," said researcher Min-Ying Su.

The abstract is here

insightful piece about game theory, information cascades, and John "a Beautiful Mind" Nash - all relating to digg. Vote it up.

Study Presented at the Society for Neuroscience

Mice given a daily drink of red wine in the form of Cabernet Sauvignon are less likely to get Alzheimer's disease, according to new experiments. It is already known that red wine - in moderation - offers some protection from heart disease and there's some debate over whether this might be applicable to Alzheimer's disease as well. Now researchers at Mount Sinai Medical Center offer some interesting new evidence.

They've been working with mice genetically modified to develop Alzheimer's disease, with the accompanying brain changes - which are chiefly the accumulation of amyloid protein deposits. In this new study, the mice were given red wine in the form of Cabernet Sauvignon in their drinking water. The red wine proved to ward off the expected memory deficits and also reduced amyloid pathology in the brain. This was compared to mice given either water alone or alcohol alone. Clearly there is some protective component in the Cabernet Sauvignon grape which may be able to protect against Alzheimer's disease. A daily glass of red wine might prove helpful in this respect.

  
George Herbert, the 5th Earl of Carnaveron

The castle on the 'castle and moat' button is Carnaferon Castle, built by Edward I in the Middle Ages. This is the seat of the Earls of Carnaveron, one of whom, George, was a friend of Egyptian Archaeology and sponsored Tutankhamun's discoverer Howard Carter, like the Hearsts in the U.S. and their association with UC-Berkeley and particularly, the Harvard-trained archaeologist George Reisner, who built a fine collection of artifacts at Berkeley, many of which are catalogued but still unpublished. We recommend the Field Museum in Chicago, which is housing the Tut Exhibit. It's the only place in the world where you can practice being a fellah, or field hand, and water your fields using a shadouf, an agricultural invention that is 5,000 years old.

There is a new test that you haven't seen before....here it is

1st blog from space?

Recent space traveler and telecom entrepreneur Anousheh Ansari is going to be blogging from space.

Keep the brain fit for space

Use the platform independent, completely scalable solution from cognitivelabs.com

cognitive labs hits front page of fark.com, this is like hitting number one on digg.com

"Chronometry led to the development of spreading activation models of memory wherein links in memory are not organized hierarchically but by 'relevance' instead."

--wikipedia


chronometry is the science of mental reaction time assessment

Cool site: stumbleupon.com
they picked up on the Cognitive Labs' research at Stanford/BrainAge/and our links to Dr. Ryuta 'learning therapy' Kawashima's work...

We hope to do some additional MRI in the near future. We've got an invite. Let's find out a) what your brain looks like taking cognitive labs tests b) eating blueberries or c) searching the web

let us know if you can think of anything else.

As promised, we are going to begin sharing some of the information we have collected on the physical and cognitive effects of spaceflight.

The following is available from NASA, other individuals who have been involved in conducting repeated physical exams on returning astronauts have discussed their data on physical changes: significant weight loss, loss of muscle mass, organ functioning changes, atrophy and lengthening of the extremities: it would be interesting to follow changes that occur once there is a semi-permanent base in space and individuals are effected for more than 1 year...and what, if any would be the effect on a second generation that was conceived and carried to gestation in space.

Current research on amphibians shows that upon return, space-born amphibians appear to be genetically encoded for the earth environment and return to 'normal' swimming behavior, but who knows how strong the encoding is and for what duration.

The site that you are helping with had around 32,000 page views yesterday, one of our top days: right about 1 million/month...

By stimulating a receptor in the brain that controls insulin responses, scientists have been able to halt or diminish the neurodegeneration of Alzheimer's disease. The finding provides possible evidence that the disease can be treated in its early stages, according to researchers at Rhode Island Hospital and Brown Medical School.

The activated receptor or agonist appears to block further abnormal cellular oxidation and accumulation of amyloid tangles.

Researchers have found that peroxisome-proliferator activated receptor (PPAR) agonists prevent several components of neurodegeneration and preserve learning and memory in rats with induced Alzheimer's disease (AD). They found that an agonist for PPAR delta, a receptor that is abundant in the brain, had the most overall benefit.

"This raises the possibility that you can treat patients with mild cognitive impairment who have possible or probable Alzheimer's disease. This is really amazing because right now, there's just no treatment that works," says lead author Suzanne M. de la Monte, MD, MPH, a neuropathologist at Rhode Island Hospital and a professor of pathology and clinical neuroscience at Brown Medical School in Providence, RI.

The study appears in the September issue (Volume 10, Issue 1) of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease (http://www.j-alz.com).

In previous studies, the researchers demonstrated that Alzheimer's is a brain-specific neuroendocrine disorder, or a Type 3 diabetes, distinct from other types of diabetes. They showed that insulin and IGF-I receptors are produced separately in the brain, and begin to disappear early in Alzheimer's and continue to decline as the disease progresses. As insulin signaling breaks down, it leads to increased oxidative stress, impaired metabolism and cell death -- all causing neurodegeneration.

Scientists were also previously able to replicate Alzheimer's in rats with Streptozotocin (STZ), a compound that is known to destroy insulin producing cells in the pancreas and cause diabetes. When injected into the brains of rats, the compound mimicked the neurodegeneration of Alzheimer's disease -- plaque deposits, neurofibrillary tangles, diminished brain size, impaired cognitive function, cell loss and overall brain deterioration.

Warning, this is a technology industry sort of post, and we generally don't recast the infinitely overexposed daily tech news...Mark Cuban, an individual who benefited from Internet radio, wonders if it might be just one person or firm, possibly, that profits in online video.

He points to the issue of bandwidth. In truth, streaming services can get very, very popular, whether audio or video, and feature mixes and mashes and other artistic siftings that people just like.

The greater the popularity, however, the more wood is thrown onto the bonfire til pretty soon the forest is clear cut and there is no more Lorax.

Is the popular service YouTube one of these bonfires?

Microsoft targets Game Usabilty for aging population....

"Microsoft's Brannon Zahand has been addressing the key issues of accessibility, from all aspects of game development, noting: 'The demand for accessibility will continue to grow as the gaming population ages. As people grow older, mild impairments can become more severe. Also, people are likely to develop new difficulties and impairments as they age..."slashdot/gamasutra

The USC memory test is a big hit in Southern California today.

It could revitalize sports media by bringing the mash-up to the sports page, adding a little excitement to the post game recap.

The sound and thunder resonates and makes it a lot more interesting than just pix.

And if you don't like it, you can switch to your team's song and feel (psychologically) like you won the game.

New Think Faster test



for HP Mgmt

Dr. Wes Ashford told me he has just been named Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Alzheimer's Foundation of America.

Congratulations, Wes! Onward to better and better games and tests. Here's to Memory Fitness!

Now you can hear Fanfare and Conquest all-in-one. The former sounds somewhat like the 20th Century Fox massed trumpet intro...., check back with that earlier post

Filmmaker George Lucas is giving $175 Million to USC.
Also, Elan Amir's company Bivio Networks closed a new $8.5 M round of financing. (read the article)

Also, Cognitive Labs should pass 1.25 million users today...

if you can't get enough of the Trojans, jog your memory by seeing them beat Cal last year. Only thing missing from the test is 'Conquest' but we'll be adding that shortly....correction, it is added

We're hoping to look a little bit at the issue of facial recognition. There's the well-known Stanford study that documents the impact of staring eyes on transactional behavior.

The fact is, the number of transactions goes up. Even with a poster, as opposed to a real visage, this has been observed repeatedly.

Autarchs and autocrats have always known this: consider Saddam Hussein. And to a lesser extent, Mubarak. In the this scenario it is not transactional behavior as much as engagement.

I was surprised the last time I was in Egypt to see the staring face so much, particularly in public places.

This was known in ancient times as well. Consider late pharaonic and Roman period mummy portraits, some of the finest examples of art from ancient times.

Or, for propaganda value, the full-face portrait:



Some consider this gold coin (of Gallic emperor Postumus - read more) the finest example of portraiture in all of the Roman coinage, if not ever. (It served as the model for the gold-U.S. $1 coins of Sacajawea)

We're going to be profiling some people that it would be worth reading up on because of the their influence. The first one is John Dobson. If you know about Astronomy then you have probably heard the term "Dobsonian."

This is a very simple kind of telescope that revolutionized astronomy by giving amateurs access to cheap, powerful telescopes. In a way, it mirrors the PC revolution, and happened almost at the same time. Around that time I (and probably many of you, too) were learning on a Commodore-64 at home and an Apple at school (a bit pricey for the home) I also read about the Dobsonian in Astronomy Magazine. So, I saved up from my paper route to get a mirror, then I bought some basic household supplies and in a couple of days - voila - I had an 8" reflecting telescope. With it you could see everything - the double cluster of stars in Perseus, the Orion Nebula, the Ring Nebula in Lyra, the Lagoon Nebula in Sagittarius and the mysterious and the numerous silvery mist galaxies in the constellation Ursa Major, starting with M-81 and continuing with those in the New General Catalogue. (NGC)

Reprint of NY Times story


John Dobson was an atheist through high school, but over time he became interested in the Universe and its workings. He enquired about joining a monastery in 1940, but was turned away at the time in order to complete his studies. He took a degree in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley in 1943 and joined the Vedanta Monastery in San Francisco in 1944, becoming a monk of the Ramakrishna Order.

During his time at the monastery, his astronomy interest led to activities in telescope building in order to understand more of the Universe. To this end, he often offered assistance and corresponded about his work with those outside. Telescope building was not part of the curriculum at the monastery, however, and much of his correspondence had to be in code so as to attract less attention. For instance, a telescope was referred to as a "geranium", which is a type of flower. A "potted geranium" referred to a telescope that was in a tube and rocker, while a "geranium in bloom" referred to a telescope whose mirror was now aluminized.

Eventually he was given the option of either leaving the order, or to cease his telescope building. At the time he chose to cease building telescopes, but this decision did not last for long and he was eventually asked by his religious superiors to leave.

Promotion of astronomy

Having left the order in 1967, Dobson became a co-founder of the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers, an organization that aims to popularize astronomy among people on the street. It was also at this time that his simple form of telescope, which came to be known as the Dobsonian, became well known.

He was later asked to speak at the Vedanta Society in Hollywood, and has continued to spend two months there each year teaching telescope and cosmology classes. He spends another two months at his home in San Francisco, and spends most of the rest of each year travelling as an invited guest for astronomical societies, where he speaks about telescope building, sidewalk astronomy, and his views of cosmology and the scientific establishment.

The Dobsonian telescope is a large, portable, inexpensive, and easy to manufacture altazimuth mount telescope. The design is named after Dobson because he is credited for being the first person to have applied the mount's principles to telescope design. He is reluctant to take credit, however, pointing out that he built it that way because it was all he needed. In his own words, he jokes that he was "too retarded" to build a more sophisticated telescope with an equatorial telescope mount. With its simplicity of construction and use, the Dobsonian has become a very popular design today, particularly for large amateur telescopes.

John Dobson co-founded the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers in coordination with two other people, having cheaply constructed several telescopes that were easy to use, including a 24-inch telescope that was built for approximately US$300. Rather than have regular meetings, the organisation simply set up telescopes on the sidewalk during clear evenings, offering to show and explain the night sky to people passing by.

In a few years, people may envy the power of those with artificial brains, according to a newsletter from the University of Calgary.

A toxin associated with Alzheimer's disease and related ailments has been found in cyanobacteria, sometimes called blue-green algae, collected from around the world.

Based on research by Hawaii scientists, it is providing what may be the first indication that different cyanobacteria produce the same toxin. It also is raising the possibility of a potential threat to public health.

Researchers are recommending that public health agencies monitor waters that can have blooms of blue-green algae that can produce the algal neurotoxin, B-N-methylamino-L-alanine, or BMAA, which can affect the human nervous system.

"As rising global temperatures trigger more blooms of cyanobacteria in the planet's oceans and rivers, the health consequences of neurotoxins such as BMAA should be monitored," the scientists said in a report in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."

In the research, Ethnobotanist Paul Allen Cox of Kauai's National Tropical Botanical Garden led a team of researchers that chased down an intriguing link between cyanobacteria and a class of apparently related nervous system diseases that include Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS or Lou Gherig's disease.

Cox was looking into neurological disease among Guam natives. Those suffering from the disease had high levels of BMAA in their brain tissue, and many of those affected ate a traditional diet that included fruit bats. In tracking down the diet of the fruit bats, Cox and his team found the animals ate the seeds of cycad trees, and that cyanobacteria in the roots of the trees produce BMAA.

"We have recently discovered that potential human exposure to BMAA extends far beyond Guam," Cox said.

Researchers found that a small sample of people who died as a result of Alzheimer's disease in Canada — where there are no fruit bats or cycads — also had BMAA in their brain tissue. There were indications of similar patterns in people in parts of Japan, where there are cycads but no fruit bats.

Cox said the key seems to be neither the cycad nor the bat, but the cyanobacteria. "It's like a detective story," he said.

Scientists have long known that cyanobacteria can produce dangerous compounds, but this appears to be the first indication that very different cyanobacteria can produce the same poison.

Cox and his team of researchers looked into cyanobacteria samples from very different environments and found that in each of the five major types of these blue-green algae, some species produce BMAA.

Often, there is not much of the neurotoxin and it may take some kind of process to "biomagnify" the poison. Fruit bats in Guam may have done that by eating a lot of cycad seeds. A new question is what might be biomagnifying BMAA in other environments.

Cyanobacteria are among the oldest forms of life on the planet. They are single-celled organisms that behave like bacteria, but can conduct photosynthesis like plants. They generally live in water, but also can live inside plants.

Also contributing to the research were cyanobacterial experts Robert Bidigare and Georgia Tien at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Cox said.

I was tuning my brain up (got up to 24 seconds) here and I noticed the ad for mymms.com.

You can create your own personalized M&Ms, in your color scheme, online.

In the computer business they called this build-to-order a few years back, or mass customization, with all kinds of nifty ramifications for the supply chain. We would achieve a crystal clear "glass pipeline" (CSC and Sun Microsystems), zero-latency (Gartner Group), efficient consumer response (ECR/PTRM), achieve supply chain synchronicity (Sting and UPS), become the controller or the krazy glue holding together the three flows of commerce (goods, information, and funds) a host of other acronyms I forgot, solemnly declared, echoing in the boardroom during periodic review sessions.

By now in 2006 not only is mass customization the norm, but mass personalization, driven by the three factors of increasing bandwidth,ever more powerful processors, and most importantly the cheap and free software revolution, which provides infinite creative opportunities to define, transfigure, and transport information at the user interface level.

That array of pixels facing you right now is likely spelled out in one of the common web lingua francas, united by simple scripting languages into active functions that capture your keyed data input efficiently, and store it easily.

These simple structures, when replicated are proving capable of handling massive loads of transactions....and so the cost of providing digital services declines. Soon we'll see machines writing this prima facie code on the fly, so sites and groups of sites will in fact be sewn together by machines - with humans providing a cognitive controller function. The human thinks, and the machines do. In this way, thoughts will be 2 steps removed from data entry. Humans will literally be capable of creating a digital world on demand through thought, with machines altering the text of reality.

Therefore, it is important to ready your brain for the increasing demand we'll be placing on it in the future - it will communicate with thoughts, create with thoughts, lead with thoughts, and discharge business with thoughts. Hard to believe, but in a little while, that's where we'll be. And, the trusty, fast computer will be right there, man's best friend.

Lighter than soap or even styrofoam, the largest gas giant yet discovered is in the constellation Lacerta that's "the lizard" and is so light it would float in a glass of water.....

The so-called HAT-P-1 orbits one of a pair of stars in the constellation Lacerta, about 450 light-years from Earth.

"This new planet, if you could imagine putting it in a cosmic water glass, it would float," said Robert Noyes, a research astrophysicist with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. The planet, a gas giant, is probably a puffed up ball of hydrogen and helium.

HAT-P-1 is an oddball planet, since it orbits its parent star at just one-twentieth of the distance that separates Earth from our own sun. While Earth takes a year to orbit the sun, the newly found planet whips around its star once every 4.5 days.

--

It may be that some of these planets, like those discovered by UC-Berkeley's Geoffrey Marcy, are 'failed stars' like some groups of disenfranchised people make up the 'failed states' of political dialogue.

In a study just published in Neuroscience, Caffeine appears to impact onset of Alzheimer's Disease -if you think that your daily cups of coffee only provide you with alertness after you wake up or during the day, think again. Long-term intake of caffeine, the major constituent in coffee and tea, has been shown to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s in mice that develop the disease. In a study just published on-line in the journal Neuroscience, researchers at the Byrd Alzheimer’s Institute in Tampa, Florida, are reporting that caffeine intake equivalent to five cups of coffee a day in humans, protects Alzheimer’s mice against otherwise certain memory impairment and reduces Alzheimer’s pathology in their brains.

An earlier study in humans hinted that caffeine was protective against Alzheimer’s disease by showing that Alzheimer’s patients consumed markedly less caffeine during the 20 years preceding disease diagnosis compared with age-matched individuals without Alzheimer’s disease.


"We wanted to test the ability of dietary caffeine intake to protect against Alzheimer’s disease in a highly controlled study in Alzheimer’s mice where the only variable that was different between groups was whether caffeine was in their drinking water or not," says Dr. Gary Arendash, Ph.D, lead researcher in the study. "We were surprised to find that Alzheimer’s mice given caffeine in their drinking water throughout adult life performed much better than Alzheimer’s mice not given caffeine and very similar to normal mice without the disease," adds Arendash.


Not only was the memory of Alzheimer’s mice protected by the human equivalent of five cups of coffee per day (500 mg/day), but levels of an abnormal brain protein that most researchers believe causes the disease were reduced. This abnormal protein, called beta-amyloid, is formed by the actions of two enzymes on a much larger protein called APP, which extends through the cell membrane of brain cells. The two enzymes (BACE and PS1) cut APP in specific places, resulting in beta-amyloid formation. Once formed, beta-amyloid molecules aggregate into "plaques" within the brain, causing death and dysfunction of cells, especially in brain areas important for learning and memory. The researchers found that caffeine reduces the level of both BACE and PS1 enzymes, thus resulting in much less of the dangerous beta-amyloid protein.