Cognitive Labs

This post is mainly of interest to Stanford, Cal alums or people in the SF bay area, and to anybody else that wants to read it...

Mike Montgomery was a fixture at Stanford from the 1980's to mid-this decade. A cerebral coach, he looked like a B-school prof, appearing to have more in common with Michael Porter than Bob Knight. Rather than drawing a pick-and-roll on the blackboard during timeouts, he would chalk out stars, dogs and cash cows.

So now, he's going from collecting term sheets at 3000 Sand Hill to ambling down Telegraph, picking up a poster of Jimi or Green Day, a Tibetan prayer flag and maybe a wedge of pizza at Blondie's to fight off the munchies.

At Stanford he turned white guys who couldn't jump into NBA players. But in the NBA relating was tougher. As in...

"Yo Monty! What up?"
Stunned, Montgomery catches the keys.
"Park my Bentley behind the gym. Don't scratch it." (From a player who earns more per game than the coach does in a season)



Cal has been in a basketball no man's land since Todd Bozeman and Jason Kidd shocked Duke and Coach K to get to the sweet 16, hit the cover of SI...and then years of decline. Maybe Montgomery can Tivo out the mediocrity of the intervening decade-plus. Watch it on your slingbox.

Labels: bozeman, cal, jason, kidd, montgomery, stanford

Stanford Classicist Joe Manning


One of the last remaining classical libraries of note, formerly in the hands of a private family in Europe, has been acquired by Stanford. The Erichsen Library, consisting of a vast trove of materials from the Ptolemaic, Roman, Byzantine, and Arab periods, will reside at the end of Palm Drive. The period in question includes that of the DaVinci Code, of course

Dr. Erichsen in the early 20th century was a foremost scholar of Demotic, which is one of the three scripts depicted on the Rosetta Stone. Demotic represents a handwritten version of popular Egyptian, distinct from the archaic language of kings and priests, and forms a bridge to Coptic, the Medieval religious language of Christians in Egypt, still spoken by some such as monks at St.Catherine's Monastery or priests in Old Cairo. One of the greatest collections of materials resides in Berkeley due to the largess of the Hearst expeditions at the turn of the Century.

Article:

Stanford has acquired the library of one of the foremost Egyptologists of the 20th century.

The collection of Wolja Erichsen (1890-1966), now at Stanford's Green Library, documents more than 1,500 years of Egyptian history, ranging from about 650 B.C. to about A.D. 1000. It includes Egypt's important transition from paganism to Christianity.

"The Erichsen library is one of the most significant and perhaps the last great Egyptology library in private hands," said Joe Manning, associate professor of classics. "It is difficult to overestimate the importance of acquiring this collection. Stanford's acquisition adds great momentum to our research and strengthens our profile as one of the very best places in the world to study ancient Mediterranean civilizations."

Manning, speaking at an Oct. 15 reception to celebrate the acquisition, emphasized that this contribution from the "heroic age" of Egyptology, which peaked between 1880 and 1920 and was centered in Berlin, is "a huge deal."

"The gift of a library is not the sexiest thing in the world—people prefer to build buildings—but this is much more important," he said, to laughter and scattered applause.

Erichsen, a professor at the University of Copenhagen, was a specialist in demotic Egyptian, the script and language of Egypt from 650 B.C. to A.D. 200, and Coptic, the last stage of the ancient Egyptian language that has particular importance for the study of early Christianity, especially since Egypt was the location of the earliest organized church.

Erichsen, for many years based in Berlin, is perhaps most famous for his important dictionary of demotic, Demotisches Glossar (1954), which is still fundamental in the field, and his Demotische Lesestücke (1937-39), a collection of demotic Egyptian texts used for teaching the language even today.

After Erichsen's death, heirs were divided about where the library should go. At one point it was considered by the universities of Würzburg and Chicago, but the collection stayed in Copenhagen until Stanford acquired it.

"The breadth of text editions and studies of demotic and Coptic text editions represented in this library is unmatched," Manning said. Many of the volumes are extremely rare text editions published in Germany before 1940. These editions often have large folio photographic plate volumes. "They are often better than working with digital photos, and simpler and easier to use," Manning added. "They are the next best thing to being there."

In many cases, they provide high-quality 16-by-20-inch photographs of texts that no longer exist because the original papyri were lost or destroyed during World War II.

The collection also contains "beautiful volumes of Egypt and Nubian temples and site plans, a lot of them now gone," Manning said. War wasn't the only enemy: The Aswan Dam flooded some historic sites, other temples were removed from original sites and reestablished in museums, and still other sites have been rifled since books about them were written in the 18th and 19th centuries.

"Arabs were not exactly keen on the ancient monuments—nor were the early Christians," Manning said. "They saw them as potential quarried stone." Hence, old stone from ancient sites was reassembled into new buildings, obliterating ancient history.

It's commonly believed that modern technology and techniques have antiquated the research of an earlier area, but the assumption does not necessarily hold in late Egyptology, a history that is very much a work-in-progress, according to Manning.

"There's a dialogue between the new and old material," he said. "Half of the known demotic texts are not even published. There are still papyri coming up out of the ground." Manning noted that, for instance, 8,000 new papyri of Greek and demotic texts were discovered in the last few seasons at a single site in Egypt. It shows that the available knowledge of the era is far from complete, and scholars are still playing catch-up. Much of the older work has not been revised or updated.

The new acquisition will be the "basis of history-building about this period. It gives great momentum to our work," Manning said. "With this gift, Stanford Libraries have gone from having an average holding of Egyptology to world class."

He said that Egyptology is "a small field, but an important field in human history." Some of its importance, however, may be lost on the uneducated eye.

For example, Coptic, a language that never truly died and is still preserved in the liturgies of the Coptic churches, is a critical language for decoding ancient Egyptian. In fact, Coptic is the last stage of ancient Egyptian, using a Greek alphabet, with an important difference: Ancient Egyptian written languages don't use vowels, but Coptic does. Hence, it has provided clues to how the ancient Egyptian language was pronounced, and also indicates the dialects of ancient Egyptian, corresponding to Coptic dialect up and down Egypt.

Labels: classics, joemanning, rogue classicism, stanford

SAN FRANCISCO - Researchers at Stanford University have developed a potentially pathbreaking blood test that, according to preliminary studies, is able to identify patients with Alzheimer's disease -- an ailment that has been notoriously difficult to diagnose.

The test has also shown promise in predicting which patients with mild memory loss are at high risk of developing the dreaded syndrome, which kills 66,000 Americans each year and inflicts incalculable heartache on the families of its victims.

Scientists have been working for years without success to develop a simple way to diagnose Alzheimer's disease, a degenerative brain disease that saps memory, sows confusion and will eventually kill patients who may have lost the ability to speak, walk or swallow.

In a paper published Sunday in the online edition of the British journal Nature Medicine, a team of scientists led by Stanford neurology Professor Tony Wyss-Coray describe a unique method that can spot Alzheimer's patients by screening for a set of 18 chemical signals that consistently turn up in the blood of people suffering from the disease.

Tip from Wes Ashford

Labels: ashford, nature, stanford, wyss-coray

The proprietors of Gaia Online, a teen virtual world portal,looked down from their digital perch and noticed that supply-"S" was shifting to S'or S-prime. Time to take action, so they just named economist Michael Boskin of the Hoover Institution to their advisory board, according to news.com. He will chair the board of economic advisors. Google also recently added a UC-Berkeley transaction-cost economics professor, who specializes in the dynamics of virtual markets, as Chief Economist. We talked to him a few times in our first start-up,which had bid/ask auction components for the supply chain.

Why is this happening? Because the share of purely digital transactions is growing -imaginary or conceptual goods that are acquired with digital currency that is pegged, however, to real currencies like the dollar and euro in a determined exchange rate. Will the traditional currencies go the way of the gold standard? Instead of 'free silver' will it be free digital tokens, or unlimited scrip?

Labels: boskin, hoover, stanford

Aerial image of SRI (wikipedia)

Cognitive Labs' has just concluded an outstanding meeting with SRI International. They've been party to some amazing innovations including the computer mouse, which they licensed to Xerox Parc for a small sum, as well as a variety of highly interesting, speculative projects. You can read more about the scope of SRI here. The 2.1 million people who have signed up at Cognitive Labs - seems to have been somewhat impressive, and speaks to the future of extended cognitive health management.

Labels: brain, Cognitive Labs, patents, sri international, stanford

A team at Stanford is harnessing the computational power of thousands of PC's and Sony PS3 computers to perform calculations related to protein folding, which may shed light on the origin of diseases including cancer and Alzheimer's. While the project has been ongoing since 2000, the addition of PS3's has kickstarted the adoption rate.

When users are online, the extra processing power can be used for the good of humanity. It is reminiscent of the Seti@home project.

Read the article by Ben Silverman of Yahoo! games.

Labels: PS3, stanford, yahoo

Using Transitive Inference, the Cichlid species of fish (related to a popular aquarium species) is able to deduce information about their environment logically.

(LiveScience.com) Fish have the reasoning capacity of a 4- or 5-year-old child when it comes to figuring out who among their peers is "top dog," new research shows.

Stanford University scientists made the discovery—said to be the first demonstration that fish can use logical reasoning to figure out their social pecking order—by studying fights among small, highly territorial, spiny-finned fish called cichlids, common in freshwater in tropical Africa, including in Lake Tanganyika in central Africa.

Logan Grosenick, a graduate student in statistics, and his colleagues found that a sixth fish could infer or learn indirectly which were the 1st through 5th strongest simply by observing fights among them in adjacent, transparent tanks, rather than by directly fighting each fish itself or seeing each fish fight all four others [image].

This type of reasoning, called transitive inference (TI), is a developmental milestone for human children, showing up nonverbally as early as ages 4 and 5; it also has been reported in monkeys, rats and birds. It allows thinkers to reason that if A is bigger than B, and B is bigger than C, then A is also bigger than C.

Labels: fish, inference, intelligence, smart, stanford