Neuroeconomics in the New Yorker

There's a long story in the New Yorker (free) on my current field of research. The author meets a good number of the big guns in the field. Happy reading!

From skimming it, I've already learned new trivia - Colin Camerer (Caltech) was a math prodigy who entered college at age 14.

and old trivia - George (collaborator) and Paul don't so much agree on brain systems for making decisions. etc.

We will have press soon too! (fingers crossed)

PMP week

last week - a new family of iPods and the Microsoft Zune out.

I'm upgrading to an 80gb iPod in a few months, that at least was decided. I like my nano that was a (temporary) stand-in as my 40gb iRiver died, but that really isn't enough space, contra early thoughts that rotating fresh music all the time would be nice.

For the Zune's draw - the to-be-built community of music sharers - I'm intrigued but not excited. 3 days / 3 plays of WiFi-shared tunes is neat. But after the that neatness wears off? "Hey karthik, can i plug in and steal music from your laptop?"

The start of more problems with e-voting

They can be hacked very easily (Diebold, at least),

and do a shitty job anyway in a primary.

species DNA is already adapting to global warming

Global Genetic Change Tracks Global Climate Warming in Drosophila subobscura
Joan Balanyá, Josep M. Oller, Raymond B. Huey, George W. Gilchrist, Luis Serra
(the paper - Science; news)

Comparisons of recent with historical samples of chromosome inversion frequencies provide opportunities to determine whether genetic change is tracking climate change in natural populations. We determined the magnitude and direction of shifts over time (24 years between samples on average) in chromosome inversion frequencies and in ambient temperature for populations of the fly Drosophila subobscura on three continents. In 22 of 26 populations, climates warmed over the intervals, and genotypes characteristic of low latitudes (warm climates) increased in frequency in 21 of those 22 populations. Thus, genetic change in this fly is tracking climate warming, and is doing so globally.
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freakin' awesome. just great.

Pre-babbling infants respond to speech in Broca's area!

Functional organization of perisylvian activation during presentation of sentences in preverbal infants
Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, Lucie Hertz-Pannier, Jessica Dubois, Sébastien Mériaux, Alexis Roche, Mariano Sigman, and Stanislas Dehaene
(the paper - PNAS)

We examined the functional organization of cerebral activity in 3-month-old infants when they were listening to their mother language. Short sentences were presented in a slow event-related functional MRI paradigm. We then parsed the infant's network of perisylvian responsive regions into functionally distinct regions based on their speed of activation and sensitivity to sentence repetition. An adult-like structure of functional MRI response delays was observed along the superior temporal regions, suggesting a hierarchical processing scheme. The fastest responses were recorded in the vicinity of Heschl's gyrus, whereas responses became increasingly slower toward the posterior part of the superior temporal gyrus and toward the temporal poles and inferior frontal regions (Broca's area). Activation in the latter region increased when the sentence was repeated after a 14-s delay, suggesting the early involvement of Broca's area in verbal memory. The fact that Broca's area is active in infants before the babbling stage implies that activity in this region is not the consequence of sophisticated motor learning but, on the contrary, that this region may drive, through interactions with the perceptual system, the learning of the complex motor sequences required for future speech production. Our results point to a complex, hierarchical organization of the human brain in the first months of life, which may play a crucial role in language acquisition in our species.
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This looks really cool. Not to mention how hard it must have been to scan infants.. As language is not my area (and/or one i usually avoid), I'm not sure how interesting this is within the field. But I don't think that from this you can support a specific nativist position.

if i were to

ever die (current chance of dying, at some point: 98%) far away from an incinerator:

cocoons nyt (company site)

everybody coffins

freeze-smash-bury

something cheap and easy to assemble, or at least with good design in mind.
morbid?  well, one person died while you read that question... the ever-present ticking.
(various blog sources)