Social Mode

Please run this blog through the Baloney Detection Kit that was published here in the last 90 days. I recommend you do it for every media byte but, a guy off the streets writing about our global financial crisis may need it more than others for obvious reasons.

There is a postulate that states, “People will fight harder to keep just what they have than they will to double it.”

The financial crisis we are now experiencing – much like the one in the 1930s – is the collection of consequences for not attending to or understanding the dynamic relationships between 50 or so markers with thousands of events, also dynamic, that occur in the marketplace.

At the same time, those with access and responsibility for our economic homeostasis were postulating and positioning the use of recycled and flawed approaches as having ‘mitigating’ circumstances surrounding their failures, again and again and…… again.Each time our institutions fell further behind at tortuous attempts of adjusting the dials to prove or show these fanciful approaches were correct but not executed correctly. No one flinched.

Each time the fanciful approaches were linked to current fears – mostly social, that were then maintained lest a change in ‘the’ approach make things worse, as in the postulate above.

Fear and shallow rhetoric prevented our economic behavior from being empirically subjected to an experimental analysis of the behavior of markets. Now we have another chance. The consequences for greater pain are more probable than any temporary gains from standing pat or biding our time. Our trillions of lost dollars and savings and confidence has occasioned a search for another method, to find a different method, a variation, to bring confidence as well as some level of empiricism to financial institutions that only pretend to be empirical.

Our strengths as a country and culture are science. It is time to try what we know works to get us to the moon and extend the average life spans in less than one hundred years from 37 to 74 years. It is also fitting that an empirical variation will help us understand what Darwin saw (whose 200 birthday we celebrate this Thursday) as the dominate feature in all species over 150 years ago.

For nay-sayers and those that have a vested interest (no pun intended) in that status quo of this pig in a poke economic approach, one can only suggest that the time for something else is upon us. That ‘something’ isn’t witchcraft, tea leaves, prayer or a link to LinkedIn.com. It is science in excess. I hope that idea gets more traction faster than Darwin’s ideas have fared.

You better hope so too.

Darwin and experimental analysis of the behavior of markets

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Feb 11
Put 2 trillion into education.

Revamp every school.

build more schools.

pay teachers very highly (pay based on college enrollment + post graduate employment)

any county not graduating 95% within 2 years loses funding.

SEE WHAT HAPPENS!

We do not have the tools, concepts, culture and work force ready to take on what swirl exists.

My Proposal for Stimulus

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Feb 10
From a private email from Mahesh Johari:

If you find yourself agreeing with what is presented below, is there anything you can do that will make a difference? Do you know a Senator, a Congressman, the President? Don’t be shy to act if you agree.

People have asked for my opinion of the stimulus bill recently. Shortly after lunch today, I came to a definitive conclusion. The current stimulus bill has no chance to solve our crisis. People have also asked me what will solve the crisis, and this answer was also clear after today’s lunch. Only one of two things will truly help: Either (1) we need to either increase the number of people in our country, or (2) we need to destroy some housing inventory.

By now you’re probably thinking… who did I have lunch with? A banker? A professor? A Federal Reserve economist?

None of the above. I had lunch with a dolphin trainer.

Professionally speaking she’s far removed from the world of economics. As she asked me about the stimulus bill, I forced myself to explain things as clearly as I could. In the course of doing so, I gained my own clarity.

Here’s what I told her (a small part of this you’ve heard before):

The fundamental problem is too many houses, and not enough people to live in them. We have made a product that lasts 50+ years to great excess – to the point that there is too much of that probably to reasonably be consumed by the current population. There are only two ways to solve that problem… if the light bulb hasn’t gone off already, read on to find out what they are!

First, let me make the case for too many homes: Turn your attention to tables 3 & 4 of this statistical release on housing: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/hvs/qtr408/files/q408press.pdf

You will see from table 4 that the home ownership rate for a long time was stable between 64 and 65%. As the bubble accelerated, that figure climbed to 4%. If we return to the long run averages it means that relative to 2004-2006 levels, 4% of Americans will be displaced from owning their home. According to this data, we’re not halfway there.

You’ll see from Table 3 that the vacant units of housing comprise 15% of total inventory. Similar historical tables show that a stable long term average is closer to 11.5%-12%. That means we have almost 3% too many housing units in the country – roughly speaking near 3.9 million excess units. Consider that the average household has 1.5 workers, and you see that we would need nearly 6 million new jobs to have enough households to fill all the excess housing units.

The bottom line is that even with varying assumptions and slightly different numbers, the conclusion is still that there are too many homes and not enough people to live in them. All the economic stimulus in the world isn’t going to create more people, that requires… ahem… another kind of stimulus. As you drive around your town over the next week, note the “For Rent/Sale” signs and empty new developments. Intuitively you will realize that my simple analysis is absolutely correct: there are too many housing units.

Our population and labor force demographics simply cannot support all the homes we have. In a theoretical economic model of supply and demand, when supply is too great, price falls and the quantity of product consumed increases.

Housing is a different animal – when demographics are such that there may not be enough people to fill all the housing units in the country, almost regardless of price, housing prices will simply keep falling for a long time to come. There almost isn’t a realistic price at which you could create enough housing demand to fill all the housing units we have – there aren’t enough people! And, if prices fell that low, a vast amount of wealth and jobs would be destroyed in the process.

Think about it this way: a stimulus (tax incentive) to buy a home can get me to leave my apartment and move into a house. Now my apartment is vacant… who’s going to live there? Here’s a better one – let’s say I’m upside down in too much home and I have enough cash in the bank to buy a smaller home – I can walk away from my upside down mortgage (sending the home into foreclosure), buy a smaller home for cash down, and make $15,000 extra from the government in the process. The damage done by one such foreclosure will outweigh the benefit of even 5 or 10 legitimate purchases.

Do you see? All of the housing stimulus is like a giant game of musical chairs, with a few million extra seats. The money thrown in that direction is literally a COMPLETE WASTE.

If home prices keep declining, guess what? The banks balance sheets keep getting worse, the real estate & construction sector remain a mess, and we don’t get out of this morass.

The root cause can only be addressed by one of three things:

(1) The passage of time: which will allow for natural destruction of the housing inventory and an adequate increase in the population.

(2) Increasing the population dramatically: so there can be enough people to live in the homes!

(3) Destroying housing units: so there aren’t too many homes!

So besides waiting, what can we do to address the root cause? How about these crazy ideas – which only seem crazy until you realize the porpoise they serve. Ok that was a bad pun, but what do you expect after lunch with a dolphin trainer?

INCREASE IMMIGRATION: Smart, talented, motivated people all over the world want to come to the United States. Let’s accelerate the process of getting them here so they fill some of our empty homes! Let’s find a way to keep the immigrants who are here and being productive from leaving.

GOVERNMENT PROJECTS THAT REQUIRE THE PURCHASE OF PRIVATE RESIDENTIAL PROPERTY: Does your city need a good public train system? What better time for the government to buy up homes on critical urban traffic routes! We can bulldoze the homes and put in those trains. Creates jobs, reduces long term energy use, and reduces housing inventory.

COMMUNITY AGRICULTURE OR ENERGY COOPERATIVES: Oh let’s take the insanity all the way, shall we? Here’s a stimulus package – let’s buy a bunch of empty houses and turn the land into a solar farm, a wind farm, or heck… just a regular farm. Let’s find a way to let people in the neighborhood use the land to generate energy, or to grow things. Great long term benefits and an immediate destruction of huge amounts of housing inventory.

COMMUNITY CENTERS: Let’s take the empty homes and turn them into community centers, 1 million centers, each with an annual budget of $50,000 for the next 10 years will only cost $500 billion. I laugh at the usage of the word “only”, but you get my drift.

What happens if we don’t address the issue directly? There is only one logical conclusion – property values continue to fall. Home prices will fall to a point that is so low that people will buy them because (a) the land is worth more, (b) the materials in the home are worth more, or (c) the owner feels they can afford to carry the property for some time and still turn a profit. Remember that home values tend to be set by the last sale price – the glut of inventory will determine that price, not the people who live in the homes. We’re nowhere near that level now.

If we don’t address the issue directly, our national debt will spiral upwards as we waste money on ineffective stimulus. Tax revenues will drop dramatically as house values fall. Banks will continue to feel pressure from foreclosure and falling home prices. The jobs that were lost in the real estate and construction, they will not coming back any time soon.

By now, I am hoping you understand what I think is the correct approach to dealing with our crisis: more people, or fewer homes. It’s very simple… Take your pick!

Stop the Stimulus – There are too many homes?

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Feb 10
Getting webMathematica working on MacOS X was not entirely trivial, even with decent install instructions.

Here’s what you’ll need to avoid wasted time in getting set up:
1. Install Mathematica first, ideally the latest version
2. Your java should be fine provided you’re on OS X 10.4.11+, but double check your java -version looking for 1.5+
3. Use tomcat6. I tried glassfish, it was kinda a pain (i.e. it wasn’t drag and drop like tomcat)
4. get the webMathematica.zip or .war file and deploy within the webapps folder in tomcat
5. create a mathpass file and put it in the /conf folder in the webmathematica web app. Follow this formating. Be sure to register you webMathematica with register.wolfram.com to get your mathID and all that.
6. Grab the J/Link jar from your current Mathematica.app/SystemFiles/Links/JLink/JLink.jar and dump it into your tomcat/webapps/webmathematica/lib/JLink.jar — maybe this isn’t necessary, but i figured it would be best to match the JLink that came with the kernal to the one used in the local webMathematica (I couldn’t get it to work with the .jar on the webMathematica disk)
7. start tomcat. try the examples.
8. COMPUTE
Sadly there are very few other places to get webMathematica troubleshooting tips. The FAQs aren’t too deep and the forums have nothing. Generally there aren’t a whole lot of people using webMathematica (should be more!) so community support suffers. Also, those who are using it generally aren’t on Mac OS X 10.5.6+.

Post a comment if you changes or suggestions or your own experience.
webMathematica and MacOS X

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Feb 7
Wolfram Mathematica Home Edition is available. It’s a $295 fully functional version of Mathematica 7.

Everyone should consider getting a copy. No, really, everyone.

What mathematica can help you do is as useful as word processing. I know, that sounds crazy. How could scientific computing be for everyone?

Consider the amount of math, data mining and research one already does just to get through the day. Do you check the stock market? do you look up information in wikipedia? do you use the tools in your online bank site? Do you watch the weather report?

Much of this data is available in Mathematica and is immediately made interactive by Mathematica. Other examples
- Map the planets and dwarf planets of our solar system, along with stars, galaxies, and more
- Calculate expected returns for a stock or examinethe stock market’s performance over time
- Manipulate images in sophisticated ways
- Make science and math, from preschool through college and beyond, come alive
- Visualize worldwide weather patterns or see decades of tornado data
- Examine protein alignments or algae growth
- Play with map projections or record your travels
- Pursue your interests in number theory or visualizecomplex functions
- Design buildings and create art
- Decorate Easter eggs or draw a Valentine
- And much, much more
OK, still not convinced? Just do the math. Mathematica can replace Visio, your calculator (graphing calculator), excel, batch photo editor and most common programming environments.

If you a developer, even just a dabbler, you must get Mathematica. It’s easy to pick up and the more you learn the more amazing things you find. Beyond that though, Mathematica’s symbolic programming is a progressive approach. In a world of multi core, multi threaded apps OOP and Procedural programming is becoming increasingly complicated and bug prone. Mathematica’s approach avoids the pitfalls of lost threads and memory leaks because the paradigm itself doesn’t allow you to make those mistakes (for the most part).

I’ll let you in on another secret, that almost no literature covers. Mathematica has the best web parsers out there. It is insanely easy to bring data in from like 200 different file formats, including HTML. For anyone who has ever built a web service, a scraper, spider or crawler, you know how painful it is to build these in most languages, not to mention maintaining a scraper or crawler. Why no one promotes this feature is beyond me considering the mashup nature of the Web now. It’s super fun to mash the various APIs out there with some cool mathematica visualizations. (Oh, and for the search engine nutz out there, the linguistic engine in mathematica is insanely easy to use vs. raw wordnet and various spelling engines. you can creating a really neat search suggestion tool within in an hour.)

(e.g. I made a visual search engine of shoes and women’s tops that crushes like.com. it took me 1.5 hours. I used the image manipulation tools in Mathematica to analyze shapes and colors of products via the built in similarity algorithms. Post a comment if you want that code)

So, yes, web industry people/media workers, you can get way ahead with this software.

BI people. Give up that lame copy of SAS and SPSS. Seriously, those products are so expensive for somewhat limited use. I’ll still install R, because it’s FREE and extensible, but those other two gotta go if you are a stats and BI person. Get a home copy of mathematica, learn it, and then get a pro copy at work. Don’t trust me on this, just try it. Let me know if you really can’t kick your SPSS habit.

I really could go on forever. The scope of use for this software is pretty insane. Hell, the documentation alone is a great teaching aid. Sometimes I just browse the documentation to learn new math or programming or to explore the data. What few people know is that the documentation itself is interactive and computable. You don’t just get a book of examples, you can actually “run the program” within the documentation and see it live. For the home user, this means you can use the documentation to get going very quickly and start to modify the examples to suit your task.

Call me a FanBoy. That’s fine. You will be too if you invest $295 and 2 hours of your time. Methinks you’ll feel what I feel about this – how can I possibly be given this much power without paying 10x this much? There must be a catch! There isn’t. This is the best deal in software. (just think of how much you paid for MS Office and Photoshop… and those only do a handful of functions)
Wolfram Mathematica Home Edition

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Feb 7
SocialMode’s favorite late night past time, Blokus.

Play it online now!

Perhaps you want to strategize?

Maybe you’d rather the computer just do it for you… or just use some maths… GOOD LUCK.

Research the four color theorem, it helps understand why this game is so crazy fun (i.e. challenging but not so challenging that you don’t want to try!)

Blokus Strategy and Blokus Online

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Feb 6
Ah, TechCrunch. You whipped out the old Excel and made the industry famous Up And To The Right Chart.

There is no strong conclusion to draw from this very limited data set. The only piece of interesting data is: of the big 4 media companies presented here only Google has any sustained growth and makes up the majority of 4th quarter growth.

The Industry is NOT doing well at all. Time Warner and News Corp had major losses, and they have huge stakes in the internet. Yahoo, MSN, AOL all suffered major losses. Mid-tier Smaller publishers are getting crushed, and you won’t see that in any of this data or any emarketer reports.

If companies in the media industry want to actually survive, get real. The existing ad model stinks and this recession just nailed the coffin shut. Don’t take my word for it, run your own analysis. (Just for fun, go look at the ads running on Yahoo, MSN, Facebook, MySpace, Video game sites… let me know if you see a direct sold campaign. Let me know if you find a non adnetwork ad tag…) Hurry and do it, because this is one short runway and there ain’t no Hudson river nearby.

The biggest advertisers in the game (financial services, computer companies, and auto makers) all took huge hits and continue to falter. The ad budgets have been slashed and they aren’t moving product. With that mix, media companies can’t do anything about their ad revenue streams if they don’t find other ways of making money.

No, I’m not doom and gloom. This is all about reinvention and change and exploration. The old model stinks and now we get to find out what to do next that is better for the user and the advertiser. This is good. It is also painful. It is not Up and To The Right, despite the fact that excel seems to only spit out charts of that type.

Techcrunch Lies, Damned Lies – Up and To the Right????

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Feb 5
“To put a trillion dollars in context, if you spend a million dollars every day since Jesus was born, you still wouldn’t have spent a trillion,” McConnell said.

This comes from a CNN editorial on our perspective on the number 1 trillion.

You know nothing makes a number seem big and important like putting a reference to the birth of Jesus. This is the worst comparison between units I’ve ever seen.

a) when was jesus born? you might say 2009 years ago.

b) what’s 1 million times 2009 years x 365 days in the year (don’t forget leap years!)? right a little under 733,285,000,000 billion.

c) providing the context of religion and dollars and time eternal makes this far confusing than it needs to be (the intention, i know!)

This is important stuff, ya know.

religion and philosophy

Strangest Jesus Reference I’ve Seen

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Feb 4
What? How could that be?… Here are some more dazzling examples of “putz-on-a-page” concerning fMRI and neuroscience:

First, here’s the good news…

Brain’s blood surge doesn’t match activity
- Based on the 28 January 2009 article by the same name by David Robson
- All [….. ] are comments and edits of jhb
CONTRARY to popular belief, a rush of blood to a certain brain region [as seen in an fMRI study] is not always linked to neural activity there, a finding that may guide future brain scan experiments.

Functional MRI scans measure blood flow in the brain. Neuroscientists interpret this as a sign that neurons are firing, usually as someone performs a task, [observes or senses the environment in some way] or experiences an emotion [implied due to reports and periphery recordings]. This enables them to link the emotion to the brain region where there was [a change in the area’s] blood flow.

Now, Aniruddha Das from Columbia University in New York and colleagues have shown that blood flow can occur without accompanying neural activity. Das used separate techniques to measure blood flow and neural activity in the visual cortex of two macaques trained to carry out a visual task.

Sitting in darkness except for a light that switched on at regular intervals, the monkeys were trained to look away if it was red, and fix their gaze on the light if it shone green.

When the timing [interval] of the pauses between the light flashes [were] changed, blood flow still increased when the macaque expected [would have normally received the timed] flash, but [without a colored light cue] there was no [‘escape’ or orientation movement] or subsequent increase in electrical activity from firing neurons [in those neural areas that were shown to be involved] (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature07664). Das suspects that the brain sent the rush of blood in anticipation of the neurons’ firing.

Christian Keysers from the BCN Neuroimaging Centre in Groningen, the Netherlands, does not believe the result is relevant to the design of previous fMRI experiments and so is unlikely to have an impact on their results. But Das says care needs to be taken in future to ensure that this misinterpretation does not lead to errors.

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The Journal of Neuroscience, December 31, 2008, 28(53)

BOLD (blood oxygenationlevel-dependent) Signals Do Not Always Reflect Neural Activity

Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive (see pages 14347–14357)

Anna Devor, Elizabeth M. C. Hillman, Peifang Tian, ChristianWaeber, Ivan C. Teng, Lana Ruvinskaya, Mark H. Shalinsky, HaihaoZhu, Robert H. Haslinger, Suresh N. Narayanan, Istvan Ulbert,Andrew K. Dunn, Eng H. Lo, Bruce R. Rosen, Anders M. Dale, DavidKleinfeld, and David A. Boas

Each year, thousands of publications present functional magneticresonance imaging (fMRI) data that suggest that a particularbrain region is active during a particular cognitive task. Casualreaders ^{[casual readers and some less casual readers}] of such papers might forget [presume or not attend to the fact] that this technique doesnot actually measure neural activity, but rather blood oxygenationlevel-dependent (BOLD) contrasts.

Synaptic transmissions requirelarge energy expenditures, and increased energy metabolism hasbeen hypothesized to act directly on blood vessels to increaseblood flow and alter BOLD signals.

This week (Feb-09), however, Devoret al. report that this hypothesis is not always the correct one. [One can only imagain that new neural pathways being laid down show somewhat different blood flow than neural activity from repetitive or redundant activities as measured by neural activity.]

Asexpected, stimulating the forepaw of rats increased blood oxygenation,vessel diameter, glucose uptake, spiking, and synaptic releasein the contralateral primary somatosensory cortex [associated with sense reception on the forepaw]. In the ipsilateralcortex, however, neural activity and glucose uptake increased,but blood oxygenation and blood flow did not.

These resultsindicate that blood flow is not directly tied to metabolism,and BOLD signals do not always reflect neural activity as recorded by various fMRI devices.

~~~~~~

Conditioning works even if you don’t know about it…

The brain, as a physical organ, has shown classical conditioning without an agent, autonomous man or the need for an interpreted purpose.

Some other experiments have shown that monkeys fire “anticipation” neurons in different areas before they perform a movement itself. There must be some neural circuits that cause vasodilation in these areas of the brain in anticipation of the light. Reducing things down to cell membrane transport to find the ‘cause’ starts to get a little like trying to find the soul or the personality when those things are mere metaphors that allow us to communicate and, after use and misuse, come to be personified and be the thing we are trying to understand rather than the behavior of the organism.

All in all this type of reduction approach has led us to some strange interpretations for headlines in magazines and pop science-shizzle articles to attract readers but not many have the cohunes of NewScientist, a normally damn good resource who boldly stated on their recent cover: Darwin Was Wrong!

More examples of “putz-on-a-page” concerning fMRI and neuroscience:

http://neuroanthropology.net/2008/04/10/bad-brain-science-boobs-caused-subprime-crisis/

http://neuroanthropology.net/2008/06/11/wired-for-belief/

To Trust or Not to Trust: Ask Oxytocin

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan 49 participants who were given…
July 15, 2008 – Mind Matters – By Mauricio Delgado

Monkey Mating Requires Lots of Brainpower

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to analyze the brains of male marmoset…
February 02, 2004 – News – By Sarah Graham

Is Your Brain Thinking on its Feet?

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor their subjects’ brain…
November 09, 2000 – News – By Harald Franzen

Escape from the Insipid: Our Brains May Be Wired for Daydreaming

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). While the subjects were not performing…
January 18, 2007 – News – By Nikhil Swaminathan

Why the Brain Follows the Rules

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner to see what parts of the brain…
June 10, 2008 – Mind Matters – By Caroline Zink

Scientists Identify Brain Region Responsible for Calculating Risk versus Reward

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how 14 healthy subjects…
June 15, 2006 – News – By David Biello

Right Brain May Be Wrong

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). As a first step, psychologist Markus…
March 24, 2005 – Scientific American Mind – By Steve J. Ayan

MRI Study Shows Lying Brains Look Different

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brains of volunteers…
November 14, 2001 – News – By Sarah Graham

Politically Correct: Why Great (and Not So Great) Minds Think Alike

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Researchers focused their examination…
March 19, 2008 – News – By Nikhil Swaminathan

The Dope on Dopamine’s Central Role in the Brain’s Motivation and Reward

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), to examine the normal human brain…
September 15, 2008 – News – By Tabitha M. Powledge

The Political Brain

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study shows where in the brain the…
June 26, 2006 – Scientific American Magazine – By Michael Shermer

Can You Believe Your Shifty Eyes?

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), if the behavior she had observed was…
April 19, 2007 – News – By Nikhil Swaminathan

Your iBrain: How Technology Changes the Way We Think

…placed. To make sure that the fMRI scanner was measuring the neural…
October 08, 2008 – Scientific American Mind – By Gary Small, Gigi Vorgan

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Thinking about Morality

…a hypothesis stemming from previous fMRI investigations into the neural…
July 29, 2008 – Mind Matters – By Adina Roskies, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

Searching for God in the Brain

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Beauregard seeks to pinpoint the brain…
October 03, 2007 – Scientific American Mind – By David Biello

Neuroscientists Take Important Step toward Mind Reading

…on functional MRI data. By analyzing fMRI scans of viewers as they looked…
May 29, 2008 – Scientific American Mind – By Christopher Intagliata

Saying no to yourself: The neural mechanisms of self-control

…button press). On each trial of the fMRI study, subjects were given three…
September 11, 2007 – 60-Second Science Blog

Five Ways Brain Scans Mislead Us

…at the capabilities and operation of fMRI, perhaps the most commonly…
November 05, 2008 – Scientific American Mind – By Michael Shermer

Brain-Scan Cell Mystery Solved

…until now the mechanism underlying fMRI’s robust success has been a…
October 06, 2008 – Scientific American Mind – By Nikhil Swaminathan

BRAIN TERRAIN

…resonance imaging (fMRI). Unlike other imaging methods, fMRI allows…
March 21, 2000 – Scientific American Magazine – By Carol Ezzell

Fact or Phrenology?

…magnetic resonance imaging–or fMRI–has made quite a splash since its…
March 24, 2005 – Scientific American Mind – By David Dobbs

Freeing a Locked-In Mind

…with the advent of functional MRI (fMRI) scans, it became possible to…
April 04, 2007 – Scientific American Mind – By Karen Schrock

Are You a Liar? Ask Your Brain

…Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) technology to determine whether someone…
November 15, 2007 – News – By Larry Greenemeier

Hypnosis, Memory and the Brain

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). They carefully selected 25 people to…
October 07, 2008 – Mind Matters – By Amanda J. Barnier, Rochelle E. Cox, Greg Savage

Can brain scans read our minds?

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to analyze changes in the flow of blood…
December 12, 2008 – 60-Second Science Blog

Does fMRI See the Future?

…magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to chronicle the brain in action….
January 22, 2009 – 60-Second Science

Can fMRI Really Tell If You’re Lying?

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) purports to detect mendacity by seeing…
August 13, 2008 – Scientific American Magazine – By Gary Stix

The Brain Is Not Modular: What fMRI Really Tells Us

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We have all seen scans with…
May 13, 2008 – Scientific American Magazine – By Michael Shermer

The Sound Track of Our Minds

…headphones while lying in an fMRI machine; each of the musical tapestries…
August 03, 2007 – News – By Nikhil Swaminathan

Brain Images Make Inaccurate Science News Trustworthy

…magnetic resonance imaging (or fMRI)—the tool that creates a…
April 07, 2008 – 60-Second Psych

Partial Recall: Why Memory Fades with Age

…imaging magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine whether those…
December 05, 2007 – News – By Nikhil Swaminathan

When Craving Is Better Than Getting

In a recent article about brain cells, Joshua Freedman a U.C.L.A. neuroscientist, noted that a monkey feels maximal reward not when he eats a grape but rather when he gets it in his possession, anticipating he can eat it. Reward anticipation is very strong and can have a negative impact, (think: addiction), according to researchers from Rutgers and New York universities. They studied the effect of cognitive therapy on the physiological reactions to anticipating positive reward, and the results are published in Nature Neuroscience this week. To get a handle on these cravings, researchers presented human subjects with cues for a monetary gift. For each presentation, they were asked to either think of the reward or think of something calming that was the same color as the cue (which was blue). The calming strategy cut the physiological arousal (measured by skin conductance response) nearly in half. Additionally, they found marked reductions in the activity of the left and …
June 30, 2008 – 60-Second Psych

Magnetic Revelations

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has become the leading research tool…
October 16, 2001 – Scientific American Magazine
Brain science says boobs caused subprime crisis… AND MORE!

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Feb 3
Getting the python mysql connector working is a truly painful experience. Alas, I can safe you a ton of time.

First thing to do. Update the Python install on Mac OS X. The default is 2.5.1. For whatever reason this default install has all sorts of trouble when trying to compile MySQLdb. I have no idea what or why and you won’t find this hint ANYWHERE.

To update, just get whatever 2.5.1+ version you want here.

Then, if you want Django to integrate with the install of XAMPP, follow this post. It links to another post that takes you through the steps of getting MySQLdb compiled. If you want to use MAMP, you just change the source of the symbolic links mentioned in the post (telling the compiler where to get mysql headers).

Oh, yes, you’ll need to get either the XAMPP or MAMP sources. Both projects provide the sources of their packages. You’ll need to get the ‘include’ directory from both and drop it into your MySQL directory.

Google for “xampp source” or “mamp source” and you’ll get to the latest versions. I’d link to them here but you might read this post at a later time and get confused by my links.

No doubt you will have Google’d your eyeballs out trying to find fixes to this process.

here’s what doesn’t matter:
- the discussion of 64bit mysql vs python 32 bit (when dealing with XAMPP or MAMP, those are both 32 bit mysql)
- messing with the types.h file on your OS x
- using macports or any exotic way of installing mysql
Now, the trickiest part is getting Django integrated in the XAMPP build of apache. (The Django dev web server works fine if you’re just playing around). I would NOT try to recompile XAMPP. Instead, get the Django Stack from Bitnami, which is Apache, MySQL, Django and Python. Yes, dev on your django dev and then port to this bitnami stack. This entire stack can be moved if you need to, which is nice.

If you’re like me, coding is more fun that configuring. I believe the above will get you coding and deploying faster than all the other recompile and bizarre options Linux gurus dish out. I’d say for production/hard core sites, do the best compile you can. For hacking up python, mysql and django, do the prepackaged stuff.

This method above has the advantage that everything is upgradeable without massive recompiles. XAMPP provides an upgrade package when they do new builds.

Anyhoo… hope this saves you some time. Hack away.
MySQLdb, Django, XAMPP, MAMP on Mac OS X 10.5

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Feb 1