Four short links: 27 December 2018
Reading Minds, Year Gotchas, LSTM Conversation, and Fast Scanning
- Reading Rats’ Minds (MIT) — In recent years, scientists have shown that by recording the electrical activity of groups of neurons in key areas of the brain, they could read a rat’s thoughts of where it was, both after it actually ran the maze and also later when it would dream of running the maze in its sleep—a key process in consolidating its memory. In the new study, several of the scientists involved in pioneering such mind-reading methods now report they can read out those signals in real time as the rat runs the maze, with a high degree of accuracy and the ability to account for the statistical relevance of the readings almost instantly after they are made. […] The software of the system is open source and available for fellow neuroscientists to download and use freely, Chen and Wilson say. Rats not included. The paper is open access, too.
- yyyy and YYYY: Why Your Year May Be Wrong (Erica Sadun) — The presence of YYYY in the date format without its expected supporting information reduces to “start of year, go back one week, report the first day.” (I’ll explain this more in just a little bit.)
- Conversation with Juergen Schmidhuber — the co-creator of long short-term memory networks (LSTMs) that are used in billions of devices today for speech recognition, translation, and much more. … The history of science is the history of compression progress. Metalearning, self-referential programs, and more. It’s a dry discussion of fiery ideas. (via hardmaru)
- Scanning 250 Pages/Minute — Our system continuously observes 3D deformation of each flipped page at 500 times per second and recognizes the best moment for book image digitization. The video is hypnotic. (via Reza Zadeh)
