For all those who are organized enough to have an itinerary planned out for SFN next week using the online Neuroscience Meeting Planner (a rather archaic tool that is only marginally useful, linked from the meeting homepage above), you may be interested in how you can use your mobile device (like iPhone, blackberry, etc) to explore your schedule.  I’ve been looking all afternoon for a way to automatically export the OASIS itinerary to outlook or Google Calendar, but nothing seems to work (though if you like using Excel to plan your events, they’ve got that covered).  An ambitious student with more time than appropriate on his or her hands could cook up some Applescript to generate iCal events from the rows of the .xls file, but I unfortunately won’t be much help there.

Once you’ve signed in to the OASIS meeting planner and have picked out a reasonably nice itinerary, you can view it on your mobile device in two ways:

1) create a pdf of the printable version of the itinerary and put this in your Dropbox folder or Evernote notebook (if you don’t use Dropbox or Evernote, drop what you’re doing and sign up – these are fantastic, infinitely useful services).  If you use a smartphone, this should be quite easy to access on-the-go (via the iPhone app for Dropbox or Evernote or the web interface for either). UPDATE: Carl Wonders on Twitter reminded me that Air Sharing is a fantastic iPhone app that can be used to transfer files to the iPhone so that there won’t be any reliance on network connectivity (a safe bet considering there won’t be wifi on the conference floor).  You can just transfer the pdf of your itinerary to your phone and not worry about spontaneous 3G outages or slow network traffic.  Thanks, Carl!

To create the pdf, first click on the “printable itinerary” button on the left, just underneath where it says “My Itinerary”

Click here to create your printable itinerary, then Print to PDF

2)  You could view the meeting planner on your mobile device (on the web) – here’s how:

Navigate, on your mobile device’s web browser, to the meeting planner and log in.  Select “My Itinerary” to get to the screen shown below, then click on “Mobile Itinerary”

On your phone's browser, click on "Mobile Itinerary"

This will provide you with a decent, though hardly good, way to explore your planned events during the meeting.  That is, of course, if we have any data coverage whatsoever.  I was really hoping there would be some kind of OASIS iPhone app for this year (I’d pay $10 easy), but unfortunately we weren’t so lucky.

If I by any chance come up with a way to import the itinerary into Google Calendar, I’ll write up a walkthrough.  Of course, if you know of anything that makes planning the meeting any less stressful, please share in the comments.  Once I have things nailed down, I’ll post a preliminary version of my itinerary here as a pdf.  If there’s anything you think I should check out, please let me know – I’m always looking to meet interesting people doing interesting research.

UPDATE: According to a new story posted recently on the SFN Annual Meeting site, the abstract and daily books are available for download to your Kindle.  I don’t know how useful this will be to everyone (an interactive itinerary would be better…), but I’m sure some people will find this quite handy.  I’ll try downloading the Kindle versions later this week and see if there’s any additional utility there.  It would certainly be nice not to carry all 5 books around every day, but I can imagine pressing “next page” over and over again will be quite inconvenient.  If you’ve used these on your Kindle, feel free to post impressions in the comments.

I’ve recently been one of a large number of victims to a very unfortunate bug involving the iPhone 2.2.1 software update issued earlier this month.  Since I upgraded to 2.2.1, whenever I would attempt to sync anything with DRM to/from my phone (this includes ringtones, videos, movies, FairPlay music from the iTunes store and Apps(!)), iTunes would crash and the iPod app’s database would become slightly more corrupted (as in, some songs would not play, the current progress of my podcasts would be erased, etc).  Thus, I’m unable to sync my podcasts (99% of my use for my phone), can’t listen to music (the other 1%), and can’t fix this problem since, importantly, restoring the phone doesn’t do a single thing to solve the problem.

Plus, it looks like I’m not alone.  This thread on the Apple support forums details the struggles others have gone through in response to this bug.  Unfortunately, I didn’t find this until after I had restored my phone, so now I’m stuck with an App-less iPhone that only has a partial collection of my music.

And, as you can see from the support form, this is due entirely to some problem with protected music, movies, and applications.  This enfuriates me.  In general, I try and buy the music I like; same for TV shows and movies (which I usually rent, but nonetheless pay for).  Of course, there are exceptions, but for the most part I try and support the artists, etc, that I like.

If I had stolen all my music and videos, I wouldn’t have a single problem right now (except maybe with Apps) – but since I was honest for at least some of my library, I’m screwed.  Thanks, Apple.  Really.  Thanks.

Have you run into this problem as well?  Does anyone have other stories of DRM causing unnecessary problems?  Leave a comment, or email me at neurotechnica at gmail dot com.

As of this morning, NeuroTechnica is now listed on Nature Blogs, a pretty incredible science blog aggregator, very similar to the one I proposed creating in a previous post.  The main difference between the current implementation and something I’d really like to see is automatic republishing (with author’s permission, of course) on a central portal.  I imagine it wouldn’t be terribly difficult for NPG to write a WordPress or Blogger plugin to take all posts (or a subset of author-selected posts) and republish them on the site.  I look forward to using this platform, though.  The content pointed to by Nature Blogs is top-notch, and I’m really excited to be a part of it.

The next week or two are really busy, but I plan on updating throughout my visit to the 2008 Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting taking place Nov 15-19 in Washington DC.

Science blogging seems to be the hot topic this week.  First, there was this short piece in the Economist about “User-generated Science“, and now Shelley Batts, Nicholas Anthis, and Tara Smith are adding to the conversation (somewhat ironically) through a publication in this week’s PLoS Biology (article).  It’s a short read, I definitely recommend checking it out.

The authors do an excellent job describing the merits of blogging about science – namely, quick peer review and dissemination of information to a larger audience than a journal or trade publication would reach.  They cite several examples of science blogs being used as educational tools in the K-12 classroom.  My favorite example of these is Cognitive Daily, written by Dave and Greta Munger (Dave is also the founder of ResearchBlogging.org, an aggregator for quality blogging about peer-reviewed research).  The husband-and-wife duo dissect recent publications in the cognitive sciences and do a great job explaining the findings in a clear and concise way.  I also really enjoy their ‘casual friday’ posts in which they conduct their own experiments through online polling software and analyze the results in a future post.  Dave and Greta even organize their posts into convenient categories that K-12 teachers can use to supplement their curriculum.

The most substantial portion of the Batts, Anthis & Smith paper is a discussion on what institutions can do to benefit from resident science bloggers, and how this involvement can benefit the bloggers in return.  Their primary suggestion is for institutions to create an aggregator, similar to Seed Media Group’s ScienceBlogs, which organizes all the blogs kept by members (be they staff, faculty, or students) of an institution by category and has a portal that displays recent posts and comments.  This kind of thing is already being done at Stanford (here).

I think there are some inherent problems in the “institutional blogging” solution which Batts et al propose.

First, I imagine being hosted by and promoted through your institution would influence the content of your posts.  It would be difficult (and perhaps not even permitted) to critique work done at one’s own institution or new policies or happenings about the university.  I doubt absolute censorship would occur except in the most extreme cases, but there would be a conflict of interest, I think.

Additionally, I don’t think that institutional blogging will solve many of the problems in science blogging.  Organizing content by institution doesn’t make much sense – just because I like Semir Zeki’s blog (http://profzeki.blogspot.com) doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll like or be interested in other blogs by UCL professors or students.  Instead, I’d like to be given ready access to other blogs that deal with similar (though somewhat unique) subject matter.  This is where ScienceBlogs really shines – they have a great collection of diverse and high-quality blogs that deal with all manner of topics, and they organize their content into “channels” of related blogs.

Thus, I think an open version of ScienceBlogs which allows (most) all submitted blogs to be indexed and aggregated would have the best potential for bringing together interesting and varied science content.  To avoid reliance on a single site, perhaps the site (OpenScienceBlogs?) could aggregate from RSS feeds and just display the content of the feed on the portal site, while linking to the original post for comments.  Or, plugins could be written for WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, etc that could make all this content aggregation relatively seamless.  Each blog could be tagged with different attributes, such as Topic (evolution, neuroscience, physics, etc), Institution, Author Information (student status, major/concentration, class year), and type of blog (research, pop sci, multi-author, etc) to make finding interesting and relevant blogs fast and easy.

This, I feel, would be an optimal way to organize and access content.  Little work would be required on the part of the bloggers (except maybe the installation of a plugin), it would require minimal staff to maintain, and hosting costs would be generally low.  Additionally, this could be combined with the institutional “badges” mentioned in the paper to confer legitimacy to the blogs (i.e., in order to display your institution’s badge, you have to submit posts to an editor or committee for review, etc).  I think it would be fair to institute community quality control measures, like those used by ResearchBlogging.org, to ensure members are posting relevant and appropriate content.  There would need to be some approval process, but it should be rapid and minimal to encourage participation.  This system would funnel readers to blogs that they’re interested in, as well as surround them with similar content they may not have discovered elsewhere.  Bloggers would get more readers, readers would have more to read and comment on and blog about – everyone wins.

If there’s anyone out there that thinks this is a good idea and knows anything about web development, contact me – I’d love to get started on a project like this.  Or if something like this is already around, please let me know.

Other posts/articles about science blogging:

Living the Scientific Life: Science blogs can advance the academic process

The Scientific Activist: Advancing Science through Conversations: Bridging the Gap between Blogs and the Academy (by Nick Anthis, an author on the PLoS Biology paper)

Driving to the lab this morning, I was floored to hear my email (concerning this post) read on Thursday’s episode 788 of Buzz Out Loud, CNET’s podcast of indeterminate length ™.  If you don’t already listen to this podcast, I highly recommend it.  It’s a great source of daily tech news and commentary, perfect for long commutes.

Neurophilosophy (and Engadget) have some nice coverage of a cool new development – a robot with a purely-biological brain.  The team (the Cybernetics Intelligence Research Group at the University of Reading) took neural tissue from developing rat neocortex and placed it in a culture filled with tiny electrodes that could both receive and send signals from the neural tissue.  The coolest part about this, though, is that there is nothing in between the electrodes and the robot (except a bluetooth wireless transmitter/receiver).  The nerve cells are directly controlling the robot’s movements, and the sensors on the robot are giving direct feedback to the tissue.  This is awesome.  And scary.  But mostly, it’s very interesting.  Check out the video on Neurophilosophy for some footage of the robot in action, it’s really quite cool.

However, we have to be careful in our interpretation of what’s happening here.  The scientists/engineers interviewed in the video are throwing around the terms “learning” and “memory”, but there’s a chance that the robotic movements we’re seeing are just the noise in the system.  This is a simple brain slice grown in culture, it doesn’t necessarily include any of the more complex bits of the brain responsible for dopamine release in response to reward or in creating long-term memories by the same mechanism that an intact mammalian brain does.  However, if the researchers can show that even this ‘brain’ picks up statistical regularities in its input/output firings and reconfigures itself in significant, reproducable ways, they’re definitely on to something big.

To be clear, I think this work is awesome, and genuinely look forward to seeing what else comes out of this research.  It would be great if this group (or Jeff Hawkins’ Redwood Neuroscience Institute) created a similar system, but with very different inputs.  For example, as mentioned in Hawkins’ book On Intelligence (by far my favorite book on neuroscience), the inputs to the microelectrode array could be weather patterns or stock market data – the neural tissue won’t know the difference.  And if the tissue can pull out the statistical regularities from the few sensors on this robot, I’m sure it could do the same w/ weather or economic patterns.

Well I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.  Soon, they’ll be using their super-predictive meteorological and economic powers to creatively destroy the human race.  Bad disaster movie on the way?  One can only hope.

Check out this demo of the new Wii Motion Plus add-on, which Nintendo promises will add true one-to-one motion control to the Wii remote.  Upon first hearing about this at E3 this year, I was very skeptical – especially since the demos, and much of Nintendo’s press conference in general, were pretty lousy.  But this demo by AiLive does a great job at showing off what can be done with this new technology.  There’s even a not-quite-subtle lightsaber-like demo about halfway through the video.  Once can only hope that the Wii Motion Plus will be required for the upcoming Wii Lightsaber Duel game, set to be released later this year.

Also, this kind of technology could be very useful for physical rehabilitation – there’s no reason the Wii remote has to be held in your hand, it could be attached to a patient’s leg, foot, arm, etc.  This may even be a powerful tool for training amputees to effectively use their new prostheses (at least while we’re waiting for true brain-computer interfaces).