The Memory Capacity of Human Brain Could be 10 Times More Than Once Thought
Salk researchers and collaborators have discovered that the human brain has a higher memory capacity than was originally estimated. This insight into the size of neural connections could have great implications on better understanding how the brain is so energy efficient. “This is a real bombshell in the field of neuroscience,” says Terry Sejnowski, Salk professor and co-senior author of the paper, which was published in eLife. Sizing Them Up So how exactly does this all work? Each of your memories and thoughts are the result of patterns of electrical and chemical activity in the brain. Synapses are still kind of a mystery to scientists. Pictured here is a synapse between an axon (green) and dendrite (yellow). At first, the researchers didn’t think this was a big deal. If the team was able to measure the differences between two very similar synapses, such as these, they might be able to more accurately classify synaptic sizes. Unreliable Synapses and Brain Efficiency Technological Impact
How to Break the Procrastination Habit - Robert Wright
New laws on marijuana were supposed to boost tax revenues and free up cops to go after “real” criminals. But underground sales—and arrests—are still thriving. It’s just after four o’clock on a hot Seattle afternoon, and Thomas Terry is standing in the parking lot of a Jack in the Box. A man is walking up the street toward Terry and a few other young men who are gathered in the shade of a brick wall where the parking lot meets the sidewalk. “Kush? Whether the man does or not, he says nothing, and keeps walking.
Estimate: Human Brain 30 Times Faster than Best Supercomputers
An artificial intelligence project recently funded by Silicon Valley pioneer Elon Musk aims to find a new way to compare supercomputers to the human brain. Instead of trying measure how quickly wetware or hardware can do calculations, the project measures how quickly the brain or a computer can send communication messages within its own network. That benchmark could provide a useful way of measuring AI’s progress toward a level comparable with human intelligence. The AI Impacts project is the brainchild of two PhD students from the University of California, Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon University. “A big pragmatic benefit of measuring the brain in terms of communication is that it hadn't been done before,” says Katja Grace, a researcher at Cal Berkeley’s Machine Intelligence Research Institute who is working on a doctorate in Logic, Computation, and Methodology at Carnegie Mellon University. IBM’s Sequoia supercomputer currently holds the TEPS benchmark record with 2.3 x 1013 TEPS.
This is the kind of music you should listen to at work
The study, which was conducted in September by Mindlab International on behalf of MusicWorks, the joint campaign from music licensing companies PRS for Music and PPL, found that participants made the most mistakes when not listening to any music at all. "Music is a key tool for business success," said Christine Geissmar, operations director at PPL. Here's what you should listen to at work. Classical music: if your work involves numbers or attention to detail Workers were better at solving mathematical problems when listening to classical music, which improved accuracy by 12pc compared to listening to no music at all. Classical music was also the second best genre for general accuracy and spell-checking, the study found. Pop music: if your work involves data entry or working to deadlines Participants listening to pop music completed data entry tasks 58pc faster than when listening to no music at all. Ambient music: if your work involves solving equations
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Bob, champion de la procrastination
L'année dernière (2012), la branche "Sécurité informatique" de Verizon a réalisé un audit pour l'un de ses clients et ce qu'elle a découvert est réellement hallucinant ! Je vous raconte... La société auditée a mis en place depuis plusieurs mois, un VPN avec authentification en 2 étapes pour permettre à ses informaticiens de travailler à la maison. Mais après avoir regardé les logs du VPN, le responsable de la sécurité est tombé sur des accès directs en provenance de Chine. Ça craint à mort puisque la société en question est dans un secteur industriel sensible, que l'authentification en 2 étapes tourne avec des clés RSA uniques générées toutes les x secondes, et que le développeur qui est censé utiliser cette connexion VPN depuis chez lui, n'est pas chez lui, mais devant son poste de travail, au bureau. Pour le responsable de la sécurité, ça sent le hacking à plein nez ! Bob, développeur, la quarantaine, maitrisant le C, C++, Perl, java, Ruby, PHP, python...etc. Source et Photo
Sleep makes your memories stronger, and helps with creativity -- ScienceDaily
As humans, we spend about a third of our lives asleep. So there must be a point to it, right? Scientists have found that sleep helps consolidate memories, fixing them in the brain so we can retrieve them later. Now, new research is showing that sleep also seems to reorganize memories, picking out the emotional details and reconfiguring the memories to help you produce new and creative ideas, according to the authors of an article in Current Directions in Psychological Science. "Sleep is making memories stronger," says Jessica D. Payne of the University of Notre Dame, who co-wrote the review with Elizabeth A. Payne and Kensinger study what happens to memories during sleep, and they have found that a person tends to hang on to the most emotional part of a memory. "In our fast-paced society, one of the first things to go is our sleep," Payne says. Payne has taken the research to heart. As humans, we spend about a third of our lives asleep. Payne has taken the research to heart.
10 best competitive intelligence tools from 10 experts
Posted on October 19, 2014 by Rob Petersen inShare117 Sun Tzu’s wisdom in The Art of War is as true today as it was in 500 B.C. Competitive Intelligence is the gathering of publicly-available information about an enterprise’s competitors and the use of that information to gain a business advantage. If Sun Tzu were with us today, he would probably be using digital competitive intelligence tools to understand his adversaries. Here are 10 experts giving us their best competitive intelligence tools: GOOGLE TRENDS: Measuring individual sites (yours or competitor) is good but the real fun in this is comparing trends. COMPETE: Has a useful interface, speaks the right language (unique visitors, visits, etc.), offers the ability to compare multiple sites, and its data is easy to understand and well presented. ALEXA: Has been around since 1996. HITWISE: An Experian product, provides excellent data and insight that no free/ low-cost alternative can rival.
