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Learn about controlling dynamic systems online
Udacity is an effort from Stanford to offer free online university-level classes. There are many other similar efforts out there, termed MOOCs (massive open online course). They have a class called CS373 – Programming a robotic car, which is surprisingly relevant to neuroscience. Basically the goal of the course is to show how to program
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Why you should have a lab blog and how
I’ve been trying to convince Chris to set up a blog for the lab. A lab blog can take many forms: it can be public or private, formal or informal, edited by a single person or several people and so on. There’s quite a few potential benefits to getting a lab blog, for instance: Publicity.
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Is beer the answer?
Disclaimer: This post is about how alcohol interferes with memory formation and how that can be paradoxically beneficial under very special circumstances. Think of the plot of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, you’ll get the idea. It’s not a license to get drunk. Jeeze. Well-meaning friends and family members may suggest that you have
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A presentation on mouse vision
We had a lab meeting on Thursday, and it was my turn to present. Since I’m waiting for data to come through, I didn’t have original research to present, so I did a presentation on mouse vision, which I’ve been reading a lot about recently. I recorded the narration, and if you have Powerpoint, you
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Connectomics in the retina
Connectomics and some of its promises made news last week when Sebastian Seung and Tony Movshon went head to head in a debate broadcast by Radiolab (archived here). I didn’t watch the webcast, but I wanted to point out a quite fascinating recent study by Briggman, Helmstaedter and Denk (2011) that shows some of the
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Topography conquers all
The eye faithfully maps visual space to different positions on the retina. This retinotopy is preserved as the signal is forwarded from retinal ganglion cells to the LGN, then to V1, and onwards. Cells which are physically adjacent on a retinotopic map have receptive fields corresponding to similar positions in space. More generally, properties like
xcorr: AI & neuro 