seesawtron

Does anyone in this field of "flow" based segmentation know how would the performance be if there were multiple moving objects in the same scene? The examples in this paper seem limted to one moving object (cluster of moving pixels) apposed to a relatively static background?

That is an interesting line of thought. Cortex and non-cortical regions are somewhat different in terms of their cell types composition which could inherently support different computation and learning mechanisms.

Substantially solid research takes years to complete. Each new finding opens possibilties of 10 new research directions that one "should" investigate. The timelines necessary for this follow up research studies blatantly exceed the scope of a Phd or Postdoc researcher and just one scientific paper.

It is not true that no one tries to confirm the results. The labs do further studies internally to follow up. Also those working closely in the field in other monitor these "findings" and try to align them in their own research whether directly comparing them or indirectly using those ideas to support or reject their own observation.

It is never one study but years of past research that lays the foundation for a scientific discovery that finally creates a paradigm shift in our understanding of the field.

Synapses are formed outside the neuron in the extracellular space (ECS), at the end of axon terminals called "boutons" which are essentially storehouses for vesciles which are tiny packages containing neurotransmitters. The internal mechanisms of the neurons as well as ongoing biochemistry at the location of a synapses "guides" the transfer of proteins necessary for strenghening of removal of these synapses.

So its possible that both mechanisms occur simultaneously, there's just not enough evidence to clearly understand these (yet).

The title assumes something and goes into looking for answers.

How about the following articles from Nature that paint a differnt picture instead of that assumption?

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03318-w [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01922-z

I am not sure that is the ferret experiment mentioned. However, this [0] one might be.

[0] https://www.pnas.org/content/112/45/14060

There are two schools of thoughts as to where "memory" is stored in neuronal networks. The larger group of neuroscientists believe it is at the synaptic level, as huge amount of research has shown how synapses change when they undergo Long Term Potentiation (LTP) or Long Term Differntiation (LTD) which relate to increase and decrease in synapse size while undergoing learning. The former correlates to strengething of a synaptic connection and the latter to the opposite.

Gallistel, Hesslow (PI of ferret study, [0]) and colleagues constitute the second, relatively smaller, group of neuroscientists who believe synapses are only an "effect" that one sees as a result of learning. The true mechanisms are either hidden in the nucleus, cell membrane or somewhere inside the cell [1]. This group so far has only very few substantially convincing experiments and more hypotheses. The ferret study [0] is one such experiment in this direction which was published in 2015. I am not aware of any more data to prove any of the hypothesis.

But of course even the inherent mechanisms that guide synapse formation and alteration are in the end guided by proteins "inside" the neuron. To me it seems these two groups are looking at the same idea at different steps of the memory learning pipeline.

[0] https://www.pnas.org/content/112/45/14060 [1] https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2101/2101.09774.pdf

Is this one of the many examples of German government wasting taxpayer's money?

Haven't companies like Google been fined enough in the past alerady and despite that they have made little effort to conform to the data privacy measures? Instead they have enabled alternative ways for tracking (eg. recent FLOC debate). Once the right to privacy (online or otherwise) becomes fundamental, such violations of privacy, consciously or otherwise, by the private companies will fall into illegal activities prosecutable with imprisonment like it is done atm for insider trading and so on. This will create a substantial sense of responsibility in everyone working on any aspects of user data.

The lack of a direct way to measure how much profit in $$ a company made in the past decade because of a single privacy violation makes it an arduous task for prosecuting agencies to decide the amount of fines and/or prison time.

A multivariate regression using do-calculus might help, could be an interesting graduate project.

We are all manifestations of the same ONE cosmic vibration.

"The carbon emissions from Bitcoin mining alone in China, which accounts for 75% of Bitcoin blockchain operations globally, is projected at 130 million metric tons in 2024—more than the overall emissions by the Netherlands, Spain, or the Czech Republic."

This paper is an example of spurious correlations that appear because of selection-distortion effect and makes the authors come up with "believable" causes ti justfiy them.

Patients undergoing brain surgeries are routinely asked to volunteer for neuroscientific studies and they often do so. Terminally ill patients also donate their brain tissue for tons of studies more often than you would think. But the scope of experiments that one can do with them and the available multimodal data available from parallel studies in human cortex is extremely limited.

On the other hand, non-human primates are readily available in a controlled environment, can be used to generate huge amounts of data specific to a diverse set of tasks and experiments that you just can not do on the human patients.

The brain is a complex machine that is extremely hard to decipher just by studying a single species or one kind of experiments. The need for studies across species with a hundred different ways of collecting and analysing data is essential to first understand the mechnasims of the brain and only then (hopefully) be able to causally alter it for specific applications in medicine and so on.

I think it is not the original figure from the paper but a sketch adapted for general audience? The publishers are now starting to ask scientists to engage audience by "simplified" plots/sketches and keep detailed accurate plots for close community.

Scientific report of a talk by the principal investigator: https://i.blackhat.com/USA-19/Wednesday/us-19-Williams-Detec...

Link to the paper at Lancet: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...

This post is a nice way to put this number into perspective.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/mjufnx/if_...

This [0] AMA from the research group answers most of the questions I am seeing here in the thread.

"Technologies range from aqueous amines - the water-rich solvents that run through modern, commercially available capture units - to energy-efficient membranes that filter CO2 from flue gas emitted by power plants. Our newest solvent, EEMPA, can accomplish the task for as little as $47.10 per metric ton - bringing post-combustion capture within reach of 45Q tax incentives."

[0] reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mdouzu/askscience_ama_series_hi_reddit_we_are_scientists/

To stretch that line of reasoning, are all religious text and places of workship discriminating against athiests too?

Its the dilemma between keeping historical literature intact despite its controversial and possibly inciteful passage vs translating/adapting it to be more politically correct for the present day audience. In this Dutch translation, they chose the latter.

"when Dante enters Hell, he visits the nine concentric circles. He then meets the many people - some of whom are historical figures - who are punished there for their sins. Arrived at the eighth circle, the poet meets the prophet Muhammad, punished " because by spreading his religion he would have sowed discord on Earth " reports the Belgian daily De Standaard. This passage has thus been partially amputated in the new translation." "The goal of the publisher was to make L'Enfer accessible to a public. wider possible, and especially the young audience, and we knew that if we left this passage as it is we would have unnecessarily hurt a large part of the readers. The passage has been preserved, but the name of Mahomet has been deleted".

Many of the Asian languages do not have the concepts of upper or lower case.

They contain vowels that go beyond the basic 5 "aeiou" of the English language (eg. see [0]). These suffice to let the speaker know how exactly to say the word unlike in English where it has to be learned case by case based on whatever is popular or acceptable pronunciation.

A subset of of these languages are tonal languages which also have special characters to additionally allow the speaker to set the pitch of the word correctly which then changes the meaning of the words [1].

[0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/other/hindi/guide/alphabet.sh... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)

You can find the paper on author's website: http://acmg.seas.harvard.edu/publications/2021/vohra_2021_ff...

This paper [0] discusses similar ideas from a neuroscience perspective of feature extraction in deeper layers and argues the possible significance of minimizing the representation decision space in one-shot learning paradigm

[0] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.21.436284v1....

Only a simulations study, title misleads one to believe that it is "actually" scientifically proven to be true.

Wouldn't it be great to restrict all political leaders from social media and let them communicate to public only via press conferences and official statements and so on? This would allow prevent messages written out just out of spite or momentary lapse of reason.

yeah depends on which stage of life you are living in. Sadly doesn't work for everybody but doesn't hurt to give it a try if someone wants to.

fun fact: they also collect data from apps they don't own but which use Facebook SDK. eg. Opera, Duolingo, Kayak and tons of others. So deleting Facebook app and Facebook account doesn't do much as you think it's does.

It strongly depends on what state of life you are currently at. If you are a 20 something individual and have to build a new life in a new city, being out of the "social apps" gives you next to no opportunities to build social connections.

If you are already well connected with your peers and friends and your social life doesn't depend on finding and exploring via the "social apps" sure you have the freedom to disconnect virtually and still remain connected socially.

Social life is impossible without the mainstream technology. Sure you can find alternatives but if no one uses it other than you, you end up being sidelined. The technology gets enforced and leaves one with no choice but to accept it or be a red flag.

Shouldn't it be possible to delete your whatsapp chat and contacts data regularly from the cloud? Eg. one could delete the whatsapp account, clear data on cloud and make a new account again. Having more control over your data stored by Facebook would give more power to the users of enforced by the government.

Do people still believe that Facebook doesn't collect data from the apps owned by them? Hell even the apps that is Facebook SDK send user data to Facebook even when you don't use facebook owned apps:

https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9941-how_facebook_tracks_you_on_...