Monthly Archives: August 2008

An old Jedi mind trick

By Michael Becker | Published: August 29, 2008
A new bit of research news has brought up old mem­o­ries for me today. Researchers at the University of California have found that an area of the brain called the perirhi­nal cor­text may help with the for­ma­tion of asso­cia­tive memories.
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Ohio University student expelled for plagiarizing Wikipedia

By Michael Becker | Published: August 25, 2008
An Ohio University senior was expelled for pla­gia­riz­ing three phrases from a Wikipedia arti­cle, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported today. Worse yet, the stu­dent was on a study-abroad trip in Greece when she was expelled and was told to make her own travel arrange­ments home. The stu­dent, Allison Routman, said she didn’t know she had done [...]
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Computer program developed to detect art forgery

By Michael Becker | Published: August 22, 2008
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports researchers have devel­oped a way to use a com­puter and image soft­ware to ana­lyze a paint­ing and deter­mine whether it is gen­uine or a forgery. The exper­i­ment was per­formed on 101 high-resolution scans of Van Gough paint­ings from muse­ums in the Netherlands. The pro­gram ana­lyzed the artist’s brush strokes and [...]
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Blog update

By Michael Becker | Published: August 21, 2008
My cat­e­gories list is too long, so I’m going to be sim­pli­fy­ing it over the next few weeks, when I have the time. I hope to nar­row it down to about five or six broad cat­e­gories, which I’ll sup­ple­ment with WordPress’s built-in tag­ging sys­tem. Wish me luck. Edit: I’ve included a few other minor changes that no [...]
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Is Google making us ask unanswerable questions?

By Michael Becker | Published: August 17, 2008
British neu­ro­sci­en­tist Baroness Greenfield points out that pre­scrip­tions for drugs like Ritalin and diag­noses of ADHD are on the rise. She cor­re­lates that with an increase in com­puter use over the past decade, asks a few open ended ques­tions and implies that com­puter use is rot­ting children’s brains. I don’t doubt that com­put­ers will change how [...]
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