blogjou

Tips from neuroscience to keep you focused on hard tasks

Understanding cognitive control can help your working life, says David Badre.

Carbon Sequestration in Forests - Addressing the Scale Question

Whether young or old forests sequester or store more carbon, is a heated debate. Depending on the consideres scale in time, space, and involved proces, there are arguments for either side. This controversy is resolved at the landscape scale.

On the value of preprints: An early career researcher perspective

The publication of preprints, publicly available scientific manuscripts posted on dedicated preprint servers prior to journal-managed peer review can play a key role in addressing these ECR challenges such as timely publication and increased interdisciplinarity in life sciences research.

Some Prescriptions for How to Escape into a Deeper Basin

Some of the suggestions for speeding upt the process of conceiving a creative idea fit in well with the pircture of using a controlled level of noise to avoid getting stuck in too shallow a basin of attraction. One can try to escape from the original basin by means of a random perturbation – for example Edward DeBono recommends trying to apply to a problem, whatever it is, the last noun on the front page of today’s bewspaper.

For a case more like that of biological evolution...

For a case more like that of biological evolution, we can turn to the competition among human societies in the past. To a great extent, fitness was measured by population. In Southeast Asia, for instance, some ethnic groups practiced irrigated rice agriculture while others raised dry rice, often by slashing and burning the forest. The irrigated-rice peoples, such as the Central Thai, the Lao, or the Vietnamese, were able to put many more individuals on the ground per unit area than their neighbours. Denser population helped them to dominate the dry-rice peoples, and in many cases to drive them back into remote hilly terrain. Looking toward the future, we may well ask whether it is desirable for density or total numbers to continue to determine winners and losers in the same way.

Deception Among Birds

For amusing examples of the exploitation of opportunities by species interacting with other species, we can turn to lying as practiced by animals other than humans. Deception by mimicry is well known; the viceroy butterfly, for instance, resembles the monarch and thus profits by the bad taste of the latter. The cuckoo (in the Old World) and the cowbird (in the New World) practice another kind of deception by lazing their eggs in the nests of other birds; the intrusive chicks then do away with the eggs or chicks that belong in the nest and monopolize the attention of the foster parents. But actual lying?

Quantum Theory

I am not sure where this project belongs. It is not like classically reading a paper and it is not about classically citing some quotes of enjoyable books. For starters, I would like to note my impressions. I need to study physics to understand the simplest of Bohm’s arguments, I do not have the time, and the energy to do so fainted as well. So I try to make the best of it and note down what I feel most interesting.

Advantages of sexual reproduction

In any case, the advantages of sexual reproduction must be considerable to outweigh the obvious disadvantage of breaking up the successful genotypes of parents and grandparents that survived long enough to reproduce. These advantages accrue to the population as a whole, however, while many evolutionary biologists insist that selection pressures are exerted only on individuals. Perhaps that need not be a rigid rule.

Inclusive fitness and the selfish gene

A further complication in utilizing the concept of fitness arizes in higher organsisms that make use of sexual reproduction. Each such organism conveys only half its genes to a given offspring, while the remaining half derive from the other parent. The offspring are not clones, but merely close relatives. And the organism has other close relatives, the survival of which can also contribute to the propagation of genes similar to its own. Thus biologists have developed the notion of “inclusive fitness”, which takes account of the extent to which relatives of a given organism survive to reproduce, weighted according to the closeness of the relationship. (Of course inclusive fitness also takes account of the sirvival of the organism itself.) Evolution should have a general tendency to favor genotypes exhibiting high inclusive fitness, especially through inherited patterns of behavior that promote the survival of an organism and its close relatives. Tha tendency is called “kin selection”, and it fits nicely with a picture of evolution in which organisms are merely devices “used” by genes to propagate themselves. That point of view has been popularized under the name of the “selfish gene.”

Recall that effective complexity is the length of a concise description of the regularities of a system.

Recall that effective complexity is the length of a concise description of the regularities of a system. Some of those regularities can be traced back to the fundamental physical laws governing the universe. Others arise from the fact that many characteristics of a given part of the universe at a given time are related to one another through their common origin in some past incident. Those characteristics have features in common; they exhibit mutual information. For example, automobiles of a given model resemble one another because they all originate from the same design, which contains many arbitrary features that could have been chosen differently. Such “frozen accidents” can make themselves felt in all sort of ways. Looking at coins of King Henry VIII of England, we may reflect upon all the references to him not only on coins but in charters, in documents relating to the seizure of abbeys, and in history books and how those would all be different if his elder brother Arthur had survived to mount the throne instead of him. All those references depend on the same frozen accident.