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Daniel Ellsberg Joins UC-Berkeley’s “Occupy Cal” Encampment
“I’ll be staying here tonight,” the former whistleblower told filmmaker John Hamilton. “I’ve never seen a group process like the general assembly tonight. They actually were voting here, thousands of people. It was an inspiring sight. I wouldn’t have thought it could happen.”
“This Occupy movement is an invention,” he continued. “Actually it came right from Egypt and from Tunisia. And actually, an inspiring thought to me is that the man who is accused of putting out the State Department cables to WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, who is sitting in Leavenworth right now, one of his cables was a major inspiration the uprising in Tunisia. So, one person speaking out can make a major difference.”
Ellsberg added: “Frankly, it’s been a while since I felt as much hope as I feel tonight. … The young people are recreating the youth movement of the 60s. And the youth movement changed the country.”
Ellsberg has been arrested at least 83 times over the years for civil disobedience. He said he was prepared to be arrested again.
Watch this video from John Hamilton, uploaded Nov. 16, 2011.
From Rolling Stone we get an in-depth treatment about:
When I first thought about doing a personal blog, I thought the following type of article would be a favorite for a technophiliac like myself to share. (Yes, I know it's not really a word, but I like it (and it pretty well describes one who is very enthusiastic about new technology).)
New Computer Chip Models How Neurons Communicate
Wednesday, November 16th, 2011
For decades, scientists have dreamed of building computer systems that could replicate the human brain’s talent for learning new tasks.
MIT researchers have now taken a major step toward that goal by designing a computer chip that mimics how the brain’s neurons adapt in response to new information. This phenomenon, known as plasticity, is believed to underlie many brain functions, including learning and memory.
With about 400 transistors, the silicon chip can simulate the activity of a single brain synapse — a connection between two neurons that allows information to flow from one to the other. The researchers anticipate this chip will help neuroscientists learn much more about how the brain works, and could also be used in neural prosthetic devices such as artificial retinas, says Chi-Sang Poon, a principal research scientist in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.
Poon is the senior author of a paper describing the chip in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Nov. 14. Guy Rachmuth, a former postdoc in Poon’s lab, is lead author of the paper. Other authors are Mark Bear, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, and Harel Shouval of the University of Texas Medical School.
Modeling synapses
There are about 100 billion neurons in the brain, each of which forms synapses with many other neurons. A synapse is the gap between two neurons (known as the presynaptic and postsynaptic neurons). The presynaptic neuron releases neurotransmitters, such as glutamate and GABA, which bind to receptors on the postsynaptic cell membrane, activating ion channels. Opening and closing those channels changes the cell’s electrical potential. If the potential changes dramatically enough, the cell fires an electrical impulse called an action potential.
All of this synaptic activity depends on the ion channels, which control the flow of charged atoms such as sodium, potassium and calcium. Those channels are also key to two processes known as long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD), which strengthen and weaken synapses, respectively.
The MIT researchers designed their computer chip so that the transistors could mimic the activity of different ion channels. While most chips operate in a binary, on/off mode, current flows through the transistors on the new brain chip in analog, not digital, fashion. A gradient of electrical potential drives current to flow through the transistors just as ions flow through ion channels in a cell.
“We can tweak the parameters of the circuit to match specific ion channels,” Poon says. “We now have a way to capture each and every ionic process that’s going on in a neuron.”
Previously, researchers had built circuits that could simulate the firing of an action potential, but not all of the circumstances that produce the potentials. “If you really want to mimic brain function realistically, you have to do more than just spiking. You have to capture the intracellular processes that are ion channel-based,” Poon says.
The new chip represents a “significant advance in the efforts to incorporate what we know about the biology of neurons and synaptic plasticity onto CMOS [complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor] chips,” says Dean Buonomano, a professor of neurobiology at the University of California at Los Angeles, adding that “the level of biological realism is impressive.
The MIT researchers plan to use their chip to build systems to model specific neural functions, such as the visual processing system. Such systems could be much faster than digital computers. Even on high-capacity computer systems, it takes hours or days to simulate a simple brain circuit. With the analog chip system, the simulation is even faster than the biological system itself.
Another potential application is building chips that can interface with biological systems. This could be useful in enabling communication between neural prosthetic devices such as artificial retinas and the brain. Further down the road, these chips could also become building blocks for artificial intelligence devices, Poon says.
Debate resolved
The MIT researchers have already used their chip to propose a resolution to a longstanding debate over how LTD occurs.
One theory holds that LTD and LTP depend on the frequency of action potentials stimulated in the postsynaptic cell, while a more recent theory suggests that they depend on the timing of the action potentials’ arrival at the synapse.
Both require the involvement of ion channels known as NMDA receptors, which detect postsynaptic activation. Recently, it has been theorized that both models could be unified if there were a second type of receptor involved in detecting that activity. One candidate for that second receptor is the endo-cannabinoid receptor.
Endo-cannabinoids, similar in structure to marijuana, are produced in the brain and are involved in many functions, including appetite, pain sensation and memory.
Some neuroscientists had theorized that endo-cannabinoids produced in the postsynaptic cell are released into the synapse, where they activate presynaptic endo-cannabinoid receptors. If NMDA receptors are active at the same time, LTD occurs.
When the researchers included on their chip transistors that model endo-cannabinoid receptors, they were able to accurately simulate both LTD and LTP. Although previous experiments supported this theory, until now, “nobody had put all this together and demonstrated computationally that indeed this works, and this is how it works,” Poon says.As a lover of literature and one who tries to keep up (poorly, I hate to say), and as I've been trying to catch up on my Jonathan Franzen reading, I thought I'd share this essay with you.
You might like:
- GPS in the head? Rhythmic activity of neurons code position in space
- ‘Can you hear me now?’ Researchers detail how neurons decide how to transmit information
- Itch receptors work through pain receptors on sensory neurons
- Microglia cells prune connections between neurons
- Optimal modulation of ion channels rescues neurons associated with epilepsy
From Politics and Culture:
Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism
From 2010 Issues 3 & 4
Burn, Stephen. Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism. London: Continuum, 2008.
Jonathan Franzen’s position in the contemporary American literary landscape is a curious one. His two latest novels – The Corrections (2001) and Freedom (2010) – have been more or less universally lauded by literary critics. Freedom was thus proclaimed a “masterpiece of American fiction” on the front cover of the New York Times Book Review, and in the Guardian it was hailed as nothing less than “the novel of the century.”
And last fall The Corrections was chosen as the best novel of the past decade in a widely publicized poll involving several prominent authors and literary critics. Despite this lavish praise, Franzen’s novels have been largely neglected by literary scholars, at least compared to contemporaries like David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers, who have both had entire books and special issues of journals devoted to their work.
As the first book devoted entirely to the work of Jonathan Franzen, Stephen J. Burn’s excellent study goes a long way toward filling this critical lacuna. His book has a double aim: to provide a study of Franzen’s work (with particular emphasis on the novels), and to situate Franzen in a larger group of contemporary authors who can be loosely defined as the successors to literary postmodernists like Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, William Gaddis and John Barth.
These successors, whom Burn tentatively labels as “post-postmodernists,” include David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers, who are also amply treated in the book.
In his preface Burn discusses Franzen’s critical neglect and he speculates that this neglect to a large extent stems from factors that are external to the author’s novels. Franzen has always been very vocal in his hostility toward the academy and this agonistic attitude may have discouraged scholars from venturing further into Franzen’s fictional woods. Furthermore, Franzen’s clumsy behavior when The Corrections was chosen for Oprah Winfrey’s book club in the fall of 2001 has drawn a lot of attention away from the work itself. (Oprah has apparently forgiven Franzen, since she promptly chose Freedom for her book club just after the novel’s publication. This time around, Franzen gracefully accepted the honor). Such external factors have without a doubt contributed to Franzen’s being passed over by many critics, and Stephen Burn therefore wisely chooses to bypass such distractions in order to focus on Franzen’s novels.
Before his analyses of the three novels (the study was published before the release of Freedom), Burn provides a valuable overview of Franzen’s early writing, much of which has so far remained unidentified. This overview is supplemented by an excellent bibliography at the end of the book, which includes Franzen’s juvenilia from high school and college, as well as his coauthored scientific articles on seismicity. After the chapter on Franzen’s early career, Burn moves on to Franzen’s novels which are treated in separate chapters. In all three chapters, Burn fully demonstrates what was also apparent in his book on Wallace’s Infinite Jest: that he is a very skillful close reader with a knack for detecting intricate patterns, digging up hidden allusions and parsing out complex chronologies. The three chapters confidently pin down the central themes of Franzen’s novels, and at the same time they draw thoughtful parallels to contemporary novels by Wallace and Powers. The analysis of Franzen’s debut The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) convincingly traces the novel’s elaborate intertextual dialogue with T. S. Eliot, while the chapter on Strong Motion (1992) focuses on Franzen’s innovative use of what Burn aptly terms “temporal form.”
The most comprehensive and convincing of the three readings, however, is Burn’s analysis of what remains Franzen’s most important novel, The Corrections. In this chapter Burn successfully shows how intricately patterned, densely interconnected and discreetly experimenting Franzen’s novel of the dysfunctional Lambert family really is, and his analysis constitutes a resounding answer to those critics who considered the novel a retrograde exercise in conventional realism. The most pertinent part of the analysis is Burn’s discussion of the novel’s different ideas of the self. In interviews, Franzen has stated that The Corrections is very much a novel about the self, and Burn demonstrates how different characters in the novel are refracted through different conceptions of the self: Chip’s Foucauldian idea of the self as shaped by institutional power structures, Gary’s materialist account of subjectivity as the inevitable outcome of certain chemical and electrical impulses, Alfred’s philosophical notions of identity, etc. Franzen doesn’t privilege any of these conceptions but stages an ongoing discussion between them, Burn argues.
The readings of the three novels draw a multifaceted portrait of Jonathan Franzen’s achievement, and at the end of the final chapter, I found myself hankering for a chapter on Freedom, which is both a logical extension of Franzen’s first three novels and a step in a new direction. That chapter will have to wait for the paperback edition of Burn’s study which will hopefully be published eventually. Such a subsequent edition could also benefit from a more elaborate discussion of Franzen’s non-fiction. Throughout the book, Burn exhibits a marked impatience with Franzen’s essays, where thorny contradictions are often glibly resolved through “rhetorical flourishes” (in Burn’s words). Burn rightly argues that such contradictions are held in tension in Franzen’s novels, which he therefore holds in much higher esteem than the essays, but his book could nevertheless profitably have included a chapter on the essays collected in How to Be Alone and on Franzen’s memoirs The Discomfort Zone, both of which remain integral parts of Franzen’s collected work.
As stated in the beginning, the purpose of Stephen Burn’s book is two-fold, and even though his introduction to Franzen’s work is very valuable in itself, the most important part of the study probably lies in its ongoing discussion of Franzen’s position in a larger American literary landscape. This position is primarily outlined in the first chapter of the book, where Burn draws a map of American fiction at the millennium, with particular emphasis on literary postmodernism and what came after. While postmodernism has gradually grown weary throughout the 1990s, a new generation of authors have come of age; a generation that attempts to move beyond the pervasive irony and self-reflection of postmodernism.
This movement, which in addition to Franzen includes figures such as the late David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, William Vollmann, Dave Eggers, Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer, is tentatively labeled post-postmodernism by Burn, who outlines three major characteristics of post-postmodern literature: 1) Post-postmodernism explicitly looks back to its roots in postmodernism. 2) It is informed by the postmodernist critique of the realist belief in language as a mere mirror of reality, but at the same time it is characterized by a greater urge to represent something real than its postmodern predecessors. 3) It is much more concerned with notions of character than postmodernism.
Burn apologetically admits that the term post-postmodernism is an ungainly one, but he rightly points out that the term has already been widely employed by e.g. David Foster Wallace and the critic Robert L. McLaughlin. Nevertheless, in its awkward accumulation of prefixes the term seems to be one of the more unfortunate names for a movement that has elsewhere been called for instance “postironic literature” or “the new sincerity.” Neither of these alternatives are perfect, but with their implications of the movement’s specific aesthetic and ethical aims, they seem preferable to Burn’s (and Wallace’s and McLaughlin’s) term, which mainly implies a purely chronological succession. And if we accept the label post-postmodernism, then what are we to call the literature of the 2030s: postpostpostmodernism? Maybe we should simply take our cue from Mark Nechtr, a character in David Foster Wallace’s novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, who like Wallace and Franzen wishes to move beyond the trappings of postmodernism:
Mark Nechtr desires, some distant hard-earned day, to write something that stabs you in the heart. That pierces you, makes you think you’re going to die. Maybe it’s called metalife. Or metafiction. Or realism. Or gfhrytytu. He doesn’t know. He wonders who the hell really cares. (Westward, 332-33)Gfhrytytu really seems to be as good a name as any…
In addition to the name of the beast, one could also discuss the specific traits Burn includes under his post-postmodern heading. The three major characteristics outlined by Burn are a very good starting point, but the list could easily be extended to include for instance a fiercely ambivalent relationship to the electronic mass media, a critique of postmodern irony and a corresponding emphasis on sincerity, a marked interest in materiality and the body, a preference for the suburbs as a setting, a strong emphasis on family – all of which would add to the discussion of post-postmodernism’s corrections of the postmodern patriarchs and help bring the movement into clearer focus.
Still, it must be emphasized that Burn’s lucid, sober and well-argued study of Jonathan Franzen and his post-postmodern peers marks an inspiring and indispensable opening of a discussion which will hopefully continue in the years to follow, as we try to plot a meaningful route through the tangled topography of contemporary American fiction.
This entry was posted in Reviews and edition 2010 Issues 3 & 4 .
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