Tag: universities

Computer chip with built-in human brain tissue gets military funding

Last year, Monash University scientists created the “DishBrain” – a semi-biological computer chip with some 800,000 human and mouse brain cells lab-grown into its electrodes. Demonstrating something like sentience, it learned to play Pong within five minutes.

The micro-electrode array at the heart of the DishBrain was capable both of reading activity in the brain cells, and stimulating them with electrical signals, so the research team set up a version of Pong where the brain cells were fed a moving electrical stimulus to represent which side of the “screen” the ball was on, and how far away from the paddle it was. They allowed the brain cells to act on the paddle, moving it left and right.

Then they set up a very basic-reward system, using the fact that small clusters of brain cells tend to try to minimize unpredictability in their environment. So if the paddle hit the ball, the cells would receive a nice, predictable stimulus. But if it missed, the cells would get four seconds of totally unpredictable stimulation.

It was the first time lab-grown brain cells had been used this way, being given not only a way to sense the world, but to act on it, and the results were impressive.

Impressive enough that the research – undertaken in partnership with Melbourne startup Cortical Labs – has now attracted a US$407,000 grant from Australia’s National Intelligence and Security Discovery Research Grants program.

These programmable chips, fusing biological computing with artificial intelligence, “in future may eventually surpass the performance of existing, purely silicon-based hardware,” says project lead, Associate Professor Adeel Razi.

“The outcomes of such research would have significant implications across multiple fields such as, but not limited to, planning, robotics, advanced automation, brain-machine interfaces, and drug discovery, giving Australia a significant strategic advantage,” he said.

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Scientists Receive Green Light to Merge Human Brain Cells with Computer Chips

Brain cells merging with computer chips could be the next evolution of artificial intelligence (AI). Scientists in Australia have been awarded funding to grow human brain cells and combine them with silicon chips.

A team led by researchers from Melbourne’s Monash University are receiving more than $405,000 as part of Australia’s National Intelligence and Security Discovery Research Grants Program. The new project, led by Associate Professor Adeel Razi, from the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, in collaboration with Melbourne start-up Cortical Labs, will see scientists grow around 800,000 brain cells in a lab. They will then “teach” these cells to perform goal-directed tasks.

The project’s goal is to create what the team calls the DishBrain system, “to understand the various biological mechanisms that underlie lifelong continual learning.”

Last year, the brain cells made headlines around the globe after displaying their ability to perform simple tasks in a video game, like the tennis-style game, Pong. The team hopes these continual learning capabilities will transform machine learning — a branch of AI. The technology is becoming increasingly relevant in society, playing a role in everything from self-driving cars to intelligent wearable devices.

According to Associate Professor Razi, the research program’s work using lab-grown brain cells embedded onto silicon chips, “merges the fields of artificial intelligence and synthetic biology to create programmable biological computing platforms.”

“This new technology capability in future may eventually surpass the performance of existing, purely silicon-based hardware,” Razi says in a university release.

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Stanford President Resigns Over Doctored Research

Stanford University’s president is resigning following an internal report that found that found he did not issue corrections soon enough on five papers that contained manipulated data.

The university this year retained a law firm to investigate President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a neuroscientist, following claims that some of his papers contain manipulated data. While the firm’s report found no evidence that Tessier-Lavigne himself doctored the papers, he “‘has not been able to provide an adequate explanation’ for why he did not correct the scientific record when presented the opportunity on multiple occasions,” the Stanford Daily reported.

Stanford faced a major crisis under Tessier-Lavigne’s leadership. Law school students shouted down a conservative federal judge, disrupting his talk in violation of Stanford’s free speech policies, the Washington Free Beacon reported. School diversity dean Tirien Steinbach, who arrived on the scene, sided with the students, accusing the judge of causing “harm.”

The incident prompted Tessier-Lavigne and law school dean Jenny Martinez to write a formal apology to the judge and put Steinbach on leave.

Following the controversy, Martinez announced that students had to complete free speech training. A Free Beacon investigation, however, found that the training “required barely a minute’s effort” and that students could easily tune out or skip the required training videos.

Tessier-Lavigne has also decided to retract or write extensive corrections for several of his peer-reviewed articles. According to the Daily, retractions are very rare in academia, occurring only in .04 percent of research papers. The retractions typically come only after “clear evidence” surfaces that “the findings are unreliable.”

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MIT Makes Probability-Based Computing a Bit Brighter

In a noisy and imprecise world, the definitive 0s and 1s of today’s computers can get in the way of accurate answers to messy real-world problems. So says an emerging field of research pioneering a kind of computing called probabilistic computing. And now a team of researchers at MIT have pioneered a new way of generating probabilistic bits (p-bits) at much higher rates—using photonics to harness random quantum oscillations in empty space.

The deterministic way in which conventional computers operate is not well suited to dealing with the uncertainty and randomness found in many physical processes and complex systems. Probabilistic computing promises to provide a more natural way to solve these kinds of problems by building processors out of components that behave randomly themselves.

The approach is particularly well suited to complicated optimization problems with many possible solutions or to doing machine learning on very large and incomplete datasets where uncertainty is an issue. Probabilistic computing could unlock new insights and findings in meteorology and climate simulations, for instance, or spam detection and counterterrorism software, or next-generation AI.

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‘Woke or KKK’: NYU Hosts Whites-Only ‘Antiracism’ Workshop for Public School Parents

New York University hosted a whites-only “anti-racism” workshop for public school parents in New York City, barring minorities from a five-months-long seminar that legal experts say was a brazen violation of civil rights law.

The all-white seminar, “From Integration to Anti-Racism,” cost $360 to attend and met six times between February and June, according to a description of the program that has since been scrubbed from the university’s website without explanation. Organized by NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education, the workshop was “designed specifically for white public school parents” committed to “becoming anti-racist” and building “multiracial parent communities.”

But to promote solidarity with all races, participants were told, it was necessary that the seminar include only one.

A few days before the first session, facilitators circulated a short handout, “Why a White Space,” to explain “why we are meeting as white folks for these six months.” The handout, produced by the nonprofit Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere, argued that white people need spaces where they can “unlearn racism” without subjecting minorities to “undue trauma or pain.”

Facilitators reiterated this argument on day one of the seminar, audio and video of which was obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. When a parent questioned the premise of the workshop—saying it seemed “a little counterintuitive” to exclude minorities from an anti-racism seminar—Barbara Gross, the associate director of Steinhardt’s Education Justice Research group, assured her that it was for their own good.

“People of color are dealing with racism all the time,” Gross said. “Like every minute of every day. It’s a harm on top of a harm for them to hear our racist thoughts.”

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The Ranks of Gun Owners Grow, and So Does Their Resistance to Scrutiny

Believe it or not, people are reluctant to tell total strangers about their potentially controversial activities. In particular, Rutgers University researchers say, gun ownership is something many Americans decline to reveal when questioned by people they don’t know. That’s especially true of women and minorities newly among the ranks of gun owners amidst the chaos of recent years. Academics are unhappy that privacy-minded respondents impair their understanding of the world we live in, but such evasion is an inevitable consequence of decades of fiery debate and punitive gun policies.

Fibbing to Nosy Strangers

“Some individuals are falsely denying firearm ownership, resulting in research not accurately capturing the experiences of all firearm owners in the U.S.,” says Allison Bond, a doctoral student with Rutgers University’s New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center and lead author of “Predicting Potential Underreporting of Firearm Ownership in a Nationally Representative Sample,” published last month in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. “More concerningly, these individuals are not being reached with secure firearm storage messaging and firearm safety resources, which may result in them storing their firearms in an unsecure manner, which in turn increases the risk for firearm injury and death.”

Bond frames the problem of dishonesty among survey respondents as posing a danger to those surveyed since they don’t receive proper firearm safety information. But her deeper concern is with the validity of research into firearms culture and policy in a country where experts don’t have anywhere near as good a handle on the prevalence of gun ownership as they had believed.

“The implications of false denials of firearms ownership are substantial,” claim the authors. “First, such practices would result in an underestimation of firearms ownership rates and diminish our capacity to test the association between firearm access and various firearm violence-related outcomes. Furthermore, such practices would skew our understanding of the demographics of firearm ownership, such that we would overemphasize the characteristics of those more apt to disclose. Third, the mere existence of a large group of individuals who falsely deny firearm ownership highlights that intervention aimed at promoting firearm safety (e.g., secure firearm storage) may fail to reach communities in need.”

It should be emphasized that the report authors didn’t conclusively identify anybody who denied gun ownership as a gun owner. Instead, the report dealt in probabilities, with the researchers building profiles of confirmed gun owners. They then applied the profiles across their sample of 3,500 respondents to estimate who was likely fibbing about not owning guns. The results depend on the probability threshold applied, but they came up with 1,206 confirmed owners, between 1,243 and 2,059 non-owners, and between 220 and 1,036 potential but secretive owners lying about their status.

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There Were At Least 13 Campus Hate-Crime Hoaxes This School Year

The 2022-23 school year saw 13 hate crime hoaxes and six questionable claims, according to a College Fix analysis.

Sports competitions continue to oddly be a source for race hoaxes, despite the omnipresence of phones that can capture alleged racial slurs.

Pennsylvania State University fans found themselves falsely accused of using racial slurs against Rutgers University’s men’s basketball team. “Further investigation into reported fan behavior at the Penn State versus Rutgers basketball game on [Feb. 26] has found that no apparent racial slurs were used by Penn State fans,” the university announced.

By now, it should be clear that claims of racial slurs at sports games are likely not true.

The hoax that attracted the most attention of them all began in August, when Duke University volleyball player Rachel Richardson claimed that someone at a game against Brigham Young University kept yelling the n-word at her. This is actually two hate crime hoaxes, because her godmother also claimed that someone yelled the word every single time the black volleyball player went to serve.

The hoax led the University of South Carolina women’s basketball coach to cancel a game against BYU, even after the hoax had been debunked. The University of Pacific canceled its game against BYU after the debunked hoax as well.

August was a busy time for hate crime hoaxes, as that is when a black female in a “head scarf” named Zaynab Bintabdul-Hadijakien was charged for an attack on the Black Cultural Center. UVA officials would not identify the suspect, and even a police report redacted her race, but The Fix dug around and found out she is a black female.

Even when a black Democrat at Harvard University stood accused of yelling a “homophobic slur” at a peer, LGBT students on campus blamed the pro-life club. This did not appear to be part of a rhetorical exercise, like when the president of MIT’s student government perpetrated two campus hate-crime hoaxes, hanging posters and chalking slurs against LGBTQ people, Latinos and other “marginalized communities,” to protest free speech.

He was not the only LGBT person who left slurs for others in his tribe. For example, a “non-binary” University of Connecticut student found “homophobic language” on a dorm room door – but the culprits were other LGBTQ students.

Other race hoaxes this school year include: the juvenile allegedly behind the bomb threats against historically black colleges and universities, a black man who trashed the University of Florida’s Institute for Black Culture sign, and the claim that white students surrounded a black female student at Sam Houston State University and poured water on her.

The university told The Fix in September 2022 that police were “unable to verify” the claim.

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Veteran biology professor who teaches scientific fact that sex is determined by chromosomes X and Y is FIRED after four students walked out of his reproductive class – accusing him of ‘religious preaching’

A veteran biology professor in Texas who has been teaching that sex is determined by X and Y chromosomes for over 20 years was allegedly fired after four students walked out of his classroom. 

Dr. Johnson Varkey has claimed he was let go from his teaching position at St. Philip’s College in San Antonio after he was accused of ‘religious preaching’.

He was discussing the human reproductive system on November 28, 2022, when four students stormed out of the lecture. 

Varkey was then accused of ‘discriminatory comments about homosexuals and transgender individuals, anti-abortion rhetoric, and misogynistic banter’. 

The professor said he received an email from the Alamo Colleges District Human Resources department in January, which said his credentials would be revoked pending an investigation. He was later fired. 

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Harvard behavior scientist who studied honesty accused of fabricating data

A prominent Harvard behavioral scientist who undertook studies about honesty is under fire for allegedly fabricating papers that she worked on, according to a report.

Harvard Business School’s Francesca Gino allegedly chalked up phony results tied to studies, including one focused on honest behavior, the New York Times reported.

She’s been placed on leave, according to her business school web page, which the Times reported showed she was still on the job as recently as mid-May.

She has published 135 articles since 2007, according to the Chronicle for Higher Education.

In a blog, called DataColada, run by three behavioral scientists, it alleged fraud in four academic papers that Gino co-authored.

They said they presented evidence of fraud to Harvard in the fall of 2021 tied to a 2012 paper and another three papers she was a part of.

The 2012 paper relied on three separate studies, including one that Gino spearheaded.

The paper claimed that people who fill out tax forms or insurance documents are more honest if they attest to the truth of their responses at the top of the page instead of the bottom, the Times reported.

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Johns Hopkins pulls ‘lesbian’ definition after uproar over use of ‘non-men’ instead of ‘women’

Johns Hopkins University removed an online glossary of LGBTQ terms and identities this week after its definition of the word “lesbian” used the term “non-men” to refer to women and some nonbinary people and fueled an online uproar.

Screenshots of the glossary before it was taken down showed that the university defined the word “lesbian” as a “non-man attracted to non-men.” It added that while past definitions have referred to lesbians as women who are sexually attracted to other women, the “updated definition” is intended to include nonbinary people who may identify with the label.

“The LGBTQ Glossary serves as an introduction to the range of identities and terms that are used within LGBTQ communities, and is not intended to serve as the definitive answers as to how all people understand or use these terms,” Megan Christin, the university’s director of strategic communications, said in a statement Wednesday. “While the glossary is a resource posted on the website of the Johns Hopkins University Office of Diversity and Inclusion (ODI), the definitions were not reviewed or approved by ODI leadership and the language in question has been removed pending review.”

Christin did not respond to questions regarding when the online glossary was first uploaded.

Screenshots of the glossary sparked an online firestorm in recent days, with many women, including some lesbians, calling the definition “misogynistic” and noting that the definition for “gay man” did not use comparable language, such as “non-women.”

“Lesbian was literally the only word in English language that is not tied to man- as in male- feMALE, man- woMAN,” tennis star Martina Navratilova, who is a lesbian, tweeted Monday. “And now lesbians are non men?!? Wtf?!?”

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