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LATEST ARTICLES ( 295 )

• The Neuro Software Gap

  Our foray into Julia was mostly motivated by a desire to have a programming language as fast as C but as easy to program as Matlab. Read more

  Posted on 04 August 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Tim’s Vermeer

  Jan Vermeer has been one of my favourite painters ever since I saw his famous “The Girl with the Pearl Earring” painting that was on display in Toronto in the... Read more

  Posted on 28 July 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Selection of the Week

  What is called classical music mostly refers to the Western symphony orchestra tradition that starts in the seventeenth century with Vivaldi and peaks in the... Read more

  Posted on 23 July 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Talk at Jackfest

  I’m currently in Banff, Alberta for a Festschrift for Jack Cowan (webpage here). Jack is one of the founders of theoretical neuroscience and has infused many... Read more

  Posted on 16 July 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Zero Matlab 2015

  So I have bitten the bullet and am committed to phasing out Matlab completely by 2015.  I have Julia installed and can sort of run code in it although I have... Read more

  Posted on 07 July 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Need for Speed

  Thanks for all the comments about the attributes of Python and Julia. It seems to me that the most prudent choice is to learn Python and Julia. Read more

  Posted on 02 July 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The MATLAB Handcuff

  The first computer language I learned was BASIC back in the stone age, which led directly to Fortran. These are procedural languages that allow the infamous GOT... Read more

  Posted on 26 June 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• New Papers

  Two new papers are now in print:The first is on applying compressed sensing to genomics is now published in Gigascience. The summary of the paper is here and th... Read more

  Posted on 16 June 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Marc Andreesen on EconTalk

  If you have any interest in technology and the internet then you should definitely listen to this EconTalk podcast with Marc Andreesen, who wrote the first web... Read more

  Posted on 03 June 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Integrated Information Theory

  Neuroscientist Giulio Tononi has proposed that consciousness is integrated information and can be measured by a quantity called , which is a measure of the... Read more

  Posted on 02 June 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Did Microbes Cause the Great Dying?

  In one of my very first posts almost a decade ago, I wrote about the end-Permian extinction 250 million years ago, which was the greatest mass extinction thus... Read more

  Posted on 24 May 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What is the Difference Between Math, Science and Philsophy?

  I’ve been listening to the Philosophy Bites podcast recently. One from a few years ago consisted of answers from philosopher’s to the question posed on the... Read more

  Posted on 17 May 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Blinking-dot Paradox of Consciousness

  Suppose you could measure the activity of every neuron in the brain of an awake and behaving person, including all sensory and motor neurons. Read more

  Posted on 06 May 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• New Paper on Genomics

  

  James Lee and I have a new paper out: Lee and Chow, Conditions for the validity of SNP-based heritability estimation, Human Genetics, 2014. As I summarized... Read more

  Posted on 22 April 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Saving US Biomedical Research

  Bruce Alberts, Marc Kirschner, Shirley Tilghman, and Harold Varmus have an opinion piece in PNAS (link here) summarizing their concerns for the future of US... Read more

  Posted on 15 April 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Big Data Backlash

  I predicted that there would be an eventual push back on Big Data and it seems that it has begun. Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis of NYU had an op-ed in the Times... Read more

  Posted on 07 April 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Ultimate Pathogen Vector

  

  If civilization succumbs to a deadly pandemic, we will all know what the vector was. Every physician, nurse, dentist, hygienist, and health care worker is... Read more

  Posted on 01 April 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Optimizing Food Delivery

  This Econtalk podcast with Frito-Lay executive Brendan O’Donohoe from 2011 gives a great account of how optimized the production and marketing system for... Read more

  Posted on 25 March 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Analytic Continuation Continued

  

  As I promised in my previous post, here is a derivation of the analytic continuation of the Riemann zeta function to negative integer values. Read more

  Posted on 10 March 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Analytic Continuation

  

  I have received some skepticism that there are possibly other ways of assigning the sum of the natural numbers to a number other than -1/12 so I will try to be... Read more

  Posted on 22 February 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE