Breakthrough in construction of computers for mimicking human brain

PUBLIC RELEASE: 11-JUL-2018

The performance and exciting potential of a new brain-inspired computer takes us one step closer to simulating brain neural networks in real-time

https://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-07/f-bic071018.php

A computer built to mimic the brain's neural networks produces similar results to that of the best brain-simulation supercomputer software currently used for neural-signaling research, finds a new study published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Neuroscience. Tested for accuracy, speed and energy efficiency, this custom-built computer named SpiNNaker, has the potential to overcome the speed and power consumption problems of conventional supercomputers. The aim is to advance our knowledge of neural processing in the brain, to include learning and disorders such as epilepsy and Alzheimer's disease.

"SpiNNaker can support detailed biological models of the cortex--the outer layer of the brain that receives and processes information from the senses--delivering results very similar to those from an equivalent supercomputer software simulation," says Dr. Sacha van Albada, lead author of this study and leader of the Theoretical Neuroanatomy group at the Jülich Research Centre, Germany. "The ability to run large-scale detailed neural networks quickly and at low power consumption will advance robotics research and facilitate studies on learning and brain disorders."

The human brain is extremely complex, comprising 100 billion interconnected brain cells. We understand how individual neurons and their components behave and communicate with each other and on the larger scale, which areas of the brain are used for sensory perception, action and cognition. However, we know less about the translation of neural activity into behavior, such as turning thought into muscle movement.

Supercomputer software has helped by simulating the exchange of signals between neurons, but even the best software run on the fastest supercomputers to date can only simulate 1% of the human brain.

"It is presently unclear which computer architecture is best suited to study whole-brain networks efficiently. The European Human Brain Project and Jülich Research Centre have performed extensive research to identify the best strategy for this highly complex problem. Today's supercomputers require several minutes to simulate one second of real time, so studies on processes like learning, which take hours and days in real time are currently out of reach." explains Professor Markus Diesmann, co-author, head of the Computational and Systems Neuroscience department at the Jülich Research Centre.

He continues, "There is a huge gap between the energy consumption of the brain and today's supercomputers. Neuromorphic (brain-inspired) computing allows us to investigate how close we can get to the energy efficiency of the brain using electronics."

Developed over the past 15 years and based on the structure and function of the human brain, SpiNNaker -- part of the Neuromorphic Computing Platform of the Human Brain Project -- is a custom-built computer composed of half a million of simple computing elements controlled by its own software. The researchers compared the accuracy, speed and energy efficiency of SpiNNaker with that of NEST--a specialist supercomputer software currently in use for brain neuron-signaling research.

"The simulations run on NEST and SpiNNaker showed very similar results," reports Steve Furber, co-author and Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Manchester, UK. "This is the first time such a detailed simulation of the cortex has been run on SpiNNaker, or on any neuromorphic platform. SpiNNaker comprises 600 circuit boards incorporating over 500,000 small processors in total. The simulation described in this study used just six boards--1% of the total capability of the machine. The findings from our research will improve the software to reduce this to a single board."

Van Albada shares her future aspirations for SpiNNaker, "We hope for increasingly large real-time simulations with these neuromorphic computing systems. In the Human Brain Project, we already work with neuroroboticists who hope to use them for robotic control."

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Please include a link to the original research article in your reporting: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2018.00291/full

Growing Up in the USSR - RAI with A. Buzgalin (1/12)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=7RFc43mcIe8

Was Donald Trump in the military? NO

https://www.metro.us/president-trump/was-donald-trump-in-the-military




















Fast facts about President Trump's military service (or lack thereof).












By
Michael Martin




Published : February 28, 2018






President Trump has a well-documented affection for all things military, from military parades to military spending to his selection of retired Gen. John Kelly as his chief of staff. His appreciation of the military is such that you might wonder if he has a military background himself. So, was Donald Trump in the military?


Was Donald Trump in the military?




A better question would be, did Donald Trump serve in the military. The answer to which is no. He did, however, attend military school. Donald Trump was sent to New York Military Academy, about 60 miles north of New York City, by his parents, Fred and Mary, in 1959 when he was 12 years old. He stayed through his senior year, graduating at 17. Trump has said that his time at the academy gave him "more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military."




There is controversy about his time there. Although Trump has said he was "one of the top guys in the whole school" and "in charge of all the cadets," the Washington Post found that Trump had been removed from a leadership position in his senior year, because he allowed hazing among the boys in his command and excessively delegated responsibilities to others, spending too much time in his room.




He was voted "Ladies' Man," according to his senior yearbook.


"Cadet Bone Spurs"




But was Donald Trump in the military after he finished school? Despite Trump's military education, he did not go on to serve. He received five deferments from the Vietnam draft, four for college and one for an ailment he was diagnosed with after graduation in 1968: bone spurs in his heels. Instead, he followed his father into the real estate business.




In interviews, he claimed that he avoided service in Vietnam because of a high draft number. The Smoking Gun uncovered details about the medical deferment in 2011.




During the presidential campaign, Trump described his health as "perfection" and said the spurs were "temporary" but couldn't recall which heel was affected or what doctor granted him the deferment in an August 2016 interview with The New York Times. "I had a doctor that gave me a letter — a very strong letter on the heels,” Trump said. He called them "not a big problem, but it was enough of a problem...You know, it was difficult from the long-term walking standpoint."




Trump's avoidance of military service has been spotlighted by members of the militarycritical of his racist and authoritarian views. For example, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq veteran and double amputee, dubbed him "Cadet Bone Spurs" after Trump asserted that Democrats who didn't clap during his State of the Union address were "treasonous."

Trump's Supreme Court: Capitalism and Democracy Can No Longer Coexist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=4VWGPBEnNCc

Right-wingers are more AFRAID than Leftists

At Yale, we conducted an experiment to turn conservatives into liberals. The results say a lot about our political divisions.

By John Bargh

November 22, 2017

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2017/11/22/at-yale-we-conducted-an-experiment-to-turn-conservatives-into-liberals-the-results-say-a-lot-about-our-political-divisions/?utm_term=.761952dbade0

When my daughter was growing up, she often wanted to rush off to do fun things with her friends — get into the water at the beach, ride off on her bike — without taking the proper safety precautions first. I’d have to stop her in her tracks to first put on the sunscreen, or her bike helmet and knee pads, with her standing there impatiently. “Safety first, fun second,” was my mantra.

Keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe from harm is perhaps our strongest human motivation, deeply embedded in our very DNA. It is so deep and important that it influences much of what we think and do, maybe more than we might expect. For example, over a decade now of research in political psychology consistently shows that how physically threatened or fearful a person feels is a key factor — although clearly not the only one — in whether he or she holds conservative or liberal attitudes.

Conservatives, it turns out, react more strongly to physical threat than liberals do. In fact, their greater concern with physical safety seems to be determined early in life: In one University of California study, the more fear a 4-year-old showed in a laboratory situation, the more conservative his or her political attitudes were found to be 20 years later. Brain imaging studies have even shown that the fear center of the brain, the amygdala, is actually larger in conservatives than in liberals. And many other laboratory studies have found that when adult liberals experienced physical threat, their political and social attitudes became more conservative (temporarily, of course). But no one had ever turned conservatives into liberals.

Until we did.

In a new study to appear in a forthcoming issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology, my colleagues Jaime Napier, Julie Huang and Andy Vonasch and I asked 300 U.S. residents in an online survey their opinions on several contemporary issues such as gay rights, abortion, feminism and immigration, as well as social change in general. The group was two-thirds female, about three-quarters white, with an average age of 35. Thirty-percent of the participants self-identified as Republican, and the rest as Democrat.

But before they answered the survey questions, we had them engage in an intense imagination exercise. They were asked to close their eyes and richly imagine being visited by a genie who granted them a superpower. For half of our participants, this superpower was to be able to fly, under one’s own power. For the other half, it was to be completely physically safe, invulnerable to any harm.

If they had just imagined being able to fly, their responses to the social attitude survey showed the usual clear difference between Republicans and Democrats — the former endorsed more conservative positions on social issues and were also more resistant to social change in general.

But if they had instead just imagined being completely physically safe, the Republicans became significantly more liberal — their positions on social attitudes were much more like the Democratic respondents. And on the issue of social change in general, the Republicans’ attitudes were now indistinguishable from the Democrats. Imagining being completely safe from physical harm had done what no experiment had done before — it had turned conservatives into liberals.

In both instances, we had manipulated a deeper underlying reason for political attitudes, the strength of the basic motivation of safety and survival. The boiling water of our social and political attitudes, it seems, can be turned up or down by changing how physically safe we feel.

This is why it makes sense that liberal politicians intuitively portray danger as manageable — recall FDR’s famous Great Depression era reassurance of “nothing to fear but fear itself,” echoed decades later in Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address — and why President Trump and other Republican politicians are instead likely to emphasize the dangers of terrorism and immigration, relying on fear as a motivator to gain votes.

In fact, anti-immigration attitudes are also linked directly to the underlying basic drive for physical safety. For centuries, arch-conservative leaders have often referred to scapegoated minority groups as “germs” or “bacteria” that seek to invade and destroy their country from within. President Trump is an acknowledged germaphobe, and he has a penchant for describing people — not only immigrants but political opponents and former Miss Universe contestants — as “disgusting.”

“Immigrants are like viruses” is a powerful metaphor, because in comparing immigrants entering a country to germs entering a human body, it speaks directly to our powerful innate motivation to avoid contamination and disease. Until very recently in human history, not only did we not have antibiotics, we did not even know how infections occurred or diseases transmitted, and cuts and open wounds were quite dangerous. (In the American Civil War, for example, 60 out of every 1,000 soldiers died not by bullets or bayonets, but by infections.)

Therefore, we reasoned, making people feel safer about a dangerous flu virus should serve to calm their fears about immigrants — and making them feel more threatened by the flu virus should cause them to be more against immigration than they were before. In a 2011 study, my colleagues and I showed just that. First, we reminded our nationwide sample of liberals and conservatives about the threat of the flu virus (during the H1N1 epidemic), and then measured their attitudes toward immigration.

Afterward we simply asked them if they’d already gotten their flu shot or not. It turned out that those who had not gotten a flu shot (feeling threatened) expressed more negative attitudes toward immigration, while those who had received the vaccination (feeling safe) had more positive attitudes about immigration.

In another study, using hand sanitizer after being warned about the flu virus had the same effect on immigration attitudes as had being vaccinated. A simple squirt of Purell after we had raised the threat of the flu had changed their minds. It made them feel safe from the dangerous virus, and this made them feel socially safe from immigrants as well.

Our study findings may have a silver lining. Here’s how:

All of us believe that our social and political attitudes are based on good reasons and reflect our important values. But we also need to recognize how much they can be influenced subconsciously by our most basic, powerful motivations for safety and survival. Politicians on both sides of the aisle know this already and attempt to manipulate our votes and party allegiances by appealing to these potent feelings of fear and of safety.

Instead of allowing our strings to be pulled so easily by others, we can become more conscious of what drives us and work harder to base our opinions on factual knowledge about the issues, including information from outside our media echo chambers. Yes, our views can harden given the right environment, but our work shows that they are actually easier to change than we might think.

Months After GOP Approved $1.5T Giveaway to Rich, Ocasio-Cortez Shreds Those Questioning How to Pay for Bold Proposals Like Medicare for All

As tweet goes viral, "I can't get over how revolutionary these simple and obvious moral statements sound coming from a (soon-to-be) Democratic politician."

by Julia Conley, staff writer

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/07/10/months-after-gop-approved-15t-giveaway-rich-ocasio-cortez-shreds-those-questioning

In a viral tweet on Tuesday, progressive New York congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez crystallized the absurdity of arguments against Medicare for All and other bold proposals—as conservatives and centrist Democrats frequently claim the United States lacks a robust social safety net because of an inability to pay for one.

In an apparent reference to a "luxuriously obscene" indulgence Gizmodo reported on in 2014, Ocasio-Cortez mocked the notion that, months after applauding a tax law containing $1.5 trillion in cuts for corporations and the wealthiest Americans, conservatives are now questioning her assertion that a country that can afford such benefits for the rich must also be able to provide healthcare and living wages to all its citizens. 

The Medicare for All plan proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), whose presidential campaign Ocasio-Cortez worked on, is estimated to cost the government $1.38 trillion per year, while the current profit-based system costs about $3 trillion per year.

Ocasio-Cortez's plan to cancel the $1.4 trillion in student debt carried by Americans "would increase GDP by between $86 billion and $108 billion per year, over the next decade" according to the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College.

Her plan to make tuition free at public universities and trade schools is also not revolutionary, she notes on her website.

"In fact, we've had this system before: The University of California system offered free tuition at its schools until the 1980s," Ocasio-Cortez's higher education platform reads. "In 1965, average tuition at a four-year public university was just $243 and many of the best colleges—including the City University of New York—did not charge any tuition at all."

Yet with the political dialogue that's heard in corporate media outlets dominated heavily by establishment Democrats and Republicans, many of whom rely on wealthy donors to stay in power, Ocasio-Cortez's focus on proposals that will benefit working Americans rather than corporate interests appears radical—even though proposals to support working families and the middle class have been the basis of successful policy-making in the past.

Calling Kavanaugh a 'Five-Alarm Fire," Progressives Reveal Action Plan to Defeat Trump's Extremist Nominee

A nationwide day of action to save the Supreme Court is planned for August 26, while protests have already begun at senators' offices

by Julia Conley, staff writer

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/07/10/calling-kavanaugh-five-alarm-fire-progressives-reveal-action-plan-defeat-trumps

While President Donald Trump said Tuesday morning that the nomination process for his Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh would be a "beautiful thing to watch" over the coming weeks, progressive advocacy groups say they will leverage their collective political will—and the tens of millions of their outraged members—to stand against the president's far-right and extremist choice.

Calling Trump's nomination of Kavanaugh a "five alarm fire," NARAL Pro-Choice America, MoveOn.org, Color of Change, and other groups announced a mass mobilization against the right-wing judge's confirmation, including a nationwide day of action planned for August 26.

Americans concerned about Kavanaugh's opposition to abortion rights and other issues the Supreme Court could rule on in the coming years are being urged to demand that Democrats unite against the nomination, and to confront Republican senators who are considered potential opponents—much like thousands of Americans did last summer as the Senate debated a repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

MoveOn.org members are already "making crystal clear that a vote for Brett Kavanaugh is a vote to end Roe, criminalize abortion, and punish women," said the group's Washington director, Ben Wikler. "We need to make sure that they understand that their entire political career will be haunted by their decision on Brett Kavanaugh for good or for ill."

MoveOn's website has a #SaveSCOTUS section for local events nationwide this week and other organizing resources.

While reproductive rights are at risk, Wikler noted, "protections for LGBTQ Americans, the Affordable Care Act, protections for people with pre-existing conditions...the ability to protect our democracy and voting rights...and the fundamental question of whether the president is above the law—all of those things are on the line, and that's why MoveOn members will respond to this just as we did with the healthcare fight when nobody thought a victory was possible."

Trump has already named one judge, Justice Neil Gorsuch, to the nation's highest court, after three Democrats joined Republicans in voting to confirm him last year. Indivisible co-executive director Leah Greenberg spoke about efforts to pressure Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to unite his party in opposition.

"We can't lose a single Democratic vote this time," Greenberg said. Indivisible chapters based in New York "held a rally outside [Schumer's] office with more than 300 people yesterday pushing him to whip the votes and to step up into this leadership moment."

The distinct possibility that Kavanaugh could be the deciding vote to overturn Roe vs. Wade, criminalizing abortion care, is playing a major role in mobilizing Americans across the political spectrum,  said Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.

"The anxiety in the country is palpable," said Hogue. "We're hearing minute by minute from both our existing members and new members, and by the way, not just the progressive base. We have independent and Republican women ringing our phone off the hook, very concerned about this moment, this nominee, this court, and this administration."

Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) are being targeted by their constituents, as the two so-called "moderate" lawmakers have equivocated in recent weeks over how they would vote on an anti-choice nominee like Kavanaugh.

In Portland, Maine, a rapid response rally began hours after Trump announced Kavanaugh's nomination outside Collins's office, with protesters holding signs reading "Women Won't Back Down" and "My Body Is Not Up for Debate."

"We saved the Affordable Care Act through Susan Collins and we need to save the Supreme Court," progressive activist Betsy Sweet told Common Dreams.

"It's not just about having a 'Blue Wave' in November, it's about us," added Portland resident Tina Marie Davidson. "We have everything to lose so we can't take anything for granted...We've been fighting for a year and a half, we rallied [Collins] last year for the ACA and we got her on our side, so we're just going to do what we did but even better and make sure she knows that this is her legacy. She needs to stand with us and represent us."

"These senators hold the keys to women's futures and our fundamental freedoms in their hands," said Hogue. "Donald Trump has been crystal clear, he wants to end Roe vs. Wade. Kavanaugh is his path to doing so. Now the only question is whether these senators will stand up and fight for women and families or be a rubber stamp on Trump’s agenda. Seven in 10 Americans believe abortion should be legal. We are the majority and those who vote for Kavanaugh, which is a vote to end Roe v. Wade, will be held accountable at the ballot box.”