The roar of the crowd may subconsciously influence some referees to give an advantage to the home team, according to a study that examines the results of over 5,000 soccer matches in the English Premier League. The matches were played between 1992 and 200

I'm sad to report today that watching panda pornography didn't excite the two pandas enough for them to engage in kinky panda sex. Perhaps the porn built unrealistic expectations for the male panda and the girl panda didn't match his kinky panda fantasies?! Maybe they should have given the girl panda some breast implants and included another girl panda into the mix. [edit by Sandra - or maybe the girl panda doesn't need to change her body, which is fine the way it is, to conform to some artificial panda porn ideal beauty standard.]

Here's the shtick:

After panda porn failed to spark amour, Thai zoo authorities turned Monday to artificial insemination in the hope of impregnating their lone female giant panda.

Authorities at the Chiang Mai Zoo in northern Thailand inseminated Lin Hui with semen from her cage-mate, Chuang Chuang, on Monday morning and will repeat the procedure on Tuesday. The artificial insemination is a last ditch effort to get Lin Hui pregnant, after videos of pandas having sex failed to entice Chuang Chuang into mating with his partner.

Read the comments on this post...

I've been waiting for a long time for major press to finally come around and start telling people how Baby Einstein videos or listening to Mozart isn't going to make your baby into a genius. If you have a baby and are wondering whether a certain product will help your baby become smarter, there is a good rule to follow. If it's on TV it's not going to help and if it costs more than $10 it's not going to help either. I'm sure watching these videos are probably better than kids watching random flashing colors on a TV, but come on.

Here's a snippet of an article from USA Today (Which I'd normally make fun of as a trashy newspaper but hey - lots of people read it).

"While neural connections in babies' brains grow rapidly in the early years, adults can't make newborns smarter or more successful by having them listen to Beethoven or play with Einstein-inspired blocks," says Sara Mead, a senior policy analyst with Education Sector, a centrist Washington think tank.

That a baby's first three years are key for brain development is beyond dispute; scientists know that babies' brains change rapidly, growing and pruning synapses. But Mead says a few early childhood advocates have misinterpreted or misused research to suggest that if parents don't sufficiently stimulate children's brains before age 3, they'll do irreparable harm. There is no evidence that the first three years "are a singular window for growth that slams shut once children turn 3," Mead says.

She says researchers don't know enough about brain growth to say whether educational toys or lessons help: We are "far from knowing how to build a better brain."

But that hasn't stopped parents from spending billions on infant brain-building products. In 2005, the market was $2.5 billion, according to Fortune.

If you're interested in a good book about the whole making kids smarter schtick Einstein Never Used Flash Cards seems to cover the topic pretty well. (I only know this book by reputation - so no guarantees).

Here's a summary of that book from Publishers Weekly:

Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

It is unclear whether the involvement of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) during encoding is restricted to the evaluative processing of to-be-encoded stimuli or if it is instead actively engaged during memory formation. The difficulty of assessing the

The new study A Feedforward Architecture Accounts for Rapid Categorization, Serre, T., A. Oliva and T. Poggio, PNAS, 2007, in press [not online yet] reveals the success of a computational version of vision modeled on the visual cortex processes of immediate recognition of objects. The feedforward model is based on what our vision perceives in the first 100-200 milliseconds of exposure in the ventral stream before cognitive feedback loops kick in. It recognized objects in a database of street scenes with reasonable accuracy and uses a learning algorithm to become better at categorizing new objects. In this study, their system was trained with exposure to images then pitted against human vision and both performed nearly the same, with over 90% accuracy for close-ups and 74% for distant views.

Thomas Serre, Tomaso Poggio and others at the Center for Biological and Computational Learning in the McGovern Institute, the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT collaborated on the system. Another new paper, Robust Object Recognition with Cortex-Like Mechanisms, Serre et al., IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol 29 No 3, March 2007 [free PDF], describes the development. The feedforward model uses four layers:

1. Visual processing is hierarchical, aiming to build invariance to position and scale first and then to viewpoint and other transformations.
2. Along the hierarchy, the receptive fields of the neurons (i.e., the part of the visual field that could potentially elicit a response from the neuron) as well as the complexity of their optimal stimuli (i.e., the set of stimuli that elicit a response of the neuron) increases.
3. The initial processing of information is feedforward (for immediate recognition tasks, i.e., when the image presentation is rapid and there is no time for eye movements or shifts of attention).
4. Plasticity and learning probably occurs at all stages and certainly at the level of inferotemporal (IT) cortex and prefrontal cortex (PFC), the top-most layers of the hierarchy.

Poggio said, "We have not solved vision yet, but this model of immediate recognition may provide the skeleton of a theory of vision. The huge task in front of us is to incorporate into the model the effects of attention and top-down beliefs."

Their next goal is research on the 200-300 milliseconds after the feedforward process of immediate recognition, and a larger one is to incorporate cognitive feedback loops. The feedforward model may ultimately be useful as a front end to more complex processing systems. Bigger implications:

This new study supports a long-held hypothesis that rapid categorization happens without any feedback from cognitive or other areas of the brain. The results also indicate that the model can help neuroscientists make predictions and drive new experiments to explore brain mechanisms involved in human visual perception, cognition, and behavior. Deciphering the relative contribution of feed-forward and feedback processing may eventually help explain neuropsychological disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. The model also bridges the gap between the world of artificial intelligence (AI) and neuroscience because it may lead to better artificial vision systems and augmented sensory prostheses.

Read more.
Download the open source software with StreetScenes dataset.
More research from the MIT CBCL lab.

x-posted from Neurofuture

Read the comments on this post...