I have no doubt that the appeal of Facebook is declining for individuals that frequent hacker news. tech-savvy, most of us out of college. But there are generations of people growing up with Facebook. I'm friends with some of my younger cousins for example, and they use the service like I used AIM when I was their (lengthy fast exchanges). Also, for high school students and college students, sharing within network is quite active. I don't think Facebook is necessarily on the decline, there is so much content that fbook has essentially cemented it's position as a social hub. I think the role of Facebook is simply maturing.
wow, thank you for posting this. i've been sailing since i was a kid and have always had to piece together this kind of information. what a fantastic resource.
I don't really understand why this is so significant or perhaps I don't understand the experiment. You are fed some training set and a certain brain activity pattern is identified as the "target." Then you show a whole bunch of other stimuli and try to teach the brain to display the target activity pattern for a different stimulus by having this proxy indicator that tells you how close you are (green disk).
Don't we do this all the time? If I'm teaching a child the letters of the alphabet then I would show an example, have them try to guess it and then give them some indication of how close they are (yes you got it, you are pronouncing it weird, no that's the wrong letter). The only difference here is that you are using proxy whereby you identify a target brain activity pattern first. It seems pretty much impossible, however, to get a target for an individual without first seeing what the target is. Certainly everyone's "target" for the same problem must look quite different.
I suppose this could be pretty useful for brain-computer interfaces but I don't know if I'd go as far as saying this is matrix-like learning.
Not only is Mathematica becoming a super rich programming environment, but Mathematica 8 now allows Wolfram Alpha web functions. Along with the CDF player it's my humble opinion that Wolfram is poised to become the next gen computing tech.