text:
A new world awaits us; and Duke neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis wants to be our tour guide to some of its most breathtaking leaps. Some of those bounds have already been recorded in his laboratory: In recent years, he has taught a monkey to use thought control to move the arms of a robot located halfway around the globe. (Headlines trumpeted "MIND CONTROL MONKEY MOVES ROBOT IN JAPAN." In Beyond Boundaries, he transplants the exciting breakthroughs of his research into what it can mean for our lives in coming decades. (Hand-selling tip: Nicolelis is a notably mediagenic author. His interviews truly register the wonder and possibilities of recent neuroscience discoveries.)
Beyond Boundaries: The New Neuroscience of Connecting Brains with Machines---and How It Will Change Our Livesby Miguel Nicolelis
View All Available Formats & Editions
A pioneering neuroscientist shows how the long-sought merger of brains with machines is about to become a paradigm-shifting reality
Imagine living in a world where people use their computers, drive their cars, and communicate with one another simply by thinking. In this stunning and inspiring work, Duke University neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis shares his/b>
A pioneering neuroscientist shows how the long-sought merger of brains with machines is about to become a paradigm-shifting reality
Imagine living in a world where people use their computers, drive their cars, and communicate with one another simply by thinking. In this stunning and inspiring work, Duke University neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis shares his revolutionary insights into how the brain creates thought and the human sense of selfand how this might be augmented by machines, so that the entire universe will be within our reach.
Beyond Boundaries draws on Nicolelis's ground-breaking research with monkeys that he taught to control the movements of a robot located halfway around the globe by using brain signals alone. Nicolelis's work with primates has uncovered a new method for capturing brain functionby recording rich neuronal symphonies rather than the activity of single neurons. His lab is now paving the way for a new treatment for Parkinson's, silk-thin exoskeletons to grant mobility to the paralyzed, and breathtaking leaps in space exploration, global communication, manufacturing, and more.
Beyond Boundaries promises to reshape our concept of the technological future, to a world filled with promise and hope.
Editorial Reviews
The wonders to come when thoughts control not only us but our tools, communications and artificial body parts.
In his first book, Nicolelis (Neuroscience/Duke Univ.) delivers an enthusiastic history of research on the brain and describes current efforts to understand how it works and how to integrate it with the world outside our bodies. Early neuroscientists broke the brain down into individual regions (speech, vision, memory), studying single neurons in the hope of explaining how the brain works. But a single violinist can't produce a symphony, writes the author, a proponent of the distributionist school who believe that populations of neurons, not individuals, form the brain's true functional unit. Recent technical advances allow scientists access to these complex collections of neurons with exciting results that may lead to even more exciting applications, which Nicolelis eagerly lays out. Researchers, including the author, have already trained subjects to operate prosthetic arms, guide robots, exchange brain signals and maneuver a wheelchair by simply thinking. Readers may prefer to skip directly to these achievements and skim even these when their comprehension lags. Groundbreaking experiments, including the author's, involve inserting numerous electrodes directly into brains, and while Nicolelis communicates his excitement at the resulting computer readouts, his explanations of what is actually happening are far too detailed and technical for the lay reader, delivered in the convoluted prose typical of academic journals.
The author provides an intriguing, nuts-and-bolts view of brain research, but readers without a background in physical science will have a frustrating time.
"Miguel Nicolelis has produced a delightful and scientifically important work by combining stories of his life with reflections on the big questions in neuroscience. The progress he and his co-workers have made toward a future where humans can use brain activity to directly control computers and mechanical devices to restore lost motor and communication functions is both awe-inspiring and filled with hope." Jon Kaas, Distinguished Centennial Professor, Vanderbilt University and member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences
"In this wonderfully vivid and fascinating book, Miguel Nicolelis describes a new view of the human brain, and how interfacing it to machines will have important implications for rehabilitation medicine and beyond." Peter Agre, M.D., 2003 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry and University Professor and Director, Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute
"Here is the seminal guide to the latest in brain-machine interfaces and the incredible potential they hold to improve the human condition. From the first moment I heard about Miguel's ground-breaking work in the hallways of Duke University, I knew he was on to something special. At once scientifically rich and readily accessible, it inspires both curiosity and hope from one of the field's most important thinkers." Bill Maris, Managing Partner, Google
"Beyond Boundaries is an absolute joy to read. Professor Miguel Nicolelis has provided a provocative, thoughtful and novel view of how this amazing machine called our brain processes and acts on information about our world. Always a scientist and often a poet, Nicolelis writes in an informative and engaging style that is accessible to specialist and layman alike. I highly recommend this wonderful book." Thomas J. Carew, Bren Professor and Chair, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, University of California, Irvine, and former president of the Society of Neuroscience
"Nicolelis is a leader in the rapidly developing field that allows brains and machines to work closely together. . .will fascinate neuroscience buffs." Publishers Weekly
Product Details
- 9780805090529
- Publisher:
- Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
- Publication date:
- 03/15/2011
- Pages:
- 368
- Product dimensions:
- 6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)
Read an Excerpt
By the time the rainy days of the tropical autumn of 1984 arrived, most Brazilians had had enough. For twenty years, their beloved country had been ruled by a vicious dictatorship, brought to power by a military coup d'état that triumphed, emblematically, on April Fools' Day 1964. For the next two decades the military regime built an infamous legacy, marked primarily by its rampant incompetence, widespread corruption, and shameful political violence against its own people.
By 1979, thanks to the growing popular opposition to the regime, the latest four-star general installed in the presidential palace had no alternative but to grant amnesty to the political leaders, scientists, and intellectuals who had fled into exile abroad. A gradual, controlled return to civilian rule had been mapped out by the generals, beginning with popular elections for state governorships in the fall of 1982.
That November, the opposition parties won by a landslide. By the next year, however, that small token of democracy had been all but forgotten. Brazilians realized they had the right and, more importantly, the power to demand more than a dictator's political bread crumbs. They wanted to oust the military government, but not through another coup d'état. Instead, they wanted to vote it into retirement through a direct election for president. That is how, seemingly out of nowhere, a nationwide movement demanding immediate direct elections for president (diretas jáin Portuguese) broke loose. The first rally took place in the tiny northeastern city of Abreu e Lima on March 31, 1983. By November, a somewhat shy crowd of ten thousand people had gathered to protest in Brazil's most populous and wealthy city, São Paulo. From that point, the movement grew exponentially. Two months later, on January 25, 1984, the day São Paulo celebrated its 430th anniversary, more than two hundred thousand people were chanting their collective demand for immediate presidential elections. In a matter of days, gigantic crowds started to converge on the main squares of Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, and other major cities.
On the evening of April 16, 1984, more than one million people congregated in the heart of downtown São Paulo to participate in the largest political rally ever staged in the country's history. In a matter of hours, a river of people, most dressed in the Brazilian national colors, green and yellow, inundated the valley where the city was originally founded. Every new group of people that arrived immediately joined into an already familiar, two-word rhythmic chant that erupted briskly somewhere in the crowd, every minute or so, and spread like thunder through space: "Diretas já, diretas já" (Elections now, elections now). If you have never taken part in a chorale formed by one million people, I recommend the experience. Nothing can prepare you for its penetrating sound, and nothing this side of the Milky Way will allow you to forget it. It is the sort of sound that carves memories for a lifetime.
Pressed by the ever-increasing flow of people, I climbed to the roof of a newsstand and, for the first time that night, gained a panoramic view of the entire citizenry that was conquering São Paulo's Anhangabaú Valley with its two-word song. For the long-vanished Tupi-Guarani, the native Indian tribe that inhabited that land before the Portuguese arrived in the sixteenth century, the stream that had run through the valley was known as the "river of the bad spirits." Not anymore. That night, the only river visible was a mighty Amazon of people. No bad spirit would have dared to exert itself in such a purposeful human ocean.
"What do we want?" part of the crowd spontaneously asked.
"Diretas" (elections), the rest of us answered.
"Quando" (when)? another group provoked.
"Já, já, já!" (now, now, now!) the whole crowd screamed back.
When that million-people choir began to sing the Brazilian anthem, not even the sky could hold its tears anymore. As the traditional São Paulo drizzle descended, I absorbed this resounding demonstration of what a population of individuals can do when they collaborate in harmony to achieve a common goal. Even though the message transmitted by the crowd (Diretas já!) was always the same, at any moment in time, a different combination of many voices was recruited to produce the crowd's roar. People weren't necessarily able to scream every time. Some were talking to their neighbors; others became temporarily hoarse, or were distracted while waving their flags; others simply dropped out of the chorale due to sheer emotion. Moreover, even as handfuls of people began to leave the rally later on, the crowd continued to thunder. For any observer, the loss of those few protesters did not make any difference at all—the overall potential population was so huge that the loss of a few people did not meaningfully alter the result.
Ultimately, the voices of those millions of Brazilians were heard. A few days later, I met with my mentor, Dr. César Timo-Iaria, to discuss a paper by David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, who had shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1981 for their groundbreaking research on the visual cortex. Hubel and Wiesel had recorded the electrical activity of single neurons in the visual cortex, using the classical reductionist approach that was the norm in labs around the world at the time. I innocently asked Timo-Iaria why we did not do the same. His reply was as forceful as the roar that I had experienced as a member of the crowd in São Paulo: "We do not record from a single neuron, my son, for the same reason that the rally you attended a few days ago would be a disaster if, instead of one million people, only one person had showed up to protest," he said. "Do you think that anyone would pay attention to the plea of a single person screaming at a political rally? The same is true for the brain: it does not pay attention to the electrical screaming of a single noisy neuron. It needs many more of its cells singing together to decide what to do next."
• *
Had I been more observant on that historic night in 1984, I may have understood that the dynamic social behavior of that thundering crowd had set before me most of the neurophysiological principles that I would obsessively investigate over the next quarter of a century. But instead of listening to a chorus of political protesters, I would be listening for the virtually unheard electrical symphonies created by large populations of neurons.
These neural ensembles would eventually provide the means for liberating a primate brain from its biological body. But in the mid-1980s, very few neuroscientists saw any reason to relinquish the reductionist experimental paradigm and its focus on single neurons. Perhaps this was because other scientific fields, including particle physics and molecular biology, had experienced extraordinary success with reductionism; in particle physics, for instance, the theory and ultimate discovery of smaller and smaller particles, such as quarks, proved to be a linchpin in the definition of the so-called standard model, which continues to be the basis of our understanding of the physical universe.
Roughly speaking, in mainstream twentieth-century neuroscience, the reductionist approach meant breaking the brain into individual regions that contained a high density of neurons, known as brain areas or nuclei, and then studying the individual neurons and their connections within and between each of these structures, one at a time and in great detail. It was hoped that once a large enough number of these neurons and their connections had been analyzed exhaustively, the accumulated information would explain how the central nervous system works as a whole. Allegiance to reductionism led most neuroscientists to dedicate their entire careers to describing the anatomical, physiological, biochemical, pharmacological, and molecular organization of individual neurons and their structural components. This painstaking and wonderful collective effort generated a tremendous wealth of data from which many outstanding discoveries and breakthroughs resulted. With the unfair benefit of hindsight, today one could argue that neuroscientists were trying to decipher the workings of the brain in the same way as an ecologist would attempt to study the physiology of a single tree at a time in order to understand the rain forest ecosystem, or an economist would monitor a single stock to predict the stock market, or a military dictator would try to arrest a single protester at a time to reduce the effectiveness of a million-strong Brazilian chorus chanting diretas já in 1984.
For an observer who benefits today from the century-old work of the true giants of brain research, it seems that what much of neuroscience still lacks is an experimental paradigm for dealing with the complexity of brain circuits. Today, systems formed by large numbers of interacting elements—things like a political movement, the global financial market, the Internet, the immune system, the planet's climate, and an ant colony—are known as complex systems whose most fundamental properties tend to emerge through the collective interactions of many elements. Typically, such complex systems do not reveal their intimate collective secrets when approached by the reductionist method. With its billions of interconnected neurons, whose interactions change from millisecond to millisecond, the human brain is an archetypal complex system.
Part of the neglect toward exploring the complexity of the brain could be justified by the tremendous experimental challenges involved in "listening" simultaneously to the electrical signals produced by large numbers of individual single neurons, distributed across multiple brain areas, in a behaving animal. For example, at the time Brazilian crowds were fighting for presidential elections, no one in the neuroscience community was sure what type of sensor could be implanted in the brains of animals so that many of these minute neuronal electrical signals could be sampled simultaneously for many days or weeks, while subjects performed a variety of behavioral tasks. Moreover, there was no electronic hardware or sufficiently powerful computer available that neurophysiologists could readily utilize to filter, amplify, display, and store the electrical activity generated by tens of individual neurons simultaneously. Neurophysiologists wondered, almost in despair, how they might choose which neurons to record from in each brain structure. Worst of all, nobody had any idea how to analyze the huge mountain of neurophysiological data that would be generated in case these technical bottlenecks could somehow be solved.
Paradoxically, few neuroscientists ever doubted that the astonishing feats accomplished by the human mind—from the production of artificial tools to the generation of self-awareness and consciousness—arise from the brain's huge number of neurons combined with their intricate pattern of massive parallel connectivity. But for decades, any attempt to tackle the technical hurdles to listen to brain symphonies was dismissed as a chimera, a high-tech experimental utopia that might only be realized through an effort on the scale of the Manhattan Project.
Essentially, all expressions of human nature ever produced, from a caveman's paintings to Mozart's symphonies and Einstein's view of the universe, emerge from the same source: the relentless dynamic toil of large populations of interconnected neurons. Not one of the numerous complex behaviors that are vital for the survival and prosperity of our species—or, for that matter, of our close and distant cousins, primates and mammals—can be enacted by the action of a single neuron, no matter how special this individual cell may be. Thus, despite the great deal we have learned about how single neurons look and function, and despite innumerous scientific achievements of brain research for the past century, the straightforward application of reductionism to brain research has proven to be insufficient and improper as a strategy to deliver the field's most cherished promise, a comprehensive theory of thinking.
All this means that the traditional and well-disseminated view of the brain, the one espoused in artful prose and beautiful illustrations in most of the neuroscience textbooks, can no longer stand. In much the same way that Einstein's theory of relativity revolutionized the classic view of the universe, the traditional single neuron–based theory of brain function needs to be categorically replaced by what amounts to a relativistic view of the mind.
• *
The first step in proposing any new scientific theory is to define a proper level of analysis for investigating phenomena and testing one's hypothesis about them. This allows for validating orfalsifying the proposed theory—the essence of the scientific method. I contend that the most appropriate approach to understanding thinking is to investigate the physiological principles that underlie the dynamic interactions of large distributed populations of neurons that define a brain circuit (see Fig. 1.1). Neurons transmit information to one another through long, projecting structures—their axons—which make discrete, noncontinuous contact (the synapse) with nerve cell bodies and their protoplasmic, treelike structures, called dendrites. In my view, while the single neuron is the basic anatomical and information processing-signaling unit of the brain, it is not capable of generating behaviors and, ultimately, thinking. Instead, the true functional unit of the central nervous system is a population of neurons, or neural ensembles or cell assemblies. Such a functional arrangement, in which populations of neurons rather than single cells account for the information needed for the generation of behaviors, is also commonly referred to as distributed neuronal coding.
FIGURE 1.1 The architecture of a neural circuit. Reproduction of a Ramón y Cajal original drawing showing a neural circuit formed by many neurons. One single neuron and its cellular specializations are highlighted. In general, dendrites serve as the main neuronal specialization receiving synapses from other neurons. Axon terminals establish the neuron's synapses with other brain cells. (Cajal's drawing from "Histology of the Nervous System" was reproduced with permission of the Cajal Legacy, Instituto Cajal [CSIC], Madrid, Spain.)
Thinking with populations of neurons! Even two of humanity's most intimate possessions—a sense of self and a body image—are fluid, highly modifiable creations of the brain's mischievous deployment of electricity and a handful of chemicals. They both can change or be changed on less than a second's notice. And, as we will see, they do.
During the first half of the twentieth century, so-called single-neuron neurophysiologists argued, with seemingly incontrovertible evidence, that after sensory information was sampled from the external world through specialized receptors—the skin, retina, inner ear, nose, and tongue—it ascended through specific sensory nerve pathways that terminated in specific cortical areas. These areas were identified as the primary sites for processing sensory information in the cortex, with the somatosensory (tactile), visual, and auditory areas gaining particular prominence. During the same period, however, an American psychologist, Karl Lashley, emerged as the poster boy for the opposition: the distributionist camp. Lashley's main obsession was to identify the location in which the brain stores a memory, which he called the engram. In his experiments, he would surgically remove cortical tissue from various areas of the brains of rats, monkeys, and apes, both before and after the animals had been taught to perform particular behaviors, which ranged from simple tasks (learning how to identify a particular object visually and then jump or reach for it) to complex problem solving (learning how to navigate an elaborate maze). After an animal was trained, he measured the impact of the cortical lesions he had created on the animal's capacity to acquire or retain the behavioral skill, or habit, it had learned. With this experimental process, he aimed to understand how associations were built between sensory information and motor behavior.
According to Lashley, after animals had been trained in a simple task, much of the remaining cortex could be removed without affecting significantly the animal's behavioral performance—provided that some volume of the primary sensory cortex involved in the task was left intact. In fact, if just one-sixtieth of the primary visual cortex remained, the animal would retain a visual-motor habit it had learned. Faced with simple tasks, the brain was amazingly resilient in handling sensory information. In his classic article, "In Search of the Engram," Lashley summarized his results as the "principle of equipotentiality," whereby memory traces were distributed throughout the sensory area, not in a specific neuron or small group of neurons.
Yet, Lashley also had found that the brain was less able to recover from damage when faced with more complex behavioral tasks. An animal would begin to make task errors with a small number of lesions, and the amount of errors produced was proportional to the cortical mass removed surgically. Once 50 percent or more of the neocortex had been removed, the animal began to lose the learned habit altogether, requiring extensive retraining. Based on these findings, Lashley proposed a second principle of memory, the "mass action effect," which stated that "some physiological mode of organization or integrating activity is affected rather than specific associative bonds." Complex problem solving became "disordered" when parts of the cortex were taken out of commission.
Many neuroscientists criticized Lashley's conclusions. Even today, simply mentioning his name in a scientific talk invariably triggers all-knowing chortles of derision. Most of the scientific blowback was leveled at his experimental approach, particularly in trying to create brain lesions and then correlating them with too simplistic or too complex tasks. Still, Lashley was able to show that there was more going on in the primary sensory cortices than most neuroscientists were willing to acknowledge.
Usually, academic battles turn out to be so bloody because their stakes are often so miserably low. Not in this case. Defining the functional unit of the brain is a solemn endeavor. After all, this quest aims at pinpointing exactly which piece of organic matter decides, on your behalf, where your body starts and ends, what it feels like to be human, what deeper beliefs you hold, and how your children and the children of your children will one day remember who you were and what became of your legacy as a human being. Few human enterprises come close in relevance and drama as the ongoing search for the true reasons that make each of us feel so irrevocably different and unique, and yet so strikingly similar to our kin.
A simple analogy helps to clarify the distinction between the two competing views of brain function I am presenting here. Consider the role played by musicians in a symphony orchestra. If you had tickets to hear a concert and arrived to find out that just one bassoonist had showed up, you would be rather disappointed at the end of the night: no matter how proficient the musician had been, and how much effort he or she put into the performance, you would not be able to imagine the symphony's full score—not even if, instead of a bassoonist, the glorious violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter or the electrifying pianist Maria João Pires were onstage. You would only get an appreciation of the entire musical tapestry of the symphony if a significant number of musicians performed together, simultaneously. For the distributionists, when the brain creates a complex message or task using a large number of neurons, it is composing a type of symphony.
A neuronal concerto.
Coding a complex neuronal message or task into a large number of small, individual fragments or actions is similar to the work of an orchestra—each fragment helps to create the meaningful whole, like the million human voices singing "diretas já" that, with its sheer power, dethroned a dictator. This sort of distributed message strategy is often found in nature.
Distributed strategies are present in many aspects of our daily lives. For instance, the production of complex phenotypical traits—how our genetic makeup is expressed in, say, our physical appearance—often relies on the concurrent expression of many genes distributed across an array of chromosomes. Another natural distributed strategy involves multiprotein complexes, which operate within individual cells to perform a variety of functions ranging from DNA translation and repair to the release of chemicals, known as neurotransmitters, by neuronal synapses. Each protein is responsible for one specific subtask and many proteins may interact together to achieve a rather complex operation. For instance, different protein complexes, embedded in the width of the lipid membrane of a single neuron, form a variety of membrane ion channels. Each ion channel works like a tunnel through the membrane. When this tunnel opens, a particular ion (sodium, potassium, chloride, or calcium) can enter or exit the cell. Multiple ion channels cooperate to maintain or alter the electrical membrane potential of a single neuron. A single ion channel cannot regulate this process, just like a single neuron cannot produce a meaningful behavior. Instead, a population of diverse ion channels is needed for neuronal cell membranes to work properly.
Distributed strategies work at higher levels, too. For example, African lions usually hunt in packs, particularly when they want to capture large prey, such as a seemingly vulnerable elephant drinking at a water hole. This pack approach ensures that if one of the lions is killed by the elephant, the rest of the pack still have a chance to get that valuable elephant steak tartare by the end of the night. Conversely, some of the most preyed-upon species usually defend themselves from potential predators by gathering into dense groups when they roam in search of food for themselves. Thus, flocks of migratory birds crossing the thin air of the Himalayas, schools of fish navigating the glassy green shallows of the Caribbean, and swarms of capybaras, a South American rodent weighing more than one hundred pounds with menacing front teeth but little else to defend it, each rely on distributed strategies for protection against predators. By increasing the density of the pack of individuals traveling together, they divide the attention of their nemesis and significantly reduce the probability that a given individual will be caught. By doing so, the chance of perpetuating the group as a whole increases—a distributed strategy of risk management.
Does this approach to handling risk sound familiar? When financial managers advise you to diversify your portfolio, spreading your investments across a large number of companies representing multiple sectors of the economy, they are proposing exactly this sort of distributed strategy, without the capybara's menacing teeth. Even the most influential technology of our time, the Internet, relies on distributed computer grids to fulfill our apparently limitless thirst for information. No single computer controls the flow of bits and bytes across the whole system, and there's no single cable connecting your computer to Google's headquarters when you type in a request to find a Web page on a particular subject. Rather, huge numbers of interconnected machines very quickly route your Google search to one of the company's many computer servers in Mountain View, California. If one of these machines goes bonkers, no problem; the remaining computer network ensures that your query is not lost.
But why do distributed strategies work so well? Why, from proteins to packs of capybaras, does it make sense to rely on large and distributed populations of individual elements? To answer this fundamental question, let's return to the brain and examine the advantages of such a population-coding scheme for thinking.
By distributing thought across a large population of neurons, evolution has designed an insurance policy for the brain. In most cases, people do not lose an important brain function when a single neuron or a small chunk of brain tissue is damaged due to a localized trauma or a minor stroke. Indeed, because of distributed coding, a great deal of brain damage has to occur before patients exhibit any clinical signs and symptoms of neurological dysfunction. Conversely, imagine the risks you would incur if only one of the neurons in your entire brain was in charge of conveying a key aspect of your life, say, the name of your favorite Brazilian soccer team. Lose that neuron, and that information would be forever lost. Yet, throughout our adult lives, individual neurons continuously die without any major side effects. The fact that we almost never notice functional or behavioral effects, though these minuscule neuronal tragedies take place every day, speaks volumes in favor of distributed coding in the brain. Neuron populations are highly adaptive, or plastic; when damaged or dead neurons need to be bypassed, the remaining ones can self-reorganize, changing their physiological, morphological, and connectivity makeup when repetitively exposed to tasks and environments. As my friend Rodney Douglas, of the University of Zurich, recently noted, the brain truly works like an orchestra, but a unique one, in which the music it produces can almost instantaneously modify the configuration of its players and instruments and self-compose a whole new melody from this process.
Evolution may also have favored distributed population coding because it is far more efficient at delivering many complex messages than single-neuron coding. Let's take a simple example. Suppose that a single neuron can convey, or in neuroscience jargon, represent, two distinct messages by flipping between two frequencies of electrical firing, either very rapid firing or very slow firing. If just one neuron was devoted to detecting images in the visual field of an animal, the animal's brain would only be able to respond to two distinct images—firing at a rapid rate when one of the images was detected and at a slow rate for the other. Any other images would not be discernible by the single neuron at that same moment. Now suppose that one hundred different neurons were allocated to perform the same job. The number of distinct images that could be detected with the same two firing states would jump to 2100.
In addition to this dramatic increase in computational power and memory, distributed coding in the brain relies on massive parallel information processing. Single neurons are capable of establishing an incredible number of connections by giving rise to axon processes that branch and reach many other different neurons simultaneously. This intricate mesh of neuronal connections can achieve wondrous things. For example, as part of my doctoral thesis, I created a simple computer program that could store, in a square matrix format, the direct connections shared between the pairs of brain areas and nuclei that form the circuit responsible for controlling cardiovascular functions. I then selected the most important forty brain structures that defined this circuit and identified which of the related forty nuclei were directly connected by a bundle of axons or nerves that uses only one synapse, called a monosynaptic pathway. In my computer program's forty-by-forty matrix, rows indicated the brain structures from which neurons gave rise to such monosynaptic pathways; the columns indicated the structures that received them. If structure number 4 had neurons that sent direct axonal projections to structure number 38, I noted "1" in the respective matrix position (intersection of row 4 and column 38). If neurons belonging to structure 38 reciprocated this connection and sent axons back to structure 4, another "1" was added to the intersection of row 38 and column 4. If there was no direct connection between a given pair (for instance, between nuclei 5 and 24), a "0" was added to the respective matrix position (see a reduced example in Fig. 1.2). Having gone through the trouble of building such a detailed matrix of direct, monosynaptic connections, I decided to ask a very simple question: given all the known pairwise connectivity of the circuit, how many neural pathways existed that could connect any pair in this circuit that did not have a direct monosynaptic connection? In other words, was there any way for information to flow between two unconnected pairs in the circuit? With that question in mind, I set a series of twenty IBM-PC XT microcomputers to run my program, hoping to get an answer. Each of these computers was supposed to seek potential multisynaptic pathways linking one of twenty distinct pairs of brain structures that did not share a direct monosynaptic pathway. At the end of this search, each computer would then print out the potential pathways in a list and a summary graph. I then headed out for a five-day holiday, to celebrate that most sacred of Brazilian religious events, Carnival.
Imagine my shock when, upon returning to the lab, I found that piles and piles of printouts had been generated by half of the computers. The programs running on those ten computers had identified thousands of potential multisynaptic pathways for connecting pairs of structures that did not talk directly to each other (Fig. 1.2). More surprising, of the other ten computers, some had not yet finished printing the potential pathways, while others had simply run out of paper. Even with just a handful of direct pairwise nuclei connections, there were hundreds of thousands or even millions of potential pathways for exchanging information between pairs of brain structures that did not share a monosynaptic connection.
By relying on large populations of interconnected neurons and massive parallel processing to encode information, advanced brains like ours become dynamic systems in which the whole becomes larger than the sum of its individual parts. That happens because the overall dynamic interactions of the network can generate complex global patterns of activity, known as emergent properties, which cannot be predicted from the outset by the linear sum of the individual features of individual elements. Such extreme nonlinear behavior enhances dramatically the physiological and behavioral outcomes that can emerge from the neural networks of the brain. Distributed networks formed by millions or even billions of neurons generate emergent properties such as brain oscillations, complex rhythmic firing patterns that underlie a variety of normal and pathological functions including certain states of sleep and epileptic seizures. Emergent brain properties also generate highly elaborate and complex brain functions, such as perception, motor control, dreaming, and a person's sense of self. Our very consciousness, arguably the most awesome endowment known to us, likely arises as an emergent property of a multitude of dynamically interacting neuronal circuits of the human brain.
FIGURE 1.2 Use of graph theory to study the distribution of pathways linking pairs of neurons. On top, a square matrix is used to represent the direct, monosynaptic connectivity of a small brain circuit. In this matrix, 1 represents the existence of a direct connection between a pair of brain structures, while 0 depicts its absence. Next to the matrix, a graph is used to represent the circuit. Circles with numbers represent the structures and directional arrows represent the direct connectivity information contained in the square matrix. The histogram below depicts the total number of pathways linking two structures (carotid baroreceptor and cerebellum) that did not share a direct, monosynaptic connection. The X axis represents the number of synapses of the pathways and the Y axis depicts the number of pathways found. Notice that millions of pathways were found for this particular example. (Courtesy of Dr. Miguel Nicolelis; redrawn by Dr. Nathan Fitzsimmons, Duke University.)
But the new view of the brain I propose involves much more than a simple shift in emphasis from a single neuron to populations of connected brain cells. Up to now, most neurophysiological theories have consistently ignored the fact that highly elaborated brains do not sit tight and wait for things to happen. Instead, these brains take the initiative and actively gather information about the body in which they are embedded and its surrounding world, tirelessly and diligently sewing the cloth of reality, opinions, loves, and, I am afraid, even prejudices that we proudly, and sometimes blindly, wear every millisecond of our lives, blissfully unaware of where it all comes from. This active information-seeking maintains what I call the "brain's own point of view": the combination of the brain's accumulated evolutionary and individual life history, its global dynamic state at a given moment in time, and its internal representation of the body and the external world. All these components, which comprise our most intimate mental existence, merge into a comprehensive and exquisitely detailed rendition of reality.
The "brain's own point of view" influences decisively the way we perceive not only the complex world around us, but also our body image and our sense of being. The Cartesian assumption, which poses that our brains passively interpret or decode signals coming from the outside world, without any preconceived viewpoint attached to it, can no longer stand up to the experimental evidence. In fact, to fulfill its enormous scientific potential—from unveiling the intricate physiological principles that govern the operation of the human brain to developing brain-machine interfaces capable of both rehabilitating patients devastated by neurological diseases and greatly augmenting human reach—mainstream neuroscience must divest itself from its twentieth-century dogma and wholeheartedly embrace this new view.
In his masterpiece, The Organization of Behavior, published in 1949, the Canadian psychologist Donald O. Hebb promoted the concept that cell assemblies are the true functional unit of the nervous system. A student of Lashley's, Hebb also postulated that no "single nerve cell or pathway [is] essential to any habit or perception." He also pointed out that "electrophysiology of the central nervous system indicates … that the brain is continuously active, in all its parts. An afferent [incoming] excitation [from the body's periphery] must be superimposed on an already existent excitation [inside the brain]. It is therefore impossible that the consequence of a sensory event should often be uninfluenced by the pre-existent [brain] activity."
I propose that the brain's work results from the dynamic interplay of billions of individual neurons that create a continuum in which neuronal space and time seamlessly combine. In a fully behaving animal, as Hebb proposed, no incoming sensory stimulus is processed without first being compared against the brain's internal predispositions and expectations, arduously built through the collection of signals and memories from previous encounters with similar, and even not so similar, stimuli earlier in life. The diffuse electrical response evoked in the brain of a conscious subject when a novel message arrives from the periphery of the body seems to depend heavily on the internal state of the brain at that particular moment in time. Thus, while the constancy of the velocity of light determines why space and time have to be relativized in relation to the state of motion of a pair of observers in the universe, I contend that evolutionary and individual history, the fixed maximum amount of energy a brain can consume, and the maximum rate of neuronal firing offer the constraints that require an equivalent relativization of space and time within our heads.
Most information about the world and our body comes to the brain as a result of exploratory actions initiated by the brain itself. Perception is an active process that starts inside our heads and not at a peripheral site on the body with which the outside world happens to come in contact. Through a variety of exploratory behaviors, the brain continuously tests its own point of view against the new information it encounters. Even though we routinely experience the "feeling" on our fingertips of such tactile attributes as texture, shape, and temperature, in reality these sensations are skillful illusions crafted by the brain—"felt" during the split second in which our fingertips make contact with an object and collect and transmit the sensory data via the nerves back to the brain. If the feeling doesn't match the brain's expectations, it will correct the mismatch by creating a moment of surprise and discomfort, like the one that emerges when you reach into a package of bread and drop the slice when you find it is wet and slippery rather than dry and crumbly. The same process takes place during our elaborate, simultaneous visual, auditory, olfactory, and gustatory "experiences" of the world. All these indisputable human traits are borne by massive electrical brainstorms, which we usually refer to, more colloquially, as the act of thinking.
But could we push the definition of thinking any further? I believe so. I propose that the brain is actually the most awesome simulator to evolve in the known universe, at least as far as we can independently verify. Like a faithful and patient modeler of reality, the main business of our brains is to produce a large variety of behaviors that are vital for our existence as human beings. In essence, these physiological purposes boil down to:
(a) maintaining our bodies in working order through the global physiological process called homeostasis;
(b) building and storing very detailed models of the external world, of our lives, and of the continuous encounters between the two; and
(c) actively and continuously exploring the surrounding environment in search of new information to test and update these internal models. This includes learning from experience and predicting future events and their payoffs by generating potential expectations for their outcomes, costs, and benefits.
This short list covers most of the basic functions of the central nervous system.
By definition, a good simulation or model allows its user to continuously analyze and monitor all sorts of events to predict future outcomes. Neurophysiologists have spent a great deal of time investigating how the brain maintains the body's homeostasis, and in recent decades there's been an explosion of research into how the brain encodes sensory, motor, and cognitive information. But for the most part, because of the difficulty in studying these phenomena experimentally, they have avoided the highly complex behaviors that are encompassed in building and nurturing a model of the world, the pervasive and primordial human longing to create a detailed account, no matter how mystical and abstract, of how the universe was created, how humanity emerged, and why we have the gift of life in this otherwise mundane solar system. Often, these longings are left to the realm of religious inquiry. But these same complex behaviors also endow humans with an ardent curiosity, a key and unique trait of our species, which has led to the emergence of art as well as scientific thinking. Complex behaviors also encompass the elaborate social and courtship strategies employed by humans to achieve the evolutionary goal of transmitting genes to future generations, as well as our continuous attempts to imprint our ideas, dreams, beliefs, fears, and passions into the memories of our loved ones, friends, and other members of our species.
By now you may be thinking that the theoretical shift I am proposing is no big deal. Yet, this issue has played a central role in an ongoing theoretical scrimmage that has engulfed neuroscience during a two-hundred-year intellectual battle over the brain's soul. And as it happens, the notion of the brain as a model builder has found significant support outside the neuroscience community. In his classic book, The Selfish Gene, the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins espouses the view that the brain, particularly that of humans, has evolved the enormously advantageous capacity of creating very elaborate simulations of reality. The physicist David Deutsch goes even further by proposing, in his book The Fabric of Reality, that all "we experience directly is a virtual-reality rendering, conveniently generated for us by our unconscious mind from sensory data plus complex inborn and acquired theories (i.e. programs) about how to interpret them."
• *
In the first paragraph of his masterpiece book, Cosmos, Carl Sagan muses, "The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us—there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries."
As far as we know, there is only one offspring of this awesome cosmos capable of deciphering its majestic language while producing a reel of luxurious sensations that our true parents, faraway deceased supernovas, never had the privilege to enjoy. While these progenitors burned away, unaware that their stardust would one day blow the breath of life on a small bluish planet revolving around an average star located in a remote corner of a distant galaxy, our brains endow us to lustily consume every bit of our conscious existence while silently carving in our minds the many intimate tales of a lifetime.
Thus, if ever there has been a scientific battle worth fighting for, it is the one in which neuroscientists have embroiled themselves for the past two centuries. And if you asked me to take a side, I would not hesitate a millisecond to say that, at the end of this intellectual brawl, as Brazilians proved twenty-five years ago, those siding with the inebriant plea generated by another huge crowd, one formed by billions of interconnected neurons, shall prevail.
Excerpted from Beyond Boundaries by Miguel Nicolelis
Copyright 2011 by Miguel Nicolelis
Published in 2011 by Times Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.
Meet the Author
Miguel Nicolelis, M.D. Ph.D., is the Anne W. Deane Professor of Neuroscience at Duke University and founder of Duke's Center for Neuroengineering. His award-winning research has been published in Nature, Science, and other leading scientific journals, as well as in Scientific American, which named him one of the twenty most influential scientists in the world. A member of the French and Brazilian academies of sciences, he lives in North Carolina.
Customer Reviews
Average Review:
and post it to your social network
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
See all customer reviews >


text:
Monthly Archives: June 2010
27 ways to triple your traffic, our latest article in Real Business
The latest article in Real Business Magazine written with the help of Return On Digital
Continue reading →
Daily Mail Base Story On Fake Twitter Account
There has been a lot of uproar since the launch of the iPhone 4 with many blogs, tweets and videos highlighting the major flaw with the new iPhone, that being the fact if you hold it in your left hand, it won't work properly.
Continue reading →
Problems with iPhone 4? Just don't hold it that way!
Apple are good at stuff. Stuff like making gadgets that look good and work and make you look cool. That's why so many people were seen queuing from the early hours on Thursday morning to get their hands on the iPhone 4.
Continue reading →
Watch Your Favourite Videos To The Sounds Of The Vuvuzela
Forget stroppy players, new balls and poor pitches – the highlight (or lowlight depending on your viewpoint) of this World Cup has been the incessant drone from the Vuvuzela.
Continue reading →
How Twitter Got Me To The Supergrass Aftershow Party
I'm a massive fan of both Twitter and Supergrass – last week I combined social media and brit pop and the results were a cracking night out in Paris watching then meeting my favourite band ever.
Continue reading →
Visit our
Digital Marketing Resource Centreto downlaod free ebooks, templates, webinars & more.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Hello, Hello. Sign In
Please enter a valid city, state or zip code
1 review | 3 out of 5
Used it today for the first time and the handle came off and I didn't have that much weight in it. Seems cheaply made. I like the legs on the chest-I can work out of it with out bending over and use the top of it as a work platform. I just hope the rest of the chest holds up. I work for the public schools and use it to carry my supplies and tools down the hallways.


text:
By judyinjerusalem
October 1, 2009
I spent yesterday in Shechem and Ramallah with a small group of journalists. I'm working on a few articles from the trip, but in the meantime, take a look at some of the photos (there are almost 100, so too many to post to the blog) at http://web.me.com/jbalint1/Site/Photos.html#grid"
What you'll see are two cities completely controlled and patrolled by Arabs; not a Jew or IDF soldier anywhere in sight in either place. Arab police officers, armed and in full uniform are on most street corners. Building and commerce is going on at an incredible pace--we visited the 12-story Nablus Municipal Mall, complete with cinema and the Palestinian Securities Exchange office, both of which would not be out of place in California.
Despite all this, it's "the occupation" that's on everyone's lips in Shechem and Ramallah as they cite the difficulties of moving into the 21st century while somehow under Israel's thumb.
As we drove in our van with PA license plates between Shechem and Ramallah we encountered the remnants of Israel's control in Samaria--the dreaded checkpoints. Since last June, Israel has dismantled and abandoned hundreds of them, and the remaining ones are supposed to protect Israeli Jews living near their Arab neighbors from attack.
At the Tapuach checkpoint outside Shechem,the jumpy soldiers hastily called a close-down in both directions just as we approached. After about 10 minutes of uncertainty, we were summarily waved through. Later we learned that an Israeli was evacuated by helicopter to hospital after he was shot by Arab terrorists a couple of miles south of where we were, between Shvut Rachel and Kida.
While we were wandering around enjoying the sights and color of Shechem's Old City, I remembered that the terrorist responsible for the Park Hotel seder night bombing in Netanya as well as the Dolphinarium horror in Tel Aviv came from Shechem.
Nevertheless, the well-dressed officials in Ramallah and Shechem still intone the same old tired rhetoric about our desire for self-preservation somehow impeding their efforts to go about building their state.
I couldn't help recalling the slogan on the back of an Arab cab in Halhul that I saw a few months ago: "Life is Not Everything." Photo at http://jerusalemdiaries.blogspot.com


text:
Saturday, May 30, 2009
2 Comments | By Ranjini Nair
To stay updated with similiar articles follow
User Comments & RatingsJoin India Forums for free to comment on this story. Have an account already? Use Quick Login to comment.
Adesh's extra-marital affair will be out in the public causing a big ...
Few more prominent names have been cast in Imagine's upcoming show, ...
Kolkata, Nov 9 (IANS) From a bouquet of vintage classics to a collage ...
Disclaimer: All Logos and Pictures of various Channels, Shows, Artistes, Media Houses, Companies, Brands etc. belong to their respective owners, and are used to merely visually identify the Channels, Shows, Companies, Brands, etc. to the viewer. Incase of any issue please contact the webmaster.
Popular Channels :Star Plus | Zee TV | Sony TV | Colors TV | SAB TV | Life OK
Quick Links :Top 100 TV Celebrities | Top 100 Bollywood Celebs | About Us | Contact Us | Advertise | Forum Index


text:
Hello everyone,
I was wondering why spiders like Googlebot still see my original URL structure in WP instead of the permalink setups I have installed? For example these two URLs are the same:
Right now Googlebot is spidering both most of the time it is spidering the numeric based one more, when I want them to spider the one using the article title. Any ideas how I can stop the spider from seeing these old URLs besides having to do one by one 301 redirects?


text:
Tennessee coach Butch Jones says the Volunteers' open practice Saturday should allow his team's 32 newcomers to enter the season with at least some idea of what it's like to perform in front of a big crowd at Neyland Stadium.
The Volunteers tuned up for their Aug. 31 season opener against Utah State with a workout that drew an announced attendance of 40,000 to Neyland Stadium.
Fourteen of Tennessee's newcomers were here for spring practice and got to play in the Orange & White Game, which had an announced attendance of 68,548. But this was an entirely new experience for the other 18 members of that heralded signing class. Jones said that "for them to come in here and have this type of environment was extremely beneficial for us moving forward."


text:
In the early history of this country, and as late as fifty or perhaps even twenty-five years ago, large tracts of sparsely settled portions of the United States presented conditions in which it was impossible for the thoroughly educated medical man to obtain a just recompense for the time and money necessarily expended in acquiring his medical education, yet these communities required the services of physicians, and it therefore happened that persons with very slight qualifications took up the practice of physic and endeavored to supply the demands of the community that was unable to obtain anything better.
With increase in population, wealth and civilization the people became more discriminating in their choice of doctors, the communication with distant points was more rapid, the advent of railroads made it easier to secure competent medical men, and consequently the poorly qualified doctors have gradually decreased until at present there are few
Some tools below are only available to our subscribers or users with an online account.
Download citation file:
Customize your page view by dragging & repositioning the boxes below.
More Listings atJAMACareerCenter.com >
Enter your username and email address. We'll send you a link to reset your password.
Enter your username and email address. We'll send instructions on how to reset your password to the email address we have on record.
Need assistance?
Athens and Shibboleth are access management services that provide single sign-on to protected resources. They replace the multiple user names and passwords necessary to access subscription-based content with a single user name and password that can be entered once per session. It operates independently of a user's location or IP address. If your institution uses Athens or Shibboleth authentication, please contact your site administrator to receive your user name and password.


text:
Drag to set position!
Group Since April 19, 2007
Ellesche ADMIN January 20, 2015
This group was created in April 2007 and ran contests until August 2013. The contests are now closed.
We would like to thank everyone for their support and participation!
(I have locked all Discussions but have left the pool open to submissions.)
We would like to thank everyone for their support and participation!
(I have locked all Discussions but have left the pool open to submissions.)
Group DescriptionAll contests have been closed.
Thank you.
Group RulesThe Group is now closed but these were the rules:
- There are 5 new contests created on alternate Saturdays.
- You may only enter 1 photo per contest thread.
- The photo should be medium-sized.
- Contest entries should be numbered accordingly.
- When it's time to vote, you cannot vote for yourself. Only vote once.
- You can vote in any contest, even if you didn't put an entry into it.
- Once the voting has begun, please refrain from entering more photos to that contest.
- The most votes wins the contest.
- To enter a contest, simply go to the photo you want to enter, click on it, then note the arrow on the right, after the email, Facebook and Twitter logos, click. This will open up a drop down menu. Click on Grab the HTML/BBCode and select HTML and Medium 500. Copy the code. Then go to the contest thread and paste the code into the 'post a comment' box within the thread. Then move it down a few lines and type in the number that is next in line following the persons entry above yours. It's as simple as that!
- You may enter any photo in more than one contest, even if it's won in the past. It does not matter, a contest is a contest in my opinion.
- The group pool is for any photos you'd like to post, it is not just for entries or winners. You may post 5 photos to the pool daily.
- There is to be no nudity or sexually explicit photos entered into the group in any way.
- The new contests start every other Saturday and they run 2 weeks. They will then be open for voting for 2 weeks. So you can basically look for new contests around the first and middle of the month.
- Voting runs from Saturday to 2 Saturdays later. If you enter, please take the time to vote. It makes it more fun!
- The winners get posted in the threads and on the main page.
- There are a few threads that you may want to enter if you are new to the group:
* Who's Behind the Camera is a photo and short description of other group members. It's fun to see who's behind the entries.
* Association Game - Come Add A Pic keeps going and going and it increases your photo exposure and makes you dig in your stream for the next posting.
* Icon for two weeks - submit your photo to be the group's icon for two weeks. Please submit it in 48X48 size.
* There are currently 2 threads open for contest ideas.
Additional Info
- Members can post 2 things to the pool each day.
- Accepted content types: Photos, Images
- Accepted safety levels: Safe


text:
WEST WINDSOR, N.J. -- Artour Samsonov and Luke Walton of the Harvard boat club led four men's pairs crews into the finals of the U.S. Olympic Team rowing trials Monday.
The competition set up the fields in men's pairs, men's double
sculls and women's pairs for the best of-three finals, starting
Tuesday on Lake Mercer. Winners of the four events will earn spots
at the 2004 Olympics.
Samsonov and Walton won in 6 minutes, 37.86 seconds. Jamie
Schroeder and Dan Walsh of the Princeton training center were .85
seconds behind.
Jason Flickinger and three-time Olympian Jeff Klepacki won the
second semifinal in 6:44.19, beating Princeton teammates Bob
Kaehler and Ryan Torgerson by 1.25 seconds.
Henry Nuzum and Aquil Abdullah of U.S. Navy/PTC won the first
semifinal of the men's double sculls in a time of 6:26.61,
defeating Harvard's Ken Jurkowski and Adam Holland by 2.19 seconds.
Jonathan Burns and Todd Beyreuther of Vesper Boat Club-Pocock
Rowing Club won the second semifinal in 6:20.04, beating Michael
Callahan and Dave Friedericks of MLARC.
In the women's pair repechage, or second chance, Kate Ronkainen
and Dana Peirce defeated Princeton teammates Katie Hammes and Maite
Urtasun by 0.24 seconds. Both crews advanced to the final, where
they will race Sunday's heat winners, Kate MacKenzie and Sarah
Jones from New York Athletic Club-Princeton training center and
Liane Malcos and Portia Johnson of Princeton.


text:
Whether you are looking for trailers or Vehicles, Hotfrog is the place to go to. Browse the businesses below in DOWNHAM MARKET, Norfolk or extend your search to nearby suburbs by using the left navigation menu. Hotfrog makes your search easier.
Downham Market, Norfolk
SJC Group are pleased to be appointed a dealer for Kraker Trailers of Axel in Holland. Kraker build one of the widest varieties of Moving Floor trail…
More info
- 18/10/2010
commercial vehicle
Small Business Hub
Sharing tips, ideas and advice to help grow your small business
Hotfrog AdVantage
Hotfrog AdVantage ads appear above the rest in Hotfrog feature pages. By upgrading today your ad will appear in front of potential customers before they notice your competitors.
Create your free Hotfrog business profile
Follow Hotfrog on:
Share on:
Hotfrog Small Business Hub


text:
Our Products & Services
Launtel offers all the fancy telecommunications products and services that the 'big players' do, but without any of the frustrations.
We don't remain anonymous behind the phone.
We'll come to you so we can see and discuss your requirements.
We don't baffle you with 'tech speak'.
We'll talk plain English and help you understand the products most suited to your business needs.
We don't pressure you into buying today's special.
We'll suggest to you the solution most appropriate to your needs.
We don't forget you once you've purchased our products and services.
We're always happy to provide you with trial products, we follow up to make sure our products and services are meeting your needs and we guarantee everything we provide.
We don't leave you to resolve problems with someone overseas.
We'll come to you personally and solve the problem immediately.


text:
Employment & Community Options
Rating: 4.91 stars 11 11 reviews
9370 Sky Park Ct. Ste 210 San Diego CA 92123 USA
Founded in 1985, we provide employment and independent living services to individuals with disabilities. We envision a society that embraces all its members as full partners in their community. Our goal is to assist individuals to become productive tax paying citizens. Our mission is to create and support opportunities for adults with disabilities and disadvantaged seniors in making choices to live, work and enjoy life with dignity and respect. For 23 years, we were a division of the Foundation for Educational Achievement under the name of Community Options. Effective March 1, 2008 we became a free standing non-profit organization named Employment & Community Options.
-Supported Employment -Integrated Employment -Independent Living Services -Micro Enterprise -Senior Community Services Employment Programs
Filter Reviews by Role
Promote This Nonprofit
GreatNonprofits badges allow you to raise awareness of your favorite nonprofits on your own web sites!
Reviews for Employment & Community Options
13 people found this review helpful
It was greatly appreciated that I had a chance to be a participant in Employment & Community Options (ECO) under Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP)in San Diego. Being 50+ job seeker, there was a barrier in employ-ment considering the present economy hence, ECO with the help of all staffs of the tremen- dous organization meet the needs of seniors like me by conducting workshops such as resume development, interviewing strategies, searching labor market and basic computer skills. I was placed on intership with a host site (Mercy Clinic) for a job experience. This will give me a current and local work refe-rence that can validate my work habits and skills. Without experience even with school certificates cannot help me to be employed as med. asst. The clinic is so happy being me as volunteer to them. ECO offers assistance in finding job leads considering a stipend that was regularly given to me every 15 days. A really great help! I am looking forward to continue this tremendous assistance of ECO/SCSEP to my fellow seniors to resolve and overcome problems in finding employment.
More Feedback
I've personally experienced the results of this organization in...
seeing the good result of helping seniors of our community not to be dependent from anybody.
If I had to make changes to this organization, I would...
invite unemployed to join considering the unemployment problems nowadays
What I've enjoyed the most about my experience with this nonprofit is...
This organization trusted me as senior that I am a mature worker who would do a job far better than a less experienced person.
The kinds of staff and volunteers that I met were...
considerate, understanding the present condition of economy and did their best to help seniors like me to get employed.
If this organization had 10 million bucks, it could...
it will be a great help to anybody who needs assistance.
Ways to make it better...
there are more jobs available to be hired
In my opinion, the biggest challenges facing this organization are...
financial capacity to meet the needs of organization therefore I would encourage philantropist and other wealthy people to contribute not only to medical research but also to human needs.
One thing I'd also say is that...
Keep your good works and SOMEBODY will reward your later.
How frequently have you been involved with the organization?
About every week
When was your last experience with this nonprofit?
13 people found this review helpful
I have had the privilege of co-charing a Gala Fund-raiser for this organization. I was able to see first-hand how dedicated the CEO and her staff are at providing employment and training options for disabled individuals. It is an excellent organization, efficiently run, making very good use of limited donated and public funding to provide for a better life for the disabled. It strives to give them a sense of purpose and pride in themselves by being able to contribute to society, and live as independently as possible.
More Feedback
I've personally experienced the results of this organization in...
seeing individuals employed and contributing to society and living independently. The money that we raised is used efficiently and with dedication.
What I've enjoyed the most about my experience with this nonprofit is...
working with the CEO and her staff to organize and deliver a successful fund-raiser.
The kinds of staff and volunteers that I met were...
very dedicated and hard-working and devoted to helping their clients. They were professional and demonstrated good ethics, as well as altrusism and a strong desire to improve their clients welfare.
If this organization had 10 million bucks, it could...
expand its services to help more individuals by providing expanded training with more resources and more employment opportunities as well as provide more assistance in improving lives.
How frequently have you been involved with the organization?
About every month
When was your last experience with this nonprofit?
6 people found this review helpful
This is a great organization. It helps by providing employment oportunities to health challenged individuals that are capable to do a great job. These employees are some of the best employees that one can possible have. I would strongly recommend that employers really take a look at these individuals and give them a chance. It can be possible be one of the best investments that you will ever make. Louis Shapiro, HHP firstname.lastname@example.com Helping Build a better tomorrow through Nutritional Supplements, Massage and Yoga
More Feedback
I've personally experienced the results of this organization in...
My Yoga class.
How frequently have you been involved with the organization?
About every month
When was your last experience with this nonprofit?


text:
Let your family and friends know that you are graduating! Announcements come with 10 inner and outer envelopes.
If you did not enter this site via the announcement page on our web site, please go to this link to complete the vital statistics page so we can complete your announcements.


text:
ELLENTON, Fla. (AP) - Authorities say an ultra-light planecrashed in western Florida, but no one was injured.
Authorities say the pilot, who was the only person aboard the plane, was not injured.
Manatee County Sheriff's Office says the Tuesday afternoon crash damaged a power pole and power lines.
Authorities are investigating the crash.
(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)


text:
Some of the names on the move ahead of the open. » Read More
A former tech bubble victim could be the industry's most likely takeover target, Cramer says.
Stocks got a weak start after the selloff in China but rebounded by midday after a report showed a surprise drop in crude inventories, which sent oil prices — and energy stocks — soaring.
Stocks got a weak start after the selloff in China but rebounded by midday after a report showed a surprise drop in crude inventories, which sent oil prices — and energy stocks — soaring.
Stocks moved back into correction mode Wednesday after Chinese stocks tumbled 5 percent, sending another ripple around the world.
World markets are back in selloff mode Wednesday, with Shanghai's 5 percent tumble the first indication that Tuesday's rally for world stocks might be a one-off event.
The Lightning Round is extended in this CNBC.com exclusive feature.
Yesterday's close marked one-week since AIG's 1:20 reverse stock split. With a one-week decline of over 40% versus an S&P decline of only 4.2% over the one-week period, will AIG's stock price rebound from this sharp decline, or will its shares continue to plummet?
Plus a stock that might have Cramer calling child services.
With Apple and Ebay's better than expected earnings yesterday, many are looking to Microsoft, which is scheduled to report after the bell today, as a barometer for the rest of the tech sector. Here are the results of a stock screen looking for beaten down techs companies that analysts expect to grow at a fast clip in the year ahead.
The Lightning Round is extended in this CNBC.com exclusive feature.
The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) kicks off today in Las Vegas and one week into the new year, the S&P Tech Sector is off to a strong start up 3.6% and only behind the Materials Sector.
As we enter the first full week of 2009, just over 25% of the S&P 500 stocks have forward EPS growth expectations in the double digits. Here is a sampling of them.
Over 95% of S&P 500 companies are in negative territory for 2008, but are there any that may be poised for a bigger rebound in 2009? Here is a screen that might give you some ideas.
Following are the day's biggest winners and losers. Find out why shares of Home Depot and Barrick Gold popped while United Air Lines and Supervalu dropped.
Here's our Fast Money Final Trade. Our gang gives you tomorrow's best trades, right now!
If you've made a lot of money playing a trend, or just investing in a hot industry, then your natural instinct is to keep finding new ways to play that trend. But that's how you get burned.Investing can be confusing. Luckily, Cramer has mapped out some road rules for all you Home Gamers trying to navigate the jungle that is Wall Street. Think of it as "Mad Money 101" –- some fundamental advice to keep in mind as you play the market. Whether you're a first time investor or a seasoned financier, it's always good to remember the basics.
Following are the day's biggest winners and losers. Find out why shares of Ford and Staples popped while iRobot and Apache dropped.
Google is up over 85 points, or 18 percent, Friday. Here are the biggest one-day moves of the S&P 500 constituents (adjusted for splits and dividends).
With the big rallies of the past few days, many are wondering if we have hit a bottom. If history is any guide, the biggest returns come within the first few months of troughs. Here are some recent examples...
As of Friday, 441 (just under 90%) of the S&P 500 companies have reported earnings. Here's a look at which companies have had the biggest surprises so far...


text:
Three people are injured and taken to the hospital after two motorcycles collide on U.S. 24 near Grantville, KS Sunday evening.
Sheriffs say the motorcycles were both traveling on west bound U.S. 24 near Clark Road just before 7 p.m. when they collided.
One of the motorcycles was sent up over the median, crossed east bound traffic and came to rest in the south bound ditch.
All were taken to Stormont Vail hospital.
No word on the extent of their injuries.


text:
cart subtotal:
This is your chance to put a smile on someone's face without ever meeting them or even knowing them, and it's that blind generosity that makes theCHIVE community so unique. Learn more about these options.
United States of Film Poster
Show your state pride, the cinematic way!
This poster is perfect for your dorm room, living room, kitchen, man cave, bathroom, or crawl space. You name the place, the "United States of Film" poster goes great anywhere!
Poster dimensions are 24'' x 36''.
Printed in 'Merica.
Frame not included, dummy.
Please allow at least 1-3 business days for order processing of in-stock merchandise, unless otherwise noted on the product pages. Once your order leaves our warehouse in Austin TX, the shipping speed selected at checkout determines how quickly the carrier delivers your order. Please see our FAQs for more information.
Items may be exchanged/returned within 45 days of delivery, as long as the item is in the same condition in which you received it. Contact Us to let us know your preference. Please note all returned items must be in their original condition: unused, unwashed, and unworn. Additionally, swimwear and all intimate apparel items cannot be exchanged or returned due to sanitary reasons. Please see our FAQs for more information.


text:
Ultraviolet Facial Snapshot Shows Skin's Hidden Sun Damage, Encourages Sun Protection
High-Tech Photos Show Early Sun Damage
Instant Motivation continued...
Fewer used sunscreen. They reported wearing sunscreen about two out of three times on their face and about half the time on their bodies when sunbathing. They skipped sunscreen more than half of the time on their face (58%) and nearly eight out of 10 times on their bodies when outside but not sunbathing.
The study went a little further for some students. After finishing the first questionnaire, they watched a video about sun protection and had an instant UV photo taken of their face. Next, they saw their pictures and completed the second survey. Some also got a sample of sunless tanning lotion to take home. The researchers also wanted to see if this alternative to sun tanning would increase after the intervention. They were warned that the lotion didn't offer any sun protection.
Changing Their Ways
The UV photographs made an impact. They prompted more students to step up their sun efforts. The photographed students were also more likely to have told people about what they learned, the study shows.
However in surprise phone calls made one month later, only a third (37%) of those who got the sunless tanning lotion used it. Several students said they were afraid it would streak and look orange or unnatural.
Since many people didn't try the sunless tanning lotion, the results from that part of the experiment were limited. Based on the small numbers who did try it, "this might lead to additional sun protection behaviors," write the researchers.
Letting people take the UV photographs home could also help, say Mahler and colleagues. They didn't do that in this study, but the photo could be a lasting reminder to safeguard skin, they say.
Their study appears in the March edition of the Archives of Dermatology.


text:
Definition of Paraclete in English:
(In Christian theology) the Holy Spirit as advocate or counsellor (John 14:16, 26).
Example sentences
- The theology of the Paraclete contains and promotes a theological-ontological congruence.
- Johannine theology of the Paraclete points to a primary way in which participation in the exercise of political power can be a form of public witness to Christ.
- And we confess the living Holy Spirit, the living Paraclete.
Via late Latin from Greek paraklētos 'called in aid', from para- 'alongside' + klētos (from kalein 'to call').
For editors and proofreaders
Line breaks: Para|clete
Definition of Paraclete in:
What do you find interesting about this word or phrase?
Comments that don't adhere to our Community Guidelines may be moderated or removed.
= trending


text:
As soon as Steve entered the hospital, all eyes were on him. He had dirt and blood all over himself, his Captain America suit had large rips where his wounds were already healing, and was carrying an unconscious Tony Stark. He had managed to take him out of the Iron Man suit with JARVIS's help, but wasn't able to wake him up, don't matter how loud he yelled his name.
Tony was taken to the emergency room and Steve asked one of the nurses for some change to call Peter.
"Hello?" The 18 year old answered.
"Peter, it's Steve. I'm at the hospital."
"What?! What happened?"
"It's... Tony."
"I'll be there in 10 minutes."
And he was. When Peter arrived, Steve explained that Tony had been injured in battle and was unconscious before heading to the restroom with the change of clothes that Peter brought for him.
It was a couple of hours before they got any news. Doctor Scott was Tony's doctor and was well aware of his condition with the arc reactor, no other doctor was ever allowed to treat Tony. He was a tall man with grey hair and rectangular glasses that kept sliding down his nose.
"Mr. Stark seems physically fine." He spoke in his thick Australian accent. "Some minor injuries have been properly treated. But he's still unconscious and it might take a few days for him to wake up, only then we will be able to diagnose any possible brain damage caused by the head injury."
It has been two weeks. Steve is going insane with the waiting, he spends as much time as he can in Tony's room, just looking at him waiting for him to wake up. Peter spends a lot of time in college, so he's mostly alone.
He twirls the golden wedding ring on his finger and taps his foot on the floor in time with Tony's heart monitor. The arc reactor shines through the hospital gown, but it seems less bright than before. Tony's skin looks pale and his beard looks weird, it's still growing back after one of the nurses shaved it completely when Steve wasn't there. 'Tony will be so pissed when he wakes up and I tell him that someone messed with his beard', he thinks and smiles sadly.
Steve is looking down and thinking about the battle that did all this, so he doesn't see it when Tony's fingers twitch and his eyes open up slowly. The first thing he sees is the ceiling, and it's so white and clean that it's actually a bit nauseating. He then hears the heart monitor and looks at the machine, trails the wires that come out of it and connect in his hand. Tony frowns before looking down at himself and there's something glowing on his chest. He lifts an eyebrow quizzically and looks down his gown to see something bright and weird just sticking out of his chest and his eyes grow wide.
"What the fuck?!" He whispers.
"Tony?" A voice calls. He quickly turns his head to the side, only now noticing the blond man sitting on a chair. The man smiles brightly, there are tears in his eyes and he's getting up.
"Did you do this to me?!" Tony asks, scared, pointing at his chest.
Steve stops walking towards him, looking confused. "What do you mean?"
"There's a huge round thing sticking out of my fucking chest! What the hell is it!?"
"That's... That's your arc reactor." Steve starts approaching him again, but when he tries to touch Tony he flinches away.
"My what?"
"Are you okay, Tony?" Steve sits on the bed and reaches for Tony's hand, but he flinches once again.
"No! I'm not! And could you please stop trying to touch me?! Creep! Who the hell are you anyway?!"
Steve can almost hear his own heart shatter at that and he gets up. Tony is looking at him like Steve is some sort of pervert, but he manages to push the button to call the doctor and leave the room before he lets the tears of shock run down his cheeks. There are four words repeatedly haunting his thoughts. 'He doesn't remember me.'.
Walking on Broken Glass - 1 by black-iiceWatch
©2012-2016 black-iice
: How about if after a fight Tony gets hurt and loses his memory? Like, he and Steve had Peter and gotten married, but Tony thinks he's back before he made his Ironman suit. And Steve has to help him regain his memory all the while dealing with the torture of a Tony who doesn't even know him?
This is me trying to write a chapter story! Hope it's not too bad. The next chapter should be up soon.
Awful title came to me while I was listening to 21 Guns by Green Day.
Also, Tony's doctor is an older version of Bon Scott, because well, I was thinking of a name for the doctor when Highway to Hell started playing. God rest his soul.
Next chapter: [link]
This is me trying to write a chapter story! Hope it's not too bad. The next chapter should be up soon.
Awful title came to me while I was listening to 21 Guns by Green Day.
Also, Tony's doctor is an older version of Bon Scott, because well, I was thinking of a name for the doctor when Highway to Hell started playing. God rest his soul.
Next chapter: [link]
Dude, you used my idea!!! I had forgotten about that!! FUCK YEAH!
Ahah yeah, I loved this idea but I could only see it in a multi-chapter story, that's why it took me so long to start it, sorry c:
Dude, I don't mind. You're going faster on your chapter story than I am with mine! And I've been working on mine for over a month.
I'm just really excited about it, I get new ideas every day c: In wish I could say I'm always like that though. I some time my brain will probably shut down and I will take forever to upload x.x But I hope you like it so far!
Can I just say I feel like a parent watching their baby grow up? It's like, I'm so proud to see my little idea turn into this wonderful story by a wonderful writer!
Aww honey you're making me blush Thank you so much, it means so much to me that you like it. I hope I won't disappoint you!
Please, please write more
Please, please write more
:c meeeeehhhh........ the sadness T_T amazingly written though...
o.o noooo *insert tears* whyyy very well written but whyyyy
Because someone gave me that prompt ;___; It will get better on future chapters though!
Thank you honey c:
Thank you honey c:
MY FEELS!!!!!!!!!!! God this was amazing. This would be beyond freaking depressing if it really happened, but I would follow it nonetheless since I have such a good experience with the first part. Applause for you!
Aww oh my god, thank you so much!
Wow you made me cry! Good start to the story! It takes alot to make me cry!


text:
Comments about 'Americans' views on morals have changed through time'
- Oldest first
- Newest first
- Most recommended
"It used to be socially unacceptable
to have premartial sex, but acceptable to
mistreat people who were a different race.
Now its just the opposite."
I disagree. It is no longer socially acceptable to mistreat people of certain colors or certain religions, but it is acceptable to mistreat people of other colors, religions, and size. All we have done is change the protected class.
Groups that are PC to mistreat:
Especially Mormons
Fat people
White people
And of some of each political party totally demean and mistreat all of differing views from themselves, some even resorting to calling the others racists.
I don't call that improvement.
- 2:55 p.m. Feb. 2, 2013
- Like
- Report abuse
Pagan, Massachussetts' divorce rate is low because the state's
*marriage* rate is low. You can't get divorced if you don't get
married. - TheProudDuck
And yet, Massachusetts was the first state to allow gay marriage in 2004.
Today, in 2013 you can cite zero adverse effects of gay marriage. Even the article I provided was x5 years after gay marriage was legal in MA.
Please, keep up.
x5 years after gay marriage, MA has the lowest divorce rate, since the 1940's.
Zero adverse effect.
- 6:52 p.m. Feb. 2, 2013
- Like (2)
- Report abuse
Re Copy Cat
I don't believe it is socially acceptable to mistreat Mormons or white people or other Christians. Fat people? Not really that acceptable either. Many Evengelical Christians believe the earth or universe is 12,000 years old and I have seen ridicule of this belief because there is so much evidence to refute it, but that's about it.
- 9:19 p.m. Feb. 3, 2013
- Like
- Report abuse
DeseretNews.com encourages a civil dialogue among its readers. We welcome your thoughtful comments.
— About comments
- Jay's Jokes: Trump's true identity is Batman
- In our opinion: Fred Adams' Shakespeare...
- About Utah: How this Utahn turned a chance...
- My view: Reform coal leasing policies and...
- In our opinion: Despite alarming shift...
- My view: Drafting women a threat to religious...
- Richard Davis: What will Americans sacrifice...
- Derek B. Miller: It's my party and I'll decry...


text:
Dead Space: A Journey Through Terror – part one focuses on Isaac Clarke's journey
EA has released the first video in its Dead Space: A Journey Through Terror series which charts the evolution of the Dead Space series to date.
The first episode of the four-part mini-series recounts Isaac's journey so far, and is posted below.
Tomorrow, part two will focus on The Art of Dead Space.
Dead Space 3 is out today in the US.
Sometimes we include links to online retail stores. If you click on one and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. For more information, go here.


text:
Skip to Main Content
IEEE membership options for an individual and IEEE Xplore subscriptions for an organization offer the most affordable access to essential journal articles, conference papers, standards,
eBooks, and eLearning courses.
Learn more about:
IEEE membership
IEEE Xplore subscriptions
The processes of software engineering and the industries themselves tend to be fluctuant. There are numerous factors, such as software methodologies, technologies, supporting tools, and process managements, which may significantly affect the strategies and activities of a software development process. We improve the PIE approach and propose an XML-based meta-model for process and agent-based integrated software development environment (PRAISE). PRAISE includes both the external representation in UML and its internal representation in XML, and can be used to support the integration of software development in a global aspect.
A not-for-profit organization, IEEE is the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.© Copyright 2016 IEEE - All rights reserved. Use of this web site signifies your agreement to the terms and conditions.


text:
Hubert the Teddy Bear: Winter Games Wii
- Publisher: Teyon
- Release Date: Feb 8, 2010
User Score
No user score yet- Awaiting 3 more ratings
User score distribution:
Positive: 0 out of 1
Mixed: 0 out of 1
Negative: 1 out of 1
Review this game
- User score
- By date
- Most helpful
There are no user reviews yet - Be first to review Hubert the Teddy Bear: Winter Games.
Whilst the number of games implies a lot of bang for your buck, their limited duration and simplistic nature might limit long-term appeal and we think a "less is more" approach, featuring fewer games with deeper play mechanics and goals would have been a better development route.
Hubert the Teddy Bear: Winter Games is not a worthwhile investment. The game feels very rushed and repetitive, and it would've been nice to see Teyon spice up the game a little.


text:
Join us on an incredible journey throughout Tornado Alley in pursuit of Tornadoes and Supercell Thunder Storms with professional storm chasers. We offer single day and 7 day storm chasing tours.
Looking for a cool and refreshing way to spend your summer vacation? For $150 you can enjoy a full day's rental. Don't let someone else dictate where to have fun when you can tow-n-go with your jet ski to the lake of your choice.
"Tow & Go" Jet Ski rentals - Dallas.Affordable Family Fun! Visit the lake of your choice. Lake Lewisville, Texoma, Grapevine, Ray Hubbard, Joe Pool ... No Limits, Just Fun
Alla's Bed and Breakfast(full breakfast &free private parking) is located near downtown Dallas Texas. Six Flags over Texas,Race track,golf,spa,trails,Dallas Botanical garden, Dallas zoo & Dallas football stadium and much more are all only 15 min.aw
Country comfort close to Canton First Monday Trade Days. Accomodations for 2 to 28, full breakfast cooked before your eyes, handicapped accessible, pool room, heated swimming pool, & hot tub under the stars.
Alla's Historical Bed and Breakfast is located near downtown Dallas Tx. Expect more than a hotel or inns! For vacation travel, experience the best romantic escape or getaway in Texas!
Christian getaway nestled in Texas beauty. Perfect setting for an E TX getaway! Let them create your fantastic retreat, reunion or group event: Scrapbook, Quilt, Craft & Spa, Ladies / Women, etc! Custom Getaways you will want to return to every year!
$150 All Day Rental
Historic Bed & Breakfast in beautiful Pineywoods of east Texas. 11 rooms, all with private baths. Newly opened fine dining restaurant "REBEKAH'S". Southern hospitality & warmth at it's finest. Home away from home. Beautiful landscaping.
JT's Party Boat Rentals 2 vessels 1-50 people on Lewisville Lake in Dallas, TX for Birthday, Family/Class Reunion, Bachelor/ette, Anniversary, Wedding, Networking, Corporate, Public or Private Charter. Tour, swim, dance, listen to music, relax-FUN!
Select your destination in Greenville Texas. Browse thousands of listings for accommodations, adventures, tours and travel services.


text:
Use of Day Laborers Common in Big U.S. Cities
NPR's Jim Zarroli reports that day-labor markets have become commonplace in America's big cities. Immigrant laborers looking for a job for the day, or maybe for the week, begin arriving early in the morning at a particular street corner. Often they congregate in the same spot day after day, year after year. These men make up an important underground work force, especially in the construction and building trades. A new study says many prefer day work to steady employment because day jobs pay better.
You must be signed in to leave a comment. Sign In / Register
Please keep your community civil. All comments must follow the NPR.org Community rules and terms of use, and will be moderated prior to posting. NPR reserves the right to use the comments we receive, in whole or in part, and to use the commenter's name and location, in any medium. See also the Terms of Use, Privacy Policy and Community FAQ.


text:
I have a class
Event that have two properties : "ID", and "ExpirationTime".
I have a list that have many events, some of them with the same ID.
I want to create an efficient LINQ query that will distinct the events by the ID, and for each ID keep the event with the smallest ExpirationTime.