Publication List

Jade Q. Wang, Trent Nicol, Erika Skoe, Mikko Sams, Nina Kraus. Emotion and the Auditory Brainstem Response to Speech. Neuroscience Letters, 469(3):319-23, Jan 2010.

Jade Q. Wang, Trent Nicol, Erika Skoe, Mikko Sams, Nina Kraus. Emotion Modulates Early Auditory Response to Speech. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 21(11):2121–2128, 2009.

Heng Zhao, Jade Q. Wang, Takayoshi Shimohata, Guohua Sun, Midori A. Yenari, Robert M. Sapolsky, Gary K. Steinberg. Conditions of protection by hypothermia and effects on apoptotic pathways in a model of permanent middle cerebral artery occlusion. Journal of Neurosurgery. 107(3), Sept 2007.

Heng Zhao, Takayoshi Shimohata, Jade Q. Wang, Guohua Sun, David W. Schaal, Robert M. Sapolsky, Gary K. Steinberg. Hypothermia Blocks Nuclear ß-catenin Translocation Downstream of glycogen synthase kinase 3-ß in Focal Cerebral Ischemia in Rats. Journal of Neurosurgery. 58(2):400-401, Feb 2006.

Heng Zhao, Takayoshi Shimohata, Jade Q. Wang, Guohua Sun, David W. Schaal, Robert M. Sapolsky, Gary K. Steinberg. Akt contributes to neuroprotection of hypothermia against cerebral ischemia in rats. Journal of Neuroscience. 2005 Oct 19;25(42):9794-806.

And one more in the oven.  Stay tuned.

live, from the frequency domain

F*** you Neuroscan. For being clunky and ugly. (Why can't you be cute like a Mac?) For your idiotic power-of-two requirement of number of points and not zero-padding for me which any sane and forward-looking developer would have put in. The only reason I'm not doing this in MATLAB is because MATLAB runs out of memory when dealing with files this large. =

Current music: Nomoredolls - Electric Sheep

Google Reader Feed Streams

Yes, indeed, it's possible to create google reader pages for different tags. It's like me editing a personalized magazine of what's out there.

So, here we are.

Jade's science feed (journal articles, news/blog clippings)

Jade's music feed (an assortment of free music downloads)

Jade's eco feed (green-ness)

Current music: Boxing Fox - Do you live?

On Math, Muses, and Poets

When RM sent me this highly entertaining NYTimes column (by Strogatz) on using diff equ's to model love, I had to share it. Of course, in the process of said sharing, came another little gem from the Journal on Applied Math (from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics).

An excerpt from the abstract:

Three ordinary differential equations are proposed to model the dynamics of love between Petrarch, a celebrated Italian poet of the 14th century, and Laura, a beautiful but married lady. The equations are nonlinear but can be studied through the singular perturbation approach if the inspiration of the poet is assumed to have very slow dynamics. In such a case, explicit conditions are found in the appeals of Laura and Petrarch and in their behavioral parameters that guarantee the existence of a globally stable slow-fast limit cycle. ... The result is that the calibrated model shows that the poet's emotions followed for about 20 years a quite regular cyclical pattern ranging from the extremems of ecstasy to despair. All of these findings agree with the recent results of Frederic Jones, who, through a detailed stylistic and linguistic analysis of the poems inspired by Laura, has discovered Petrarch's emotional cycle in a fully independent way.

In summarizing the work of Jones, the authors state that Jones made the assumption of the cyclical nature of Petrarch's emotions, and "on the basis of this conjecture, Jones... put all undated poems in chronological order." But in this case, the authors set up some basic behavioral parameters:

And found the solution to be a limit cycle.

Oh, and more pretty graphs:

The paper is highly entertaining, very readable, and not as verbose as you might otherwise expect. Really, papers in the humanities should read like this. Characterized by precision, humorous, and defended up to the limits of falsifiability. Well worth the effort to read it, for poets and scientists alike, not just the slender intersection of the two.

References

Rinaldi, Sergio. Laura and Petrarch: An Intriguing Case of Cyclical Love Dynamics. SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics, Vol. 58, No. 4 (Aug., 1998), pp. 1205-1221

Current music: The Dandy Warhols - Bohemian Like You

thoughts about H1N1

If the low death rate from H1N1 in the U.S. is due to superior medical facilities and early detection, then the Third World is in for some serious decimation. Can you imagine what might happen if H1N1 exploded in Sub-Saharan Africa? There would be few accurate numbers on the rate of spread, and there would be little or no access to the effective anti-virals.

Sure, you hear lots of people talk about how hundreds of people die from seasonal epidemics every year, and in this case, look how low the death rate is if patients are found early and given adequate treatment. That's because these people are assuming the entire planet looks exactly like the U.S., when they are much more likely to just die off in such large numbers, no monument can hold their names. The only way to stop from decimating the Third World is to slow the spread of H1N1 enough such that we get a vaccine in production before it's out there.

Current music: The Magnetic Fields - Washington, D.C.

H1N1: pandemics in perspective

My dear critical readers, I know you're a smart bunch. I recognize the need to not freak people out, but seriously: what is wrong with presentation of the following data set?

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The swine flu virus that has sparked fear and precautions worldwide appears to be no more dangerous than the regular flu virus that makes its rounds each year, U.S. officials said Monday. [That's last week, Monday a week ago, mind you.]

"What the epidemiologists are seeing now with this particular strain of U.N. is that the severity of the disease, the severity of the flu -- how sick you get -- is not stronger than regular seasonal flu," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Monday as the worldwide number of confirmed cases of swine flu -- technically known as 2009 H1N1 virus -- topped 1,080.

The flu has been blamed for 26 deaths: 25 in Mexico and one in the United States, according to the World Health Organization.

First, reporting the raw numbers of deaths in the upswing of an epidemic tells you nothing about the dynamics of the situation. Moreover, "how sick you get" or the severity of the illness is NOT the same thing as how "dangerous" an illness is. I don't know if I'm the only one who thinks this, but I would evaluate the "dangerousness" of an illness as its fatality rate, that is, if you get sick, this is the probability that you will actually die. For instance, the probability you will die in a given skydiving jump is 1 in 100,000 (0.001% fatality). [1] Similarly, "you would have to jump 17 times per year for your risk of dying in a skydiving accident to equal your risk of dying in a car accident if you drive 10,000 miles per year." [1]

The fatality rate for the 1918 H1N1 flu was > 2.5%, as compared to < 0.1% [2]. In comparison, fatality rate is about 0.1% for the Asian and Hong Kong flus,[3]. Let's take a quick, back-of-the-envelope look at the numbers for the 2009 H1N1 virus. It has been in Mexico the longest, so we have the best sample size in terms of latency. 58 deaths divided by 2,282 cases gives us 2.54% (5/12/2009), which looks pretty similar to the 1918 H1N1 virus.

There are a couple ways of looking at this. The fatality rate of swine flu is approximately 1 - fatality of anthrax (in 2-3 days). And given the population of the planet, even anthrax has no chance of ending civilization. And the Black Death, depending on your geographical region, killed 20-80% of the population. (The fatality rate of the bubonic plague is supposed to be in the neighborhood of ~50% in 3-7 days without treatment.) In comparison, the fatality rate of SARS was ~9.6% (globally, with medical attention), even though it varied widely by region. [4]

So... no, it's not the end of the world. 2.54% risk of death is not large in the grand scheme of things (looking at the planet as a whole), but it's pretty high for normal life. And remember, this is risk without potential reward, thrill, or even entertainment. On a personal level, my fatality risk acceptance is ~1% for, say, the magical granting a superpower of some kind (the alternative being 'life continues as normal'). Higher if I get to choose the superpower in question. Maybe about ~0.1-0.01% if I only level up. (Those who know me know that I am generally not at all risk-averse. For instance, when playing video games, when you don't die in real life.)

Seriously, wouldn't you rather go skydiving instead? Yes, go skydiving about 50 times a year for the rest of your natural life (assuming you're 25 now...)? Or go skating on thin ice? If there's a medical team within reach, your risk of death from hypothermia is relatively low.

Don't. Panic. But go wash your hands.

Current music: t.A.T.u. - Белый Плащик

non-random linkdump: on memory

Every damn morning, swamp gas from a weather balloon ... reflects the light from Venus. Does what is actually possible/feasible change that what we perceive to be beautiful? Does it change how we choose to live?

This kind of thinking completely misses the point of having experiences, "good" or "bad". Have a bad day? Don't analyze, search one's soul or talk about it; just push ERASE. Why bother doing the harder task of learning from painful experiences when this option is available?

And suppose there were a way to find your way once you're already lost? You're lost in the woods -- we all are, even the captain. The difference is he likes it that way.



Current music: BT - Memories In A Sea Of Forgetfulness

sometimes

1 20 1 1 20 7 7 1 1 7 20 1 7 1 7 1 1 3 3 3 3 7 1 1 3 7 20 20 3 20 1 1 20 1 20 20 20 7 3 1 1 1 7 1 7 1 3 20 1 20 1 7 1 7 3 7 7 20 1 7

... No, the book is wrong. This whole conclusion is fallacious.

Current music: Gattaca Soundtrack

space litter

ISS dodges space junk again. And I quote:

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station Sunday were forced to change the orbit of the station -- and the Space Shuttle Discovery that is currently docked to it -- to avoid an estimated 4-inch piece of space junk that may have been on a collision course.

It's the third time in three weeks that astronauts on the space station have had to worry about space debris , but it's the first time they have deemed the threat serious enough to change the orbit.

Current music: Wall-E Soundtrack

Objects in Space

There needs to be a non-governmental international entity for monitoring our friendly skies, tracking objects in space. This is why. All nations with space programs or who have satellites up there should subscribe to this service, provided by a responsible provider with lots of computing power.

Like Google. :P

Current music: Billy Cobham - Stratus

the art of statecraft

As J once said, statecraft is foremost a matter of defining one's goals/objectives and then setting out to achieve them. There are important life lessons in the seminar I just went to (about women negotiating for positions in academia or industry). The 'I'm ridiculously stellar so I don't need statecraft' outlook is just as harmful as 'If I'm good, I'll be rewarded without having to ask for a raise/promotion/benefit.' You have to know what your objectives are, and remember them when you're lost in the woods.

Current music: Elysian Fields - Set the Grass on Fire

non-random linkdump

Just to see if I can.

Plan A

Plan B

Current music: PJ Harvey - Sheela Na Gig

form is emptiness, emptiness form

At the close of the 2621st anniversary of the birth of Thales of Miletus, it seems timely to sit back and reflect that our universe contains stuff, and that in particular, it isn't empty.

like squeezing toothpaste

sometimes writing a discussion section is like getting the last bit of toothpaste out of the tube -- you know it's there, just beneath the surface -- if you just press a little harder against the convex surface or pull those shoulders back to focus onto the brush before it slips back into its container.

Current music: Poe - Hello

Tr16-244

Astronomers imaged Tr16-244, along with neighbor star WR 25, as part of a series of studies on star-forming nebulae. They are rare and powerful stars that live relatively short lives, burning through their hydrogen fuel faster than most stars. They radiate brilliantly in ultraviolet wavelengths and appear blue in color. Newly released images from Hubble show Tr16-244 is made up of three stars, with two stars orbiting so closely around each other that they appeared as a single point of light in previous images.

Current music: Etro Anime - Diablo

stand back, try science

Next episode is SfN highlights. Awesomeness.