Author Archives: Nathan Crock

Synaptic Theory of Working Memory

This is an article published in Science by Mongillo, Barak, and Tsodyks in 2008. This is an addition to the reverberation theory about working memory. It adds that working memory is sustained by calcium-mediated synaptic facilitation in the recurrent connections … Continue reading

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Synaptic reverberation underlying mnemonic persistent activity

This is a review article published in TRENDS in Neurosciences by Xiao-Jing Wang in 2001. The following two sentences from the abstract summarize the entire review nicely. Stimulus-specific persistent neural activity is the neural process underlying active (working) memory. Since … Continue reading

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New neurons and new memories: how does adult hippocampal neurogenesis affect learning and memory?

This is a Nature review article from 2010 written by Wei Deng, James Aimone and Fred Gage. Timeline and processes involved in the development of a new hippocampal neuron Freshly born neurons develop from neural progenitor cells in the subgranular … Continue reading

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The Physiology of Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow

Daniel Kahneman talks about two distinct processes taking place in the brain. Thinking fast, and thinking slow. One process is internal, intrinsic, such as reflexes, visual processing etc. Another is slow and deliberate, memory recollection, mental math etc. While reading … Continue reading

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Dropbox Woes – Recovering Data in Bulk

TLDR To recover many recently deleted files or folders scattered across many directories, just delete the folder highest in the file system tree that contains everything you want restored. Then recover that folder through the Dropbox web app. All of … Continue reading

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Israel and Palestine – 21st Century Warfare

Sufficiently intelligent individuals know better than to get involved in politics. As a result we are left with the politicians we have today. Unfortunately, I must not be sufficiently intelligent. I have sought truth regarding the current plight between Palestine … Continue reading

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Artificial General Intelligence: Concept, State of the Art, and Future Prospects

Ben Goertzel, Founder of OpenCog, presents a high level summary of the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) field in his 2014 review article [1]. Here I summarize the paper and then share my conclusions. Summary The paper can be broken into … Continue reading

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Get Good Grades, Learn Science, Be Cool

Math and computer science can seem difficult, but if it seems difficult to you then it just hasn’t been presented in a way tailored to how you think! Let me show you how fun and easy it can be. I … Continue reading

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Configuring an AWS Ubuntu Server Instance

After connecting to your newly instantiated server, you will want to configure it. The first thing I always do is create an account for myself, and then disable the public/private key authentication requirements for SSH tunneling. Be wary about whether … Continue reading

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Launching an AWS Instance

We will be configuring a virtual server to provide data aggregation and visualization services. There will be many posts in this series, but we must begin by initializing our Amazon Web Services (AWS) instance. First choose to “Launch Instance” from … Continue reading

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