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Journals checked regularly (in no particular order):
Behavioral Neuroscience
Journal of Experimental Biology
Journal of Neurophysiology
Journal of Neurobiology
Journal of Neuroscience
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Current Opinion in Neurobiology
Robotics and Autonomous Systems
Neuron
Journal of Computational Neuroscience
Neural Computation
Adaptive Behavior
Artificial Life
PLoS Biology
PLoS Computational Biology
Biological Cybernetics
Nature
Nature Neuroscience
Nature Reviews Neuroscience
For all except the last four I’ve made the link such that if you introduce your Sussex username and password you can not only check the titles but also download the papers. For the last three (yes including Nature!!!) Sussex has no access (and I have to resource to my wife’s password for help!).
By regularly I mean I check the table of content of each of those Journals at least once a month for articles of interest. I dedicate at least half a day per week to browsing through the titles. From this I end up piling up at least 10 new papers to read, of which I end up actually reading only 2 or 3. Hope to improve on this with time. I would particularly like to keep an online record of those that I found interesting with a specific note or two.
Finally, for many of these journals you can give out your mail and they’ll automatically send you the new titles as they come out. I’ve stopped checking them this way because of the ‘passivity’. I ended up checking the titles of the paper when the mail arrived, which most likely are times when I am not 100% up to properly reading them. So I would end up just reading the mail to get it out of the way and never coming back to them. Whereas by actively going to their websites I know I check only when is most appropriate.
So, briefly I’ll see if I can mention at least titles and authors of papers I’ve read or would like to read this week (and do this regularly.. fingers crossed):
Systems level circuit model of C. elegans undulatory locomotion: mathematical modeling and molecular genetics
Jan Karbowski, Gary Schindelman, Christopher J. Cronin, Adeline Seah and Paul W. Sternberg
Evolving a Neural Model of Insect Path Integration
Thomas Haferlach, Jan Wessnitzer, Michael Mangan, and Barbara Webb
The neuronal dynamics underlying cognitive flexibility in set shifting tasks
Anja Stemme, Gustavo Deco and Astrid Busch
Role of Nitric Oxide in Classical Conditioning of Siphon Withdrawal in Aplysia
Igor Antonov, Thomas Ha, Irina Antonova, Leonid L. Moroz, and Robert D. Hawkins
Multiple Memory Traces for Olfactory Reward Learning in Drosophila
Andreas S. Thum, Arnim Jenett, Kei Ito, Martin Heisenberg, and Hiromu Tanimoto
Capitalizing on cortical plasticity: influence of physical activity on cognition and brain function
Arthur F. Kramer and Kirk I. Erickson
Programmable springs: Developing actuators with programmable compliance for autonomous robots
Bill Bigge and Inman R. Harvey
Autonomous and fast robot learning through motivation
M. Rodríguez, R. Iglesias, C.V. Regueiro, J. Correa and S. Barro
Chained learning architectures in a simple closed-loop behavioural context
Tomas Kulvicius, Bernd Porr and Florentin Wörgötter
Developmental learning for autonomous robots
M.H. Lee, Q. Meng and F. Chao
Sensory adaptation
Barry Wark, Brian Nils Lundstrom and Adrienne Fairhall
Homeostatic signaling: the positive side of negative feedback
Gina Turrigiano
Learning to hear: plasticity of auditory cortical processing
Johannes C. Dahmen and Andrew J. King
Consistent dynamics suggests tight regulation of biophysical parameters in a small network of bursting neurons
Attila Sz�cs, Allen I. Selverston
Please let me know if I’m missing certain Journals that you think might be relevant. Also let me know if you have an overall strategy that works for you.
This video got digged as a part of an ‘art of science competition‘. I think it is really cool. These guys are known to do very interesting behaviors, including lots of learning. I could definitely see myself using these organisms and then generating artificial life models in parallel to explain their behavior.
Shown here is the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans crawling on an agar surface followed by a homemade tracking video microscope. C. elegans is a small (1mm in length), free living worm that is commonly found in the soil. C. elegans moves forward by wiggling sinusoidal waves down its body and changes direction by performing pirouettes, a choreographed sequence of turns and reversals. By studying these patterns of motion we hope to better understand the behavioral biology of C. elegans.
In an effort to improve my writing, I have been treating myself to evenings of practice under the tutelage of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style; as recommended by Randy. I will be writing down the rules (and possibly more than just the rules) here (a) to help me remember them as I write them down and (b) for quick access when the book is not around.
I. Elementary Rules of Usage
1. Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding ’s.
2. In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last.
3. Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas.
4. Place a comma before a conjunction introducing an independent clause.
5. Do not join independent clauses with a comma.
6. Do not break sentences in two.
Rules 3, 4, 5 and 6 cover the most important principles that govern punctuation.
7. Use a colon after an independent clause to introduce a list of particulars, an appositive, an amplification, or an illustrative quotation.
8. Use a dash to set off an abrupt break or interruption and to announce a long appositive or summary.
9. The number of the subject determines the number of the verb.
10. Use the proper case of pronoun.
11. A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject.
From this first section, the rule that I break the most is definitely No. 7. One of the wrong examples that they give is: “Your dedicated whitter requires: a knife, a piece of wood, and a back porch”. I do this all the time. The suggested way to improve the sentence is: “Your dedicated whittler requires three props: a knife, a piece of wood, and a back porch”.
The most unintuitive examples that I have seen so far come from rules 9 and 10. “One of the ablest scientist who has attacked this problem”. They say this is a ‘common blunde “One of the ablest scientist who have attacked this problem”.
Kandel’s book is turning out to be quite inspirational for me. I will add here a couple of quotes that I want to remember later on.
I have been reading Eric Kandel’s relatively new and partly autobiographical book titled In Search of Memory which I stumbled upon in the Library. I will be posting here some of my notes on the things I find interesting in the book.
