Slär·tē·bärt-fa·stē·bast

"I wonder if Jungian archetypes will show up in the optimal feature sets soon-to-be distilled from digitized human narratives (analogous to the way phonemes showed up when Ng analyzed sound)."

"Because of the heterogeneity of clinical manifestations associated with the ASD population, this review also addresses the importance of dividing individuals with ASD into clinically relevant subphenotypes in the quest to identify appropriate biomarkers."

"The neural and genetic bases of human language development and associated neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD), in which language impairment represents a core deficit, are poorly understood. Given that no single animal model can fully capture the behavioral and genetic complexity of ASD, work in songbird, an experimentally tractable animal model of vocal learning, can complement the valuable tool of rodent genetic models and contribute important insights to our understanding of the communication deficits observed in ASD. Like humans, but unlike traditional laboratory animals such as rodents or non-human primates, songbirds exhibit the capacity of vocal learning, a key subcomponent of language. Human speech and birdsong reveal important parallels, highlighting similar developmental critical periods, a homologous cortico-basal ganglia-thalamic circuitry, and a critical role for social influences in the learning of vocalizations. Here I highlight recent advances in using the songbird model to probe the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying the formation and function of neural circuitry for birdsong and, by analogy, human language, with the ultimate goal of identifying any shared or human unique biological pathways underscoring language development and its disruption in ASD."

"Using 16 qubits within a D-Wave processor, the experiments demonstrated that, for the problem studied, even with annealing times eight orders of magnitude longer than the predicted single-qubit decoherence time (the typical time it takes for environmental factors to start to corrupt the state of a qubit), the probabilities of performing a successful computation are similar to those expected for a fully coherent system. The experiments also demonstrated that by repeatedly annealing the open system quickly several times rather than annealing a hypothetical closed system slowly once, quantum annealing can take advantage of a thermal environment to achieve a speedup factor of up to 1,000 over the closed system (a closed system is one which does not interact with its environment, whereas an open system does interact with it)."