lifeasdaddy - A google ad for a blog about neuroscience

I use gmail, Google's email service.  I find it really useful - the contra for using the "free" service is that Google ads appear in the sidebar, and the topics of the ads are somewhat related to the content of the email.

I received a reply email from someone yesterday in which we both discussed a blog. Hence the Google ads in the sidebar were somewhat related to blogs or blogging. 

One ad was this:

Discover a smarter neuron
and an unusual take on how memory works. At a new neuroscience blog.
nine-radical.blogspot.com

I thought, "That's interesting.  An individual blogger has coughed up money for a Google Ad.  I'll click through."

Here's the blog called REWIRING NEUROSCIENCE.

Apparently it's a blog by John Harris, and was established in September 2005.  His blogger profile has counted 1,899 views up to this moment.

I wonder how much he paid for the advert?

I wonder how much it has boosted his traffic?

I wonder who John Harris is?

The blog is quite detailed, and to my layman's eye (pun intended Mr. Harris) it seems like the blogger knows whereof he writes.

Here's the blog home page, which is impressive, and has some great photographs.

Maybe the author is this Dr. John Harris of the University of Nottingham.

Maybe the author is this Professor John Harris of The Institute of Neuroscience (Newcastle University)

Maybe the author is this "veteran medical device entrepreneur" John Harris of Arboretum Ventures.  Hmmm.  Bachelor of Industrial Engineering from Stanford and MBA from Kellogg.  Yes, you seem like the most likely John Harris to be web savvy and experimenting on a nexus between Google Ads and blogging.  Here's his picture and another bio.

Well, if he's doing google ads and blogging, my bet is he's got a google alert on some of the words in this blog post, which means .... he's reading this.

Please make yourself known to us Mr. Harris!

Comments

[John McDonough]

Sorry for a very late post, but I too was trying to find John Harris and your site came up.

There is a relatively new idea at Texas A&M University about using Noise Based Logic (Deterministic multivalued logic scheme for information processing and routing in the brain). See this link for their papers: http://www.ece.tamu.edu/~noise/research_files/noise_based_logic.htm

This would replace John Harris' multiple lines with fewer lines because of the orthogonal states of the noise based vectors. This group doesn't seem to be going anywhere with their idea although they are publishing several papers/year. Perhaps they and Harris could get together to see if they can make the two ideas work together. Harris thinks that "memory" is a place and noise based logic gives the possibility of unbelievable amounts of "places" with very few lines. So the number of neurons in the brain would give fantastically large numbers of places to store Fourier transforms. And the constant brain activity could be the old delay line memory at work but with noise based logic.

[John Harris]

John. Rewiring-neuroscience.com explores the problem of how a single spike of fixed amplitude, gliding along an axon at 60 mph in complete isolation -- might be carrying analog information to the brain. The noise-based model, like most encoding/decoding systems, requires and operates upon trains of spikes. If it were presented with a single isolated spike it would stop working. Not a criticism, just a complete lack of common ground. The noise-based model makes a great computer though. Thank you for your interest and your observations. John

[lifeasdaddy]

Thanks, John Harris, for once again giving some clarifying comments here.

In case anyone missed it, Mr. Harris's blog is here:

http://www.rewiring-neuroscience.com/

[Helio Perroni Filho]

Dear Mr. Harris,

I am Helio Perroni Filho, first author of the paper "A Biology-Based Template-Matching Framework". I am writing here in hopes you read this, as I couldn't find any other way to contact you.

I first came into contact with "Rewiring Neuroscience" in 2007, and have always considered it an intriguing work. For a couple of years now I have been trying to build some kind of Computer Vision machinery upon its concepts, but it wasn't until last year that I could find the right problem and mathematical framework to succeed.

I still visit your site from time to time, both to re-read old chapters and to check the odd new chapter. I was thrilled to find you added a sidebar referencing our article, thank you very much! (Incidentally, while we did submit our paper to ICAI2012, we ended up having to withdraw it from that conference; a revised version did get presented on ISDA2012 though.)

I wonder if we could get a forum or some other place set up where people could discuss your ideas, and maybe get to talk to you now and again? If you lack the time, just give me a nod and I'll set it up and run it for you. Mr. Meade has been kind enough to let us talk to you through his blog, but I feel kind of embarrassed for hijacking his post like this... :)