1. Meet the claustrum, which may be the seat of consciousness within the brain.

"Although only tested in one person, the discovery suggests that a single area – the claustrum – might be integral to combining disparate brain activity into a seamless package of thoughts, sensations and emotions. It takes us a step closer to answering a problem that has confounded scientists and philosophers for millennia – namely how our conscious awareness arises... One proponent of this idea was Francis Crick, a pioneering neuroscientist who earlier in his career had identified the structure of DNA. Just days before he died in July 2004, Crick was working on a paper that suggested our consciousness needs something akin to an orchestra conductor to bind all of our different external and internal perceptions together... 'Francis would have been pleased as punch,' says Koch, who was told by Crick's wife that on his deathbed, Crick was hallucinating an argument with Koch about the claustrum and its connection to consciousness."

2. The vision behind the content discovery app, Random.

"Random balances relevance and serendipity. It starts by suggesting topics that might be of interest to you. You then choose and get new content in front of you - be it a a blog post, video, photo or a news article. And then you choose again to find new things, at your own pace. You do not need to type in anything. You do not need to follow anyone. You do not need to sign in. The system learns from you and also brings up stuff from the periphery of your interests. Everyone has a unique journey when exploring new things."

3. Hey, good point: It's easy to separate human from machine in a Turing test with the use of ASCII art. 

"For example, Snoopy has a scarf where the 'fringe' is made from '/' characters. Humans find it difficult to avoid seeing pictures in such text patterns, however chatbots such as ELIZA and the more recent Eugene Goostman lack any visual intelligence. They can't see Snoopy or talk about his scarf at all. An easy to use strategy to defeat all such chatbots in a Turing Test is simply to send them an obvious ASCII art image, and then ask them to answer questions about it. All conversation based chatbots will fail to answer relevant questions about a transmitted image because the software can not see the image and can not generate any internal representation of it. Chatbots will be forced to use evasion and distraction to avoid answering questions about an image whereas humans will be able to respond immediately and correctly."

4. OpenCog, the open-source AI platform.

"OpenCog is an open-source software project aimed at directly confronting the AGI challenge, using mathematical and biological inspiration and professional software engineering techniques. The OpenCog Foundation is a non-profit organization, founded in 2011 as a formal entity to foster research, guide the development of the project, and encourage the adoption of the framework in universities and research centers around the world. OpenCog is currently being used at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University to power the next generation of intelligent game characters."

5. Wait, what?

"A crude prototype of BodyBeat, revealed in mid-June, uses an external custom-made microphone to track body sounds, such as breath or cough, with the ambitious aim to detect illnesses or record food consumption. The microphone is placed on the neck with a 3D-printed neckpiece, which is plugged into a small audio processing device that is wirelessly connected to a smartphone. BodyBeat authors plan to redesign the system for better usability in commercial applications. It may sound far-fetched."

Today's 1957 American English Language Tip

camelopard does not contain the word leopard, & should be neither spelled nor pronounced as if it did. (Giraffe is now the usual word.)

Seriously. Here's the 

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