TechnoLife: Consciousness is tied to 'entropy', say researcher...

TechnoLife: Consciousness is tied to 'entropy', say researcher...: Well connected: is the entropy of neuronal networks linked to consciousness? Consciousness appears to arise naturally as a result of a...

Consciousness is tied to 'entropy', say researchers Oct 18, 2016 3 comments

Well connected: is the entropy of neuronal networks linked to consciousness?
Consciousness appears to arise naturally as a result of a brain maximizing its information content. So says a group of scientists in Canada and France, which has studied how the electrical activity in people's brains varies according to individuals' conscious states. The researchers find that normal waking states are associated with maximum values of what they call a brain's "entropy".
Statistical mechanics is very good at explaining the macroscopic thermodynamic properties of physical systems in terms of the behaviour of those systems' microscopic constituent particles. Emboldened by this success, physicists have increasingly been trying to do a similar thing with the brain: namely, using statistical mechanics to model networks of neurons. Key to this has been the study of synchronization – how the electrical activity of one set of neurons can oscillate in phase with that of another set. Synchronization in turn implies that those sets of neurons are physically tied to one another, just as oscillating physical systems, such as pendulums, become synchronized when they are connected together.
The latest work stems from the observation that consciousness, or at least the proper functioning of brains, is associated not with high or even low degrees of synchronicity between neurons but by middling amounts. Jose Luis Perez Velazquez, a biochemist at the University of Toronto, and colleagues hypothesized that what is maximized during consciousness is not connectivity itself but the number of different ways that a certain degree of connectivity can be achieved.
Many ways of connecting
Perez Velazquez's colleague Ramon Guevarra Erra, a physicist at the Paris Descartes University, points out that there is only one way to connect each set of neurons in a network with every other set, just as there is only one way to have no connections at all. In contrast, he notes, there are many different ways that an intermediate medium-sized number of connections can be arranged.
To put their hypothesis to the test, the researchers used data previously collected by Perez Velazquez showing electric- and magnetic-field emissions from the brains of nine people, seven of whom suffered from epilepsy. With emissions recorded at dozens of places across the subjects' scalps, the researchers analysed every possible pairing of these data "channels" to establish whether the emissions in each case were in phase with one another. They added up the number of synchronized pairs and plugged that figure along with the total number of all possible pairings into a fairly straightforward statistical formula to work out how many different brain configurations that level of synchronicity yields. They then took the logarithm of that number to establish the brain's entropy.
The data were analysed in two parts. In one, they compared the emissions from four of the epileptic patients when undergoing a seizure and when in a normal "alert" state. In the second, they compared emissions from the other five individuals when sleeping and when awake. In both cases, the bottom line was the same: subjects' brains display higher entropy, or a higher value of a similar quantity known as Lempel–Ziv (LZ) complexity, when in a fully conscious state.
Varying results
Guevarra Erra admits that the results are not watertight. Indeed, the LZ complexity of one of the four epileptic patients in the first analysis showed no change between seizure and alert states (although that person did remain conscious during part of the seizure). In another individual, LZ complexity actually increased in the second analysis while that person was asleep. Guevarra Erra says that he and his colleagues didn't carry out a statistical analysis of their results in part because of the "very heterogeneous" nature of those results. But he nevertheless remains "highly confident" that the correlations they have identified are real.

Windows 10 update traps some systems in a boot loop, Microsoft promises fix

Microsoft insists that this problem only affected people in the Windows Insider Program, though it has not explained why others not in that program would have been impacted by the latest patch. A fix has been pushed out for the issues but the company has provided no details into what went wrong or what the patch fixes. The supposed link to a knowledge base (KB) article that’s supposed to describe the problem is actually dead as of this writing.

Original story below:

For well over a year, Microsoft has tried to position Windows 10 as a new type of operating system — one that’s continually updated without allowing for meaningful customer intervention, with security, driver, and software updates combined together by default and updated on Microsoft’s timeline. Pro customers can delay updates for a period of time, but non-enterprise users aren’t allowed to push them off indefinitely.

The company has repeatedly promised that by giving up this control, its customers will receive more timely updates, features, and improvements. It’s the kind of promise that requires an ironclad commitment to shipping stable software — and Microsoft has been dropping the ball in myriad ways ever since Windows 10 launched. Last week’s update for Windows 10 Anniversary Edition (KB3194496) has trapped some users in an unending reboot loop.

Microsoft has told ZDNet that it’s already in the process of fixing the problem and will release an updated script in the near future. The problem doesn’t affect all users, but issues like this often leave me wondering how machines trapped in an endless boot loop are supposed to get the fix in the first place. Presumably the company will release instructions on how to short-circuit the boot loop manually and apply the appropriate patch.

Part of why this is making waves is because the problem was reported by early adopters before the patch ever went live to the larger community. Microsoft apparently either ignored that feedback or never read it in the first place. Prior to 2014, Windows releases were evaluated by an extensive programmatic testing team within Microsoft itself, but Satya Nadella gutted this division when he became CEO. In its place, Microsoft rolled out a system in which developers were expected to troubleshoot their own code, with remaining QA resources dedicated to real-world tests and troubleshooting.

In theory, the above should’ve allowed Microsoft to roll updates more quickly and improve its software on a more rapid cadence. We have seen new Windows 10 features appear more rapidly than previous iterations of the operating system. Along with those benefits, however, has come a series of problems. For example, Windows 10 Anniversary Edition broke most webcams because it no longer supports compressed data streams, which the vast majority of webcams rely on in order to function. At least some Kindle devices crashed Windows 10 AU when plugged in, and Microsoft’s KB3176934 broke PowerShell. Last year, the company pushed an update that removed software from users’ systems after erroneously flagging it as incompatible with Windows 10.



None of these issues are show-stoppers in and of themselves. There have always been Windows patches that caused problems on a small number of machines, and that’s inevitably going to happen when you have 400 million devices running any operating system given that Windows 10 can run on hardware that’s 10+ years old. But as John Dvorak points out on PCMag.com, this problem takes on an entirely different dimension given how Microsoft now forces people to take updates whether they like it or not. You can still prevent Windows 10 from updating, to be clear — the Windows Update service can be manually deactivated. But this is a brute-force solution to the problem that exposes users to significant security risks.

One potential explanation for how these problems keep slipping through is that Microsoft doesn’t recommend Windows Insiders test fast ring deployments on primary sy