Back Talk--Following Ulysses on (the) Amazon

Glia Talk Back

The cells in mammalian brains fall into two main categories: neurons and glia. The idea that glia are second-class citizens in the brain, existing merely to sustain and support the more important and complex neurons, has been challenged in recent years by evidence that glial cells have important functions of their own. Perhaps the beststudied glial cells from this point of view are astrocytes, ...

DBMSs Should Talk Back Too

Natural language user interfaces to database systems have been studied for several decades now. They have mainly focused on parsing and interpreting natural language queries to generate them in a formal database language. We envision the reverse functionality, where the system would be able to take the internal result of that translation, say in SQL form, translate it back into natural language...

New Neurons Don’t Talk Back

GABAergic interneurons enforce highly sparse activity patterns in principal neurons of the dentate gyrus. In this issue of Neuron, Temprana et al. (2015) show that immature adult-born neurons largely function independently of inhibitory feedback circuits, neither receiving nor generating feedback inhibition.

The Ulysses perspective

Yahoo! for Amazon: Sentiment Extraction from Small Talk on the Web

We develop a methodology for extracting small investor sentiment from stock message boards. Five distinct classifier algorithms coupled by a voting scheme are found to perform well against human and statistical benchmarks. Time series and cross-sectional aggregation of message information improves the quality of the resultant sentiment index. Empirical applications evidence a relationship with ...