Scholarpedia:Invitation to Visual Cognition
Dear %NAME%,
As an editor-in-chief, I would like to invite you to write a short entry "%TITLE%" for the Visual Cognition chapter of Scholarpedia - the free peer-reviewed encyclopedia. This project, being a synthesis of philosophies of Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia, is ambitious and unique. You can read more about it at http://www.scholarpedia.org. Your article will be peer-reviewed, and upon acceptance, you will become the curator of the topic "%TITLE%" in Scholarpedia (see below).
Most articles in Scholarpedia are written by the original authors. For example, Benoit Mandelbrot, the inventor of fractals, writes "Fractals" and "Mandelbrot Set". Franz Halberg, who coined the word 'circadian', writes "Chronobiology" and "Circadian Rhythm". Richard Karp, the inventor of the notion of NP-completeness, writes "NP-Completeness". Lotfi Zadeh, the inventor of fuzzy logic, writes "Fuzzy Logic". John Holland, the inventor of genetic algorithms, writes "Genetic Algorithms". Edward Lorenz and Jim Yorke, the discoverers of chaos, write "Butterfly Effect" and "Chaos", respectivelly. Vernon Mountcastle, the discoverer of cortical columnar organization in the brain, writes "Cortical Columns". Herman Haken, the creator of synergetics, writes "Synergetics" and "Self-Organization". Robert Galambos, the discoverer of sonar in bats, writes "Echolocation in Bats". Larry Weiskrantz, the discoverer of the phenomoneon of blindsight, writes "Blindsight". Endel Tulving writes "Episodic Memory". Brenda Milner writes "HM Patient". Tim Bliss, the discoverer of LTP in neurons, writes "Long-Term Potentiation". Gerald Edelman, the creator of Neural Darwinism, writes "Neural Darwinism". John J. Hopfield, the creator of a popular neural net, writes "Hopfield Network", and so on. Among authors of Scholarpedia are 6 Nobel Laureates and 3 Fields Medalist.
Currently, Scholarpedia hosts Encyclopedia of Dynamical Systems, Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience, and Encyclopedia of Computational Intelligence. All three will be published in a printed form, though their main purpose is to remain online freely available to the community. These encyclopedias will be seeds to start other focused encyclopedias, including Encyclopedia of Cognitive Neuroscience and Encyclopedia of Neuroscience (which will include your article).
Click "Random article" (left menu) to see sample peer-reviewed articles. The following articles in the Visual Cognition chapter have already been reserved, and some are finished: Attentional Blink (K.L.Shapiro) Blindsight (L. Weiskrantz) Boundary Extension (H. Intraub) Change Blindness (R. Rensink) Conceptual Short Term Memory (Mary C. Potter) Color Vision (K. DeValois) Computer Vision (T. Poggio) Contextual Cueing (M. Chun) Eye Movement (K. Rayner) Extrastriate Body Area (P. Downing) Fast Visual Processing (S. Thorpe) Fusiform Face Area (N. Kanwisher) Inattentional Blindness (D. Simons) Inhibition of Return (R. Klein) Motion Induced Blindness (Y. Bonneh) Multiple Object Tracking (A. Pylyshyn) Neural Correlates of Consciousness (C. Koch) Natural Visual Stimuli (P. Konig) Ocular Dominance (G. Kreiman) Object Substitution Masking (J.T. Enns) Orientation Selectivity (R. Shapley) Psychological Refractory Period (H. Pashler) Saliency Map (E. Niebur) Synesthesia (V. Ramachandran) Vision (B. Wandell) Visual Attention (election of authors) Visual Cognition (B. Scholl) Visual Cortex (D. Felleman) Visual Masking (B. Breitmeyer and H. Ogmen) Visual Motion (J.A. Movshon) Visual Salience (L. Itti) Visual Short Term Memory (Steve Luck)
The best living experts (typically, the original discoverers) were just invited for the following articles: Repetition Blindness, Priming of Popout, Visual Search, Masking (in general), Event Perception, Motion Picture Perception, Spatial Updating, Visual Fading, and so on. Please, visit Scholarpedia later to see the names.
%YOURNAMEWASSUGGESTED% You can write your article alone. However, we highly recommend that you take a co-author, e.g., somebody junior from your lab, to write this entry. Your co-author will become your co-curator when the article is reviewed and accepted. If you want to change the title or have other preferences, please let me know.
I have created the following account for you in Scholarpedia: Username: %USERNAME% Password: %PASSWORD% To accept this invitation, please click %URL% There, you will be able to choose your self-imposed deadline and the frequency of automatic reminders (weekly, monthly, never).
If you cannot write this article within a reasonable period of time, please let us know as soon as possible by clicking %URL%&no=1 In this case, we would highly appreciate your suggesting the names of the best experts to invite to write this article.
The main idea of Scholarpedia is that articles should outlive their authors via the process of curatorship. Similarly to Wikipedia (a free non-reviewed encyclopedia), anybody can edit or revise articles in Scholarpedia, even after they are peer-reviewed and published. For example, other scientists may find and correct an error in your article, add a figure, rewrite a paragraph that is not clearly written, and so on. In contrast to Wikipedia, each article in Scholarpedia has a Curator (typically, its author), whose name is at the top of the article and who accepts or rejects each such revision. For example, if you read an article in Wikipedia on "Blindsight", you do not know who wrote it and whether or not you could trust it. If you read Scholarpedia article "Blindsight", which is authored and curated by Larry Weiskrantz, then you know that everything there is either written by or was later approved by Dr. Weiskrantz. In this sense, Scholarpedia is unlike anything else that has ever been done with scientific publications. Just think of what your article would look like 50 years from now!
The 13th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica has "Space-Time" entry written by A. Einstein and "Psychoanalysis" entry written by S. Freud. If Britannica had the feature of curatorship, physicists and psychologists of today would be fighting each other for the honor to be curators of these articles. The goal of Scholarpedia is to invite today's Einsteins and Freuds to write entries on their major discoveries so that future generations of experts would be willing to maintain these articles via the process of curatorship.
Another unique feature of Scholarpedia is that its authors are either invited by the editor-in-chief (this letter) or elected by the public. Public election of authors ensures fairness in assigning articles to the corresponding experts in each field. Soon Scholarpedia will be transferred to election-only regime.
I hope your schedule would allow you to contribute to the Encyclopedia. If you cannot write this article, please let me know ASAP (by clicking one of the two links above) so that I can invite another expert or initiate election of authors for the article. I am looking forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely Yours, Eugene M. Izhikevich – Editor-in-Chief of Scholarpedia, the free peer-reviewed encyclopedia.
The Neurosciences Institute, Eugene.Izhikevich@nsi.edu 10640 John J. Hopkins Drive tel:(858) 626-2063 San Diego, CA, 92121, USA fax:(858) 626-2099
