EFTA00436955.pdf

From: To: Subject: Re: For Jeffrey from Marvin Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2011 21:51:17 +0000 Hi Marvin. I will paSs along. Sent via BlacicBerry by AT&T From: Marvin Minsky Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2011 17:42:41 -0400 To: ReplyTo: Subject: For Jeffrey from Marvin Dear Jeffrey Hope things are OK with you! Recently you agreed to resume supporting my consultancy to you. This has become really urgent because our project director (Neil Gershenfeld) has switched his interest from our high-level theories of commonsense thinking to focus on scans of fragments of brain tissue. (This is really unfortunate, because similar attempts to examine those neural networks are already popular around the world — whereas only a handful of researchers work on higher-level models.) So he has suddenly unfunded my support at MIT — along with that of Sussman and Winston — even though I was instrumental in obtain that funding (mainly from Intel). By the way, the seed money you provided for the Music project has already attracted more funding! About the graduate student we discussed—Heikki Ruuska from Finland — since the demise of Push Singh, he is the first student I've met who can help me debug my new cognitive theories.) As you suggested, Martin Nowak has agreed to make him a visiting scholar in Evolutionary Dynamics. However, the one-year J-I visa requires him to list a "funding source". Would you be able to be named as that funding source? Nominally, this would make us liable for up to $30,000 — but I'm fairly sure that once Heikki can mention the Harvard appointment, he will be able to get his own funding. Sorry for such short notice! Best, Marvin EFTA00436955