comp-neuro policy

Comp-Neuro Mailing List (cneuro@bbb.caltech.edu)
Fri, 2 Oct 98 10:26:41 PDT

The recent posting to comp-neuro of a petition by Jim Bower has generated
several replies (about equally divided between those who thought that the
posting was a bad idea, and those who thought that it was justified), and has
also raised some questions about comp-neuro policy.

With rare exceptions, I require that postings to comp-neuro have some
relevance to neuroscience. (What's a rare exception? I'd call
once in four years rare.) Discussion of neural computation that overlaps
connectionist and biological approaches is always welcome, as long as it
has sufficient biological relevance. In fact, I would like to see more
discussion on this mailing list, so that it is not just limited to
announcements of postdoc positions and conferences.

Political discussion is not a good use of this mailing list. For that reason,
I've forwarded replies to the petition posting to Jim Bower, for his personal
response. In general, political postings are not appropriate, but will be
considered if they are directly related to issues faced by computational
neuroscientists, e.g. legislation affecting scientific use of the internet,
funding for NSF/NIH, etc.

The policy on commercial postings is similar. I would like to keep this
list as "spam-free" as possible, but will post short announcements of books or
products that I feel to be of genuine relevance to computational neuroscience.

I hope that you will trust my judgment in following the guidelines for
this list:

The list is primarily intended to support the discussion of technical
issues relating to computational neuroscience and neural computation in
biological systems.

Dave Beeman, moderator of comp-neuro