Is the feedback nucleous social?
On the carriage of baby auto-feedback post, we may speculate the auto-feedback origin is on reproducing a nucleous social feedback. See the hilarious demonstration in the video below.
On the carriage of baby auto-feedback post, we may speculate the auto-feedback origin is on reproducing a nucleous social feedback. See the hilarious demonstration in the video below.
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Christian Aranha
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3:02 PM
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Posted by
Alexandre Linhares
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9:17 PM
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[updated after a new suggestion]
Here are some of the Everests for Computational Cognitive Modeling. Some people call them AI-complete. That might not be the best term, as it extends the notion of NP-Completeness, which is a precise, formal, mathematical notion, into a very blurry territory.
Anyway, I've put them from easier to harder...
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Alexandre Linhares
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4:29 AM
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Here are interesting articles about Numenta, from Wired and CNN Money. Very worthwhile.
I´ve been convinced by Drama 2.0 that the web2.0 is now a bubble. Damn it; I'm now bearish.
However, here's my longer-term view. If history is any indication, a timeline of transformation in the information revolution can be nicely broken into decades.
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Alexandre Linhares
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4:26 AM
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O Professor Heitor Gurgulino de Souza vai receber no dia 11 de Dezembro, das mãos do embaixador Francisco Seixas da Costa, na Residência da Embaixada de Portugal em Brasília, as insígnias de Comendador da Ordem do Infante Dom Henrique, com que foi distinguido pelo Governo português.
Talk about some recursion.
Since chunking mechanisms use a lot of recursion, perhaps we may want to start a class on them by visiting the largest island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island.
THIS IS THE ORIGINAL SOURCE, and kudos to them!
(All I've done was mash it up; the credit is all theirs).
~~
Largest island
Greenland
View Larger Map
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Largest lake
Caspian Sea (RUS/KAZ/AZE/TKM/IRN)
View Larger Map
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Largest lake on an island
Nettilling Lake on Baffin Island (CAN)
View Larger Map
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Largest island in a lake
Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron (CAN)
View Larger Map
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Largest island in a lake on an island
Pulau Samosir in Danau Toba on Sumatera (INA)
View Larger Map
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Largest lake on an island in a lake
Lake Manitou on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron (CAN)
View Larger Map
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Largest lake on an island in a lake on an island
Crater Lake on Vulcano Island in Lake Taal on Luzon (PHI)
View Larger Map
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Largest island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island
Vulcan point in Crater Lake on Vulcano Island in Lake Taal on Luzon (PHI)
View Larger Map
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Alexandre Linhares
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2:50 PM
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Labels: chunking, cognitive mechanisms, fluid concepts, memory, technology
We are turning some good cranks on that Rubik's cube.
From the start of the PhD course we had wanted to publish everything on, the slides, and slidecasts of the whole thing. But at one point these last weeks a real dilemma came up. What we were talking about, and doing, and seeing it run on the screen, was new. Something that most likely has not been done before, and that, if the underlying philosophical premises are correct, might have quite an impact in both computer science and cognitive science.
My mind goes like this: what to do with it? Publish the classes, as the original plan called for? Publish as a series of papers? Get a PhD candidate to work on it and see what's up? Write up a patent? If we're correct than it could potentially have wide applicability.
I think we made an advance on what we've called autoprogramming before. So I'm on Jekyll-and-Hyde mode on this one.
And the thing is... I think there's more. I think that there's another important idea clearing up... something like "concept-oriented programming"... or maybe "encapsulating object encapsulation". Just to give a glimpse of the idea: in language and cognition we use analogy all the time, of course. But how can we say that "that lawyer is a vampire", that "if independent, Quebec will become a small boat in a big storm", or something I said the other day, that "I really hope that Dr "dude" Lisi is a new Einstein. We really need a new Einstein."
In Object-oriented programming, objects have state and interfaces. But in human concepts, we apply the interfaces and properties and relations that belong to one class to almost anything else. A Canadian state becomes a boat, a lawyer becomes a fantastic figure dreamed up in novels, someone becomes an "Einstein".
How can we design classes and objects that reflect this? Even with polymorphism, inheritance and all that OO-goodness, it seems far-fetched. But I think we're stumbling on the answer. And it is beautiful. This week I'm designing the blueprint & requirements, and I hope to have a proof-of-concept (pun intended) by next week.
There's a parallel here with what Garret Lisi says about his work: either our model will be extremely simple and elegant, or it will fail spectacularly. While neither Jekyll nor Hyde wins the fight, we can't say much for now.
In the meantime, feel free to check out the possible theory of everything in the universe below.
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Alexandre Linhares
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1:08 PM
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Today I could'nt go to the class. I was giving a seminar of text mining and artificial intelligence on Fluminense Federal University (UFF). Here then goes my today's contribution.
Doing cognitive science is hard job because we just can't look inside us clearly. We can't ask objective questions to our brain. We have only access to a very high level instructions. Thus, last class I refactored my intuition about the hedonic guide of our lives, e.g., one being tries to maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain as well. I realized it might have a possibility that this is not a simetric distribution. Ingrate, but I think one may have much more pain then pleasure. Pain is a strong word, the left extreme. A discomfort or distress may be a better word. Thus, one may have much discomfort in daily life. It might be necessary to make us move on, to act or todo something.
Imagine one exposed to a situation that causes him this feeling. The situation sets hedonic function to a little bit under neutral point. A short-circuit alerts to bring back balance. One only stabilish peace if the short-circuit was released. Ok, my point is that this situation is kind of a bit similar with pleasure, but it is not the same. A pleasure is a move with neutral point as origin. I suppose we have a stick that slip a bit down every time. And this movement is what makes life.
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Christian Aranha
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9:41 PM
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I think we're on the verge of a breakthrough. We are about to solve the shape sorting problem, the most important scientific problem that nobody cares about.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Swedish Academy.
Images from qotile.
And here's a live specimen in its habitat:
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Alexandre Linhares
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9:28 AM
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Classes dealing with
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Alexandre Linhares
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7:42 PM
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Things to finish STILL in 2007!
I'll be posting here the NUMBO's real slipnet, directly from Daniel Defays's code. Please disregard my previous guesses!
Node Numbers
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
12
15
16
20
25
30
40
50
60
70
80
81
90
100
150
Sum nodes
1+1
1+2
1+3
1+4
1+5
1+6
1+7
1+8
1+9
2+2
2+3
2+4
2+5
2+6
2+7
2+8
3+3
3+4
3+5
3+6
3+7
4+4
4+5
4+6
5+5
7+8
5+10
Multiplication nodes
2x2
2x3
2x4
2x5
2x7
2x10
2x12
2x20
3x3
3x10
3x20
4x4
4x10
4x20
5x5
5x6
5x10
5x20
6x10
7x7
7x10
8x10
9x9
9x10
10x10
10x15
Other nodes
Operand
Result_+
Result_x
similar
operation
instance
plus
minus
times
multiply
add
subtraction
I guess I'll be delving deeper into the lisp code, to see what's the best way to design an OO framework to handle it.
Thank god for Daniel Defays.
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Alexandre Linhares
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1:18 AM
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We are, today, taking small, but significant steps towards our framework.
The MOST crucial thing now is to proceed in a manner that gives us total confidence in what has been done. If there is any bad design decision, it will be rapidly found and corrected.
This is the most important thing in building such complex mechanisms. We have a long way to go, but let's take each single step in rock solid ground. This is a framework, not a program. It will be used for a long time period. It has to be rock solid.
We can only move on to new functionality when we feel confident to say, as members of the Cosa Nostra are fond of saying: "forget 'booout it!"
Finally, here's an important tip: Compile and run. Nothing has changed? GOOD!
Posted by
Alexandre Linhares
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10:26 PM
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Posted by
Christian Aranha
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7:52 PM
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An example from O`Reilly:
Refactoring to Strategy
The getRecommended() method presents several problems. First, it's long—long enough that comments have to explain its various parts. Short methods are easy to understand, seldom need explanation, and are usually preferable to long methods. In addition, the getRecommended() method chooses a strategy and then executes it; these are two different and separable functions. You can clean up this code by applying STRATEGY. To do so, you need to
Create an interface that defines the strategic operation
Implement the interface with classes that represent each strategy
Refactor the code to select and to use an instance of the right strategic class
Whenever a design decision is based on an educated guess, the implementation should not be done through class methods, but with the strategy pattern.I don`t know to what extent we will be able to follow this. That is precisely why we need to start getting used to the refactoring involved and master these three small steps.
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Alexandre Linhares
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10:19 PM
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Let me start with an...
“anecdote used by Jerry Jordan, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, in an article in the Cato Journal last summer. Jordan described a U.S. businessman visiting China a few years ago. The American came upon a team of 100 workers building a dam with shovels. Shovels.
He commented to a local official that, with an earth-moving machine, a single worker could build the dam in an afternoon. The official replied,
"Yes, but think of all the unemployment that would create."
"Oh," said the businessman, "I thought you were building a dam. If it's jobs you want to create, then take away their shovels and give them spoons."
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Alexandre Linhares
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6:27 AM
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Some important links today.
UPDATE: Boy survives two-hour flight to Moscow hanging onto plane wing (digg it here, story here, here, and here)
On our science section we have a great piece by The Economist. How can women still complain?
The Capyblanca Prize for industrial design goes to 3M's specially designed self-adhesive hooks: "Sticky bear is REALLY HAPPY to see you".
On our beauty department we have the solution for you big-nosed people out there: Be a Cleopatra Nose!
Paul Graham now has a feed. Check it out.
Finally, for those who only want the truth and the real truth and nothing but the truth, regularly check out the news in the official North Kolea Blog.
Victoly to North Kolea!!!!!!
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Alexandre Linhares
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6:01 PM
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If there is a social science that sees as its birth right to advise on matter of policy then it's Economics. From cold war strategy to inflation-fighting to abortion, economists have been advising policy for over a century.
They should better watch their backs now, for the cognitive scientists are coming.
In a way, economists are already cognitive scientists. They study people's (or animals'--but these are called ecologists) behavior in the aggregate. Two fundamental pillars of classical economics are the ideas of (i) incentive systems and (ii) utility.
Incentives assume that people will tend to do what they get incentives for, and will tend to inhibit their behavior if a negative incentive is there. Sticks and carrots, sticks and carrots. This insight, of course, is the behaviorist insight: treat the mind as a stimulus-response black box. Incentive systems work most of the time. Sometimes they backfire, as in "perverse incentives" which actually encourage people to do exactly the opposite of the intended policy.
I have come to believe that the mind has three distinct feedback systems, and incentives apply to just one of them, an hedonic system. Give a shock to a mouse, and the poor creature will learn not to do whatever it was doing. Stimulate it's brain's pleasure center, and, like a heroine addict, mice will ignore food and sexy females, fancying themselves all the way to their death. Inhibitions act as if they were sending a global halt message to the brain's numerous activities, and hedonically good incentives will bring computer-loopy types of behavior.
This is a good insight, of course, but it is not sufficient to explain (and predict) behavior. More is needed. We need to look inside the black box.
Utility is related, but different. It concerns different preferences that different people may have. I like nurses; maybe others don't. Different people, different preferences. Classical economics takes this into account, and it probably stems from the same cognitive mechanisms which have built different memories through experience. Genetic and anatomical stuff also may play a large part in determining preferences.
Another thing involved in utility is that it does not grow linearly. A 30 minute massage is a better experience than a 30 second one. But it is probably worse then a 30-day one. Now, if the hedonic feedback system helps to determine your preferences, a different system, I think, acts over here; an attentional feedback system--this one does not directly drives behavior, but it decides what gets stored into memory. The first minute of the massage gets stored; the fifth hour is just plain boring (people in chronic pain notwithstanding, but even they should find diminishing returns).
Now, here's some cognitive science creeping under the economists' stage.
Herbert Simon, for one, pointed out that we just can't figure things out--or at least not as infinitely deeply as the rational actor model suggests. The space of possibility is just too monstrouly huge. Here is one of the goals of the Human Intuition Project: to study how intuition guides the choice generating process, and the repercussions of this to economics. Intuition destroys the vastness of the space of possibility, presenting a tractable course of thought and action. (Perhaps misguided, of course, but if it's here, there are evolutionary reasons).
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky truly turbocharged Simon's work--eventually leading to the school of behavioral economics. They've shown that framing affects decision-making; that the utility curve was susceptible to language, that preferences do revert even within a single individual in an instant of time. But this insight is something that economics should have embedded in the models since Thomas Schelling, another psychologically inclined economist. I love how he brings up our Jekyll and Hyde nature, and the deep, deep, questions involved. Choice and Consequence, and Micromotives and Macrobehaviors, and the Strategy of Conflict, is beautiful cognitive science, an enmeshing of philosophy, psychology, economics, and mathematics. (A Schelling point, for example, should be something studied by cognitive psychologists--though I´ve never seen a single textbook mention the term.)
Language and framing seem to be now on the agenda of cognitive scientists as policy advisors. George Lakoff, looking at language, telltales how the Bush team used language to present policies which become impossible to attack. My favorite example is the term "tax relief". Only a monster can be against any kind of relief. Watch your language, sir. Beware if you want to argue against this policy.
Even Steve Pinker seems to be joining the boat. In his recent book, he shows how language indirection distorts, for example, game-theoretical models. For example, nobody bribes a cop in direct language. Corruption has an etiquette. Here in Brazil you can buy a cop for a "cervejinha" (i.e., a small beer). In China or Greece it would be called an "envelope", in Iraq a "good coffee", in Mexico a "refresco", in North Africa, "un petit cadeau". Everyone knows the meaning of the message, but nobody uses the information efficient terms: "Can I bribe you, officer?"
The euphemisms, and language indirection, introduce plausible deniability, this distorting the game-theoretical scenario, as Pinker points out: they have long been know by diplomats to be "not a bug, but a feature" of language. Teen kids rarely know that the fastest way to a girl's, ahem, "heart", is never the direct route.
There are some very important insights I feel should find their way, eventually, into economic models:
I think that's not enough. Most undergraduates want a job after school; and Undergraduates-level cognitive scientists should play great roles as policy designers and advisers, and, of course, in entrepreneurship.The majority of people who major in Brain and Cognitive Sciences attend graduate school, in fields such as medicine, neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, or computer science. Some attend law or business school. With or without advanced degrees, majors work in a diverse array of careers, as researchers and professors, in telecommunications, financial advising, human resources and human relations, counseling, teaching K through 12, ergonomics, environmental design, robotics, AI.
One of major trick experiences for a human to learn. This video gives some hints to understand that phenomena.
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Christian Aranha
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1:37 PM
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Full story from the Wall Street Journal.
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Alexandre Linhares
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9:51 AM
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The other day I was mentioning a case in which a nurse responds incredibly rapidly to a furiously serious situation in a neonatal intensive care unit. Then this guy comes up with this:
"You really have a fetiche with nurses, hã?"
To which I reply: "Only when their name isn´t OLGA."
Why study these cases in a business school? What is the relevance of that? Why should a decision-making course actually start with the case of a radar operator, and also look at, for instance, chess-players or firefighters? (No fetiche here, thanks for asking--but remember: not all firefighters are equal).
What can business students get from studying this?
Superficially, people such as nurses, doctors, firefighters, radar operators, chess players, etcetera, do tasks which are extremely distinct from what a manager does. But look closer, and you´ll start to see deep, deep, similarities, in their cognitive processes.
Most white-collar work is, of course, like this: reading email, downloading attachments and working on them and sending them back, deleting those cheap v!agr@ emails, talking to people over the phone, not falling asleep in meetings and trying to sound intelligent, and making "exciting, enthusiastic", presentations.
What ties managers and chess players together is that their job consists, mostly, of separating what´s important in a situation from what´s irrelevant in it.
Imagine the immense amounts of paper and phone calls trying to reach, for instance, Larry Allison, this coming week. It will be vast. Most of it will be filtered by secretaries and managers with that specific job in mind. But he´ll still have to deal personally with an large load of "incoming" information. Two documents stand in his desk, waiting for a signature. What´s important, and what´s not? How to separate what´s important from what´s irrelevant? It´s extremely tricky, and there´s not a single isolated piece of information that´s up to the task.
Sometimes, a single comma can cost you a million Canadian dollars.
I believe something like 70% of my own email is marked "urgent". Hardly any of it is, of course. So a "high-priority" or " urgent" mark is no good source of information. Neither is the sender. It could be someone extremely important, yet, the message still is rather unimportant. There´s not a single isolated piece of information that will tell us whether something is relevant or not.
It´s in the whole scenario. Importance is spread over the whole chessboard, the whole health history of the baby turning blue, the whole situation about a strange fire that´s just too hot to handle (tough it looks, to the unexperienced, that it should be easy to handle).
It´s all in the struggle between one´s expectations and one´s perception. If you´ve acquired precise expectations about a situation, then you´ll know what to expect. This is one of Jeff Hawkins crucial points. Did you know that the brain is "saturated with feedback connections?" In some parts of the cortex, there seems to be 10 times more information going from the brain to the senses (e.g., from your brain to your eyes), than the connections coming from the senses to the brain. Why is there such a high-bandwidth going on the wrong direction? The answer seems to be that the brain is telling the senses what to expect, "and only report back to me if something is different from what I´m telling you". That´s what Hawkins calls the memory-prediction framework, and close in philosophy to what the folks over at overcoming bias call cached thoughts.
This can only be done through experience, of course. So an international master reconstructs a chess position after a mere 5 seconds presentation, and we can´t do it.
When something departs from expectations, your attention is rapidly grabbed because of this high-bandwidth info the brain is sending your eyes. If you have experience, you know what to expect. Two good questions to ask every time you´re studying decision-making or intuition or judgment are: how could an inexperienced person deal with this situation? And of course the classic: how could a machine do this? What are the information-processing mechanisms going on here?
How do we cache those thoughts? What are the precise cognitive operations involved? FARG theory has, in my opinion, solved the problem of how we classify things into categories in a satisfactory manner. So now the issue is: how do these categories and concepts form in the first place? Harry Foundalis has the best thesis on the subject. If this problem is nailed in the coming years, then we´ll be on rich, rich, unexplored territory.
And the nurses? Aren´t they incredible? These creatures exist for the sole purpose of making you feel better.
Dios mio!; isn´t that awesome?
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Alexandre Linhares
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8:37 PM
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Imagine the following scenario. A secretive meeting, years ago, when Apple´s Steve Jobs, the benevolent dictator, put in place a strategy to get into the music business. It included not only a gadget, but also an online store, iTunes. I have no idea how that meeting went, but one thing is for sure: many people afterwards must have been back-stabbing Jobs, and mentioning "the music business? We´re going to sell music? This guy has totally lost it."
Fact of the matter was, technology had forever changed the economics of the music business, and Jobs could see it.
Having said that, I´d like to make a modest, billion-dollar, proposal, to the likes of Adobe, Yahoo, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, and whomever else might be up to the task.
Cui Bono?
Think about science publishing. I publish papers for a living. My first paper came out in Biological Cybernetics, a journal which cost, in 1998, over US$2000 for a one year subscription. I live scared to death of Profa. Deborah, who reviews my scientific output. And there are others like me in this world. Oh yes, many others.
The economics of science publishing is completely crazy for this day and age. Authors give enormous effort to bring their work to light, editors and journal and conference referees also put in enormous effort. All of that is unpaid, of course (or at least indirectly paid, in the hopes of tenure and/or prestige). But then, our masterpieces go to a journal, which obliges me to transfer copyright to the likes of Elsevier, or Springer, or someone else. Then some money starts to show up! According to wikipedia, Springer had sales exceeding €900 million in 2006, while Elsevier upped the ante to a pre-tax profit (in the REED annual report) to a staggering €1 billion (on €7.9 Billion turnover). But for those who brought out the scientific results, for those that bring the content, and the fact checking by referees and editors, all that work goes unpaid. The money goes to those who typeset it, then store it in a server, then print it out and mail it to libraries worldwide. And let´s not forget those which actually pay for the research, the public, as most research is government-financed. In the words of Michael Geist, a law professor:
How did we get here? A better question is how could it have been otherwise? In the last decades, how could a different industrial organization appear? Cui Bono?Cancer patients seeking information on new treatments or parents searching for the latest on childhood development issues were often denied access to the research they indirectly fund through their taxes
Adobe revolutionizes how the world engages with ideas and information.
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Alexandre Linhares
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8:19 AM
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Labels: 2007, economic theory, editorial, science and ignorance, technology
Maybe I should mention something about the Club of Rome meeting last week; some positive things happened for our growing Brazilian chapter. The first one of those was due to Claudia's immense efforts, and now we have a beautiful copy of Limits to growth: 30 year update in portuguese. We'll be working on that launch soon.
I had a little setback, which I plan to write about later on. But a learned a lesson from the Samurai: Good shoes, a good bed, and a great job. More soon.
Another thing I'm glad is the deal, with my good friends Rolando and Sebastian, who brought one of the first production models of the very cool US$100 laptop, to execute Digital World 2008 in Brazil. Also in the picture are Raoul Weiler (Belgium) and Yolanda Rueda (Spain). I'm not sure that I should publish much additional information here, but some of our partners are the World Wide Web Consortium, The "Comitê para Democratização da Informática", and of course NETMATRIX. We hope to bring Prof. Negroponte next year.
We finally had a chance for a meeting of the Brazilian Chapter, in a dinner. Here are (clockwise from center-left) Profa. Eda Coutinho, Prof. Heitor Gurgulino (now a vice-president of The Club of Rome), Claudia Santiago, me, Mrs. Lilian (Prof. Gurgulino`s wife), and Prof. José Aristodemo Pinnoti.
Oh, and Don Juan Carlos I, The King of Spain, such a nice fellow.
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Alexandre Linhares
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7:59 AM
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Posted by
Christian Aranha
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10:24 PM
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Really, I really mean it. Listen to the Samurai!
LISTEN TO THE SAMURAI!
And remember: boys don't cry.
I was trained as an operations researcher, both in my PhD with Horacio Yanasse (PhD, MIT OR center) and in my MSc with José Ricardo de Almeida Torreão (PhD, Brown Univ Physics).
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Alexandre Linhares
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12:58 PM
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There is today an immense flux of innovation going on on the web. Entrepreneurs are finding untold riches in all sorts of domains: from skype to google to youtube to blogs to buzzword to facebook, things which were unimaginable in 10 years have become part of everyday life.
But cognitive scientists are just not there. Not yet, I feel.
But I believe that the next huge wave of innovation will come from cognitive technologies. Bridging the gap from machine information-processing to human information-processing is something so large-scale that, as soon as the first big-hit cognitive engineering enterprise comes up, venture capitalists and scientists and engineers from all walks of life will start jumping ship.
We know a lot about the brain. We know a lot about perception. We know a lot about language, vision, we have all sorts of psychological experiments detailing human behavior and cognition. But we are still in a stage of a pre-foundational science. There is widespread debate about, well, just about everything. Consider this:
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Alexandre Linhares
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6:03 AM
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Adobe has acquired Buzzword. Having one of the largest, and by the way, coolest, companies behind it will be the kiss of death to Microsoft Word.
With Buzzword, you get almost all word-processing functionality what really matters on your browser--with the addition of online collaboration. I was one of their first beta testers, receiving my invitation from Roberto Mateu on July 19th. I have Masters and PhD students writing up papers and theses with it, in real time collaboration, dispersed all around: Taisa is in the heart of the Amazon, Anne is in Harvard University, and Analize is in Curitiba, in the Brazilian South.
They have been adding features every month. It´s one of those things that, after you have it, you wonder how could you live without it. Soon, it will have the host of Adobe TrueType fonts, pdf support, offline functionality, etcetera. Yesterday it was alpha-geek only, but now it will spread like wildfire.
Adobe isn`t disclosing the financial part of the deal, but something like this just wouldn`t go for less than 100 million, perhaps some multiples of that. After this huge incentive, expect similar start-ups to jump in the Adobe AIR bandwagon and, twelve months from now, spreadsheets and more sophisticated presentation programs. In the future, expect everything all the way from charting to equation editors. Microsoft Office "ultimate" (¿?) goes for USD679,00. The "student edition" goes for USD149,00. (By the way, Apple should just give up this space and bundle iWork into new machines.) Scoble mentions that MS will still have some "office" revenue stream, yet: "There is blood in the water even if only the early sharks can smell it."
I`ve just replied to Tad Staley`s email, congratulating these folks.
As I wrote before, I´m almost feeling a little bit sorry for Mr Gates. But only almost. And only a little.
But, hey, maybe that cool Zune will make up for these lost sales?
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Alexandre Linhares
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3:23 AM
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Here´s an email I´ve sent some months ago to a number of very bright people.
The 1000 dollars offer holds until the end of this year.
Imagine if two famous biologists published a study, over 30 years ago, with two parts: in the first part, they unequivocally showed that sharks and dolphins had a strikingly different nature. In the second part, however, they tried to explain that difference by looking at the habitats of a dolphin and the habitat of a shark (i.e., the same data). Imagine that that paper would be cited by hundreds of people, for decades.
Now imagine that Chase and Simon, writing a study entitled "Perception in chess", in Cognitive Psychology 4, p.55—81 (1973), divided it into two parts. The first part (p.55—61) of the paper showed that when chess masters looked at a board for 5 seconds, they could reproduce it with enormous accuracy, while beginners could not reproduce it for more than a few pieces. This difference could not be explained by masters' greater memory, for, in randomized positions, the effect disappeared, with masters and beginners able to reproduce only a few pieces of the board. Sharks and Dolphins, it was clear, were different.
Now, what was the nature of the chunks like? The second part of the paper devised two tasks, a 'perception task', and a 'memory task'. These tasks looked at masters and beginners 'interpiece interval times' (within glances at the board, and in between glances) in reconstructing the boards. The results were unequivocal: the data was exactly the same for masters and beginners (figs 3 and 4). They pointed this out clearly:
[Perception task, p.65] "The first thing to notice is that the data are quite similar for all subjects. The latencies show the same systematic trends, and, for the probabilities, the product moment correlation between subjects are quite high: Master vs Class A=.93; Master vs Class B=.95, and Class A vs Class B =.92. The same is true for the between glance data… Thus, the same kinds and degrees of relatedness between successive pieces holds for subjects of very different skills."
[Memory task] "Again the pattern of latencies and probabilities look the same for all subjects, and the correlations are about the same as in the perception of data: Master vs Class A=.91, Master vs. Class B=.95, and Class A vs. Class B=.95".
The obvious conclusion is, of course, that whatever difference exists between Masters and Class B players, it cannot be obtained from this dataset. Nothing about the "nature of the chess chunk" can ever be obtained here.
Yet, with that dataset at hand, the authors proceeded to study the nature of the chess chunk: "These probabilities are informative about the underlying structures that the subjects are perceiving" (p. 68). How can they be, if a Master subject perceives the global meaning of the position, and a Class B perceives nothing?
"Our data gives us an operational method of characterizing chunks, which we will apply to the middle-game memory experiments of subject M[=Master]" (p.78). One wonders: why bother? Send the master home. They could gather all they needed a from a Class B subject, or from a yanomami, after that non sequitur.
Chase and Simon 1973 explained the difference between sharks and dolphins by looking at their habitats, and the whole world bought it. At the risk of running into utter humiliation, I will paypal one thousand dollars to the first person on this list that proves me wrong. The deadline for your thousand shiny dollars is 24h before the deadline for submission to cogsci in Nashville, when I will go on and commit scientific suicide.
Any takers?
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Alexandre Linhares
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Labels: cognitive science, decision-making, perception, psychology, shortsightedness