Categories
links

Links for February 2011

Categories
tweets

Tweets for 2011-02-26

Powered by Twitter Tools

Categories
tweets

Tweets for 2011-02-24

Powered by Twitter Tools

Categories
quotes

Vonnegut on the Semicolon

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.

Kurt Vonnegut, A Man without a Country

Categories
tweets

Tweets for 2011-02-23

Powered by Twitter Tools

Categories
tweets

Tweets for 2011-02-23

Powered by Twitter Tools

Categories
events Me science

Talk: Infering cognitive architectures from high-resolution behavioural data

I’ve been invited to give a talk at York Centre for Complex Systems Analysis. I’ll be speaking on the 13th of May, a friday, to the title “Infering cognitive architectures from high-resolution behavioural data”. It’ll be an overview of what it is exactly that I try to do as part of my work.

Abstract: I will give an overview of some of the work done in our lab, the Adaptive Behaviour Research Group (http://www.abrg.group.shef.ac.uk/ ) in the Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield. Across human, non-human animal, simulation and robotics platforms we investigate the neural circuits that allow intelligent behaviour, bringing to bear psychological, neuroscientific and computational perspectives. We are particularly interested in the action selection problem – that of deciding what to do next (and of doing it). This talk will focus on my own work looking at 3 paradigms where we have collected high-resolution behavioural data in humans – mistakes made by expert touch typists, eye-movements during visual search and a novel paradigm for investigating the learning of new motor skills. I will make comments on how we analyse such data in order to make inferences about the underlying architecture of human decision making.

Categories
tweets

Tweets for 2011-02-22

  • Had loads of fun talking to skepticallyspeaking.com about computational cognitive neuroscience and Mind Hacks. Interview broadcast next week #

Powered by Twitter Tools

Categories
tweets

Tweets for 2011-02-21

  • Consumers born or made? "Advertising…is the only institution which we have for instilling new needs" Potter (1954) http://bit.ly/hQxQHN #
  • Evidence-based viva preparation http://bit.ly/hxBF2W thanks @keepstherainoff #
  • Most of us are not really too busy or overwhelmed, we just have that feeling because of our choices about how we structure our time #

Powered by Twitter Tools

Categories
tweets

Tweets for 2011-02-17

Powered by Twitter Tools

Categories
quotes

The Second Coming (Slouching towards Bethlehem)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

W.B Yeats

Categories
tweets

Tweets for 2011-02-16

  • Milgram's "obedience" studies, not about obedience after all? Excellent post http://ht.ly/3Xl5z & chimes with my ebook:http://bit.ly/dW7z6b #

Powered by Twitter Tools

Categories
tweets

Tweets for 2011-02-16

  • Milgram's "obedience" studies, not about obedience after all? Excellent post http://ht.ly/3Xl5z & chimes with my ebook:http://bit.ly/dW7z6b #

Powered by Twitter Tools

Categories
tweets

Tweets for 2011-02-15

Powered by Twitter Tools

Categories
tweets

Tweets for 2011-02-11

Powered by Twitter Tools

Categories
tweets

Tweets for 2011-02-10

Powered by Twitter Tools

Categories
tweets

Tweets for 2011-02-09

  • Templeton Positive Neuroscience Awards will grant $2.9 million at the intersection of Neuroscience and Positiv… (cont) http://deck.ly/~hrC4Y #
  • Congratulations Tweetdeck, you've added enough functionality to break why I like twitter. I quit. And your mobile version is buggy as hell #
  • This looks like it could be very useful for dealing with email: http://www.boxbe.com/ Anyone got any experience? #
  • More fun than it should be : http://isparade.jp/ #

Powered by Twitter Tools

Categories
intellectual self-defence systems

choice is not preference

There is a beauty to the arrangement whereby a cake is shared by one of us dividing it and the other choosing which part they want. The person dividing doesn’t know which part they’ll get so they have every incidentive to make fair shares. They say that John Rawls took this as inspiration for his philosophy of how a just society should be organised (but I don’t know enough about that).

But the cake cutting example only works for a world where the cake is homogeneous and the two cake-eaters have identical preferences (in this case, to have as much as possible). Imagine a world where the cake has a fruit half and a nut half, say, and I have two cake-eaters, A and B. A likes fruit and nut equally, she doesn’t care. B is allergic to nuts. Now the game of “one cuts, one chooses” doesn’t work. If A cuts she will slice the cake in half and be happy with whichever half she’s left with, but B better hope that A makes a half which is entirely fruit, otherwise she’ll be forced to make a choice between two bits of cake, some of which she can’t eat. B is at no risk of losing out, A is at substantial risk. If B cuts first, she might consider cutting the cake into a nut half and a fruit half, but then she has to hope A chooses the fruit half. And she might cut the cake into mixed halves an put up with a portion she can’t eat (but ensuring B only gets half the cake). The game-theoretic solution is probably to cut the cake into a larger, nut-plus-small-amount-of-fruit, half and a smaller, just-fruit, half. A will choose the larger half. A definitely wins, B loses out.

The solution whereby A and B both have half, and both enjoy their halves equally (ie B gets the fruit half) is simple, but enreachable via this sharing game.

I’m reminded of an experiment I think I read about in George Ainslie’s Breakdown of Will (don’t have the book to hand to check, so apologies for inaccuracies. We can pretend it is a thought experiment and I think it still makes the point). There’s a large long cage with a lever that opens a door at the other end. If you are a pig it take 15 seconds, say, to run from the lever to the door. After 20 seconds the door closes, so you get to eat your fill for 5 seconds. One pig on her own gets regular opportunities to feed, as well as plenty of exercise running backward and forth. Now imagine a big pig and a small pig. The big pig is a bully and always pushes the small pig off any food. In a cage with normal feeding arrangements the big pig gets all the food (poor small pig!). But in this bizarre long cage with the lever-for-food arrangement, a funny thing happens. The big pig ends up as a lever pressing slave for the small pig, who gets to eat all the foot.

To see why, we need a game-theory analysis like with the cake example. If the little pig pressed the lever, the big pig would start eating the food and the little pig wouldn’t be able to budge her. There’s no incentive for the little pig to press the lever, she doesn’t get any food either way! The big pig, however, has a different choice : if she presses the lever then she can charge down to the food and knock the little pig out of the way, getting 5 seconds of food. It’s worth it for big pig, but the outcome is that she does all the running and only gets a quarter of the food.

This suprising result is none the less a ‘behaviourally stable strategy’, to bastardise a phrase from evolutionary game theory.

Bottom line: minimally complex environments and heteogenities in agents’ abilities and preferences break simple fairness games. In anything like the real world, as Tom Slee so convincingly shows, choice is not preference.

Categories
tweets

Tweets for 2011-02-08

  • Trying to learn mixed models logistic regression using #rstats Now feel whatever the statistics equivalent of "really high" is #
  • Evidence based date questions http://is.gd/og9T63 from okcupid #
  • "New technologies and the Reinvention of the Author" http://is.gd/bsH1KF Prospect Magazine Literary Festival event your bag @alteralison? #

Powered by Twitter Tools

Categories
tweets

Tweets for 2011-02-07

Powered by Twitter Tools

Categories
tweets

Tweets for 2011-02-07

Powered by Twitter Tools

Categories
tweets

Tweets for 2011-02-05

  • Brunch in Cambridge Heath #

Powered by Twitter Tools

Categories
tweets

Tweets for 2011-02-04

Powered by Twitter Tools

Categories
tweets

Tweets for 2011-02-03

Powered by Twitter Tools

Categories
tweets

Tweets for 2011-02-03

Powered by Twitter Tools

Categories
tweets

Tweets for 2011-02-02

Powered by Twitter Tools

Categories
tweets

Tweets for 2011-02-01

  • Thought it was impossible to smell underwater? Not for the star-nosed mole. It re-inhales its own air bubbles http://is.gd/2Y6yUh #
  • "I didn't used to believe in synaesthesia, but then I saw scents" (via @alexfradera) #
  • If I publish a paper, I sign over copyright for my figures to the publisher. Can I avoid this If I copyright them with a CC license first? #
  • .@tom_chance is my IP guru, thanks Tom! #
  • The bowtie. Extinct in the wild? #

Powered by Twitter Tools