Author: tom

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Links for February 2011

COMMONSense: ‘Commons is what we hold in trust’
‘an indispensable lesson about Burkean anti-meddling arguments: don’t get tangled up in them too much. Life is too short and there’s too much sewage in the world.’
YouTube: Stewart Lee on Top Gear
UK Universities could learn from Texas, where they admit the top 10% from every high school
Russel Hoban on Riddley Walker: ‘what I have acheived as a writer has come from being friends with my own head’
Video: Steve Jobs on How to live before you die
The one-sentence solution to almost all procrastination: Don’t wait until you feel like doing something
Tim Radford ‘Of course scientists can communicate’
Jonah Lehrer: The Curse of Mental Accounting
‘Does a mild case of ADHD make us more creative? Why distraction is an essential part of the imagination’
XKCD’s productivity tip: reboot your computer every time you get bored
UK governments’ Behavioural Insight Team fails to convince any dept to use its ideas
Twitter as public private speech
‘Procedural literacy [ie coding] will be essential if humanities students are to understand virtual worlds as rhetorical and ideological spaces, just as film and the novel are likewise understood as forms of representation and rhetoric’
Existential Gaming: ‘On my first day, I thought the game was about punching pigs. So I punched pigs.’ (plus, lego as the ultimate Satrean toy)
Is crime a beast or a virus? Thibodeau & Boroditsky. 2011. Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning. PLoS ONE

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Tweets for 2011-02-26

Stress Potentiates Early and Attenuates Late Stages of Visual Processing http://bit.ly/ghEASn via @mariapage #
Manchester Cafe Scientifique. Robin Dunbar in april! http://www.cafescientifique.org/manchester via @McrSciFest #
love the idea of 'procedural literacy' @tom_chance: "Why humanities students should learn to program" – http://ur1.ca/3axxp #

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Tweets for 2011-02-24

Clay Shirky's list of people who change the world by helping us look at it in a particular light http://say100.saymedia.com/thought-leaders #
Now, every time I use a semicolon, I think of Kurt Vonnegut #

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

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Tweets for 2011-02-23

Lifehack: once you finally find the thing you are looking for, put it in the place you looked first for it -> an adaptive filing system! #
Why Twitter’s New Retweet Feature Sucks http://outspokenmedia.com/social-media/twitters-new-retweet-feature-sucks/ #
Look's great! RT @profschwabe New PhD position in my group. Check out http://www.informatik.uni-rostock.de/ars/?page_id=140 #
Looks great! RT @profschwabe New PhD position in my group. Check out http://www.informatik.uni-rostock.de/ars/?page_id=140 #
Talking in York, 13th of May: "Infering cognitive architectures from high-resolution behavioural data" http://idiolect.org.uk/notes/?p=1363 #

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Tweets for 2011-02-23

Lifehack: once you finally find the thing you are looking for, put it in the place you looked first for it -> an adaptive filing system! #
Why Twitter’s New Retweet Feature Sucks http://outspokenmedia.com/social-media/twitters-new-retweet-feature-sucks/ #
Look's great! RT @profschwabe New PhD position in my group. Check out http://www.informatik.uni-rostock.de/ars/?page_id=140 #
Looks great! RT @profschwabe New PhD position in my group. Check out http://www.informatik.uni-rostock.de/ars/?page_id=140 #
Talking in York, 13th of May: "Infering cognitive architectures from high-resolution behavioural data" http://idiolect.org.uk/notes/?p=1363 #

events Me science

Talk: Infering cognitive architectures from high-resolution behavioural data

Post author By tom
Post date February 23, 2011
2 Comments on 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.

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Tweets for 2011-02-22

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

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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 #

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Tweets for 2011-02-17

Columbia University prof. tells it like it is on US TV http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCPz2SzROFQ #
The ebook reader in 2050 http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/01/stephen-collinss-cartoon-e-book-reader-2050/ #

quotes

The Second Coming (Slouching towards Bethlehem)

Post author By tom
Post date February 17, 2011
1 Comment on 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

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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 #

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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 #

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Tweets for 2011-02-15

Oh, look @sheffielduni now does a MSc in Science Communication. http://bit.ly/gdgMkM I wonder if the course directors use twitter? #
You understand that relative percentages are meaningless. Maybe it's because you're not a Londoner http://yfrog.com/hshzjrkj #
If you want to do a PhD in Sheffield supervised by me, now is the time to let yourself be known! #
Psychology PhD projects at the University of Sheffield (I'm in here a few times) http://psy-phd.group.shef.ac.uk/ #
Ok, annoyingly my projects aren't listed in the previous link. Here's what's on offer: http://tomstafford.staff.shef.ac.uk/phd.htm #
Get my ebook about dreams, morality and stories for $0.99 or £0.71 http://mindhacks.com/2011/02/15/the-cut-price-narrative-escape/ #
A note on human behaviour: Enjoying the Natural History Museum yesterday, I came across this exhibit http://bit.ly/eCSMe0 #

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Tweets for 2011-02-11

I have organised an away day for my research group. They are under orders to eat greek food, play snooker and talk about science #
http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/ #

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Tweets for 2011-02-10

RT @AlecPatton UK Universities could learn from Texas, where they admit the top 10% from every high school http://wp.me/pwY1p-EV #
RT @alexfradera Stewart Lee on the instumental view of learning http://j.mp/h6oqmk #

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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/ #

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.

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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? #

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Tweets for 2011-02-07

(The neuroscience of) The Quick and the Dead http://youtu.be/_aMfSwuObb0 #

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Tweets for 2011-02-07

(The neuroscience of) The Quick and the Dead http://youtu.be/_aMfSwuObb0 #

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Tweets for 2011-02-05

Brunch in Cambridge Heath #

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Tweets for 2011-02-04

Guardian Law "Legal Heroes" series http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/series/legal-heroes #
So who's up for breakfast/lunch in east london tomorrow? #

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Tweets for 2011-02-03

RT @NewPubThink: "Intellectual life is not dead within the university, but nor is it safe there." http://bit.ly/hu1Nnp #

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Tweets for 2011-02-03

RT @NewPubThink: "Intellectual life is not dead within the university, but nor is it safe there." http://bit.ly/hu1Nnp #

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Tweets for 2011-02-02

Subitizing exists for touch http://is.gd/LLe8kL #
Iconnote is a blog by Alison G. Gibbons http://iconnote.blogspot.com/ #
Useful innovations in teaching http://is.gd/a87jep #

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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? #

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Tweets for 2011-01-29

The problem with psychoanalysts is their tendency to be the conspiracy theorists of mind and culture #
♺ @dougald: Fascinated by the exchanges @uniteddiversity have been having with authors re: piracy – http://bit.ly/fV2vI9 #copyright #

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