I attended an interesting talk yesterday at ICDL-EpiRob on how one key property of developmental learning is trying over and over again at difficult tasks (like learning to walk). The experimenters found that a sense of elation would drive repeated failed trials which often led to better policies in the end, suggesting that being immune [...]
This semester is all about trying to complete my thesis proposal so that I can move into candidacy and eventually graduate. I’m not sure how these things usually go, but many of the things in my thesis proposal are new ideas that also need to find there way into conference papers, a journal article, and [...]
Almost all natural numbers are very, very, very large.
[The visualization of the week is here.] I’ve had the opinion that climate scientists should provide expositions of the science of climate change at various levels of sophistication so that interested people from different backgrounds can educate themselves about this issue. Instead we seem to get roughly two types of output from climate scientists: useless press releases [...]
What follows is my attempt to understand the controversy surrounding a single issue that emerged as a result of the “Climategate” controversy. A couple of disclaimers are in order. The first is that I’m not a climatologist and have never taken any climate related courses. The second is that I’m not necessarily a global warming [...]
In an otherwise interesting but ill-thought-out comparison of cuckoldry and rape, I found this little nugget: We all know that women tend to be more expressive about their complaints – you can’t beat ‘em for wailing and gnashing of teeth. Really? That hasn’t been my experience. And anyway, even by the flimsy standards of economics [...]
I attended a talk by Art Markman on the future of cognitive science titled, “Get together, Think big, Talk loud: The future of Cognitive Science”. He raised an interesting point near the end of his talk. The traditional curriculum for science focuses on classic disciplines like biology, chemistry, and physics, but how many people really [...]
I’ve been reading a number polemics that provide examples of problem science but stop short of naming the people responsible. Take for example this: Too many research papers in Computer Science are nonsense: they convey no worthy message. Yet, they pass a Turing test of sort: at a glance, they are indistinguishable from interesting research [...]
I am a fan of Easily Distracted, but there’s a lot to dislike about this particular post on ghostwriting academic work. The first thing that jumps out is how disingenuous and scornful Burke is towards anybody who isn’t a practicing scholar with a cushy faculty position, a shiny Ph.D., and a truckload of well received [...]