by this passage in Numbers are associated with different types of spatial information depending on the task van Dijck, Gevers and Fiasa
"When patients neglecting the left side of perceptual space bisect physical lines, they typically shift the subjective midpoint towards the right. Similarly, when indicating the midpoint of a numerical interval (e.g. what is in the middle between 1 and 9?) they overestimate the midpoint (e.g. 7)."
I first saw this video of Peter Greenaway's projection onto Da Vinci's "Last Supper" about a year ago. I'm still astounded by it every time I see it:
Then today I saw this projection by Apparati Effimeri on the side of the Malatestiana castle in Cesena, Italy. Have a look at 2'15" and 3'30". Pink Floyd video much?
No, not Eurovision, though equally baffling and capable of inducing eyestrain. The VSS annual meeting, and the Neural Correlate Society release the results of the Best Visual Illusion contest. Enjoy!
PLoS ONE, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
Where else can you read about research as diverse as the discovery of self-medicating behaviour in caterpillars and the differences in brain activity when telling apart reality from fiction (I'm going to read that one properly and write it up on the serious blog, which has not been updated in ages.) What is more, PLoS articles are FREE - to anyone with an internet connection - no matter whether you're in a university or a web cafe, whether you're in Cambridge or Cairo. Hurray for open access.
And hurray for good dental hygiene. A collaboration between researchers at Kyoto and Ubon Rajathanee Universities studied monkeys that live around the Buddhist shrine of Prang Sam Yot in Thailand. They found that the macaques had learnt to use human hair as dental floss. Not only that, monkey-mothers repeated the "flossing gestures" significantly more often when observed by their monkey-babies than when not.
The length of the flossing episode didn't vary between the infant present/not present conditions. The authors therefore argue that the change in behaviour doesn't result from the mother being distracted by the presence of her infant. Rather the increased repetition of the flossing gestures (reinserting the hair and repeatedly "snapping" the teeth) is intended to demonstrate how flossing is done.
Doesn't it make you proud to be a primate?
Medic, visionary statistician and sword swallower Hans Rosling at TED, debuning the myth of a persistent and inevitable "third world".
Part One:
Part Two:
[Disclosure of interest - there's a certain author on this paper that is married to the author of this piece...]
Take a look at the figure on the left (click on it to make it bigger). It's taken from a paper by Corney and Lotto. The left hand column shows some optical illusions that you've probably seen before. In Box A for example, the corner lines look lighter than they actually are, and in Box D, there is a tendency to see light spots appearing in the intersections of the darker grey lines.
In the right hand column, the blue line on the graph shows the actual lightness (reflectance) of the stimuli - that is, how much light is really being returned to the eye by the points along the blue line (assuming the blue line wasn't there!). The red curve shows the perceived reflectance - that is, how light the stimulus appears to be, once the brain is done processing the image in the light of prior experience.
Graph A shows the brain overestimating lightness throughout, but particularly at the points of maximum lightness - the "bands" in the corner that we see as being lighter than they really are. Graph D - my favourite - shows an oscillation: an intersection between two dark grey lines is perceived as lighter than it is (causing the appearing and disappearing "blobs" that we see). At the points furthest from these intersections, the line actually appears to be darker than it is.
Now for the sting: the brain in question was an artificial neural network (ANN) that only ever existed inside a computer. It was trained to successfully perform on a lightness constancy task. Most excitingly, when trained to discern between overlapping layers, the ANN sees White's illusion (Box E). White's illusion has been problematic to model as the lightness perception goes "the other way" from the stimuli shown here. Thus, the by-product of learning to see lightness and depth is a susceptibility to these illuaions. This also tells us something about how animal brains, including our own, work.
For the full article see Plos, and for a writeup see New Scientist.
Dan Hodgins coordinates the the child development program at Mott Community College. He seems to have some sound advice to parents about developmental stages of children. What he doesn't seem to do so well is neurophysiology. Which is a worry - as he's using it to prescribe educational interventions based on differences between the brains of the sexes that are, for the most part, of dubious significance, some of which are of dubious reality and in once case, are totally made up.
Dan Hodgins has a theory about the "Crockus" which, Hodgins claims, is four times larger in girls than in boys. Apparently, among other ramifications of the difference in size is that "Girls see the details of experiences" whereas boys see the broad picture. He even provides an unlabeled slide showing the size of the Crockus in girls and the size of the Crockus in boys. Strangely however, his slides don't actually show the Crockus - instead using the pars opercularis and the motor cortex as examples of the scale of this structure.
So where is the Crockus? Apparently - nowhere. No literature search/Google search/"shout out" to the neuroanatomy community has managed to find it. Prof. Mark Liberman of Language Lab had a theory. Maybe Hodgins misheard/misremembered "Broca's" or even "Pars Opercularis" as Crockus? Not wishing to just, y'know, hypothesise baselessly, Liberman emailed Hodgins, who replied:
Thanks for asking....The Crockus was actually just recently named by Dr. Alfred Crockus. It is the detailed section of the brain, a part of the frontal lope. It is the detailed section of the brain. You are right, it is four times larger in females then males from birth. This part of the brain supports the Corpus Callosum (the part of the brain that connects the right and left hemisphere. The larger the crockus the more details are percieved by the two sides of the brain.
For boys, usually they only view and analyze the whole picture, not the sum of its details. Girls brains are wired to look at the details first, which then leads them to the whole picture.
Look at the work by Moir.
This deepens the mystery, I think, because I can't find any likely-looking Alfred Crockus via Google Scholar or Wikipedia or even general web search. I think that the "Moir" he's referring to is the co-author of Anne Moir and David Jessel, Brainsex, 1992. But Amazon offers its "Search Inside" feature for that work, and a search for "Crockus" in it comes up empty.
The last few days in London have been blighted by Tube strikes, due to the failure of cowboys PFI contractors Metronet. One of the presenters of Radio 4's Today Program was more than usually snippy about the notion of walking to work in London.
I guess if you have to arrive in time for a 6am broadcast you might never have walked to work - but there's something satisfying, and very pleasant about walking in, even when the Tube is running. It's certainly more fun than the mobile sardine-tin that is the Northern Line at peak hours. DH and I used to walk to and from work, in Bloomsbury, from our home in Elephant and Castle - a journey that more or less spans the whole of Zone One. It gave me time to ponder the day ahead/just gone and included a very pleasant five minutes (yes really, five whole minutes) crossing Waterloo Bridge. Even to this day DH tends to walk to work at Old Street.
It's free exercise, valuable thinking time and saves a lot of carbon compared to car or taxi. The charity Living Streets is trying to make walking as pleasant and easy as possible. As well as their own initiatives, they've linked to this alternative Tube map showing average walking times between Tube stations, created by students from Central Saint Martin's. For point-to-point walking maps, together with time, calories and carbon saving data, Walk It is also excellent.
Did you know?
I decided to teach myself how to knit - relying heavily on the people at Knitting Help to find out how to cast on nicely. The reason? Innocent's Big Knit in aid of Age Concern. It's amazing - I've gone from never having touched a pair of knitting needles (or at least not since the jumbo sized ones you're made to play with in infant school "craft" lessons) to knocking up 2 small hats per evening.
Here are a few of my creations so far (now in blurryvision!):
But it's time to move on to bigger projects. I've already knitted myself an i-Pod Nano case in fetching lilac and purple. But David is now asking for something he saw over at Aphra Benn's place:
How to knit a Moebius scarf from the middle to the edge.
I'll start that when I've decided I've done enough hats.
And after that, brains..?
At work I keep getting emails about this allegedly amazing new programming language called Ruby. "Try it", they say, "All the cool kids are doing it". But I worry, is it a gateway language? Will I be scripting Perl in a chichi little cybercafe in Hoxton by autumn? Will winter see my slow decline as I'm turning tricks in VB? <shudder>
And then I found The Poignant Guide to Ruby. And I was seduced. To the dark side or to the light I know not - I haven't actually learnt any Ruby yet... but the first three chapters hasve made me laugh out loud a coupla times. More than I can say for, "C++: the Core Language*".
Instead of Hello World we begin with:
"Like when you meet Somebody in college and they look like somebody who used to hit you in the face with paintbrushes when you were a kid. And so, impulsively, you conclude that this new Somebody is likely a non-friend. You wince at their hair. You hang up phones loudly during crucial moments in their anecdotes. You use your pogo stick right there where they are trying to walk!"
There's never anything in them worth the trees that they're printed on[1]. Instead, for your delight and delectation I direct you to this post from Science Creative Quarterly.
Part book review, part essay, entirely interesting. Well worth a read. It's more likely to change your life than an article on this season's trend for rattan garden furniture[2].
----Notes----
[1]Except Bad Science, but you can get the unexpurgated version of Ben Goldacre's comments online anyway. Take that old media.
[2] I'm not suggesting that there is such a trend - I have the world's most useless balcony (25 foot long, 9 inches wide) so what the heck would I know about garden furniture?
Jeff Hawkins is one of those jaw dropping people who seem to have an amazing capacity to make things happen. He's the pioneer behind "pen based computing" and the Palm and Handspring companies.
More recently he's used his money and inventiveness to found the Redwood Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, based at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at Berkeley. From this, along with long term collaborator Donna Dubinsky, he's spun off a company called Numenta.
Why the business update? Well, Hawkins is of the view that current research in AI will never succeed in emulating "holistic" human intelligence. In that he's right. In the AI community, we're very good at solving particular problems (such as how to win at chess) and developing particular techniques (like the neural net or genetic algorithm). We have computers that are a lot smarter than computers "ought" to be - this area of research is known as "weak AI". We're also pretty good at using some of these intelligent modes of computing to better understand living intelligences, like human perception for instance.
Strong AI - making a computer that thinks like a human - has been a dirty word for some time now. The reins on this area of research were tugged in pretty sharply at the onset of the AI winter and have never been slackened since.
Hawkins may be about to change all that with his model of Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM). The details of his group's work can be found here and [PDF] here.
Hence the business update. I get my jollies from evolutionary computation and logic programming, so this is not my area. From the (very) little I do know about neurally inspired computing, this doesn't look like "neural nets 2.0". But I don't know: is this old news, a pipe dream, or the shot in the arm that brings "hard AI" back to life?
If I read something like this from any other entrepreneur I'd be cynical as all getout. On Hawkins' past form however, I'm downgrading that to merely sceptical. With an option on secretly hoping to be convinced.
And if all that was just too dry for a Friday - take a look at this "tutorial" on neural architecture:
(Spotted on Mind Hacks
Prof. Hasok Chang, a colleague from the Evidence Science project, won the 2006 Lakatos Award in Philosophy of Science for his book Inventing Temperature. If you're in London tomorrow (the 18th April) and can make it to the LSE in time, be sure to catch his talk. It promises to be extremely interesting.
Plenty of interesting fodder in the carnival (see post below), particularly in the light of the recent attention paid to the egregious posts - including those inciting sexually violent acts - on Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users blog.
For my £0.02 (that's like what - $0.04 US at current exchange rates?) in the light of what's happened to Sierra and others, I appreciate where Tim O'Reilly's Code of Blogging Conduct (CoBC) is coming from. Briefly - there are 7 Principles O'Reilly suggests:
1. Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog.
2. Label your tolerance level for abusive comments.
3. Consider eliminating anonymous comments.
4. Ignore the trolls.
5. Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so.
6. If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so.
7. Don't say anything online that you wouldn't say in person.
The notion of a Code of Conduct always raises the hackles of a woolly liberal like me. There's an instinctual belief that those trying to dictate acceptable behaviour will dictate the terms in such a way that it benefits them alone. But I think O'Reilly's done a sterling job here, though I'm not sure whether I'd call this a code of conduct. As you'd expect from O'Reilly they are a clear, interesting and useful set of how to's that will help make blogging more fruitful for those who choose to adopt them.
Principles 1, 2 and 3 are suggestions for good editorial practice, and the way they're implemented will vary from blog to blog. O'Reilly hat tips Kaylea Hascall for the notion of a set of Creative Commons type badges that will let readers know what "flavour" of comment you'll allow. Me - ad hominem attack are a nono; I'm relaxed about profanity; but absolutely no tales of some 16 year old babysitter killed by an axe wielding maniac or similar that conclude "if you don't post this comment to 15 other blogs you will die a horrible death". If someone can make me a succinct badge that conveys that I'll be eternally grateful!
Principles one and two kind of run together for me. If you have an editorial policy on your blog regarding the comments you'll allow then this should be made explicit. There's no point hoping that someone who's recently turned on to your blog will "get" the culture you're fostering. An explicit declaration of what will and won't be posted saves the blogger from a lot of whining from deleted posters whose amour propre has been damaged, and saves would be posters a lot of time and energy, if they know a priori what doesn't fly on your site.
Principle 3 has caused a bit of a ruckus in the blogging community. There are many (such as the fab NHS Blog Doctor) who can't divulge their identities for professional reasons, and others who can't or won't for personal reasons. However, I think that there are gradations of anonymity - there are those who know me in the "big room with the blue ceiling" that I wouldn't dream of giving my phone number to for example. A consistent online identity - even if it's nothing more than a username - is at least "fair dealing" when it comes to tying together a picture of who says what. I like Slashdot's default guest handle of "anonymous coward" - it's hard to upbraid someone about their behaviour if you can't see a pattern of behaviour emerging. For the purposes of a useful CoC, anonymity must allow you to retain as much privacy about your real life identity as you would retain in talking in any location where you might be overheard. Those posters who don't use a consistent identity - whether posting as "anonymous coward" or using endless sock puppets - should be taken about as seriously as a phonecall from a Mr "Haywood Djablomé".
I find 4 very hard - I think most serious bloggers, particularly the scientists and engineers, all do at some level. At the bottom is a difficulty in recognising some of the less obvious trolls. This is a result of my perplexity in not understanding how someone can be engaging in a discussion in anything less than a spirit of openness and goodwill. Thankfully I've never been high profile enough to have truly bothersome trolling. Maybe the Scientiae carnival will change all that...
5 and 7 will be ignored by trolls, but are at least good reminders for those of us who maybe just get a little het up sometimes. I know I prefer delivering the bad news about someone's diminished intellectual stature and personal effectiveness ("you're a jackass") in private than in public.
Number 6, read in conjunction with number 5, suggests that bad behaviour be tackled offline. One of the problems I've encountered in other forums is that trolls use this propensity for the "good citizens" to address the troll privately to divide and rule. The complainant is left with the impression that they're the only one that finds the behaviour to be out of line. It's only when the members of the forum can name the behaviour as being unacceptable in public that they realise they're not the only one having a problem with the troll in question. There needs to be some sort of corollary to 5 - when private communication fails, we have a right or perhaps a duty to calmly and dispassionately name the poor behaviour in public.
So I've been won over. The Code of Conduct looks reasonable and useful. It will only be noticed by the "good citizens" - but if nothing else it will empower us to name bad behaviour. The Internet is a public place - but so is the bus stop. You're having a edifying, enlightning or entertaining conversation, waiting for the bus. Some idiots keep barging in to make threats, or derailing the conversation with loud yelling. Not only that, they do so in disguise. You'd be happy to call the behaviour unacceptable. Don't settle for less online.
The brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant Ben Goldacre reports on a fantastic article from the Indie on the (increasingly laughable) Channel 4 doc "the Great Global Warming Swindle" (GGWS).
To whet your appetite, here are Connor's graphs:
Martin Durkin, the writer and director of the GGWS, has form in this area. The ITC ruled that his 1997 documentary "Against Nature" (also for Channel 4)
"The programmes breached the Programme Code in respect of the failure to make the four interviewees adequately aware of the nature of the programmes, and the way their contributions were edited. The Commission directed Channel 4 to issue an on-screen apology to the individuals concerned."
[C]rucially, the axis along the bottom of the [Global Temperature] graph has been distorted in the C4 version of the graph, which made it look like the information was up-to-date when in fact the data ended in the early 1980s.
Mr Durkin admitted that his graphics team had extended the time axis along the bottom of the graph to the year 2000. "There was a fluff there," he said.
If Mr Durkin had gone directly to the Nasa website he could have got the most up-to-date data. This would have demonstrated that the amount of global warming since 1975, as monitored by terrestrial weather stations around the world, has been greater than that between 1900 and 1940 - although that would have undermined his argument.
"The original Nasa data was very wiggly-lined and we wanted the simplest line we could find," Mr Durkin said.
I keep seeing this van in Aber:
It's possibly he funniest vehicle I've ever seen (but then again I am terrified of clown cars).
The text reads
You know that feeling: when you open the cinema guide for the week and see that there's a Marx Brother's retrospective on.... but then you realise that Duck Soup was on last night? I felt like that today while reading this obituary.
I wish I'd known - or at least known of - Prof Morgenbesser. Professor of philosophy, teacher and wit. Once asked to prove a questioner’s existence, Morgenbesser retorted, “Who’s asking?”.
I wish I'd been at the lecture where Oxford philosopher J.L. Austin explained that, while many languages use the double negative to denote a positive, no languages use a double positive to denote a negative. Morgenbeser: "Yeah, yeah".
His ready wit sometimes got him into trouble it seems. Once while lighting up his pipe on the way out of a subway station, he was stopped by a police officer. Morgenbesser protested to the cop that the rules covered smoking in the station, not outside. The cop protested, “If I let you do it, I'd have to let everyone do it,” Morgenbesser replied, “Who do you think you are — Kant?” The officer took offence, and Morgenbesser's colleagues managed to have him released only by giving a tutorial on the Categorical Imperative down at the precinct.
Sidney Morgenbesser 1921-2004
Columbia Obit
Miles Kington's "Where are they now?" A special survey was also strangely cheery in a death related way:
"Paul Foot has arrived safely in heaven where he is scandalised by the employment conditions of the angels...Judas Iscariot...was set up for the role of a fall guy before his suspicious death in custody"
