David’s Ramblings

Nothing sucks more than a math test you haven’t studied enough for. Except maybe a math test you haven’t studied enough for that starts at 8 am. We had our first combo test today. It wasn’t quite as bad as I expected it to be, but it definitely was painful.

Combinatorics is basically advanced counting. You wouldn’t expect it to be as complicated as it is. But when you start talking about strings of length 20 with 4 t’s and distinct beginning and ending letters, it gets kind of tricky.

Of course, I didn’t think it wasn’t necessarily hard, it was just too long. There wasn’t enough time to finish everything to the extent I would have liked. You can tell a test is too long when there’s not that random guy who finishes in 30 minutes and makes you feel like you’re completely retarded.

Luckily, when a test makes you feel down, there’s always a way to make it feel better – IHOP. It’s been a long time since I’ve been, and man did I need it. All the stress goes away when you bite into a fruit filled crepe. Yum, yum.

And on top of that, there’s the mid-season finale of Burn Notice, a show I’ve grown rather fond of. It may have started crappy, but today has ended pretty well.

I’ve been updating my blog a decent amount lately. To do so, I’ve been using the blogging software known as MarsEdit. WordPress comes with a web-based system for posting, but I find a desktop application to be far more effective for meeting my needs in an application.

MarsEdit meets my needs pretty well. It allows me to save drafts locally and work on them when I don’t have an internet connection. It also allows me to drag and drop pictures into my posts with no additional work. I can literally drag a picture from wikipedia and drop it into the edit box, having it come out as it did in my previous post for Cog Sci. It handles all of the uploading and resizing automagically.

MarsEdit certainly isn’t the only desktop blogging application. I’ve tried a few others before. Mainly Ecto, and a bit of Blogo. I feel MarsEdit has the cleanest, most useful interface I’ve encountered though.

It does come with the unfortunate price tag of $29, which seems a little steep for the amount of use I personally will get out of it. (Seeing as my blog only stays active about one month a year.) I’m not sure if I’ll find myself buying the full version when my trial expires, but if I don’t, I think I’ll have a hard time replacing it. Bottom line, if you need to make posts to a blog on a Mac, wish to avoid using the web interface, and are willing to pay some money, MarsEdit is definitely a worthwhile tool.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the nifty Flickr integration, which doesn’t affect me a whole lot, since I rarely post to flickr, but it can upload your images to your Flickr account before dropping them into your post.

(ELOG 3 for CS3790: Cognitive Science)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology

(All of my pictures are stolen from Wikipedia)

Gestalt psychology focuses on the idea that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Gestalt psychology brings with it four main principles: emergence, invariance, multistability and reification. On top of that, there is also the application of gestalt to perception: prägnanz – our tendency to order our experience in a manner that is regular, orderly, simple and symmetric.

Emergence, the first principle given by gestalt theory, is demonstrated very well by above picture. The dog in the picture is not found by noticing a nose, then an ear, until we say, “a ha! That must be a dog because of all the features like a dog.” We notice the dog all at once. The dots organize themselves into that pattern almost magically.

Invariance is the second principle which states that our mind has a tendency to recognize objects regardless of scale, rotation and translation. Further, we can recognize objects despite warping and skewing, or differences in representation.

Third we look at multistability, our brain will waver between various interpretations of ambiguous experiences. Look at the figure below:

Finally, there’s reification – or generative perception. Our brain has a tendency to fill in the blanks to make a picture more understandable. In C below, our brain has a tendency to see a ball with spikes, not because a ball is drawn, but because the organization of spikes makes more sense in a 3d perspective of a globe.

The rules of prägnanz or the “Gestalt laws” of perception are all pretty simple. The law of common fate, the law of closure, the law of continuity, the law of symmetry, the law of similarity and the law of proximity, are all fairly self-explanatory. (See wikipedia if you need help). They have a real application for HCI purposes as well. If we know how people tend to group objects, we can apply these grouping to apply logical groupings for users.

Overall, the only real problem with Gestalt psychology is that is more a list of observations, and does almost nothing to explain how the brain works in this way. This has drawn a lot of criticism from other psychologists, seeing as it does nothing to extend our understanding. Still, knowing how people tend to group and classify objects is useful, especially when you’re going to be creating some sort of interface.

(ELOG 2 for CS3790: Cognitive Science)

There is a debate in cognitive science about whether the mind and the brain are the same. On the one side, the materialists – those who believe that the mind is simply a part of the brain, completely physical in nature. On the other side, dualists, those who believe that there is a distinct difference between the brain and the mind. The dualists feel that there is something beyond the brain.

Personally, I think I take the side of the dualists, though I do see a lot of merit in the claims of both sides. The materialists posit that everything can be understood in a very scientific manner. They claim that none of our brain actions are beyond scientific understanding. The fact that we can eventually understand everything, including the state of our brain, does appeal to my scientific nature. I like to think that we can eventually understand everything.

Unfortunately, the materialists claim that there is nothing beyond the brain to understand. They claim that we are really just very sophisticated machines with inputs and outputs predefined to certain specifications. To the materialist argument, consciousness is simply a by-product of randomly firing neurons that we could eventually learn to understand and even possibly control.

This leads to a very deterministic view on life in general, implying that if we had a good enough understanding of the person, we could entirely map out and predict every choice they would make. The materialists have to deny the possibility of free will. Everything is cause and effect – the brain is pushed by certain stimuli to create a certain response. As much as I like to believe that science holds all of the answers, I find it hard to swallow that I am a simple automaton carrying out tasks to some already defined specifications.

The dualist argument appeals to me because it does not try to deny free will. It proposes that there is something beyond our simple brain states. It claims that consciousness is not just simulated by random firing of neurons, but that there is something inherently different about the consciousness beyond simple brain states. The possibility of a brain affected by something beside external factors, a soul, if you will, gives me the benefit of having free will, of being in control of my own destiny.

When it comes down to it, the debate really is whether there is more to life than science can ever fully explain. I’m not very religious, but I can’t help but feel that there is.

(This is my Chapter 1 ELOG for CS3790: Cognitive Science )

Dual-coding Theory [wikipedia]

When we first talked about dual-coding theory in class, it intrigued me. I began to look at how I use my brain on a day to day basis and tried to see how well dual-coding applies to my own mental processes.

The basic idea is that we process mentally on two distinct channels – visual and verbal. When our brain must process information, the information comes generally in two forms – analog and digital. Analog information is basically that which is present in the physical world (buildings we see, faces, cars, etc). Digital information is that which is represented symbolically (words, feelings, math). Analog information tends to be better processed visually, while the digital information tends to work with the verbal side of things.

Often we can come up with a digital representation of an analog thought, but it loses a lot of the detail. Turning the time of a mechanical clock into the time 3:32 has the same general meaning, but we don’t know what color or size the clock was. At the same time, a symbolic, digital representation may require many images, or even be impossible to completely capture in an analog fashion.

A story was brought up in class of a woman who was unable to think of things in a digital way. All symbolic information had to be coded in her brain with analog mental pictures. She could not think of love just as an idea, but needed a picture to associate with love to understand it.

When I try to think about working with that sort of limitation, I find it hard to imagine I would be functional. My day-to-day mental process is almost completely based on speech. When I think, I talk silently to myself, phrasing the thoughts as if I am presenting them to an outsider. The purely symbolic nature of this internal dialogue is only occasionally interrupted by something concrete like visualization.

Working Memory [wikipedia]

As we currently understand the brain, memory is not a distinct mental process, but actually quite related to the processing of new experiences. For example, the same parts of the brain are shown to be active when shown a picture as when asked to recall a picture. This implies that the memory is actually a stimulus reconstructed on the fly, and processed in the same way we would process external stimuli.

The Dual-code hypothesis and Baddeley’s model of memory are then somewhat related. Considering my own experiences, they would seem to accurately describe my typical thought processes. Like I said, I usually think in words and not pictures, but the lack of pictures can be explained by the abundance of visual stimuli I am encountered with on a day to day basis. I imagine that my study would be helped by giving myself a chance to process more visual stimuli along with my “inner voice” explaining everything.