tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10757773399090285072024-03-05T23:32:30.931-06:00Riven by Five<br><br><br><br><br><blink><strong>Standards Driven</strong></blink>* Rivenx5 *http://www.blogger.com/profile/16916674312654206102noreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1075777339909028507.post-86591545741198179512012-01-15T11:56:00.005-06:002013-08-01T10:59:44.470-05:00Download and run Apple Hardware Test (AHT) from a USB drive.Background (why I’m in this state)<br />
<br />
I have a MacBook Pro 2,2 which came with Tiger. Then I upgraded to Leopard, then Snow Leopard and most recently, to Lion. For each of these upgrades I did a clean install, because I’d heard bad things about Ruby, CPAN, fink, MySQL and stuff getting munged. Effectively, I would wipe the old system and copy (not “Restore”) my old files.<br />
<br />
The Situation (what didn’t work)<br />
<br />
It seems like my GPU may be on its way out, so I wanted to run Apple’s Hardware Test (AHT). I don’t have my original system disks nearby, from which AHT could be run rather easily. Booting holding ‘D’ didn’t work, neither did F2 or Option+’D’, as some forums claimed. So I poked around and found that my /System/Library/CoreSerives/ didn’t have a .diagnostics directory (where AHT reportedly should be). This is probably because of all my clean OS installs. I found a place to download it (see below), but copying AHT into that .diagnostics directory still didn’t allow me to boot into AHT using the normal steps. I think this is because having cleanly installed Lion, it expects to use the new fancy internet-AHT like the MacBook Airs -- but the system ROM doesn’t trap Option+’D’ at start-up. So I still couldn’t get AHT to run. Here’s what I did to get it to run / boot from a USB stick.<br />
<br />
The Method (what did work)<br />
<br />
1) Download the AHT for your computer (see downloads below for specific models).<br />
<br />
1b) My copy had me convert the downloaded .dmg from some “old” type using Disk Utility. (Just open the .dmg in Disk Utility and “Convert” to a new target, then mount the target.)<br />
<br />
2) Mount and completely wipe a USB stick.<br />
<br />
3) From the AHT image, copy /System to the root folder of your USB stick:<br />
<div><code><br />
cd /Volumes/USB_STICK/ && cp -r ~/AHT_ARCHIVE/System .<br />
</code><br />
4) Now, from the USB drive, copy the /System/Library/CoreServices/.diagnostics/diags.efi to the root directory:<br />
<code><br />
cd /Volumes/USB_STICK/ && cp ./System/Library/CoreServices/.diagnostics/diags.efi .<br />
</code><br />
5) Shutdown all applications.<br />
<br />
6) “bless” the USB drive in mount-mode, with the EFI file, and immediately reboot:<br />
<code><br />
cd /Volumes/USB_STICK/ && sudo bless --mount /Volumes/USB_STICK --setBoot --file diags.efi && sudo reboot<br />
</code><br />
7) You should now be booting into AHT -- don’t hold down any keys. <br />
<br />
8) Run the tests, and yank the USB key after AHT reboots you.<br />
<br />
<br />
You can download the AHT package for your computer using this URL: <br />
<code><br />
http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Hardware_Test/018-[MODEL NUMBER]-A.dmg <br />
</code><br />
where [MODEL NUMBER] is the four-number ID below:<br />
<br />
3282 for Mac-F4208AC8, Mac-F42289C8 Xserve1,1 and Xserve2,1<br />
3259 for Mac-F42C8CC8 MacBookAir1,1<br />
3273 for Mac-F42C88C8 MacPro3,1<br />
3254 for F4238CC8, F42386C8, F4218EC8, F4208EAA, F4208DC8, F4208DA9, F4238BC8, F42388C8 and F22788C8 inclusively.<br />
<br />
or more specifically:<br />
3085 for Mac-F22788C8 MacBook3,1<br />
2886 for Mac-F4208EAA Macmini2,1<br />
2845 for Mac-F42386C8 iMac7,1<br />
2833 for Mac-F42388C8 MacBookPro3,1<br />
2770 for Mac-F4238BC8 MacBookPro3,1<br />
2769 for Mac-F4208DC8 MacPro1,1<br />
2667 for Mac-F4208DA9 MacPro2,1<br />
2766 for Mac-F4208CAA MacBook2,1<br />
2592 for Mac-F42189C8 MacBookPro2,1<br />
2591 for Mac-F42187C8 MacBookPro2,2 <br />
2590 for Mac-F4208CA9 MacBook2,1<br />
2579 for Mac-F4218FC8 iMac6,1<br />
2535 for Mac-F4218EC8 iMac5,2<br />
2534 for Mac-F4228EC8 iMac5,1<br />
2533 for Mac-F42786A9 iMac5,1<br />
And these are there, but too old to identify: 2418, 2405, 2398, 2393, 2392, 2342, 2216, 2215, 2158, 2120, 2079, 2056, 1880, 1879, 1680 and 1594.<br />
<br />
(Thanks to mkincaid at the macnn forum for that post.)<br />
<br />
Enjoy!</div>* Rivenx5 *http://www.blogger.com/profile/16916674312654206102noreply@blogger.com218tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1075777339909028507.post-49469326966633143242011-05-23T16:30:00.002-05:002011-05-23T16:32:21.690-05:00Exciting Esoterica<div style="text-align: justify;">It’s been a while since Brian Cowen stepped aside to <a href="http://www.newstalk.ie/2011/news/new-york-times-welcomes-ms-enda-kenny/">Ms. Enda Kenny</a>, and boy have I been productive. My old supervisor, Mark Keane, of University College infamy, and I have three papers to appear in two conferences this summer: <a href="http://ijcai-11.iiia.csic.es/">IJCAI-11</a> and <a href="http://cognitivesciencesociety.org/conference2011/index.html">CogSci-11</a>. IJCAI is an amazing conference, one of a couple top-tier computer-science conferences (as rated by the <a href="http://www.arc.gov.au/era/era_journal_list.htm#2">ERA</a> and <a href="http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/%7Ezaiane/htmldocs/ConfRanking.html">these guys</a>.) IJCAI stands for “International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. It dates back to the cold war, the “Joint” implying a Soviet - West collaboration. Cool eh? CogSci is also a very good conference, though the acceptance rate was pretty high (~72%) and Mark thinks “it’s gone down-hill a bit [now that I’m less involved...].” It’s still an A-rate conference according to the ERA guys, and to be honest, I’d be overjoyed with with the two papers in CogSci were it not overshadowed by the IJCAI paper. Plus, once I find some money willing to be spent on me, I’ll get to present in Barcelona for IJCAI and Boston for CogSci!</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The IJCAI paper is about tracking stock-market bubbles using changes in the number and kinds of verbs in financial reporting. For some of you, the abstract + intro + discussion will be interesting. The method will bore everyone, and the model and analysis might be of technical interest to the more...patient...reader.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The CogSci papers are a bit more technical, and less widely-exciting. They are a splitting and bolstering of some bits of my master’s thesis on metaphor. One focuses on clustering of metaphoric phrases (found in financial text) based on the arguments they take. It’s a neat methodology, and I think we’re onto a good, real results. The second paper focuses on isolating metaphoric antonyms (soar-plummet, gain-lose) in financial text. Again, it investigates using argument distributions to generate results that correlate to those of a human-study. The abstracts are worth everyone’s time, the rest is a bit dense.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Below are the citations and abstracts, with non-publisher links to the papers.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Gerow, Aaron and Keane, Mark T. (2011) Mining the Web for the "Voice of the Herd" to Track Stock Market Bubbles. To appear in <i>Proc. of the 22nd Intl. Joint Conf. on A.I. (IJCAI '11)</i>, Barcelona, Spain, 16-22 July, 2011.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Abstract</b> We show that power-law analyses of financial commentaries from newspaper web-sites can be used to identify stock market bubbles, supplementing traditional volatility analyses. Using a four-year corpus of 17,713 online, finance-related articles (10M+ words) from the Financial Times, the New York Times, and the BBC, we show that week-to-week changes in power-law distributions reflect market movements of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJI), the FTSE-100, and the NIKKEI-225. Notably, the statistical regularities in language track the 2007 stock market bubble, showing emerging structure in the language of commentators, as progressively greater agreement arose in their positive perceptions of the market. Furthermore, during the bubble period, a marked divergence in positive language occurs as revealed by a Kullback-Leibler analysis.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Available <a href="http://www.scss.tcd.ie/%7Egerowa/publications/gerow_keane-VOTH-manuscript.pdf">here</a>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Gerow, Aaron and Keane, Mark T. (2011) Identifying Metaphor Hierarchies in a Corpus Analysis of Finance Articles. To appear in <i>Proc. of the 33rd Ann. Meeting of the Cog. Sci. Soc. (CogSci '11)</i>, Boston, MA, USA, 20-23 July, 2011.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Abstract</b> Using a corpus of over 17,000 financial news reports (involving over 10M words), we perform an analysis of the argument-distributions of the UP- and DOWN-verbs used to describe movements of indices, stocks, and shares. Using measures of the overlap in the argument distributions of these verbs and k-means clustering of their distributions, we advance evidence for the proposal that the metaphors referred to by these verbs are organised into hierarchical structures of superordinate and subordinate groups.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Available <a href="http://www.scss.tcd.ie/%7Egerowa/publications/gerow_keane-metaphor_hierarchies-manuscript.pdf">here</a>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Gerow, Aaron and Keane, Mark T. (2011) Identifying Metaphoric Antonyms in a Corpus Analysis of Finance Articles. To appear in <i>Proc. of the 33rd Ann. Meeting of the Cog. Sci. Soc. (CogSci '11)</i>, Boston, MA, USA, 20-23 July, 2011.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Abstract</b> Using a corpus of 17,000+ financial news reports (involving over 10M words), we perform an analysis of the argument-distributions of the UP and DOWN-verbs used to describe movements of indices, stocks and shares. In Study 1 people identified antonyms of these verb sets in a free-generation task and a match-the-opposite task and the most commonly identified antonyms were compiled. In Study 2, we determined whether the argument-distributions for the verbs in these antonym-pairs were sufficiently similar to predict the most frequently-identified antonym. It was found that cosine similarity correlates moderately with the proportions of antonym-pairs identified by people (r = 0.31). More impressively, 87% of the time the most frequently-identified antonym is either the first- or second-most similar pair in the set of alternatives. The implications of these results for distributional approaches to determining metaphoric knowledge are discussed.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Available <a href="http://www.scss.tcd.ie/%7Egerowa/publications/gerow_keane-metaphor_antonyms-manuscript.pdf">here</a>.</div>* Rivenx5 *http://www.blogger.com/profile/16916674312654206102noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1075777339909028507.post-7426296538751728232011-03-10T04:46:00.002-06:002011-03-10T04:48:01.640-06:00The follow-up<div style="text-align: justify;">Here's how it worked out:</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Fine Gael: 76 [Centre-right]</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Labour: 37 [Centre-left]</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Fianna Fáil: 20 [Centrist]</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Sinn Féin: 14 [Quasi-Marxist, Nationalist]</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Socialist / People Before Profit / ULA: 5 (Includes Seamus Healy) [Leftist]</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Green: 0 [Environmental]</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Independents: 14 (4 stated leftists, 1 stated conservative)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Right. So. Fine Gael / Labour coalition recently finalised. Endy Kenny, head of Fine Gael, is Taoiseach. Fine Gael takes 10 cabinet positions (similar to U.S. cabinet) and Labour takes 5. The full cabinet is described <a href="http://www.irishtimes.com/focus/2011/cabinet/index.pdf">here</a>. Independents are working to form an ad-hoc alliance. The five ULA seats, along with at least three other like-mindeds, appear headed for cahoots-dom. Sinn Féin will probably vote with, but not be aligned with an independent lefty alliance. However, there are a number of independents with centre-right sympathies (a la Fine Gael). So it seems the majority government won't have too much trouble passing legislation. They will, though, be tempered by Labour's large involvement--so we're likely to see a productive, centrist government. And! Renegotiating the EU/IMF bailout is on the table (thank goodness...) Sad to see the Greens go but happy to see a number of leftists come in.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Ah. And as for collecting election posters: our house has two Fianna Fáils, a Fine Gael, Sinn Féin, Labour, and an independent -- all from the Dublin Southeast constituency.</div>* Rivenx5 *http://www.blogger.com/profile/16916674312654206102noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1075777339909028507.post-71895102849471842912011-01-12T22:08:00.001-06:002011-01-16T00:17:22.769-06:00Saving Space in OS XSaving Space in OS X<br />
<br />
Do you ever miss that old Microsofty feeling you used to get when deleting Temporary Internet files or some dumb folder in Application Data and find you have about five gigs more space? Well, touching the almost-out-of-swap-space 95% disk-usage on my laptop has rekindled my fondness for those cute temporary files and that warm fuzzy feeling you get when you zap them.<br />
<br />
Now then, aside from some standard Unixy business in /var, some long-gone junk in /usr/local, and running the fink cleanup business, I couldn’t find anything much delete! So what did I do you ask...actually you didn't ask...sorry... But! I figured out a way to get my respectably large, unequivocally hip 72 gigs music down to a lovable 48G. Yep. No joke. Here’s the deal.<br />
<br />
I rip a lot of music from oulde fashioned CDs, and upon looking at my import settings, in iTunes->Preferences->Import Settings, I found I was using some nonsense called an AIFF encoder. This, as they say, sounds a bit dodgy, so I switched to the MP3 encoder. Yes, even though most of my music is OGG (and yours should be too!) I grudgingly switched from one oppressive format to another. And here’s why.<br />
<br />
Now! I can order songs in iTunes by bit-rate (in list view, right-click in the headings bar to add a bit-rate column). At the top of the list was a whole bunch of seemingly random songs encoded at staggeringly useless 1141kbps! Whoa. Rumor has it that some people can tell 256kbps from 196kbps but I think that’s rubbish. So I changed my encoder (back in Import Settings) to 196, which is as awesome as it will go. Then! I select all the too-well-encoded-to-be-reasonable songs and went to Advanced->Create MP3 Version and iTunes converted the daylights outa them songs, and then I cunningly deleted the old ones. If you’re tight on space, not unlike myself, you’ll have to pull this maneuver in batches. Oh, and iTunes croaked when I selected over 1000 songs for conversion...bummer. But in the end, I’ve reclaimed a good bit of disk-space.* Rivenx5 *http://www.blogger.com/profile/16916674312654206102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1075777339909028507.post-90519844241598593082010-10-19T07:01:00.001-05:002010-10-20T05:51:38.754-05:00Noun-Noun Compounds<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Here’s my latest mini-project.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Noun-noun compounds are a relatively rare syntactic occurrence where two nouns are paired together to blend or attribute separate concepts. Some examples include “island bungalow”, “race car”, and “stock market”. Interested yet? When you think about it, it may seem like the first noun is actually an adjective, but it’s really not. Technically adjectives need a form different from their noun counterparts. Nouns and verbs in English often share form: “</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">run </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">for the door” and “I’ll go for </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">a</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">run</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">”. Adjectives, however, have a distinct form--forms that are often generalised and over-extended to create fake words. Cramming our examples into an adjective-noun structure we would get “island-esque bungalow”, “race-ish car”, and “stocky market”. None of these really sound all that great, and it’s not just the made-up-ness of the words. These examples are overly constrained by the interface between lexical and syntactic boundaries. An adjective is not what we want, despite it be syntactically a little more common. So! People make up noun-noun compounds instead of breaking lexical rules. I think Ray Jackendoff takes this as evidence that lexical constraints apply in parallel to syntactic constraints, not in sequence.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Linguistically: We can explode the syntax of noun-noun compounds as such: [n1 + n2] => “the [n1] type of [n2]” or inverted: “an [n2] of the [n1] type”. Poetically, these options might be neat...but that’s about it. They are a more explicit, boring form of concept combination. In fact, its so explicit, that some of the metaphorical shading present in the concise, noun-noun form, is lost. Replacing the fluidity of metaphor we get boring old category assumptions, such as Q: what type of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">bungalow</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">? A: the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">island</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> type. This supposes there are a discrete set </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">types-of-bungalows</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> one of which is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">island</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Dumb! Noun-nouns are better.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">So, why do we care? Psychologically, noun-noun compounds are interesting because they are a case of analogy and concept blending. But beyond that, they are a wonderfully small and easy example</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">of</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> conceptual genesis.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Now there’s a buzz-word for ya. But check it out. New concepts are created every day. Often words are used to characterize, describe, or understand concepts. But sometimes words enable the creation of new concepts. Terms, different from concepts, are particularly interesting when they are new and isolated. A good example is the term “moral hazard” in recent financial and political talk. The term refers to a situation where someone behaves differently than they would have had they been aware of the full extent of risk. So we have this noun-noun compound used to characterise a circumstance that is recently relevant to the financial and political arenas. The term is introduced without much explanation, but it catches on regardless. Metaphor aside, this is an example of conceptual genesis, enabled and largely inspired by the creative use of language.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What we want to do see what noun-noun compounds say about language and people.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Step 0) Make sure they’re interesting. See above.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Step 1) Find them. See below.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Step 2) Figure out what it means. ...</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Step 1:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Below is a script for finding noun-noun compounds in arbitrary text. It uses </span><a href="http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/projekte/corplex/TreeTagger/"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000099; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">TreeTagger</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> (free but separate) to tag a text file with part-of-speech tags (Noun, verb, etc...). And then it finds the compounds and their </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemma_%28linguistics%29"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000099; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">lemmas</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, collapses them into their frequency of occurrence and gives you a spreadsheet.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It needs a Unix environment and TreeTagger. TreeTagger takes the majority of time, but run on 10,829,875 words it’s not bad:</span><br />
<br />
<div style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">real 3m32.609s</span></div><div style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">user 5m24.708s</span></div><div style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">sys 0m20.861s</span></div><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Step 2:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Preliminarily: I’ve looked at the results from a corpus of financial texts and get this! 91 of the top 100 noun-noun compounds are distinctly financial in nature. Compare this with the 45 / 100 for the top bare nouns. This makes me think that noun-noun compounds might be even MORE interesting...</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">More later!</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Script: get_NNs.pl</span><br />
<br />
<pre>#! /usr/bin/perl -W
use strict;
$| = 1;
##
## A script to find noun-noun compounds in a text file.
## Uses TreeTagger to lemmatise and POS-tag the corpus.
## Then we count and sort the instances into a CSV.
##
## A. Gerow, 2010-10-14: gerowa@tcd.ie
##
unless (-r $ARGV[0] && $ARGV[1] && -x $ARGV[2]) {
print "Usage: ./get_NNs [input file] [output file] [path to tree-tagger command]\n";
exit(-1);
}
if (-e "./temp") {
print "Error: Please remove ./temp before running.\n\n";
exit(-1);
}
sub INT_handler {
unlink("./temp") if (-e "./temp");
print "\nCaught SIG_INT, exiting\n\n";
exit(-1);
}
$SIG{'INT'} = 'INT_handler';
my $INFILE = $ARGV[0]; # input file
my $OUTFILE = $ARGV[1]; # output file
my $TT_PATH = $ARGV[2]; # path to language-specific tree-tagger binary
my $prev_type = "";
my $prev_word = "";
my $prev_lemma = "";
my @results;
# Words to exclude (added ad hoc.)
my @exclude = qw'zero one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve
the an a of per cent for in ? and his her has from its their to these
this that were out were new after whose began before them last with
sent rose take first second third fourth fifth sixth seventh eighth
more garner over also formal into down up strong all hit far day week
year decade highest lowest sure hard other recent said our abouta abouthe
abarrel';
# First cat the corpus through tr to delete some characters before TreeTagger gets it.
print "Tagging...";
qx+cat $INFILE | tr -d '=\`"<>/@#?$%^&(){}[]' | $TT_PATH > ./temp 2> /dev/null +;
print "done\nSearching for noun-noun compounds...";
# For every word as tagged by TreeTagger:
open(IN, "<./temp");
while (<in>) {
chomp;
my ($word, $type, $lemma) = split(" ");
# Lower-case, remove '?' and spaces.
$word = lc($word);
$word =~ s/\s*//g;
$type = substr($type, 0, 2); # Includes NNS, NNX, ..., NN*
# Skip if 1) the word is in the exclude list
# 2) the word is contracted 'is' (ie. 's)
# 3) the word contains digits
# 4) the word is shorter than 3 letters
if (grep($_ eq lc($word), @exclude) || lc($word) eq "'s" ||
lc($word) =~ m/[0-9]/g || length($word) < 3) {
$prev_word = "";
$prev_type = "";
$prev_lemma = "";
next;
}
elsif ($type eq 'NN' && $type eq $prev_type) {
push(@results, "$prev_word,$prev_lemma,$word,$lemma");
}
$prev_word = $word;
$prev_type = $type;
$prev_lemma = $lemma;
}
close(IN);
print "done\nWriting CSV...";
# Count and collapse like instances:
my %count;
map { $count{$_}++ } @results;
# Write to file and sort it, ascending by number of occurances:
open(OUT, ">temp");
map { print OUT "${count{$_}},$_\n"} keys(%count);
close(OUT);
qx/echo 'count,word_1,lemma_1,word_2,lemma_2' > $OUTFILE/; # CSV header
qx/sort -n temp >> $OUTFILE && rm temp/; # UNIX numerical sort
print "done\n\n";
exit(0);
</in></pre>* Rivenx5 *http://www.blogger.com/profile/16916674312654206102noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1075777339909028507.post-18831850597700015912010-07-14T13:48:00.002-05:002010-07-29T12:53:08.759-05:00Spike Activity<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Right then. Since I last spouted:</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">- Finished those pesky <a href="http://rivenbyfive.blogspot.com/2010/01/classes.html">classes</a>. All wrapped up rather nicely. This year I successfully tricked the philosophy guys into thinking I was a philosopher, the psychologists I was a psychologist, the linguists a linguist, and computer scientists are still unclear about how what I do has anything to do with computers. I win.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">- Worked through writing a respectable article which my supervisor and I are submitting to be published. The process basically amounts to finding and jumping through various technical hoops. More on this later.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">- Was accepted to a couple PhD programmes and finally accepted an offer at <a href="http://www.paddi.net/images/tcdaerial.jpg">Trinity</a> <a href="http://www.pleon.it/web/blogs/geektalk.nsf/dx/2508200616.04.02GCAJHK.htm/content/M11?OpenElement">College</a> <a href="http://www.movie-maniacs.co.uk/images/hogwarts%20school.jpg"> Dublin</a>. It’s renown for its humanities division, its progressive acceptance of women, and its deplorable exclusion of Catholics and, of course, its impeccable <a href="http://rivenbyfive.blogspot.com/2009_09_01_archive.html">lawns</a>. I’ll be studying under <a href="http://www.scss.tcd.ie/Khurshid.Ahmad/">these</a> <a href="http://people.tcd.ie/vogel">two</a> jokers. I plan on calling the second “Carl Stallman” (long hair + emacs obsession = <a href="https://belenus.unirioja.es/%7Erumoral/gnu/img/stallman.jpg"> rms</a>). The other has so-far eluded a nick-name, however, his demeanor is reminiscent of a certain loud-mouthed PLU faculty member...except the Trinity version's dress-code belies his capitalist sympathies.</span>..<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">- So. Right now I’m finishing the minor thesis. The idea: metaphors applied to common financial objects (stock, market, economy, etc...) will be of a few domains (spatial, physical, war, etc...). But! The linguistic instances of these metaphors will take a number of forms, many of which are antonymic (fall & rise, soar & plummet, rally & retreat, etc...) My job is to compare the collocates (words that occur nearby) these various antonym pairs. The hypothesis: those antonyms that are less agreed upon (experimentally based) will exemplify a more diverse set of collocates in the corpus even though they statistically occur most-often as describing the action of a small set of objects. Got it? This is important because 1) it reaffirms that metaphor is cognitive not linguistic but comes at this from the top-down as a corpus-based study, 2) it suggests that some objects make more metaphorical sense when used to describe either positive or negative events, but maybe not both, and 3) the method is an example of a corpus approach to cognitive-linguistics, and more specifically, metaphor. Bing bang boom. A+.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">- Was lent a <a href="http://www.rolandus.com/products/productdetails.php?ProductId=926&ParentId=60">Roland</a> electronic drum-set for a month. Strong points include more-than-real rebound on the toms, a very sensitive snare complete with rim-shot, quiet, and lots of “styles” of drum-set (my favorite was named “power-house-fusion.” Hah!) Weak points include a very soft hi-hat that offered nearly no rebound, and that its compact size would likely become a crutch, making it hard to go back to bigger set. In the end it was an absolute joy to play for the first time in a year. Thanks P.C.. Huzzah.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">- Will be moving from the UCD campus to Renelagh (still in Dublin) -- living with architecture students. Lord help me.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">- Reading Nabakov. Lovely.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">- New bands include The Riot Before, The Flatliners, The Menzingers, Turin Brakes, Austin Lucas, and old motown stuff. New albums include Against Me! - White Crosses, Murder by Death - Good Morning Magpie, and Gaslight Anthem - American Slang. All well worth buying.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">- Someone mistook me for a messenger. Two Bicycle Points! Two people asked me directions, questions I could answer. Two Dublin Points! And one person on the phone thought I was from Galway. One Irish Point!</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Points abound.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span>* Rivenx5 *http://www.blogger.com/profile/16916674312654206102noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1075777339909028507.post-73705217142001166402010-03-21T16:00:00.003-05:002010-03-21T16:00:54.998-05:00A Network Model of Biological Evolution?Finishing Tim Ingold's piece and the book <u>Linked</u> by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert-L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Barab%C3%A1si" id="rrqt" title="Albert-Laszlo Barabasi">Albert-Laszlo Barabasi</a> in the same day was more circumstance than anything, but the overlap was unavoidable. Barabasi, a Hungarian physicist at the University of Notre Dame, has been forging a new line of research known as Applied Network Theory. Seminal work in the field includes <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/2776392" id="ryoi" title="The Strength
of Weak Ties">The Strength of Weak Ties</a>, <a href="http://dces.essex.ac.uk/staff/hunter/Milgram%20PsychToday%201967.pdf" id="zu1." title="The Small World Problem">The Small World Problem</a>, and more recently on power-laws: <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0412004" id="ozev" title="Power
laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf's law">Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf's law</a>. <br />
<br />
Inspired partly by computer networks, applied network theory takes the basic data structure of a network of interconnected nodes and applies it as a model to various naturally occurring phenomenon. Some particularly good examples revealed in Barabasi's book include social networks, cell-biology and genetics, international financial markets, and everyone's favorite network, the world wide web*. Interesting properties, of varying degrees of complexity, fall out of simple network structure like "hubs" of proportionally large inter-connectivity, "islands" of relatively segregated sub-networks, and of course weak links such as those found abundantly in social networks.<br />
<br />
The connection to Tim Ingold's call for a organism-centric biology is not hard to see. Network theory offers a simple and scalable model for organism-culture interaction. A directed graph (one in which nodes' connectivity distribution is said to follow a power-law) could explain mimetic / culturgen heritability and expansion. Networks have been used to show how companies rise to monopolies, how youtube videos go viral, and why child-naming patterns exhibit momentum. Networks offer what could prove to be an elegant reconciliation of implicate organismal traits and their relationship to culture.<br />
<br />
<br />
*One emergent feature of directed networks are sub-structures referred to as "tubes" which are segments in which elongated, one-directional flow occurs. Thus, U.S. Alaskan Senator from, Ted Stevens, wasn't <i>completely</i> full of crap when he so elequently characterised the internet as a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f99PcP0aFNE" id="qy-g" title="series">series</a> of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cZC67wXUTs&feature=related" id="drt3" title="tubes">tubes</a>.* Rivenx5 *http://www.blogger.com/profile/16916674312654206102noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1075777339909028507.post-68120079401829751342010-03-02T11:38:00.003-06:002010-03-02T11:40:01.399-06:00Simulating the BrainIn reading von Uexkull's piece on umwelten, it got me thinking about the ramifications of a popular strategy in brain simulation: simulate simpler animals' brains first, then we can move up to humans. Here is a small list of some popular (if not successful) attempts at brain simulation.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/" id="bx14" title="The Blue
Brain<br />
Project">The Blue Brain Project</a> has focused on simulating a neocortical column of a rat. Bi-products of the project, however, include a simulation framework and a number of noteworthy genetic algorithms for large-scale simulation. A <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8164060.stm" id="e2m0" title="number">number</a> of <a href="http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-07/computerized-rat-brain-spontaneously-develops-complex-patterns" id="k2cb" title="popular">popular</a> <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124751881557234725.html" id="de01" title="articles">articles</a> have been written on the project.<br />
<br />
On a smaller scale we have <a href="http://www.neuron.yale.edu/" id="h8_g" title="NEURON">NEURON</a> project from Yale, which seeks to simulate single brain neurons for use in larger network-based simulations.<br />
<br />
On a bigger scale we have a DARPA funded group at IBM who recently claimed the "<a href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/ibm-unveils-a-new-brain-simulator" id="o-e0" title="largest">largest</a>" cortical simulation to-date.<br />
<br />
IBM's success on the company's Blue-architecture super-computers has spawned an even larger project: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y0NOa-yjr8" id="im9l" title="SyNAPSE">SyNAPSE</a>. SyNAPSE is more in line with the chip manufacturer's agenda in that the goal is to instantiate brain-like redundancy and generality in a marketable hardware platform.<br />
<br />
In reading about some of these projects and thinking of our friend <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_von_Uexk%C3%BCll"> von Uexkull</a>, I'm wondering at what level of complexity umwelten may emerge from any kind of simulation. Clearly brains aren't the whole story in our engagement with the word. Might simulations of cortical tissue shed light on the organisation of our larger cognitive capacities? What really intrigues me is the idea that our more general abilities (like visual, tactile, and lingual systems) may have co-evolved with our exceptionally generalised brain. Will simulations, once computationally feasible, shed light on cognition? Or, will embodiment provide the next hurdle for technologists to jump? Might simulations replace imaging in neuroscience? And the bigger question: once we understand the brain, what's left?* Rivenx5 *http://www.blogger.com/profile/16916674312654206102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1075777339909028507.post-52291707897156826822010-02-23T14:44:00.002-06:002010-02-23T14:44:59.929-06:00Embodying CognitionLast week the podcast <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/" id="a855" title="All in<br />
the Mind">All in the Mind</a> had a good talk with neuroscientist John Donoghue from Brown University about interfacing brains with machines. Donoghue founded a enterprising upstart, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberkinetics" id="pxv." title="Cyberkinetics">Cyberkinetics</a>, which cleverly makes a product called the BrainGate, which is gizmo that plugs a brain into a computer. Think it's crazy? So do people at <a href="http://www.gizmag.com/go/3503/1/" id="wkzg" title="Gizmag">Gizmag</a> and <a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/brain.html" id="ml_." title="Wired">Wired</a>.<br />
Currently the product has patients moving a cursor around a large screen, the concept carries some intriguing baggage. Specifically, I'm thinking of those pesky zombies. Here's a thought experiment:<br />
<br />
Imagine a completely paralysed person of good mental health. We connect her up to one of Donoghue's BrainGate's and now she's moving a cursor around. Now imagine we afford her the ability of "clicking". At this point she's able to use a standard computer, with an on-screen keyboard, given it's positioned in her gaze. Now imagine we connect a sophisticated robot to this computer giving our permanently supine patient input, by way of LCD, and ability to control the robot. Predictability a bit slower than most, our patient now has the ability to move about the world and receive visual input from this interaction. Is it too naive to say we have succesfully embodied (some of) her cognitive processes? I think it is...at least at this point. But imagine we give her a suit that can stimulate her skin as the robot's skin is stimulated. Likewise, we reproduce all the other senses with technology. Now imagine we've perfected the BrainGate and deprecated the silly cursor-interface in lieu of a faster, fully integrated neural interactive mode. Lastly, imagine this apparatus is so absolutely integral that were the robot to experience what it is programmed to know as death, the interface would heartlessly recreate the experience for our hapless patient.<br />
<br />
Sad really.<br />
<br />
Could we have said the robot was conscious? No way. Unless! Conscious is as conscious does, a credo the robot lawfully enforces, however arbitrarily. Might this be "our" relationship to our "mind?" And might this relationship be of some evolutionary worth?* Rivenx5 *http://www.blogger.com/profile/16916674312654206102noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1075777339909028507.post-31612505219718398792010-02-15T14:09:00.001-06:002010-02-15T14:10:22.317-06:00Kurzweil's follyWhat follows is a cleaned-up, link-infused conversation I recently had with a biologist friend and practicing Luddite:<br />
<br />
<b>Adam</b>: I saw Molly the other day, not quite Chomsky, but close.<br />
<b>me</b>: Yeah?<br />
<b>Adam</b>: Yeah, now I'm here in Parkland eating some oatmeal squares.<br />
<b>me</b>: I bought your book the other day. Not quite Chomsky, but close.<br />
<b>Adam</b>: oh really? So you're the one.<br />
<b>me</b>: Yeah, it's in the mail...so don't ask any questions, but I'm sure it's a regular tour-de-force.<br />
<b>Adam</b>: Yeah dude. <br />
<b>me</b>: Hey, I found the anti-Adam.<br />
<b>Adam</b>: You found what?<br />
<b>me</b>: <a _fcksavedurl="http://www.kurzweilai.net" href="http://www.kurzweilai.net/">Ray</a> <a _fcksavedurl="http://bigthink.com/ideas/14532" href="http://bigthink.com/ideas/14532"> Kurzweil</a>.<br />
<b>Adam</b>: Too late!!! Already knew about the Great D******bag and his coming <a _fcksavedurl="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity"> singularity</a>.<br />
<b>me</b>: So you're in, yeah? We take off next week.<br />
<b>Adam</b>: Oh yeah, <a _fcksavedurl="http://www.google.ie/search?q=define%3A+Transhumanism&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a" href="http://www.google.ie/search?q=define%3A+Transhumanism&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a">transhumanism</a> and the whole schebang!<br />
<b>me</b>: A friend over here gave me one of his books.<br />
<b>Adam</b>: What a gomer, huh?<br />
<b>me</b>: My friend's Canadian...but Ray, yeah: pipe-dreams in print.<br />
<b>Adam</b>: It's a good idea to study the rate of technological change but he gets some things so wrong.<br />
<b>me</b>: I agree with his <a _fcksavedurl="http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1" href="http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1">accelerating returns</a> from technology...but I'm pretty sure he looses all ground with his blinding optimism.<br />
<b>Adam</b>: Yeah, but not just that. When he plotted human achievement in the line of cosmic and biological evolution my head exploded. He made a really basic mistake evolution is not exponential and never will be.<br />
<b>me</b>: Well, he slips in memetic evolution as the exponential part. But I think he had it a bit backwards.<br />
<b>Adam</b>: You know the <a _fcksavedurl="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox">Fermi paradox</a>? Between the number of planets and galaxies and time, if a technological singularity was inevitable it should have already happened. But of course…it hasn't...<br />
<b>me</b>: Is that the one in reaction to <a _fcksavedurl="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZt3Zg2y8ks" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZt3Zg2y8ks">Carl Sagan's argument for ET life</a>?<br />
<b>Adam</b>: I think so. It's not a direct refutation of Kurzweil but it's suggestive.<br />
<b>me</b>: Kurzy also misses the growing and absolutely irrefutable tension between our biology and our technology. I thought this was his grossest error. I mean, people in "developing nations" are unbelievably less likely to have mental illness, or stress related problem, and even drug addiction. Sure they might be starving and we can't seem to find an alternative to join-us-or-die capitalism, but there's an undeniable link between pace and complexity (which Kurzy exalts) and Huge Societal Problems.<br />
<b>Adam</b>: Yep. We're still a bunch of apes.<br />
<b>me</b>: I want to be bonobo.<br />
<b>Adam</b>: I've been reading a lot of junk on language and how it turned up in the first place. At Kurzweil's pace of evolution, we're due-up for another ground-breaking advancement like language.<br />
<b>me</b>: If you're interested in language stuff, check out <a _fcksavedurl="http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/164" href="http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/164">Steven</a> <a _fcksavedurl="http://www.google.ie/url?q=http://designative.info/2009/11/12/watch-steven-pinkers-language-and-thought-talk-at-ted/&ei=tpV5S8TuLJL80wTCrZzmCw&sa=X&oi=video_result&resnum=7&ct=thumbnail&ved=0CCEQuAIwBg&usg=AFQjCNFWj8vsMqeEf3Ozju624ur3CB0u5A" href="http://www.google.ie/url?q=http://designative.info/2009/11/12/watch-steven-pinkers-language-and-thought-talk-at-ted/&ei=tpV5S8TuLJL80wTCrZzmCw&sa=X&oi=video_result&resnum=7&ct=thumbnail&ved=0CCEQuAIwBg&usg=AFQjCNFWj8vsMqeEf3Ozju624ur3CB0u5A">Pinker</a>. Brilliant stuff. He's one of the few than run a psychology tack without sacrificing the linguistics.<br />
<b>Adam</b>: Oh yes, I've watched Pinker.<br />
<b>me</b>: He's <a _fcksavedurl="http://thesituationist.files.wordpress.com/2007/02/steven-pinker-sm.jpg" href="http://thesituationist.files.wordpress.com/2007/02/steven-pinker-sm.jpg">cool-looking</a> too, right?<br />
<b>Adam</b>: I've got this penchant for stalking cool people on the internet and pacing my room listening to their talks. <br />
<b>me</b>: Oh! We're studying all about qualia in a philosophy class. Crock of shit...basically...<br />
<b>Adam</b>: Yeah, qualia is bullshit.<br />
<b>Adam</b>: I listen to Pinker, Dennett, Chomsky, Jackendoff and the rest.<br />
<b>me</b>: Yeah, Dennett has a pretty <a _fcksavedurl="http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/quinqual.htm" href="http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/quinqual.htm">home-run argument against qualia</a>.<br />
<b>Adam</b>: Good, it deserves it. You know, you might like my little book.<br />
<b>me</b>: I'm excited to get it.<br />
<b>Adam</b>: It doesn't directly apply to consciousness but it toys with at least one implication.<br />
<b>me</b>: If I cite it...I'll let you know.<br />
<b>Adam</b>: Here's a line from it: "I am increasingly convinced that the real division in the intellectual arena is not between selfish ideologies but between two opposite poles separated by their stance on information flow. One pole claims the human minds as an autonomous source of information and the other sees it as a recipient."<br />
<b>me</b>: Interesting. The "current state" of cognitive science is increasingly "postcognitivist", which basically breaks cognition from the traditional view of purpose-built sub-systems -- the view that we're computers that process input and provide output -- and forms a new one where we're walking accidents of thought. Hah!<br />
<b>Adam</b>: I could see that. Is there any space for computation in this view? Is computation just another subsystem?<br />
<b>me</b>: Well, that might be good traditionalist defense. The new guard kind of hold that when we say, see a baseball coming towards us, we aren't computing anything. Instead, we have an experience, informed by our history of sensorimotor experience that tells us, rather simply, to deal with the situation. (Catch it or get out of the way.) The can of worms is really in embedded cognition which is the view that we use our world and our bodies as our cognitive system...not just our brains. So then we've this recurrent problem of interaction-as-cognition. It gets a bit hairy, but really interesting. And it really draws a useful line in the sand between cognitive science and psychology. (Which in my opinion should admit that it's a clinical discipline and hand the theoretical torch off to cognitive and neuroscience.)<br />
<b>Adam</b>: So wait, if the "conscious" aspect of consciousness is epiphenomenol, how could evolution have shaped it, or is the point that it never has?<br />
<b>me</b>: I suppose that's a really good question. But it's kinda like a lot of evolution: consciousness wasn't useful until it was accidentally made available by an organized brain. Hofstadter has wonderfully human and respectfully emotive ways of putting this stuff.<br />
<b>Adam</b>: Read <a _fcksavedurl="http://tal.forum2.org/hofstadter_interview" href="http://tal.forum2.org/hofstadter_interview">this</a>. It's cool, though certainly might already know about it, but Doug's even got something to say about Kurzweil.<br />
<b>me</b>: Cool, I will, but I got run to the store before it closes.<br />
<b>Adam</b>: Good talking.* Rivenx5 *http://www.blogger.com/profile/16916674312654206102noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1075777339909028507.post-24167912276295604472010-01-30T10:54:00.001-06:002010-01-30T10:54:41.994-06:00Classes<div style="text-align: justify;">As opposed to last semester, this semester involves only a minor amount of psychology, which is comparable only to The Bible in its classification as good news.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Post-Cognitivist Seminar:</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Basically everything in cognitive science that the psychologists don't want to talk about. Big themes include embodiment, joint action, affordance, subjective experience, enaction, ecological psychology, and <a href="http://postcog.ucd.ie/" id="gw.y" title="blogs">blogs</a>. This one's lead by our trusty course director Fred. I get the vague impression that most academics over 50 would scoff at the endeavor, while more of the ones under 40 might be in the "oh neat" group. We impressionable students, however, have agreed on a collective "huh?" Oh yeah, grades? Nope. If we blog we pass...not a joke. I'll cross-post my musings here so expect some seriously smart stuff.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Connectionism and Dynamical Systems:</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Also taught by Fred, but this time less out of left-field more on the math. For those in the know, connectionism is the greater community of neural network models. They can model tons of stuff, very well, very magically, very obtusely. Some people have philosophical problems with the approach, but most of them don't know are stuck in the 50's. Connectionist models are notably more neurally plausible than traditional, programmatic models, but very quickly leave the idea of a neuron behind. Allegedly we needn't know how to progam...but I'm planning on changing that. We're beginning using this software package: <a href="http://cogsci.ucd.ie/Connectionism10/bp.zip" id="kcet" title="http://cogsci.ucd.ie/Connectionism10/bp.zip">http://cogsci.ucd.ie/Connectionism10/bp.zip</a>. (Unzip and run the .jar. If you can't do that, install java and try again.) It was partly modified by Fred himself and, according to him, is one very few pedagogically useful connectionist simulators. There's a <a href="http://cogsci.ucd.ie/Connectionism10/FredBP_V1/index.php" id="ys_g" title="web-applet version">web-applet version</a> too, though Fred wasn't if it would work from off-campus.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Cognitive Modeling:</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">This is the more technical follow-up to first-semester's Cognitive Psychology, taught by my research advisor's old buddy, <a href="http://www.csi.ucd.ie/users/fintan-costello" id="xwed" title="Fintan">Fintan</a>. The big project is this: we're given a spreadsheet of data from an experiment and we need to come with a model that predicts the results. Everyone gets the same data, so we get to critique eachother's models. I plan on describing mine as "ground-breaking", "breath-taking", if not downright "awe-inspiring."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Philosophy of Mind:</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">I'm the only one in our class that's excited for this one. It's taught by a few different professors in the <a href="http://www.ucd.ie/philosophy/staff/" id="vm6s" title="giant philosophy department">giant philosophy department</a>. Topics including dualism, embodiment, science, souls, language, consciousness, minutia, and dementia. The format: read, talk, read, talk, write.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">For the curious: last semester went fine. My GPA was .3 points higher than my graduating GPA for undergrad. This means that I am 7.5% smarter than I used to be. In a classic ecopsychological critique, however, it may mean that UCD is 7.5% dumber than PLU.</div>* Rivenx5 *http://www.blogger.com/profile/16916674312654206102noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1075777339909028507.post-35153496996515850922010-01-25T11:18:00.002-06:002010-01-30T10:41:15.298-06:00Introducing the Emerald ShadowHere's my new bicycle:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjavEz3nmcauwj-jk5WJRHxxWrt9duNTXAfUZijle8VAfvltuECs-1zPm67ESHiW9uXfZtji5JId0NlB8r7mXzcTkeKK7SR6NPHfVgPvrD7MGMBIUB1GFNwv-WcIczcBv7_sS0xz_x3spUW/s1600-h/DSC00190.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjavEz3nmcauwj-jk5WJRHxxWrt9duNTXAfUZijle8VAfvltuECs-1zPm67ESHiW9uXfZtji5JId0NlB8r7mXzcTkeKK7SR6NPHfVgPvrD7MGMBIUB1GFNwv-WcIczcBv7_sS0xz_x3spUW/s320/DSC00190.JPG" /></a></div><br />
Recall the bush bike's original form:<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaxqasQ3zMqGn5izNzKjPBF4G-TGQRypLgDuGO3t5bFAzDdA8279W8kWLRTlJuqAbpHvzB8robZvzFYKQ2e3PXkij8nVJ59nJ5jLFFO9FYRon-rsX9on65zRDMSmwv4NyU9RR6cIjDrykC/s1600-h/DSC00104.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaxqasQ3zMqGn5izNzKjPBF4G-TGQRypLgDuGO3t5bFAzDdA8279W8kWLRTlJuqAbpHvzB8robZvzFYKQ2e3PXkij8nVJ59nJ5jLFFO9FYRon-rsX9on65zRDMSmwv4NyU9RR6cIjDrykC/s320/DSC00104.JPG" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/rivenx5/TheEmeraldShadow#">More pictures</a>!</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The whole process was longer than expected...mostly due to stripping and painting. Some things to note:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">- The chrome fork. I couldn't use the stock fork with "industry standard" 700c wheels because even "extra long reach" caliper brakes wouldn't reach the rim. This was a bummer because I spent upwards of two hours filing the axle eyelets to fit a modern axle. Oh well. The chrome one looks nice and was inexpensive.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">- The chain. Another unforeseen bummer. The chain I ordered online wasn't long enough. Yeesh. And because my local bike shop only carries <a href="http://www.evanscycles.com/product_image/image/647/361/c7f/35798/product_page/charge-masher-half-link-chain.jpg">half-link</a> chains I had to get one of those. It's funny looking, but reportedly stronger. We'll see.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">- Only one brake, and no, it's not a fixed gear, just a single speed. A rear brake won't work for the same reason the stock fork wouldn't work. Now I've read, heard, and had explained to me by a physics professor, that the majority of braking is done by your front brakes. So that's fine. And I've never gone over the handle-bars either, which <a href="http://www.sheldonbrown.com/brakturn.html">Lord Sheldon</a> says rarely happens. So I'm thinking we're ok. We'll see.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">- The brake lever. It's one these <a href="http://www.evanscycles.com/product_image/image/66e/d9e/eda/28420/product_page/cane-creek-crosstop-levers.jpg">cross-style</a> "interrupters" which are great, small, torquefull, and versatile, but they don't give you the hood-of-the-brake riding position for drop handle-bars. Thus, I'm reduced to the tight / upright or low / back-pain-inducing positions. We'll see.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">- The paint isn't quite as shiny or tough as I'd hoped. Oh well.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">- The frame provide less <a href="http://rawge.bravepages.com/minichoppers/trail/trail1.jpg">rake</a> than I'm used to. Means we're less stable, but "better" at cornering...as if that's <i>ever</i> a problem. But it also means that the front wheel bumps my toes sometimes. Oh well. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Overall, I'm very happy with it. The gearing is a bit higher than my previous bike which means I work harder and go faster...which aligns perfectly with my life-theme... It's wonderfully smooth, startlingly silent, and as comfortable as I'd expected. For those interested, here's the inventory:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Frame: 1978 Raleigh Tourist (SL-1?), lugged steel</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Fork: BBB chromed steel</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Handle-bars: Nitto's smallest track drops</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Wheels: Sun CR18 36-spoke</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Hubs: Origin track flip-flops</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Crank-set: Sugino 67.5m w/ 46-tooth chain-ring</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Pedals: MKS urban track</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Free-cog: Shimano 16-tooth</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Brake Caliper: Cane Creek SCR-3</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Brake Lever: Cane Creek Crosstop</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Stem: BBB's cheap MTB version</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">"Seat": WTB speed</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Seat-post: some BMX thing</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Chain: BBB half-link BMX chain</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">"Tyres": 700x25 Continental Gatorskin Ultras</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div>* Rivenx5 *http://www.blogger.com/profile/16916674312654206102noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1075777339909028507.post-28140498475137305862010-01-19T12:53:00.007-06:002010-01-19T13:06:37.116-06:00How-to: Paint a BikeFirst off: I have never painted a bike before.<br />
Second off: I'm not restoring anything but function--I'm just painting it.<br />
<br />
What you need:<br />
<br />
A Bike: Namely a 78' Raleigh Tourist.<br />
Paint stripper. I'm using the not drip, gel stuff. Allegedly easier, better, and smellier.<br />
Filler primer: Spray on primer that claims to fill cracks. My local bike-shop said this stuff is important and hard to screw up.<br />
Primer: Sticks to the filler under-coat, and the paint over-coat.<br />
Paint: I think automotive spray-paint is the way to go, but I've heard other hilarious ideas like "grill paint", and "aviation paint". I'm going with a dark(er?) green.<br />
Gloss coat: Actually important if you're worried about chips (and you should be) or water sticking to it (and you should be). It'll look prettier, which isn't always good, but it's nonetheless important.<br />
Sand-paper, wire-brush (big and small), and <maybe> a paint brush.<br />
<br />
1) Take off everything that can be taken off of the frame. This includes the veritable bottom bracket and the infamous head-set, in addition to the brakes, stem, seat-post, "derailer", etc...<br />
<br />
2) Strip that sucker. I used some gel stuff and a paint brush. It was messy and smelly, and took three tries to get 95% of the paint off. One more try might have helped, but I wasn't really in the mood.<br />
<br />
3) Filler primer: Now that you've stripped the dirt, rust, paint, and the inner lining of your lungs, you're ready to spray. Just spray the filler-primer on like spray paint. Once it's fully dried, sand it down with low-grit sand-paper. Watch out, I realized after spraying this stuff, that the entire room get a bit of yellow dust on it, which was easily wiped up with a towel.<br />
<br />
4) Primer. Same idea, but you don't have to sand it down afterward. I'm going for two coats. Let them dry before applying subsequent coats.<br />
<br />
5) Paint. Same as primer, but this time be careful to be even. I used just one coat, per the instructions on the paint can.<br />
<br />
6) Gloss: One coat worked for me. And like in all things: be liberal. Interestingly, this dulled the paint a little bit. Oh well.<br />
<br />
7) Don't touch it, take it outside, or even assemble the bike much less ride it: you might scratch the paint.<br />
<br />
<br />
Pictures!<br />
<br />
Before:<br />
</maybe><br />
<div id="zot1" style="text-align: center;"><img height="300" src="https://docs.google.com/File?id=dcw7nvv8_17d3mqkjfz_b" width="400" /><br />
</div><br />
<br />
<div id="u0.v" style="text-align: center;"><img height="300" src="https://docs.google.com/File?id=dcw7nvv8_18cb55rxdt_b" width="400" /><br />
</div><br />
<br />
<div id="j94m" style="text-align: center;"><img height="300" src="https://docs.google.com/File?id=dcw7nvv8_19dhn99xfq_b" width="400" /><br />
</div><br />
During:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><img height="300" src="https://docs.google.com/File?id=dcw7nvv8_21gf36fvgh_b" width="400" /><br />
<br />
<div id="txl:" style="text-align: center;"><div id="eefa" style="text-align: center;"><div id="famt" style="text-align: center;"><img height="400" src="https://docs.google.com/File?id=dcw7nvv8_37hnvc6hhm_b" width="300" /><br />
</div><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Filler Primer:<br />
</div></div></div></div><div id="ehp0" style="text-align: center;"><img height="300" src="https://docs.google.com/File?id=dcw7nvv8_23cqf5f5fq_b" width="400" /><br />
<br />
<div id="a9d4" style="text-align: center;"><img height="300" src="https://docs.google.com/File?id=dcw7nvv8_24d99csxhs_b" width="400" /><br />
</div><br />
</div>Primed:<br />
<br />
<div id="x64r" style="text-align: center;"><img height="300" src="https://docs.google.com/File?id=dcw7nvv8_25jwzv3bd8_b" width="400" /><br />
</div><br />
<br />
<div id="yuq9" style="text-align: center;"><img height="300" src="https://docs.google.com/File?id=dcw7nvv8_26gx8vt3f7_b" width="400" /><br />
</div><br />
Painted:<br />
<br />
<div id="onni" style="text-align: center;"><img height="300" src="https://docs.google.com/File?id=dcw7nvv8_29fb4j74jg_b" width="400" /><br />
</div><br />
<br />
<div id="re0j" style="text-align: center;"><img height="400" src="https://docs.google.com/File?id=dcw7nvv8_30hm9rw33r_b" width="300" /><br />
</div><br />
Coated (complete):<br />
<br />
<div id="h.8h" style="text-align: center;"><img height="300" src="https://docs.google.com/File?id=dcw7nvv8_31d95tsfcd_b" width="400" /><br />
<br />
<div id="du8o" style="text-align: center;"><div id="t7rw" style="text-align: center;"><img height="400" src="https://docs.google.com/File?id=dcw7nvv8_38cx8mjghq_b" width="300" /><br />
</div></div></div><br />
<br />
<div id="ggoh" style="text-align: center;"><img height="300" src="https://docs.google.com/File?id=dcw7nvv8_33dbvq94k3_b" width="400" /><br />
</div><br />
<br />
<div id="no9c" style="text-align: center;"><img height="300" src="https://docs.google.com/File?id=dcw7nvv8_34cp9x4jdk_b" width="400" /><br />
<div style="text-align: left;"><br />
As you can see, it turned out pretty well. There are a few, unpictured, glitches like the the underneath the bottom bracket, and the underside of one of the seat stays. But overall, I'm very happy. Anyone really interested, I used Range Rover's "Highland Green." It's darker than the pictures make it look, but nonetheless pretty.<br />
</div></div>* Rivenx5 *http://www.blogger.com/profile/16916674312654206102noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1075777339909028507.post-11901714251153454982010-01-01T00:53:00.004-06:002010-01-05T15:27:27.174-06:00Book ReviewsSorry for the hiatus. First it was classes, then exams, then not exams, then painting a bike (pictures soon), and now this: book reviews.<br />
<br />
1) The Jungle, by Comrade Sinclair: 1.5 / 5<br />
<br />
Ok, I abhorred Ayn Rand's Fountainhead because it just a giant capitalist bowling pin wielded to inflict the blunt force trauma of "objectivism." Likewise, The Jungle was a socialist two-by-four inducing a particularly vegetarian head-wound. What I liked was the sense that Sinclair was <i>reporting</i> on injustice, which is exactly what he was doing. What I didn't like was that the character was lifeless, alone (not lonely), and blended in seamlessly with the unbelievable predictability of the repressed proletariat. Protagonist Jurgis does nothing but suffer, which would be fine, were it not happening in a vacuum--and not a literary vacuum of oppression-by-Adam-Smith--just a vacuum of mediocre writing. What gets me a plot-line soap-box is why in the world Jurgis didn't continue to be a hobo! My guess is that Upton needed to present a valiant, duty-bound person <i>before</i> they become a socialist champion. Cheap trick Sinclair, but I suppose about half us vegetarians owe it in part to you.<br />
<br />
2) Consciousness Explained, by Daniel Dennett: 3.5 / 5<br />
<br />
Despite the lie of a title, Dennett has a gift for academic synergy. He begins by laying out a "heterophenomenological" framework of anti-cartesian cognitive introspection. What does that mean? Well, that's what the book is about. The big deal: Cartesian duality (mind vs. body) is false. Thus, the Cartesian theatre (the one in our head where we unconsciously direct what we become conscious of) is also false. Instead, Dennett gives us his reputed theory of Multiple Drafts where our consciousness is our ability (or rather, our inability to refrain from) abstracting sensori-motor input into iterative categories which we simultaneously recall, update, and project onto our experienced lives. What struck me interesting were the similarities between a) massively parallel connectionist architectures (neural networks), and b) Douglas Hofstadter's theory of Strange Loops. Surprisingly, Dennett's model is neurally plausible (ie. it "maps" well to known functions of the brain.) Also, it's surprisingly respectful of deep philosophical debates like subjective experience, other minds, and free will. What's lacking, in the book at least, is an evolutionary picture. I thought it deserved a couple chapters about how assuming purposeful design of the brain is what lead to the Cartesian problems in the first place. Dennett, good friends with High Priest Dawkins, seems altogether shy about evolution's lack of intent, which potentially makes consciousness a side effect of otherwise naturally selected, useful brain-functions. Ground rule double invoked for lack of trying...otherwise could have been a home-run.<br />
<br />
3) Nocturnes, by Kazuo Ishiguro: 2.5 / 5<br />
<br />
Ishiguro, author of Remains of the Day and one of my personal favorites, Never Let me Go, has a new book, Nocturnes. It's a set of five, loosely interwoven short stories about musicians and sunset. Wonderful prose. Great scenery. Plot-lines were dry and the characters were unfortunately boring. A couple cheap tricks (like reconstructive surgery, fame, fortune, and communism) adorn the five stories, but they end were they start: nowhere interesting. Ishiguro has what I've found to be an unrivaled style of clarity that let's his characters live in our minds, but Nocturnes doesn't live up to past efforts. My prescription is for Ishi to stay far away from short-stories: the long ones let the characters be characters, the short ones just feel a little cheap. Well worth the time, especially for fans of earlier work, but I got the feeling Kaz was fulfilling a contract more than writing a book.* Rivenx5 *http://www.blogger.com/profile/16916674312654206102noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1075777339909028507.post-8699470707617225312009-11-20T13:29:00.000-06:002009-11-20T13:29:17.665-06:00Recording Streaming Audio in OS XI finally got around to finding a way to record streanubg audio: not hard.<br />
<br />
What you'll need:<br />
<a href="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/" id="zcmr" title="Audacity">Audacity</a>: Good, free and open-source sound editing suite. (Does more than steal sound from the internet.)<br />
<a href="http://www.cycling74.com/products/soundflower" id="qe55" title="Soundflower">Soundflower</a>: Doesn't do much: presents a sort of audio bridge so that you can direct input to a given channel and then record form a given out-bound channel. Very simple.<br />
<br />
There are other packages out there that do things a bit "better", but they either aren't free or as flexible.<br />
<br />
After you download and install those packages:<br />
1) Start Soundflower. You should see a flower icon up in that "tray" thing near the clock. Don't fuss with it.<br />
2) Start Audacity. First time you need to tell it to record input from the "Soundflower (2ch)" device.<br />
2a) You may want to tell Audacity to "play-through", as in, let you hear stuff as you record it.<br />
3) Open your system->sound preferences and tell it output to "Soundflower (2ch)".<br />
4) Click on that record button.<br />
5) Go to your <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu_moia-oVI" id="tac-" title="Against Me! covers Bad Religion">favorite</a> youtube song and play it. Don't worry about timing, you can edit stuff out later.<br />
6) When it's done press stop and give it some ID3 tags in Audacity if you're into that. Delete the junk at the beginning and end of the scopey looking sound-track.<br />
7) Export it. I recommend <a href="http://www.fsf.org/resources/formats/playogg/" id="ctr2" title="Ogg Vorbis">Ogg Vorbis</a>, but you can use other formats. If you use that Other Format, you'll allegedly need the <a href="http://lame.buanzo.com.ar/" id="li:8" title="LAME">LAME</a> encoder package thingy.<br />
8) When you're done exporting you can add it your iPhone/Tunes/Pod/Mac/Life/Work/etc...<br />
<br />
Don't forget to change back your audio settings so things...you know...work.<br />
<br />
The next how-to or at least how-I-did-it-and-seems-to-work will be on bike painting.* Rivenx5 *http://www.blogger.com/profile/16916674312654206102noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1075777339909028507.post-1171453365678082272009-11-11T12:12:00.000-06:002009-11-11T12:12:47.837-06:00Book Review<a href="http://books.google.ie/books?id=OwnYF1SCpFkC&dq=I+am+a+strange+loop&client=firefox-a" id="yf2h" title="I am a Strange Loop">I am a Strange Loop</a>, by Douglas Hofstadter.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hofstadter" id="zz6t" title="Douglas Hofstadter">Douglas Hofstadter</a> was an aspiring physicist and recovering mathematician when he accidentally wrote the cognitive science masterpiece/tour de force/award winning/whirlwind/etc... <u>Godel Escher Bach</u> (GEB). It's long, complicated, very good, and altogether mesmerizing. If book-critics didn't use the term as much as they do, I'd call it whirlwind. Apparently, it was so whirl-winded that old Doug thought the message was lost. So he <a href="http://www.cogs.indiana.edu/people/homepages/hofstadter.html" id="ssm1" title="kicked back">kicked back</a> for while, and then a long time later, wrote another book called <u>I am a Strange Loop</u>.<br />
<br />
This book claims to focus on what was missed in GEB: consciousness rising from the "strange" recursion of symbol-strings made possible by our minds. He begins by defending his view that there are varying degrees of consciousness. At one end we have amoebas, on the other we've everyone's favorite evolutionary pinnacle: humans. He draws analogies to music, win, and other things about which people are connoisseurs, but he does it more artistically and less technically than in GEB. He explains Godel's incompleteness theorem, which proved that math would never be free from self-reference, which is very important for everyone who thinks math is pure and free of contradiction. Doug goes on to show a couple of "fun" problems with basic mathematical concepts. Great. <br />
<br />
While he has a gift for metaphor, I could have used more tofu and potatoes. He centres his first base-hit around an experiment (more of an activity) where he looped some videos of their own playback and took pictures of the results. (think hall of mirrors in 4-D.) Very pretty, moderately stimulating, but still astronomically far from consciousness. In the second half of the book he begins talking in terms of I-referencing, which is what people do when they think "I". All his examples of strange recursion fall short in one way or another, which almost seems planned so that he can bounce back and say, "you see! you see! It only works in the mind! Booyaah!" Well that's fine.<br />
<br />
Interestingly, having begun my endeavor into syntax, and recently been inspired by a certain <a href="http://rivenbyfive.blogspot.com/2009/11/noam-chomsky.html">eminent linguist</a>, the idea of recursion has been made very clear: pretty important. It's sure evident that recursive schemas in the minds we got gave rise to the linguistic capacity we also got! Since <u>I am a Strange Loop</u> didn't leave me with much more than that, I'll leave you with it too.<br />
<br />
And since you all have to quote old <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin" id="rpou" title="Chuck D.">Chuck D.</a> this year: "<span class="body">My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.</span>" Now that's got to be recursive!<br />
<br />
I say 2.5 / 5 on the superior-scientific-star-scale.* Rivenx5 *http://www.blogger.com/profile/16916674312654206102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1075777339909028507.post-48314715951035656852009-10-14T16:42:00.003-05:002009-10-14T17:04:04.834-05:00Typicality, not StereotypesEveryone knows there are discernible comedic attributes about academic folks. Here are the new ones I've uncovered:<br />
<br />
<b>Linguistics Professors</b>:<br />
<b>Sociolinguists</b>: Language is everywhere! Everything everywhere has languages and meaning and value and social relevance. If you talk, gesticulate, grunt, smile, hit things, or do so much as move molecules, you're a lingual creature and I care. You're great and if I write my paper about you, it'll be great too.<br />
<b>Semanticists</b>: Don't talk about people, babies, or gorillas. Don't talk about science, philosophy, psychology, or math that isn't Complete. If it's not modeled or model-able, it's not linguistics. If it pretends to be novel, it's not linguistics. If it's old, new, from the West Coast, the 60's, the 19th century, or from anywhere but MIT, Brown, or UPitt...you guessed it, it's not linguistics. I don't want anything to do with anything to do with anything but semantic models. Got it? It's not rocket science! That wouldn't be linguistics. In fact, all the linguists that couldn't cut it went into rocket science after doing shrooms at UC Berkeley.<br />
<br />
<b>Neuroscientists</b>: Well, my fMRI clearly shows this red area is clearly red...and in this area over here...which is probably important. I've done more statistical modeling than I can count, which is ironic, but there are still more holes in my paper, which has a paragraph of a title. But besides that, I think we can all agree that a) these pictures are sweet, and b) this esoteric, small, weird-named piece of the brain gives rise the Veritable Human Condition. If I could please just get another multimillion Euro grant, I could do, like, two more fMRI's and have this whole thing sorted out. We're so close!<br />
<b><br />
Cognitive Psychologist</b>: Ok...we got it wrong up until the 20's. And yea, we had wrong in the 60's. But Chomsky wrote that book...but kinda got it wrong until the 70's. And that PDP group jumped the gun a little bit. But now! We think we're pretty sure we've got it wrong again... But there are exciting prospects for such fields as [insert unrelated technical field]. There's also this new-wave, a second wind if you will, that's gaining momentum...so don't forget about us!<br />
<br />
<b>Cognitive Scientists</b>: I think we've got some really great pieces to the Big Puzzle That Everyone Has Been Working On Since The Beginning Of Time. It's really just a matter putting it together.* Rivenx5 *http://www.blogger.com/profile/16916674312654206102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1075777339909028507.post-31767906018929039052009-10-04T18:27:00.002-05:002009-10-04T18:29:09.093-05:00New Bike!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGsrNKkLPiYbb3Z5-819t7c5ozCtRNb482ylnpsNF7pA7HHl0-CAzSMMpFsaxy-ax11DVLcG_D4TyTjaD_tK4jxs2qYqXMZ-iDKQGBvGdRNU00GTQtpZVqUiyn9fi4D2dWM869tBe-Gyhm/s1600-h/DSC00104.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGsrNKkLPiYbb3Z5-819t7c5ozCtRNb482ylnpsNF7pA7HHl0-CAzSMMpFsaxy-ax11DVLcG_D4TyTjaD_tK4jxs2qYqXMZ-iDKQGBvGdRNU00GTQtpZVqUiyn9fi4D2dWM869tBe-Gyhm/s320/DSC00104.JPG" /></a><br />
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I found it in a bush...call it...my Brand New Bush Bike!<br />
<br />
But! It's a 1978 Raleigh Tourist Roadster LD-4. (Judging by the hubs, Sheldon Brown, some flickr pictures, and TEH INTERNET) It's condition? That can only be described by denying it of it's bike-nes...specifically...it doesn't roll. And, as my very astute roommate pointed out, rolling is key. But come on! It's a 78' Raleigh. I don't know if that means anything. What I do know is that it's a steal-lugged frame...albeit rusted...and is a good size for me. Honestly, the best components are in the lamentable you-ride-with-that? condition.<br />
<br />
Here's the run-down. To get it to a minimally operating state (call it "rolling"), I need a pair of track wheels. I'm looking into this. If it's a keeper, then I need to get it powder-coated and completely overhauled. Here's what I'm thinking: €100 (US $5,000,000) for some wheels, "tyres", cog, chain, and tubes. And then! I can scoot around on an old rusty Raleigh!<br />
<br />
Better still: If I can make get the frame scraped and coated, I can make minor upgrades throughout the year. Then! I'll either have a sweet old Raleigh that I found in a bush and fixed up, and doesn't it look great, or I can sell it on ebay.ie for about €400. It's a sure bet! If anyone out there knows late-70's Raleigh componentry (ie. new stuff I can get that won't not work), leave me line.<br />
<br />
This means I'm eating Ramen for the rest of the year...<br />
<br />
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!* Rivenx5 *http://www.blogger.com/profile/16916674312654206102noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1075777339909028507.post-43103286938973205092009-09-26T11:33:00.003-05:002009-09-26T20:38:57.708-05:00TCD and then Vote No:Trinity College Dublin:<br />
<br />
Were a murder committed, an eccentric British investigator called, a cooky professor implicated, and a star "maths" student expelled for some silly reason, the whole thing would be filmed at this place:<br />
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It's got Giant Doors, cobble stones, intimidating statues, that book o' Kells, and smart students. <br />
<br />
Now then...<br />
<br />
Vote No:<br />
<br />
Sitting on a bench reading something about connectionism (the answer to all cognitive questions) I was asked by a homeless man, "How come when I steal from my boss, I go to jail...but when he steals overtime, tips, and raises from me, the economy goes up?" Good question! Which brings to a tid-bit of current Irish politics: The veritable Lisbon Treaty! Ireland voted against a treaty that would broaden it's ties to the EU by providing it with a partial voice on a EU economic council, among other things. Now the same vote is back, because the folks in power think Ireland got it wrong. Far lefties, like the anarchists, socialists, Sinn Fein, Greens, and People Before Profit, along with far right nationalists are against the treaty. The lefties are generally opposed to globalizing economies, which they see as largely responsible for Ireland's economic collapse, while the nationalists see EU involvement as European (and probably UK) capitulation which would of course be the ruin of Ireland. Centrists from Fine Gael and Fine Fail are promoting the treaty and mainly responsible for it's re-appearance on the ballot. In my opinion, I'm with the lefties. It strikes me that economic treaties, such as NAFTA, CAFTA, and this Lisbon treaty (smaller but similar) erode workers' rights by consolidating markets across borders where less protective and increasingly opportunistic companies can exploit human labour. It is, however, a fine line. There are no jobs in Ireland. Not a single one. A treaty, as proposed, would indeed create jobs, which is important, but at the cost of devaluing new and existing employment, and more importantly devaluing labour in general. I'll stick to the socialist party line on this, and pretend to vote no.* Rivenx5 *http://www.blogger.com/profile/16916674312654206102noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1075777339909028507.post-20115409796269483132009-09-14T16:24:00.000-05:002009-09-14T16:24:31.579-05:00As it Turns OutCognitive Science is pretty neat. Another neat thing that turns out to be true: fMRI is the Mother Of All Brain Imagining Techniques. So far, the only reasons to do anything /but/ an fMRI is that you can't, won't, or just really like scans with names like "CAT" and "PET". As it turns out, MRIs (functional and otherwise) use GIANT MAGNETS (awesome!!!) to align those little dipoles we like to call hydrogen atoms. And then the gizmo measures the time it takes your dipoles to discombobulate. In turn, this tells us something about someone's brain. What's particularly audacious about these things is how dramatic the post-processing needs to be in order to get something useful. First you have to compensate, computationally of course, for movement along all three spatial axes. Then you gotta antialias your voxels. Then you're looking at collating your slices into a 3D image. And, of course, you have to choose your imaging type, probably T2. Lastly you'll want to take relative averages against your baseline for each time-slice. And Voila! You have a vague idea that something may have happened...and you know vaguely where it happened. Now we're cooking.<br />
<br />
In another not-so-recent not-so-scientific breakthrough, it turns out that single-speed bikes--you know, the ones people like because they're cheap and simple--are both expensive to buy and complicated enough to stump the most Irish of bike-store people. So it goes.<br />
<br />
But! I have a number of nifty ideas for a cognitive psychology question. As it turns out, coming up with smart questions really /is/ almost as hard as answering them. We had to come up with a question concerning human cognition for this week's class. My ideas are here in list form:<br />
<br />
1) How do people separate words in spoken speech?<br />
2) How do people simplify language for assumed learners (baby talk, pet talk)?<br />
3) How do, if at all, people find the meaning of made-up adjectives?<br />
4) How well can people make up a verb for a given noun?<br />
5) How accurate are people at determining projectile trajectory in 2D?<br />
5a) How fast can someone /decide/ accuracy? And how is this speed related to accuracy?<br />
5b) How might visual distractions affect accuracy?<br />
5c) Does technical knowledge of spatial geometry have any effect on accuracy or speed?<br />
<br />
What interests me most about number 5 are the potential evolutionary aspects. For instance, there's an obvious advantage to determining the accuracy of parabolic curves (so as to throw something accurately...or dodge that dodge-ball). There may also be advantages to accuracy in linear prediction. But might we be significantly less accurate for logarithmic or exponential curves?<br />
<br />
As it turns out, you'll have to check back in seven years to get answers to any of these questions. And, as it will likely turn out, the answers won't make anyone better at basketball.* Rivenx5 *http://www.blogger.com/profile/16916674312654206102noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1075777339909028507.post-52071344763805688352009-09-06T18:15:00.002-05:002009-09-06T18:15:54.767-05:00Moderately Uninteresting UpdateI'm in Ireland.<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
Interesting things: wonderfully friendly people...everywhere...I'm talking smiles on the streets friendly. Already got caught in the rain. Oh well. Roommates are sweet folks, though two are from the US. Hah! Two more from Ireland and one from Japan. Went to an Anglican church service this morning—ye olde Holy Communion Rite 1—all words, no songs. But lead by two women reverends. Way to go Church of Ireland. Now I need a Book o' Common Prayer. Next up is hurling. Rough sport. Then there's the Irish language...sounds pretty sweet to me. Then you have the proxied internet connection here are UCD. Not very nice. But I think Skype will work. Oh and one other not very nice thing: big college campuses. Oh well. One high note to end on is that classes start tomorrow.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
Here's the rundown on classes. Advances in Neuroscience: primary literature review in the field. Not sure what to expect. General Linguistics: “A tour of the ologies.” Meaning semantics, syntax, phonology, and morphology. Then we have Cognitive Psychology, a computer science module. This one is being taught by a particularly professional looking gent who happens to head the department. Oh well. Lastly is Neuropsychology where “the primary purpose of this course is to demonstrate how data from brain-damaged patients and from functional neuroimaging are used to test theories of normal cognition, and how cognitive theories and methods are used to understand brain-behaviour relationships.”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
Oh well. </div>* Rivenx5 *http://www.blogger.com/profile/16916674312654206102noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1075777339909028507.post-21721656705071346712009-08-27T20:37:00.000-05:002009-08-27T20:37:31.100-05:00Room's of Their ownHaving recently finished V. Wolf's <i>A Room of One's Own</i>, I got to imagining other writers as if they were women.<br />
<br />
In first was J. Keruoac, the veritable vagabond himself. I imagine a number of differences were Jack a woman. First, I figure she wouldn't have been so found of railroad cars, hitchhiking, and garden-level squats. Instead, I see a bit more apprehension in her travels. I'm sure level-three sex offenders would be at the top of the fear-list, as well as all her friends. I doubt her womanizing down south would have reversed very literarily...except to a Very Progressive Crowd. And that scene pissing off the back of the flat-bed truck would have put the whole thing over the edge. Nice try girl-named-Jack, but no cigar(s).<br />
<br />
Next up is R. Ellison of <i>Invisible Man</i> fame. Of course, the title would have been different. What's more, I don't think it would have the same sting. In the 50's, women were just coming into literary visibility. A whole book on the subject would have been ill-timed and not a likely choice for publishing. In the book, however, we could trade the paint factory for a bakery. And the political escapades for a series of home-furnishings commercials. The opening wrestling scene could stay, but we'd have to add some mud. And maybe we fore-go the whole process of becoming and realizing one's invisibility, and settle for just figuring the whole damn thing was planned. Sorry Ralphy, but I think you'd have sucked as a girl.<br />
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Lastly I have P. K. Dick. No jokes about the name. Now then. While it's hard to isolate a typifying Dick novel, I imagine we have to trade the predictably present drug-addiction for society-inflicted psychological problems. Then we trade Dick's hardened male figures (caught in helpless situations) for otherwise helpless women caught in hardening situations. Very good. But most of all, we'll need to trade in all the technology jargon (invariably unexplained) and get some Huxleyan eugenics programs. All in all, the novels would be a hit! Way to go Dick!<br />
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There you have it. Now, if they all meet in a bar? Depends on the bar, but I'm guessing they don't have a thing to say to one another.<br />
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Peace,<br />
- G.* Rivenx5 *http://www.blogger.com/profile/16916674312654206102noreply@blogger.com2