Letters Remain

  • The Infant Brain, Redux

    An interesting follow-up if you enjoyed reading about the development of the infant brain last week: Seed Magazine interviews Alison Gopnik, asking about her research and “why everything we think we know about babies is wrong“.

    Seed: You describe children as being “useless on purpose.” What do you mean by that?

    AG: It’s related to one of the basic things that came out of our research: Why do children exist at all? It doesn’t make tremendous evolutionary sense to have these creatures that can’t even keep themselves alive and require an enormous investment of time on the part of adults. That period of dependence is longer for us than it is for any other species, and historically that period has become longer and longer.

    The evolutionary answer seems to be that there is a tradeoff between the ability to learn and imagine — which is our great evolutionary advantage as a species — and our ability to apply what we’ve learned and put it to use.

    The article also mentions how Gopnik believes “Freud’s and Piaget’s conceptions of young children’s theory of mind are wrong”. A recent (correlative) study has shown that she may be correct.

    Tags:
     / / / /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • History of the 160 Character Text Message

    I’ve never given much thought to this, and maybe that’s a sign of how well it was designed and implemented: the history and (high-level) technical development of  text messaging.

    Would the 160-character maximum be enough space to prove a useful form of communication? Having zero market research, [the research commitee] based their initial assumptions on two “convincing arguments”:

    For one, they found that postcards often contained fewer than 150 characters.

    Second, they analyzed a set of messages sent through Telex, a then-prevalent telegraphy network for business professionals. Despite not having a technical limitation, Hillebrand said, Telex transmissions were usually about the same length as postcards. […]

    [Friedhelm Hillebrand, the ‘father of text messaging’,] had an argument with a friend about whether 160 characters provided enough space to communicate most thoughts. “My friend said this was impossible for the mass market,” Hillebrand said. “I was more optimistic.” 

    Nowadays, with the ubiquity of text messging and services such as Twitter I feel that there is little doubt that 160 characters is enough to get across all but the most complex or important messages.

    Tags:
     / / / /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Testing Rationality and Bias

    How can we test our rationality and various biases?

    Shouldn’t you get more rationality credit if you spend more time studying common biases, statistical techniques, and the like?  Well this would be good evidence of your rationality if you were in fact pretty rational about your rationality, i.e., if you knew that when you read or discussed such issues your mind would then systematically, broadly, and reasonably incorporate those insights into you reasoning processes.

    But what if your mind is far from rational?  What if your mind is likely to just go through the motions of studying rationality to allow itself to smugly believe it is more accurate, or to bond you more closely to your social allies?

    So just because you know of all the cognitive biases and fallacies doesn’t mean you’re not going to fall victim to the bias blind spot or actually become more rational.

    This puts me in mind of this (paraphrased) quote from an anonymous advertising executive:

    Those who claim to be well versed in the ‘psychology of advertising’ and to therefore be ‘immune’ not only don’t know much about psychology or advertising, but are our ideal targets.

    Tags:
     / / /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Infographic Inspiration

    There’s not much I can say about this collection other than giving you its accurate title: 50 great examples of infographics.

    via @mikaarauz

    Tags:
     / /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Interpreting Hybrid Images

    Remember how the Mona Lisa’s famous smile was painted in low spatial frequencies, hence why we interpret the face differently depending on where we look?

    Now, Mo of Neurophilosophy takes an in-depth look at how our brains interpret hybrid images and complex visual scenes, shedding more light on this effective imaging technique. He also links to the hybrid images section of MIT’s Computational Visual Cognition Lab which contains a fairly mind-boggling gallery of hybrid images.

    Tags:
     / /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Procrastination as Newton’s First Law

    There’s a lot I identify with in this article of Joel Spolsky’s where he talks of using the Fire and Motion strategy to cope with workplace procrastination.

    There have been times in my career as a developer when I went for weeks at a time without being able to get anything done. As they say, I’m not in flow. I’m not in the zone. I’m not anywhere. […]

    Once you get into flow it’s not too hard to keep going. Many of my days go like this: (1) get into work (2) check email, read the web, etc. (3) decide that I might as well have lunch before getting to work (4) get back from lunch (5) check email, read the web, etc. (6) finally decide that I’ve got to get started (7) check email, read the web, etc. (8) decide again that I really have to get started (9) launch the damn editor and (10) write code nonstop until I don’t realize that it’s already 7:30 pm.

    Somewhere between step 8 and step 9 there seems to be a bug, because I can’t always make it across that chasm. For me, just getting started is the only hard thing. An object at rest tends to remain at rest. There’s something incredible heavy in my brain that is extremely hard to get up to speed, but once it’s rolling at full speed, it takes no effort to keep it going. […]

    Maybe this is the key to productivity: just getting started. Maybe when pair programming works it works because when you schedule a pair programming session with your buddy, you force each other to get started.

    I feel that the text in bold is key.

    via Less Wrong

    Tags:
     / / / /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • UK Bank Holidays

    Today is the May Day Bank Holiday here in the UK, so I thought I would look at the history of why we have these public holidays.

    I was sure that the commonly held belief  of why ‘bank holidays’ are so called was incorrect, and it appears that Wikipedians confirm this assumption: “Bank holidays are often assumed to be so called because they are days upon which banks are shut, but this is not in fact the case”. However, I found the reason behind bank holiday legislation fascinating and very… British:

    In 1871, the first legislation relating to bank holidays was passed when Sir John Lubbock introduced the Bank Holidays Act 1871 […]. Sir John was an enthusiastic supporter of cricket and was firmly of the belief that bank employees should have the opportunity to participate in and attend matches when they were scheduled. Included in the dates of bank holidays are therefore dates when cricket games were traditionally played between the villages in the region where Sir John was raised. The English people were so thankful that they called the first Bank Holidays ‘St. Lubbock’s Days’.

    Tags:
     / / /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • How to Win at Monopoly

    It appears that a couple of high-profile blogs linked to this a few years back, but it’s new to me: how to win at monopoly.

    Monopoly is a game of luck, strategy, and people skills. No strategy will guarantee you a win; that’s one of the reasons Monopoly is so interesting. In any given game, a newcomer can beat a lifetime champion. Still, there are a few strategic tips that came out of the computer simulations that will help you best play the odds: you may not win any given game, but in the long run, you’ll come out ahead. The “people skills” element isn’t captured here. But as a general rule, think about what your opponents want and see if you can engineer a trade with them that’s a win/win for you both. That type of negotiating is as vital in Monopoly as it is in real life.

    Tags:
     / / /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Online-Only Newspapers: Counterintuitive Trends

    Studying the progress of the Finnish financial daily Taloussanomat as it became Europe’s first online-only newspaper, researchers from City University London discovered a number of seemingly counterintuitive trends from the newspaper’s retiring of its print business.

    Six and a half months after going online-only Unique Users were 22 percent lower and Page Impressions 11 percent down. […]

    Although Taloussanomat costs fell 52 percent when its presses were silenced, revenue also dropped—by at least 75 percent—due to the loss of print advertising and subscription income. […]

    Based on their case-study [the researchers] conclude that a newspaper would have to have an operating loss of 31 percent or greater to make ditching its print edition worthwhile.

    The researchers have also conducted a number of other studies in this realm that may be of interest.

    via @zambonini

    Tags:
     / /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Development of the Infant Brain

    Looking primarily at the research of Alison Gopnik, Jonah Lehrer looks at the development of the infant brain.

    Gopnik argues that, in many respects, babies are more conscious than adults. She compares the experience of being a baby with that of watching a riveting movie, or being a tourist in a foreign city, where even the most mundane activities seem new and exciting. “For a baby, every day is like going to Paris for the first time,” Gopnik says. “Just go for a walk with a 2-year-old. You’ll quickly realize that they’re seeing things you don’t even notice.”

    via Mind Hacks, which itself has a word of caution about the claim that babies have more neurons than adults.

    Tags:
     / / / / /

    Lloyd Morgan