I was a test subject for someone's PHD on this. AFAIR it was about identifying the part of the brain that is responsible for aborting actions. Like if you decide to pickup a pan, and then notice the handle is hot, some people can't help but pickup the pan anyways because they lack this abort function.
They took an MRI of my brain.
They found where one part of my brain resided in the MRI images.
I performed reaction tests -- press this button for green circle, press that button for blue circle, abort pressing button if the icon gets crossed out (the crossing out was delayed)
Then they strapped the magnet to my head (not touching but very close AFAIR)
Then do all the tests again
AFAIR they showed that part of the brain did affect your ability to abort an action. I think they knew this anyway because of behavior of people with brain injuries. So I guessed they learned the magnet scrambled that part of the brain?
It was extremely boring doing these tests. I don't remember much about it except that the magnet made unreasonably loud popping sounds.
> I think they knew this anyway because of behaviour of people with brain injuries.
Tests like this are intended to prove or refine information derived from clues from damaged subjects. You can learn a lot of things about complex systems like the brain by studying their failure modes, but you have to be careful of inferring causation from correlation and other such fallacies — for instance here they could have been trying to rule out the behaviour being a secondary symptom (the correct response actually being controlled elsewhere normally, but that is blocked by the damage rather than the damage having affected it more directly), or testing to see if multiple areas are directly involved in the behaviour rather than it being as simple as that one area seeming to control the veto, or just ruling out a pre-existing condition in the initial subjects unrelated to the subsequent damage.
I am assured that the human brain is so incredibly complex that it is almost impossible to understand it ... but experiments like this make me worry that Evolution just knocked most of it up in Perl over a weekend...
An inability to abort an action when facts change ? What if there was a test for that. Would we stop people standing for office? Be set free from some crimes?
I demand to see the source code for human brains ! It needs a proper security audit.
My PhD was (partially) on this. The inability to inhibit actions when facts change on a short timescale (sub-second) is thought to be biological. According to the most widely accepted theory, think of the brain as having a slow system and a fast system. The slow system is good for complex processing, but of course it is slow. There is also a fast system for quickly responding to things. If something changes while the slow system is working, usually the fast system is pretty good at stopping the slow system from acting, allowing the brain time to incorporate the new information into its plans. But if you are already planning on doing something and getting ready to do it, there is a limit to how quickly the fast system can interrupt the slow system. It tends to be on the order of 1/10 to 1/5 of a second.
On a longer timescale (minutes to days), there is a clinical symptom called "perseveration" whereby people can't let go of previously held beliefs in the face of changing information. It is common in, e.g., patients with schizophrenia.
I was once using an old but high end HP DC power supply to test a repaired 12V microcontroller circuit that someone else mysteriously blew up "with a spark". Before I hooked up the fraying and grimy alligator clips coming off the supply, I had the thought to check the actual voltage with a multimeter, in case the supply was out of calibration. Before I consciously perceived what my multimeter read, my hands rapidly dropped the frayed wires. I connected up the multimeter again, and it read 120V! Someone had mistakenly missed a decimal point, and the archaic LED display made it look like 12.0V.
A low level part of my brain definitely took over control of my hands, based on interpretation of visual signals. That was 6 years ago and I still think about it every few days.
oh - the highly repetitive response common in autism.
Are there gradients of perseveration? This is absolutely fascinating - a brain based answer to why people do many behaviours - from sitting in the corner mumbling one word over and over, to various forms of self sabotage ("always picking the wrong man")
(And I might say heartening - as the father of an ASD child,
it can seem hopeless, but just being armed with some knowledge of where the behaviours come from might allow some hope)
There are ways we can measure perseveration in the lab, and so yes, it can be higher or lower in different people. If you want to look into it more, a popular way to measure it is the Wisconsin Card Sort Test (WCST), or the version for children, the Dimension Change Card Sort task (DCCS). However, like all cognitive tests, these are imperfect measurements of perseveration - they may be indicators of higher or lower perseveration, but scores may be influenced by a multitude of other factors as well. Likewise, there may be aspects of perseveration not captured by these tests - like you mention, there are different ways that one can be perseverative, and one single number can't ever represent the complexity of human behavior.
"I do not imply that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. We should claim the right to suppress them if ... they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument." - Karl Popper.
People advocating "deplatforming intolerance", a.k.a. applying censorship, should ponder this quote.
I’d be willing to bet that those who cite the paradox as support for censorship have only ever read the stupid meme cartoon about it that gets passed around on Facebook and Twitter, they always seem surprised into silence when someone posts quotes back from the actual text that show their argument is as strong as their research.
We want to reduce traffic fatalities and injuries caused by distracted driving. Come help!! Check out the website for the office address and media videos if you're into those things.
The technologies we are currently using includes AWS, C#, C++, Python, Ubuntu, darknet, docker.
We're ONSITE but we do work flexibly. e.g. I work from home 2 days a week.
Send me an email! murray@acusensus.com. I love reading code. If you have some code that you are able to share, send it to me! I will read it and send back any commentary that pops into my head.
My understanding is that the motor pulls the card in using random speeds which vary as the card is getting sucked in (start sucking, slow, fast, slow, fast, etc, fully sucked in). The machine knows how to account for the variance, but the skimmer doesn't (in general skimmer's assume a constant swipe speed). You can kind of see it cause the machine does the same thing when spitting out your card. It would be more convenient to spit your card out fast like a transport ticket, but then your card could be skimmed on the way out.
Cards are usually swiped in a somewhat smooth motion. Even then, it's easy to fail the motion, and you often need to swipe again.
The anti-skimmer moves the card very fast in short bursts, so while it may seem just a bit jittery (averaged out), the skimmer will end skipping whole pieces of band or losing sync.
Maybe they could use small rubber rollers to detect velocity and sync appropriately, like in a mouse.
Oh man, I feel for you. If you want to and are legally able, you can send the sample work to me and I will review it for you. (I am firmly settled in a different country -- zero chance of application plagiarism).
Does your awareness reduce? It's hard to notice a change in awareness. Sometimes I notice a transition from haziness to attention when a sound draws my attention. My understanding is that the haziness is a form of sleeping and is exactly what a nap is meant to be. If you fall into a deeper sleep you will get some of the side effects others talk about -- grogginess etc. The length and depth of sleep is related, so I thought that's why you need to be careful to only nap for short periods of time.
When I nap, even for 20m, I dream. Grogginess comes if I take longer than 20 minutes or so - although if I time it right, I can hit a non grogginess event again after 1.5 hiurs. Sleep cycles, I guess
It is worth noting that the unintelligible accent issue is context dependent. A native English speaker can be the person with an unintelligible accent, and that person may need to work on their communication skills in order to have influence.
I experienced this phenomenon first hand as a native English speaker with an Australian accent. At my first hostel abroard there was a mixed group of european (non UK) people conversing in English, and I thought I'd try and join in.
me: howrya?
group: blank stares
me: how are you?
group: blank stares
me: how - are - you?
group: look of fear
me: hello?
This first experience was definitely a shock, and it took me some time to realise what it must have been like for the group.
In terms of learning to understand native speakers, travelling in their country for an extended period seems to work. My family has hosted many international guests through exchange programs, including adult guests who had never left their home country (but were taught English at school). Communication was sometimes very difficult, but universally the guests were able to pick up on the Australian accent over time. When exchanges move from blank looks to questions about particular words used, you can start having clunky conversations.
The exchange programs did give our family tips on how to converse with the guests. The only tip I can remember is to try and use different words. Often the longer and fancier word (e.g. gigantic, massive) is easier to understand for the guest than the short and simple word (e.g. big).
Tuplespace is all about lookups/publish/subscribe on filters on the tuples. For the vast majority of the time, filters are of the form of (<string>, <type>, ...) or (<string>, <value>, ...) . You don't need to use skip lists (or binary trees generally) for that, you can use nested hash tables on the prefix/suffix of the tuples. Then you get O(len(filters)) instead of O(log(size of tuple space)). Trust me when I say that using hashes of filters is a lot faster.
Also, see my higher-ranked post about why I stopped using tuple spaces.
I still don't understand. What makes the XML version better than the JSON version? Why is creating XML like that a good solution, while creating JSON like that is not?
The XML is better because when the data types directly relate to tag names it is simple to understand, read, and write, process, and there are tons of XML libraries in every language that do object-xml serialization automatically. With JSON, since there are no types, you must manually write your own data-object serialization and embed the type system right into the data structure itself.
It sounds like that might be better for a statically-typed language where you might need specific types in the data file. But I would argue that not only is it overkill in a dynamically-typed language, it's bad. We're talking about data here. There's no reason to couple it to data types in your code.
Plus, serialization to JSON in a dynamically-typed language is pretty much automagic compared to what you have to do with XML.
Just for kicks, I am going to try and implement these two algorithms using using the State Machine Compiler (http://smc.sourceforge.net/). I expect that my "code" will be much less than 10,000 lines, although I don't really know how long the code SMC itself generates will be.
I spent a few hours looking into Ragel over the weekend, and, honestly, I can't envisage how a html5 parser mostly written in Ragel would look. But I'm going to give it a crack.
They took an MRI of my brain. They found where one part of my brain resided in the MRI images. I performed reaction tests -- press this button for green circle, press that button for blue circle, abort pressing button if the icon gets crossed out (the crossing out was delayed) Then they strapped the magnet to my head (not touching but very close AFAIR) Then do all the tests again
AFAIR they showed that part of the brain did affect your ability to abort an action. I think they knew this anyway because of behavior of people with brain injuries. So I guessed they learned the magnet scrambled that part of the brain?
It was extremely boring doing these tests. I don't remember much about it except that the magnet made unreasonably loud popping sounds.