Jim Davies: the Blog

When Reason Isn't Enough: Teaching Evaluations

2012-01-28T04:03:00.000-08:00

I work at Carleton University as a professor. Here it is mandatory that we administer surveys to our students to evaluate our quality of our teaching in each class. The scores that these tests generate are used to evaluate a good deal of a professor's job performance when it comes to things like tenure and getting certain teaching awards.

I get a free newspaper called the CUAT Bulletin*, which claims to be "Canada's voice for academics." The most recent issue (January 2012, 59:01, page A2) features a commentary written by eight people entitled "Student Surveys a Poor Measure of Teaching Competence." I read it with interest.

The paper is well-reasoned. Here are its points:

It makes an analogy with doctors and their patients, and how we might assume that the patient might poorly evaluate a doctor because of things the doctor did that were painful but necessary. They describe what kind of negative effect this incentive effect would have on medicine.
Struggling students will give low assessment scores even if the teacher is doing a good job.
Student assessments measure an emotional disposition before the full effect of the course is known to the student.
They conclude that the measurement is arbitrary and should not be used.

We live in a culture (or at least I do) where reason is lauded, and thought to be the best way to think and come up with beliefs. Usually I'm on the side of reason. I'm on the side of reason when the only alternative is irrationality: wishful thinking, biased thinking, selfish thinking, etc.

However, when reason is contrasted with evidence, I'm afraid I will almost always side with the evidence.

And evidence is exactly what this commentary is missing. Not a shred of evidence is provided for the thesis of the commentary, nor any of its main points.

But first, let's talk about measurement for a moment. Is it possible that someone likes beer and also would not consider having sex on the first date? Of course it is. But that does not mean that asking someone if they like the taste of beer isn't predictive of whether or not they might consider sex on the first date. In fact, if someone likes the taste of beer, they are 60% more likely to want sex on the first date.**

The most important thing in measurement is how accurate the measurement is. If the measurement is accurate, it really doesn't matter whether the measurement "makes sense." In this case, you can reason your way out of thinking that beer liking predicts first date sex having, but you'd be reasoning yourself out of something that has some truth to it.

You can also predict pretty well how good a chess player someone is by how many chess books they have in their house. This is true even though someone who sucks at chess might have those books anyway. (I can't remember where I read this.)

Which brings me back to teaching evaluations through student questionnaires. All of the points made in the commentary basically amount to nothing if the student evaluation is accurate. And even though educational research is not my specialty, it took me about 20 seconds of web searching to find some evidence that is relevant to the issue.

There are limitations to student evaluations: they are bad at evaluating course goals, content, design, materials, and evaluation of student work. However, they do enable the detection of patterns in teaching development. Was that so hard?

I'm not going to make this a debate about the quality of teaching evaluations; that's not my point. My point is that eight people wrote this article with a title that begs for evidence, and provided none of it. How can eight scholars not have thought to look at the evidence? Either they didn't think to look for it, or they (falsely) imagined there would not be any. Maybe they thought that other scholars reading the commentary would not be persuaded by evidence. That's insulting.

There are 100 plausible ideas for every one that's true.

Demand evidence. Reason is often not enough.

* What does CUAT mean? Good question. I found their website and the unpacking of the abbreviation does not appear to be on the front page of the website. I have no idea what it stands for.

** This is from the terrific Ok Cupid blog: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-best-questions-for-first-dates/

*** http://www.yorku.ca/univsec/senate/committees/scotl/tevguide.pdf

Pictured: Students in Ecuador. From Wikimedia Commons.

Reflections on Wikipedia and How Much We Use It

2012-01-19T04:25:00.000-08:00

Wikipedia gets used so much that it's like the air- we use it constantly but rarely notice it. Yesterday Wikipedia went black for 24 hours, and it gave me an opportunity to appreciate it. I tried to access it about three or four times yesterday.

How much is one view of Wikipedia worth to you? Let's say it's very low, like one cent. Even at this price, you should be paying Wikipedia about $11 per year.

(1 cent * 3 daily page views * 365 days)

That's just paying for what you use. So it should not count as a charitable donation-- by that I mean that however much you typically give to charity, this should be in addition to that. This shoestring operation works completely by donation.

Today I'm going to give Wikipedia $22, and will continue to give at least that much every year.

Each page view is worth more than a cent to me. What's it worth to you?

New Year's Resolution 2012: No Orange Food

2012-01-01T10:26:00.000-08:00

Every year my man Lou Fasulo and I do a new year's resolution together that lasts one year. Last year's resolution was to eat at least one blueberry every day.

Overall, it went pretty well. I always strategize to make sure I don't violate whatever rule I've made. I knew that fresh blueberries are expensive, infrequently available, keep poorly, and require lots of diligent shopping. Thus I decided to eat dried blueberries.

The other strategy I had was to take it with my pills. Dried blueberries are very small-- much smaller than a multi-vitamin. So I just swallowed whole a dried blueberry every day with whatever other pills I was taking that day. Worked great!

I only missed five days. I use a pill box, and once the blueberry stuck to the lid and I didn't swallow it that day. Once I was in Switzerland and ran out. I could not find any blueberries of any sort at the airports. And somehow, in the last few days of the year, with having little schedule, I plain forgot to take any pills at all on several occasions.

This year my beloved's brother Michael suggested that I eat no orange food for one year. I liked the idea, and Lou agreed to it. I can drink orange stuff, but I can't eat it. This includes foods such as:

oranges
cheese doodles
orange cheddar cheese (white would be okay)
carrots
tangerines
pumpkin
cantelope
doritos
cheezits
cheapo mac and cheese
orange peppers
banana peppers (some)
mango
orange sherbet
orange popsicles

Some egg yolks are yellow and some are orange, sometimes depending on how they're cooked. I need to watch that.

If you want to know why I do these resolutions, and what my past resolutions have been, to the best of my memory, see the Jim Davies FAQ:
http://jimdavies.org/personal/faq.html

Pictured: Eating a carrot a few minutes before midnight on December 31, 2011. In the background is my friend Heather, at whose house I was partying.

Blog the Cut Parts of Your Book

2011-12-18T08:45:00.000-08:00

I like to write books. I expect I will also like to publish books; I'll let you know when it happens.

One of the tough things about any kind of writing is having to remove things from your book that you love but just don't belong. It's hard.

In my non-fiction books, I have ideas that I think are new, exciting. I want people to know about them. But sometimes they make the book worse, and I have to cut them.

I write non-fiction using a typesetting program called LaTeX (pronounced LAH-teck). It's a wonderful thing, and one of my favourite things about it is that you can make "comments." Here is a screenshot of my working environment:

Working with LaTeX is not a "what you see is what you get" interface. Writing is a bit like coding HTML. I'll explain what is going on in this snippet. Rather than numbering sections, you can code them with the "\section{section name}" tag. You cite things using citep (a separate file contains the citation information). All of the stuff in orange are comments. You make comments by starting the line with a "%". What this means is that when you run LaTeX, these things are ignored, and you get a gorgeous PDF. You only see them when you look at the source. This is really wonderful. The bit "% --gossip" means to me that I'm starting a section on gossip-- I can find it quickly because the preceding double hyphen is my signal for the discussion for a topic. So if I want to jump to the gossip section, I just search for "--gossip".

I use the comments for making annotations for myself. The complete reference, what page it's on, the website from which I originally found out about the paper, my reservations about where in the book it should be, a note to myself to change something, etc.

When I cut something from my book, it's often not because it's a bad idea, but because it just doesn't belong. So I comment out that section. I can still see it, but it does not show up in the final document. It shows up, unobtrusively, in orange. As the book evolves, that commented section might suddenly fit elsewhere. It's still there, waiting to be un-commented.

Now I know Microsoft Word has something called "comments," but it's nothing like this. They do not remain in line with the text, it's not easy to turn text into a comment, and worst of all, comments are printed by default which drives me crazy. The unspoken intention is that when the document is done, you would have no comments, that comments are for the editing stage only.

My book is going through drafts right now, and my colleague Jeanette Bicknell is reading through it and giving me great comments. She's smart, interesting, and writes a great blog on the psychological effects of music for Psychology Today. Check it out at
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/why-music-moves-us

In one of her recent comments, she told me that my section arguing that tabletop role-playing games should be looked at as a form of art is contentious, and really not necessary for the point I'm making. She's absolutely right. So I cut it. More specifically, I commented out the section.

However, it's still an interesting topic. If I were using a word processor, I'd have to cut it out completely and maybe stick it in another file of fragments that I could mine later (this is exactly what I do when I use Word). That's ungainly. There's no record of where it was in case I want to put it back in, and I'm not reminded of it when I read through my book.

Commenting is easier on the writer than deleting because, to the writer, it still looks a bit like it's in the book. That's the psychological benefit: you're not as hesitant to comment as you are to delete; there's less at stake. Instead of having to kill your darlings, you're putting them in a cryonic stasis, ready to thaw out and live again.

But what to do with these cut sections? I just figured it out:

Blog Your Darlings

After the book gets published, it's good to comment on the book on your blog, for promotional purposes. You don't want to repeat too much of what's in the book, but you want to write interesting things that make people want to read it. So my plan is, after the book is published, to go through the commented sections and expand on them in blog postings.

This way, the blog has content that is novel and interesting, but still relates to and gets people interested in reading the book. The two support each other. Readers of the book get to learn more through the blog, which can then be used to get people interested in your next book.

And those ideas that were hard to me to remove from the book get to see the light of day in the end.

Giving Up On Understanding

2011-12-12T04:50:00.000-08:00

I have spoken to religious leaders who express how beautiful mystery is. They see the appreciation of mystery as being humble in the face of a complicated universe. They want us to love mystery like we might love the smell of apple pie.

It’s a lovely idea. And what could be wrong with appreciation? It turns out that appreciation of mystery for its own sake has a dark side.

Keith Stanovich makes an excellent point in his book The Robot’s Rebellion. It concerns people’s love of mystery. His point is that appreciating mystery is an intellectual surrender. It signals the end of critical inquiry.

In the religious case, often the request to appreciate mystery is a request to stop asking why.

Let’s take the common phrase “God moves in mysterious ways.” This statement is used when it appears that God has done something counter to the values we ascribe to him. I see the phrase as a tactic to combat the devastating problem of evil.

The problem of evil is from the philosophy of religion. It is the apparent contradiction between the fact that there is preventable awful things in this world, along with the idea that there is a god who is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good. If God knows about horrendous suffering, and has the power to stop it, how could he not if he is all good? That is the essence of the problem of evil. It’s a tough one for theists.

You can see how the love of mystery encourages people from looking too closely at instances of this problem. Why would a good person, doing great things, die early of a painful disease? A common religious reply is that God either caused it (or did not intervene) because of some greater good that we don’t know. It’s a mystery why it happened that way; trust in God.

Note that we hold our own doctors accountable to higher standards. If a doctor knew of a patient that was sick, and had the power to cure him, then, if she was indeed good, then she would be morally obligated to help. But because of our love of mystery, God gets a pass.

When you’re watching a magic show, sure, go ahead and enjoy the mystery. But when people are telling you to appreciate mystery, they are often trying to hide a problem with their own worldview, and protect it by disabling your critical thinking.

Pictured: An angel sculpture at a flea market. From Wikimedia Commons.

What Is Intuition?

2011-12-08T05:49:00.001-08:00

Intuition is when we get a feeling about something, but that feeling does not come immediately with a justification. The essence is that you have some value judgement or decision, but you don't know where it came from.

It's an everyday word for something that is scientifically legitimate. Most of what goes on in our minds is unconscious. We're aware of only a tiny bit of it. Intuitive thoughts are churned up by your unconscious. Then it's up to your deliberate, conscious mind to decide what to do with them. Often, we get a feeling about something and then quickly construct a rationalization for it. We'll often believe that the rationalization is the cause of the belief or feeling, but often it's an afterthought-- a justification created by our conscious mind to explain the behaviour of our unconscious.

Okay, so intuitions come from unconscious processes. But where did these processes come from? What makes them be the way they are? Here's where things get interesting. The simplistic answer is that they are either innate or learned. It's not that black and white (for example, sometimes innate processes can be triggered by experience), but it's a good first-order approximation.

Innate Intuitions

There are some things we didn't need to learn. A baby knows to suck at her mother's breast, and we naturally tend to dislike bitter tastes and peering over from great heights.

Long before psychology and cognitive science even existed, there was a debate between nature and nurture in the philosophical tradition (in parallel with the rationalist and empiricist debate in epistemology). And even today there is a debate, but now it's more nuanced. The question is no longer (or should no longer be) what is innate and what is learned, but rather what is the contribution of innateness and what is the contribution of our environment for a particular behaviour? For example, for how happy people are, 60% of it is innate, and 40% is your history and current situation.

So when you look over a cliff, or watch this video of a tower repair worker climbing a tower to get to work:
http://youtu.be/yCYZZPwJr_c

You might get a sense of the fear of heights. People I talk to about this video report a queasy, uncomfortable feeling in their guts and, interestingly, a tingly feeling in their feet. They didn't have to fall from a great height to learn this reaction. It evolved.

How do you know that great heights are dangerous? You can reason it out, but you also have a strong intuitive feeling that's hard to shake. For example, take this video. You know you're only watching a video, yet a part of your mind reacts as though you were really there. Knowing it's a video doesn't shake the feeling. I have friends who report that they can't even watch the whole thing. It's too harrowing.

Learned Intuitions

Not all intuitive processes are innate. Many are learned.

Processes turn from conscious to unconscious all the time. In cognitive science we call this automatization. Things become automatic. It's very easy to understand with physical action. For example, the first time you tried to drive, you probably were overwhelmed with all of the things you needed to keep track of. After driving for years, however, the act of driving becomes completely automatized. First, you can stop thinking about which way to turn the wheel and start paying more attention to where you want to go. As routes get automatized, you might drive yourself all the way home without even realizing it happened- it is so automatic that you were able to think about completely different things the entire time.

Typing is another good example. When you get good at typing, you no longer think about where to put your fingers. Your attention is dedicated to thinking about what to write.

When things are automatized they get faster and more efficient. At that point, actually thinking about what you are doing consciously can mess you up. For example, if I try to think about where to put my feet when I'm running down stairs, I am more likely to make a mistake. It's better to just go for it.

So it is with physical actions. However, we also have many learned preferences that come with culture. Let's take table manners. In Britain, it's fine to eat with the fork in the left hand, tines down, and to push peas on to it with your knife. In America, this is not permissible. In Germany, you may hold the fork in your left hand, but with the tines up, even as you cut with the knife in your right hand.*

When you see someone using inappropriate table manners (by the standards of your culture), it evokes a mild disgust feeling. You also get a mild disgust feeling when smelling food that has gone bad. However, the former came from cultural conditioning, and the later is innate.

The main point I want to make with this post is that you can't tell just by feeling whether your intuition was learned or innate.

Why does this matter?

It matters for a few reasons.
1) We judge other people based on our intuitions.
Cultural practices become so ingrained that we mistakenly feel that they are "natural" in some normative sense, and that people from other cultures should abide by them. I'm not saying that every culture is equally good. I think there sometimes are objective reasons to think one way is better than another-- I'm American and I have my quibbles with American culture, for example. However I think we all would agree that many cultural practices are rather arbitrary traditions that have no objective right or wrong about them. Yet we have the same intuitive feelings about the arbitrary ones as we do about the objectively sensible ones.

2) We have to decide how to act in the world, and sometimes innate intuitions should be trusted more than learned ones.
Child-rearing is my favourite example. We learn child-rearing practices and grow up thinking that they are sacrosanct. For example, there is a belief in my own culture that pornography and nudity is bad for children to watch. I've looked, and I can find no research to support this. I've also found no research to disprove this-- I've found nothing at all. But we feel strongly about such things, and the feeling is not different from the feelings that are innate and evolved to protect and nurture the child. Some have intuitive notions that violence is a good way to discipline a child. They feel very strongly in favour of this, but in this case it's been shown that this is a pretty bad way to discipline a child (it makes the child more violent in the long term).

We have innate drives to breastfeed and to be affectionate with babies. Indeed, these things are good for babies. The innate feelings should be trusted (in most cases**) and the learned feelings should be questioned.

Unfortunately, we cannot tell the difference by simply looking into ourselves and examining the intuition and how it feels to us. It's a problem.

* When I go out to dinner at international conferences I like to try to guess where everyone at the table is from based on how they hold their knife and fork.

** Not all of our innate drives are good either, which complicates the problem. For an excellent book on the topic, I recommend Keith Stanovich's The Robot's Rebellion.

Reference
Stanovich, K. E. (2004). The Robot's Rebellion. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, London.

Pictured: A water droplet. From Wikimedia Commons. For some reason it turned up when I searched for "intuition."

Do People Turn Selfish When Disaster Strikes?

2011-12-06T02:57:00.001-08:00

There's a common idea in our society that when there is a disaster, people will get scared and turn into selfish, looting animals. That without a strong government, without something to keep people in check, they will ignore the law and the ethics that they tend to abide by in more stable times. In Neil Strauss's entertaining non-fiction book Emergency, he refers to himself as a "fliesian," meaning that the world is like The Lord of the Flies, where people will turn on each other when the going gets tough. Survival blogs and books talk of "The Golden Horde," which is supposed to represent the unprepared masses who will run across the land, taking whatever they can. How realistic is this?

The answer, based on some things I've been reading lately, is a bit complicated.

When People Get Better
The first part of the answer is shocking and unintuitive to anyone who has not lived through a disaster. Often, when a disaster strikes, people seem to instinctively form communities and help each other out. People will step outside and talk to their neighbours, share food, etc. This interesting reaction, as described in the interesting book A Paradise Built In Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, the goodwill that follows a tragic event, such as 9/11 or the huge earthquake in Mexico city, is astonishing. In fact, people reminisce about the community spirit they felt even years later.

The author of the book laments that the word "anarchy," which historically just meant "without government," now has come to be synonymous with the burning and rioting behaviour we see in movies. Not only can anarchy be peaceful, it can be better than normal times.

However, the government is made up of people who assume that people will turn into criminals. Often, as described in the book, the government's reaction to a disaster is a second disaster, shooting people who come near grocery stores (apparently there's no difference between going to an abandoned grocery store for food and using the disaster as an opportunity to steal a new television set.)

Sounds promising, doesn't it?

When People Get Worse
On the other hand, without any government at all, people sometimes appear to be quite savage. I have been reading Steven Pinker's great book on the decline of violence over the centuries The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. In general, without police, people will prey on each other. Maybe not everybody, but enough to make society very dangerous.

Here is a great TED talk about organized crime. In Misha Glenny's theory, organized crime can take root especially well when a government collapses and there is a period of time in which the normal functions of government are not working and people need to turn to "privatized law enforcement," or organized crime. Even if a government is established afterward, just a bit of time without police infrastructure can result in a crime world that is hard to shake. The whole talk is great, but start watching at 4:00 if you're pressed for time.
http://youtu.be/XO1Me-MY-Q0

Montreal is a relatively safe city, but a few hours into the police strike of 1969, there were six bank robberies, twelve arsons, one hundred lootings, and two homicides before emergency powers were called in (from Pinker's book). Pinker also makes a convincing case that the poor engage in more violence because the police tend to ignore violent crimes that poor commit against other poor. If people can't trust police to make things right, they resort to vigilante justice (violent crime).

What Sense Can We Make of This?
I am not an expert in history or disaster studies nor even the psychology of violence. That said, I will tell you my belief based on what I've been reading.

People will spontaneously help each other in a disaster for a short period of time (up to a few months, maybe?). In prolonged war, or failed government, however, there are enough people who will do bad things to make life pretty miserable for everybody.

If you live in a failed state, or in a prolonged war zone, be careful with other people.

But if there is an earthquake in your city, you don't need to sit on your stoop and shoot anyone who approaches.

They might be stopping by to see if you need any food.

References
A Paradise Built In Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life

Pictured: G20 London protest riot police. From Wikimedia Commons.

Don't Waste Student Work: TEDxOttawa 2011 Talk by Jim Davies

2011-11-25T08:19:00.001-08:00

I gave a talk at TEDxOttawa on October 22, 2011 on my philosophy of education. I am quite proud of it.

You can watch it and get more information about it here:
http://jimdavies.org/research/publications/TEDxOttawa/2011/

Thanks to the organizers!

My Calligraphic Art Will Be For Sale at SKETCH to Benefit SAW Gallery

2011-11-23T09:56:00.001-08:00

Ottawa residents: I donated several pieces for this benefit. I will be there late, because my beloved's choir is performing that same night.

Galerie SAW Gallery and Scotiabank present

SKETCH

Galerie SAW Gallery’s ever popular holiday fundraiser, with more than 175 participating artists!

Friday, November 25, 8PM - 2AM

67, Nicholas Street, Ottawa

Admission: $5. Information: (613) 236-6181

You won’t know what to choose from the hundreds of works available in every style imaginable! With many works priced affordably, starting at only $10, you have no excuse not to get your hands on some beautiful, tender little drawings for your lovers, friends or family. Be an original this holiday season by sharing with your loved ones the powerful gift of art.

Publication: Using semantic similarity to predict angle and distance of objects in images

2011-11-14T10:52:00.001-08:00

I have a new publication, which is in the proceedings of the Creativity and Cognition conference. My graduate student Sterling Somers presented it, and he did a great job. I'm going to use some of his ideas the next time I present this work.

http://jimdavies.org/research/publications/creativity-and-cognition/2011/SomersGagneAstudilloDavies2011.html

What Does It Mean For a Computer Program To Be Creative?

2011-11-14T08:42:00.001-08:00

Last week I was at the ACM Creativity & Cognition Conference and in one of the workshops we got into an argument about the nature of creativity (no surprise there).

Some people were saying that for a program to be creative required that it change the search space it was using. To understand this point of view, it's important to understand what artificial intelligence researchers mean by "search space."

For any given task, the search space is a theoretical graph of states of the world that can be reached through action. For example, in chess, each move you can make puts the board into a different state. If you were to link all of the possible moves going from one state to another, then you'd have a description of the search space. In chess, you can't legally move a pawn backwards. So there is no link between the two states of the board that would require that move. Typically we picture the search space as a graph, which is a bunch of nodes connected by links. The nodes are the states, and the links are the actions. However, the picture of a graph that we might have in our heads or on paper can be misleading, because for any serious domain the search space is unimaginably large. In chess, the number of board configurations is commonly thought to be ten to the 120th power. That means a 1 with 120 zeros after it.

Playing chess is often viewed as navigating this search space.

So, back to the creativity question. When people talk about true creativity expanding the search space, they mean adding states and actions to the space itself. The classic tale of the Gordian knot is a great example of this. The Gordian knot was a fiendish knot that baffled all of those who tried to unravel it. Legend has it that Alexander the Great solved the puzzle by chopping the knot with his sword (pictured.) He expanded the search space, which had been assumed by everyone else to include only pulling at rope. Personally, I find this about as creative as winning a chess game by strangling your opponent, but I guess I can see the allure of this tale.

Although expanding the search space is undoubtedly creative, requiring an expansion of the space to qualify a thing or process as creative is setting the bar far too high.

For one thing, the search space that human chess players use is the same search space that computer programs use. If expanding that space is required for creativity, then it's impossible for any human to be creative in chess either. The same holds for music composition. If you think of musical notation, there are a finite, albeit enormous, number of ways notes and rests can be arranged on a single page. But nobody would think that creating a new piece of music was not creative.

As for chess-playing computers, they are teaching things about chess to chess experts.

“They make a lot of counterintuitive, even absurd-looking, moves that on closer inspection can turn out to be outrageously creative…By generating countless new ideas, they are expanding the boundaries of chess, enabling top players to study the game more deeply, play more subtly.” –John Watson, international chess master, Quoted in Best American Science Writing 2006, p13, from Mueller’s New Yorker article on AI chess “Your Move.”

Pictured: Alexander the Great cuts the Gordian knot. A public domain image from wikimedia commons.

Doing Things Every Day

2011-11-08T07:35:00.000-08:00

I have a list of things that I like to do every day. The list makes me more productive. It also makes me more busy, because doing these things takes time away from other things. In this essay I'll discuss my thoughts on this after doing it for years.

What To Do Every Day

There are a few reasons why you might want to do something every day. The first is that it has a combination of being important and not incredibly fun. You might like to play video games every day, but you probably would not want to commit to it because it's not particularly important, and it's also fun enough so that you don't need extra motivation.

Another reason you might want to do something every day is if the thing benefits from daily repetition. For example, cleaning up the kitchen every day helps keep the house clean. It's not as though you can do a ton of kitchen cleaning once every three months. It just doesn't work that way. Another example is exercise, the benefits of which you get if you do it often. Another is study and memorization or some other kind of practice such as sports, meditation, or flash cards.

What I Do Every Day

There are pills I take every day, and I try to floss every day, but these little things become routine and are not the kinds of things I'm interested in in this essay. I'm talking about bigger things. My list changes frequently as I rearrange my priorities.

1. Anki flash cards.
Every day I review flash cards on Anki. I've discussed my reasons for using spaced-repetition learning systems in previous blog entries so I won't repeat them here.
http://jimdavies.blogspot.com/2009/06/use-supermemo.html
http://jimdavies.blogspot.com/2011/07/deciding-what-to-forget.html

2. Write Three Pages.
I use a website called 750words.com. It's kind of like a blog that nobody else can see. It counts the number of words you've typed and tells you when you've hit 750, which is about the number of words on three pages. Writing three pages every day is an idea called the "morning pages" from the famous book "The Artist's Journey," and I can vouch for its effectiveness. Here's what typically happens: you start by writing like it's a diary. You describe all of your problems and what's bothering you. The first day, you have more problems than can fit on three pages. The next day, you finish, and you have a bit left over. By the third or fourth day, you're sick of writing about your problems. This is when the magic happens. You either start writing about potential solutions to your problems, or you write about other things entirely. Either way, this process actually helps you deal with your problems. I use 750words.com to compose long emails I've been meaning to write, or blog entries I'm drafting. This one was written on this site too. Of course, if you're any kind of writer you can use it to work on your novel or whatever. Journaling has many benefits-- one study even found that it can improve your grades.

3. Work On My Book
I am writing a book, and writing is one of those things that needs to happen just about every day if you are going to maximize your productivity. Many studies have proven this empirically. Anyway, I used to have "working on my book" be a substitute for my "write three pages" but I changed because there are a lot of non-writing activities associated with working on a book, such as editing, updating references, not to mention looking for publishers and agents and sending out proposals. So I keep the morning pages and working on the book separate.

4. "The Daily"
Every day I do "the daily," which is different for each day of the week. I found that there were things that I needed to do periodically, but not every day. So I reserve a slot every day, and what day of the week it is determines what that thing is. This one's hard to keep up with, but right now the plan is:
Monday: Write blog entry
Tuesday: Look at recent journal RSS feeds
Wednesday: Update Spill that and Lanyard Review Blogs
Thursday: Read "Barking Up The Wrong Tree" Blog
Friday: Do a weekly review (updating todo lists, etc.)
Sunday: Journal keepup

5. TCOB (Taking Care of Business)
This is a catch-all that involves lots of little things. If I have something I need to do that takes less than a half hour, such as reserving a rental car, it goes into a special todo list called TCOB. When I get to do my TCOB, I just spend half an hour going through that list doing those little things. Very satisfying.

I used to do some things every day, but stopped: meditation, studying Chinese, exercise, reading.

When To Do These Things

Morning is better for routine, I find. Why?

1. You have more will power in the morning.
Will is like a muscle. It gets tired when you use it, and extensive use over time makes it stronger. Your will is stronger in the morning, and more depleted in the evening. So if you're trying to get yourself to do stuff that's difficult, morning is the best time. So later, when you lose your energy and can't do the hard stuff, the most important stuff is already done.

2. I have more time in the morning.
I tend to get up early, about an hour or more earlier than my beloved. So I have a great deal of quiet, alone time before breakfast. I walk the dog, and try to get through these things.

3. Evenings tend to fill with social activities and other chaos.
My nights are often very different. In contrast, my mornings are much the same, day to day. Routine is key to getting these things done.

How Long To Do These Things

I invented a system that keeps me very productive that I call the "half hours method."
Every morning I pull out a spreadsheet and fill in what I'm going to be working on for each half hour of the day. I only allow myself to work on anything for a half hour at a time (with few exceptions). I find that if it's less than a half hour, I can't get anything done, and if it's more than a half hour, I'm likely to slack off and check email or something. No matter how much you don't want to do something, if you know that you'll only have to do it for a half hour, it's much easier to get started.

Because I try to do each daily thing for a half an hour, with five things to do every day, it takes me two and a half hours to get through them. It sounds like a lot, but these things are important to me, and I'm happy that I work on them every day.

When To Give Yourself A Break

I just got back from travelling. I went to Switzerland and then to Atlanta, Georgia, for two conferences. It's very difficult to keep up with these things when I'm away, and, possibly, not a good idea anyhow.

For one thing, I now bring an iPad instead of a full laptop computer. I do this because iPads don't run out of batteries as fast, then hold my iTunes stuff in a way I like a lot, and it serves as a TV, book, and notebook, and game player. The downside is that I don't like how Anki works on it (I can't get it to do LaTeX entries correctly) and typing is too much of a pain for much serious work. If I had a Macbook air, I might bring that instead, but I don't, and I might just prefer the iPad anyway.

But even if I had a computer with me, I'm not sure I'd try so hard to stick to my daily activities when I travel. For one thing, I think it's good to have a break. If I'm in a new city, how about seeing the city, or meeting other people at the conference, or, indeed, just taking a break instead of spending two and a half hours "sucking face with a monitor" as my friend Chris Stapleton puts it? Travel is an opportunity to shake your life up a bit, to see the world from a different perspective.

In the same vein, I'm wondering how strict I should be with myself regarding my upcoming sabbatical. I want to take the time to think about new things, recharge my batteries, get a different perspective and shake things up in my head. Do I really want to spend two and a half hours every day doing these things during that time?

I haven't decided.

Pictured: Three alleged saddhus (Hindu holy men) sitting on the Vishnu Temple of Kathmandu's Durbar Square, Nepal, performing the vitarka mudrā. Notice that they may not be saddhus in the strict sense of the word. This image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Get Out and Vote... If You Happen To Agree With My Values...

2011-10-06T08:35:00.000-07:00

Today is a voting day in Ontario. and I see signs around encouraging people to vote. I remember the "rock the vote" campaign in the 1980s trying to do the same thing. What's striking to me about these initiatives is that they are trying to get people to vote at all, rather than trying to get people to vote for a particular cause or person.

If the goal is to increase voter turnout without biasing in favor of a particular cause of candidate, then it makes sense to target everyone, not a particular demographic that might vote in a particular way. The ultimate goal would be to increase voter turnout for all of the issues or candidates on the table. If you're targeting people would tend to vote liberal, then you'd get more liberal votes, relatively, than conservative. This would be disingenuous with the stated mission of the cause.*

This is where it stops making sense to me.

Let's assume that the primary reason for a vote is to determine a winner. Equally increasing the number of votes for all issues or candidates, which is what these initiatives seem to want to do, would, if successful, lead to no difference in the outcome of the vote. So in terms of the primary objective of a voting system, these initiatives make no sense at all.

It is not as though there is no cost. Money and time are spent trying to get people to vote-- resources that could be put to making a real difference in this world. On top of that, for every extra person they get to vote is at least a half hour of wasted time for that person. Wasted, because if these initiatives are successful, your vote is cancelled out by someone else's anyway.

There are other benefits of having a lot of people vote. The country can be proud of itself, claiming that the people care about politics. However I think this is a minor benefit and certainly not worth it.

I will anticipate a counter argument. Perhaps, if everyone were equally encouraged to vote, there would be a different outcome of the election-- perhaps people who don't normally vote, as a group, tend to favor one position over another. In fact, I believe this is true. Poor people vote less, and poor people tend to be more liberal. In this case, the stated goal might be greater turnout, but the either hidden or unanticipated consequence would be an increase in the relative amount of liberal votes.

So if you're out there, trying to get people to vote for what you believe in, I get it. But if you're just trying to get people to vote, what is the point? I'm not asking rhetorically; I really have no idea what they have in mind. Think of the opportunity cost with this activism-- isn't there some science you could be doing?

*When I use terms like "liberal" I'm not referring to specific parties that might be called "liberal." I'm referring to the general political outlook.

Pictured: The Canadian Museum of Civilization, Gatineau, Quebec.
Wladyslaw [FAL, GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons

Pictured: a graphic showing values differences between the left and right wings. From the blog "Information is Beautiful."

Filling the Well, Drawing From the Well

2011-10-04T06:05:00.000-07:00

By Bluemangoa2z at ml.wikipedia [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

Most people spend the first part of their life preparing themselves for doing things in the next part. School is a great example. For the most part, going to school isn't intrinsically valuable. It's building up your mind, your habits, for what you will do after school. I call this kind of activity "filling the well."

In contrast, doing productive things in your life is "drawing from the well." I have found that I'm reaching the point in my life where I need to focus on drawing from the well, and keep the activities that I'd classify as filling the well at bay.

There are things I endeavor to do every day.

1. Anki: This is a flashcard program to help me remember things.

2. Writing by book: I try to work for half an hour on my current book.

3. Journaling: Basically the "morning pages" from "The Artist's Way," I use 750words.com to try to write three pages every day.

4. Processing and Reading: I try to spend half an hour every day going over the notes of things I've read and incorporating them into new notes, papers, and books I'm working on. Leftover time I spend reading.

Doing all of this takes two hours every morning (I used to meditate too, but stopped.) I can't always get to all of them, so I need to prioritize them.

1 and 3 are filling the well, 2 is drawing from the well, and 4 is a bit of both. I was in formal education for 26 years. That's a whole lot of filling the well. It's time I started giving back to the world. The world has invested in me, and I need to contribute.

I have always had the policy that it's always better to produce than to consume, but now I feel it has a bit more urgency. It makes one think differently about things like reading-- people seem to think reading is an intrinsic good, but I feel it's filling the well. If you're reading all the time but never doing anything valuable with the insight gained from the reading, then you're just filling the well and never drawing from it. It's like continuously raising money for charity but never spending it on actually helping anything.

As you age, you should focus more on drawing from the well and less on filling it. Until you're 20 I think it's fine to focus entirely on filling the well. In your 30s you should have a mixture-- it's still early enough in your life that investing in your mind will have time to pay off. In your 40s you should be very focused on drawing from the well. After you retire, and you just want to rest and enjoy, it's time to focus your life on appreciation-- you can go back to reading now.

Jim Davies to Speak at TEDxOttawa

2011-09-28T11:20:00.000-07:00

I have been invited to speak at TEDxOttawa.

It's on Saturday, October 22, 2011.

http://www.tedxottawa.com/jim-davies/

I will be talking about my theory of education this time, on why teachers should strive to have their students do productive work for assignments. I call this philosophy "Don't Waste Student Work."

If you'd like to attend, click this link:
http://themeanrhino.us2.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=f507096a0f4abfd8988a0f7f1&id=bf470e821e

This is real honor, having already given a TEDx talk before. You can watch my previous talk here: http://youtu.be/caBIboOGSe4

Symbolism in the Film "Where The Wild Things Are"

2011-09-18T17:01:00.000-07:00

This post is an analysis of the Spike Jonze film Where the Wild Things Are. I assume readers have either already seen it or don't mind my giving away what happens in it.

I was expecting a fun fantasy movie, given the fact that it's based on a children's book, and because of quirky director Jonze (who also directed Being John Malkovich.) What I didn't expect was to see one of the most emotionally moving films I've seen in years.

The film starts by establishing the emotional life of a young boy, Max. His mother works hard. His older sister ignores him to play with her friends. He builds an igloo, gets into a snowball fight with neighborhood kids, and they collapse it on him. He is scared and crying, and his sister, who is among the friends, does not help him.

His mother comes home, and tries to pay attention to him, and it's clear that she loves him, but her work is stressful and apparently in danger. She spends time on the phone while Max wants attention. He wants attention from her later when she is with a date in the living room. He acts out, ordering her around. She tells him he's out of control. He bites her and runs away.

He boats to a land where there are big monsters and becomes their king by lying to them about his powers. The society's current problem is loneliness and sadness.

The world Max enters appears to represent his mental landscape.

When he arrives, Carol (a male wild thing) is angry and smashing houses, which represents destroying the igloo. They all roughhouse and end up in a huge pile. Max is trapped inside, just like he was in the igloo. However, here he finds it comforting and warm, and they all sleep like that. Perhaps this is how he comes to grips with the igloo experience.

The main monster character, Carol, wants attention from KW. However, she does not have time for him, and wants to pay attention instead to Bob and Terry. The attraction to Bob and Terry is inexplicable because they appear to be captive birds who can only squawk. I believe Carol represents Max, KW represents his mother, and Bob and Terry represent the phone. Max's mother spends a good deal of her time talking to the phone, an entity, like the birds, that Max cannot understand.

Carol takes Max to a cave in which he has built himself a model of an ideal world. The model itself represents this new land for Max. Max instructs the wild things to manufacture a huge fort. The build it and everyone is happy.

The arrival of Bob and Terry ignites Carol's jealousy, and the society continues to unravel. Earlier Judith expresses dissatisfaction with Max, accusing him of playing favorites. She tells him that as the leader, he is never allowed to get angry. Only the subjects of the king can get angry. This is when Max comes to accept that leadership is difficult, and his mother can legitimately get upset at him.

Carol's anger increases when he feels Max drifting away, and he pulls off the arm of another wild thing, Douglas. This represents Max biting his mother. In the same scene, Max uses his mother's words on Carol: "You're out of control!"

Eventually they realize he is not a king at all. The wild things return to their melancholy state and Max returns to the real world, less selfish, and more appreciative and mature.

Overall, it's a very sad movie. The wild things are big and dangerous, but ultimately lonely and looking for a savior He leaves them in the state he found them, or perhaps in a slightly worse state. Looking at Max's experience in the new land, he could have learned the following lessons: Leadership is difficult or impossible. People must make their own happiness and not expect others to provide it.

The wild things are unhappy, and I think they are permanently so. They are like an unhappy family, bound together but quick to be on each other's nerves. We can understand KW's need to get away. In our world, as adults anyway, we can leave our families save for occasional visits. For the wild things, there are no others.

I'm done talking about the symbolism.

This Is A Movie For Adults

Although it contains some whimsy, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, this is a film for adults. However, it could be that the book is better for adults too. I found this short article interesting and convincing:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/books/review/Handy-t.html

Overall I found the movie very moving. It didn't matter that the wild things were ten feet tall and had claws. They were people with problems I recognized right away. They spoke softly, intimately, with human voices and had human names. It is also the only movie I really know if that deals so effectively with anger in young children. I was almost teary-eyed in the first ten minutes. My favorite film, Kiki's Delivery Service, has a bit of that, but the anger is not as intense, and the reaction is not violent. I recommend this film for when you're feeling contemplative. It's heady, sad, and psychological. I think children would find it boring.

Pictured: Graffiti based on the book. By Scott Woods-Fehr from Saskatoon, Canada (Where The Wild Things Are) [CC-BY-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The Reason I Love the Food Box (It's Not What You Expect)

2011-09-14T17:52:00.000-07:00

A food box is a service that delivers a box of food (mostly fruits and vegetables) to your door every week. My beloved and I have been getting them for a while now, and I love them. Before I explain why, I will tell you reasons other people love the food box, but don't impress me.

Bad reason 1) It's organic.

There is no evidence that organic food is any better for you. If you inhale or inject too many pesticides, you will be hurt, but as my man Alex Gill says, everything is poisonous; it's just a matter of dosage. There is no scientific evidence that non-organic food is any worse for you.

Although organic farming might be better for the soil, because farmers are not using the strongest pesticides, you end up throwing out a lot of food. Lots of people like to eat food without pesticides, but so do pests. You end up using more farmland to get the same amount of edible food if you're going organic.

So environmentally, there appears to be a trade off, and in terms of health, there is no benefit. Since there's usually an extra cost for organic food, I would prefer, actually, if my food box were non-organic. But there are no non-organic food box services in Ottawa.

Bad reason 2) It's locally grown.

Well, some of it is. They get what they can from greenhouses and regular local farms. But we get bananas too.

People like locally grown food because of the environmental benefit. I'm not convinced that there is a benefit at all. When food is brought from long distances, it's usually shipped in bulk. The economies of scale sometimes can mean that it's less expensive, in terms of fuel, to bring an orange from Florida here in a big truck full of oranges than to drive an orange in a pick up truck full of oranges ten miles.

My box is delivered by a van, to my house. This means that instead of my walking down the block to the grocery store and back, somebody is driving around, delivering the food boxes. I'm not convinced we're doing the environment any favours.

The other thing people like about local food is that they are helping their immediate community. I think it's natural to care about the people around you more than people far away, but I also think it's wrong to do so. I have not heard a convincing argument in favour of helping local Canadians rather than helping, say, Mexicans. With a global view, everyone needs the business. In Mexico they need it even more.

So I don't particularly mind that the food is local when it can be, but I wouldn't be happy if I were paying more to help some Canadian farmer at the expense of an Argentinian, for example.

Which brings me to the actual reasons I love, I adore, the food box.

Good reason 1) It enforces variety.

We get crazy vegetables. Vegetables I've never heard of. Vegetables I would not buy because I don't know how they taste and I don't know how to cook them. Swiss chard. Pattypan squash (pictured).

Usually, when we shop, we buy things we know what to do with, and that makes us risk averse. We end up eating the same things. Now I get yellow tomatoes, weird garlic. I have to search for recipes. We've been pleasantly surprised so often. I feel like my food palate is growing a lot.

A related benefit is that opening the food box is a little like opening a Christmas stocking. We don't know what we're getting week to week.

Good reason 2) It encourages me to eat vegetables.

Even with a small food box, it's a struggle to eat all of those vegetables in a week. The result is that I'm constantly trying to eat them. I make vegetable frittatas for breakfast. I munch raw wax beans while I watch The Clone Wars. We don't go out shopping for dinner very often-- it's a matter of figuring how how to eat what we already have. If you want more vegetables in your diet-- and you probably should, if you eat a Western diet-- it's so great.

Good reason 3) It's cheaper (I think).

I'm not sure about this, but I believe it's cheaper for us to get this food box delivered than it would be to buy them at Hartman's Independent, the centretown grocery store on our block.

Good reason 4) Ethical Milk and Cheese.

Factory farms are hell on Earth for the animals that live in them, and I really don't like supporting them. I buy eggs from my co-worker Lianne, who raises chickens. Through the food box I can get milk and cheese from Quebec. The farm gives tours (factory farms tend not to) and I don't believe we have factory farms in Quebec or Ontario. So by drinking this milk and eating this cheese (it's delicious), I don't have to pay my meat offsets. If you don't know what I'm talking about, see my previous blog entry on the subject:
http://jimdavies.blogspot.com/2010/03/meat-credits.html
The milk is definitely not cheaper than grocery store milk, but I can't find ethical milk elsewhere.

We love the food box and recommend it to anyone who finds compelling any of the reasons above.

Pictured: Romanesco broccoli or fractal broccoli is an edible flower of the species Brassica oleracea and a variant form of cauliflower. I ate this recently too from our food box. We use Ottawa Organics and are quite happy with it. http://www.ottawaorganics.com/

I'll be Giving a Talk on Imagination and Virtual Reality

2011-09-13T07:56:00.000-07:00

Speaker: Dr. Jim Davies, Carleton Institute of Cognitive Science
When: Thursday September 15, 11:45am-1:00pm
Where: Dunton Tower 2203, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Title: Imagination: The Third Reality to the Virtuality Continuum

Abstract: Both the art and science of the imagination have integral roles in defining compelling Mixed Reality (MR) experiences. In this paper we argue that the audience member's own imagination is an essential third kind of input in defining the full virtuality continuum for MR. It is traditionally accepted that there are two experiential inputs in MR incorporating a combination of stimuli of the real world as well as from artifacts (typically from computers). Using a case study of a MemoryScape Prototype for the Maitland Holocaust Museum, we show how, in addition to reality and augmented/virtual reality, imagination scientifically serves as an important third reality to the virtuality continuum to achieve the experience designer's intent for the audience’s perception of MR experiences.

The paper this talk is based on was co-authored with Chris Stapleton at the University of Central Florida.

Can You Imagine a Three-sided Square?

2011-09-05T11:31:00.000-07:00

Can you imagine a three-sided square? Try it.

In one sense of "imagine," you can, and in another, you can't. Let's start with the "can't."

Sometimes, when people use the term imagination, they are referring to mental imagery. Mental imagery is when you generate sensory like experiences from your own mind, rather than from the environment, through your sensory organs. This happens when you dream, and when you hear a song in your head. If you try to picture a three-sided square, you're not going to be able to do it. As soon as it has more or fewer than four sides, it ceases to be a square.

However, not all of imagination is mental imagery. When you are entertaining hypothetical situations, you can imagine statements. For example, if you imagine that you were jealous, it need not be even accompanied by any mental imagery. It's just a fact that you're entertaining. In this sense of the word, you can imagine a three-sided square. You just can't picture it.

Will this imagined fact lead to contradictions? Perhaps. This is what we mean when we say things like "I can't imagine he's like that for his birthday." What we mean is that, given the other things we know about the world, we think it's very unlikely. But if those inferences are not made, then the contradictions might not be detected. And in any case, the fact can be imagined. We can imagine contradictions too.

This is a problem for non-Euclidian geometry. A cube is a three-dimensional analog of a square. We can picture cubes. The lesser-known tesseract is a four-dimensional analog of a cube. Can you picture that? No, although the image above is an attempt. We can't picture more than three spatial dimensions without flattening it out to three.

But can we, in some sense, imagine four spatial dimensions? Of course. There are huge areas of mathematics that require this. When I did work at Los Alamos National Laboratories, we had to do vector calculations in 17,576 dimensions. Don't be too impressed; the math is actually rather simple. But you'll drive yourself crazy trying to picture it.

One idea that physicists have for the shape of the universe is a three-dimensional surface of a sphere. What does this mean?

Picture a balloon covered with dots made by a sharpie. The surface of the balloon is space, and the dots are galaxies. Because of the big bang, the surface of the balloon is gaining area. It's getting bigger. Got it?

The surface of a balloon is two-dimensional. It's a flat sheet that happens to be curved. The rubber of the balloon itself is, of course, there-dimensional, but we're not talking about that-- we're only taking about the surface.

Now here's the tricky part. In the case of the universe, the surface is three-dimensional. You might have heard that if you were to travel far enough in a single direction in the universe you'd end up back at the same place. This is true. It's like being an ant on the surface of a balloon. No matter where the ant walks, it can't leave the surface of the balloon, and eventually it will come around to where it was. Everywhere the ant looks, there are dots. Likewise, we see stars all around us.

The misconception people have with the big bang is that it's like an exploding firework-- a bunch of stars moving in some larger space. But it's not. The surface of the expanding balloon is all the space there is. The "inside" and "outside" of the balloon does not exist. All of space is in the surface of the balloon. And it's expanding, which, in three dimensions, means that the distance between all of the galaxies is getting greater. This is why all stars appear (in our telescopes) to be moving away from us. That's what happens to a dot on an expanding balloon, too. In fact, it's better to think not of the stars as moving, but as space expanding between them.

And "before" the big bang, there was no space at all. There was a time, long ago, when the entire universe was a single square foot (it didn't stay that way for long). There was nothing outside of that square foot. No space, no stars, nothing.

Can you picture that? No, you can't.

But you just might be able to imagine it.

Pictured: A tesseract. This work has been released into the public domain by its author, JasonHise at the English Wikipedia project. This applies worldwide.

Hyperbolic Discounting and Asking For Favors

2011-08-22T04:13:00.000-07:00

Hyperbolic discounting is when you value something more in the present than you do in the future. For example, getting a dollar today is worth more to you than getting a dollar a year from now. It also means that cost today is worse than a cost tomorrow. In some situations, this makes perfect sense. In the money example, inflation and interest mean that a dollar today is literally more valuable than the dollar a year from now. The problem is that we apply this reasoning to things we should not.

I was just reading in Wired magazine about how people tend to put movies they want to want to watch in their Netflix queue, but when it comes down to what they want to watch now, they tend to pick lowbrow movies. So, for example, someone will say they want to watch Kramer vs. Kramer a month from today, but right now they want to watch My Cousin Vinny. What's going on here is that you are screwing over your future self. Your future self seems distant, and you're willing to impose your higher-level desires, what you think a person should do, on your future self as though they were someone else. So people end up getting DVDs in the mail of movies they don't want to watch.

Fitness centers work the same way-- you pay for a membership, forcing your future self to exercise in order to relieve the feeling that you wasted your money.

Pictured is a snowboarder. Snowboarding is regarded as a relatively dangerous activity (I'm not saying that it is-- bicycling is also regarded as dangerous, but it's not. The answers to such questions require empirical study, not cultural common sense.) It could be that hyperbolic discounting encourages this kind of risk-taking. Many physical injuries feel worse when you are older. Are snowboarders screwing over their future selves to have fun today?

This is related to the idea of second-order desires, which are desires about desires. For example, you might want to eat a huge bowl of ice cream, but knowing that it's a lot of calories, you might not want to want the ice cream. When you commit your future self to exercise, you think you should exercise, even though in any given moment you might not be too excited about doing it. Philosopher Harry Frankfurt calls beings with no conflict between their first and second-order desires "wantons" (1971).

How can this work in your favor when asking people to do things? Ask them well in advance. The further in advance, the better, because the further in the future the requested activity is, the more distance the person will feel with that future self (the "hyperbolic" part refers to the curve of how value decreases over time-- exponential discounting is the same idea with an exponential curve.)

So if want someone to help you move tomorrow, they're less inclined to do it than if you asked them if they would help you move two months from now. Two months later, they feel obligated to help because they already said they would, even though, in the moment, they find the thought just as unappetizing.

References:

Ariely, D. (2011). Gamed. Wired p137.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/58854545/ArielyWired

Frankfurt, H. (1971). "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of the Person". Journal of Philosophy 68 (1): 5–20.doi:10.2307/2024717.

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

Picture1: Sébastien Toutant, a snowboarder, at the downtown Québec big air competition. He won the event.. By Letartean (Own work) [CC-BY-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Picture: By Moxfyre (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0), GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

A Bicycle Named Stacey Pilgrim

2011-08-16T04:58:00.000-07:00

Here is a video of my new bicycle:
http://youtu.be/iYiQtiJg7H8

It's a Strida folding bike. My folks got it for me for my birthday, and I absolutely love it. I named it "Stacey Pilgrim."

Stacey Pilgrim is the sister of the protagonist of one of my favorite movies of all time, "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World."*

Fans of the movie will know that Stacey is not a major character. I was asked why I didn't name the bike "Ramona Flowers," after the love interest in the movie. There are two reasons. First, I think the character Ramona is kind of a sarcastic, unpleasant person in the movie. But the second reason is a cognitive science reason-- the name "Ramona Flowers" does not describe well an angular bike like a Strida. Here's a picture of a Strida with some dude riding it.

As I was riding the bike, I was trying to think of a name, and "Tracy" and "Stacy" both came to mind. In my mind, these are good names for angular things. "Ramona" is a good name for a rounded thing. Sound crazy? It turns out that sounds are not as arbitrary as linguists tend to think. In one experiment, participants were shown these two images:

And asked which one was kiki and which one was bouba. Which do you think was bouba?

95% of people thought the first one was kiki and the second one was bouba (Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

Em sounds are associated with curvy shapes, and plosives such as the "k" sound are associated with spikier shapes. "Sn" sounds are more likely to be associated with nasal meanings, such as sneeze and snore (Robson, 2011).

This is part of a controversial field of study called phonosemantics, which claims that phonemes have meaning. As I mentioned above, linguists tend to think that phonemes do not have meaning, but the ones I've talked to believe it but only cite anecdotal evidence and reasoning (as opposed to empirical studies) to support their view.

There is empirical evidence for phonosemantics. There appear to be cross-language similarities
with these meanings. Participants in one experiment could guess the meanings of antonyms (e.g., fast/slow) in foreign languages better than chance (Robson, 2011).

Why would sounds have meanings? We don't know for sure, but there are theories. One is that the act of making a sound physically resembles other experiences. For example, the "br" sound at the beginning of a word involves building up pressure behind the lips and tongue and then releasing the air suddenly. Words with "br" at the beginning are more likely to be associated with some kind of breaking through of a threshold: breach, break, bran, branch, brawl, brief, brittle, brook, browse, bruise (Magnus, 2001).

So, looking at my bike, I think Stacey Pilgrim is a much more appropriate name than Ramona Flowers, due to the angular nature of the bike. What do you think?

Further Reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism

References:

Magnus, 2001: http://www.trismegistos.com/Dissertation/DissIntro.htm

Ramachandran, V. S., & Hubbard, E. M. (2001). Synaesthesia: A window into perception, thought and language. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8(2), 3-34.

Robson, D. (2011). Kiki or bouba? In search of language's missing link. New Scientist, 2821, 30-33.

* Right now my favorite movies of all time are
1) Kiki's Delivery Service
2) Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
3) Bruno
4) Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Territorial Behavior

2011-08-11T08:01:00.000-07:00

When people come over for dinner, they often ask where they should sit at the table. My beloved says "anywhere is fine," and I have to feel sheepish asking them not to sit in my seat.

I felt sheepish because it feels very irrational to me to feel the need to sit in the same seat in my own house. I also never really knew why I wanted to do this. Was it because of comfort of the normal? Perhaps, but there is a theory that it's actually territorial behavior.

http://www.bakadesuyo.com/why-do-you-always-sit-in-the-same-place-in-me

From my favorite blog, Barking Up The Wrong Tree.

I have found that one of the strongest feelings of territorial behavior is at retail establishments. Just getting close to the behind-the-counter area at a clothing store or a bar makes the clerk very, very uncomfortable. I felt this too, when I worked as a soda jerk in high school.

My beloved had a retail job once, and left it. She came back to get a paycheck, and went behind the counter. The person working there, whom she's worked with for a long time, asked her to not stand behind the counter. It's interesting-- my beloved's social role changed in an instant (she quit) which immediately triggered a change in the deep-seated, visceral feelings of where is and is not allowed to be. It's especially interesting because it was not a question of trusting her, just a change in role.

I have also felt strong territorial feelings when it comes to how closely people stand to me when talking. Different cultures have different ideas about how close it is appropriate to stand to someone, and I've found that there are individual differences with people in America and Canada, too.

One person I was very close to tended to stand too close to me for my taste. I would back up, and he, unconsciously, would step forward. Realizing this was not working, I learned to stand with my foot out in front of me to keep him at a distance. Writing about it, it sounds ridiculous, but the fact was that when someone is standing that close to me, it's so distracting I can barely concentrate on the conversation.

There is a very famous cognitive scientist (I won't mention his name, but he's big in the ACT-R community) who wants people to stand quite far from him. His conversation partners would, of course, unconsciously followed him every time he backed up. I have watched him, at social functions, back up until he was cornered, like a trapped animal.

Deciding What To Forget

2011-07-18T07:45:00.000-07:00

Recent news articles discussed how Google is changing human memory. Here's one example:

http://tech2.in.com/news/science-and-technology/google-effect-affecting-your-memory-reports/231022

The basic finding is that people are relying more on external memory storage (computers and the internet) and less on their biological memories. The tone of these articles is invariably negative, but they don't usually contextualize this effect-- it's not new. Books have had the same effect. Wouldn't you try harder to memorize some things if you did not have the option of writing it down, or reading it out of a book?

Recently I read an interesting book (Moonwalking with Einstein, recommended) which, among other things, included a history of our memory techniques. There was a time when books were very rare. If you could get to a book at all, usually a bible, it might be your only chance in two years to be with it. So readers tried very hard to remember what they were reading. Nobody's complaining about books, as well they shouldn't. By freeing up our memories with books (and writing in general) we have cognitive resources freed up for higher-level reasoning.

At some point, I believe we will have wearable computers with constant, worldwide internet access. When this happens, our need to biologically remember facts drastically reduce. But we're not there yet, and there is still a great need to memorize things. Years ago I was arguing with Thad Starner, a researcher of wearable computing, about the need to memorize. I was of the belief that it wasn't as important to know the science literature by heart because we could search it so easily. Later in the conversation, I could not recall a paper that would have established one of my points. He told me that I'd just disproved my own theory. He was right.

I spend a good deal of time memorizing facts: about 10 minutes per day, on average. I use a computer flash card program that, every day, only shows me the cards I most need to study. I've written about using spaced repetition learning systems before:

http://jimdavies.blogspot.com/2009/06/use-supermemo.html

In that entry, written two years ago, I was using Online Supermemo. I have since switched to Anki, which I now recommend.

http://ankisrs.net/

Using flash cards to memorize changed how I read for the better. Rather than taking in the book with the faint confidence in my understanding, I now force myself to process the text more deeply-- if I read something important that I want to memorize, I need to reconstruct it in my mind as a question and answer that is appropriate for Anki. Even this simple reconstruction makes the information more deeply processed and less easily forgotten. Once it's in Anki, though, I'll never forget it. The software won't let me.

Having used Anki and Supermemo for several years now has also changed my views on writing. I'm working on a textbook, and in it I'm putting questions and answers appropriate for flash cards at the end of every chapter, to facilitate the use of flash card systems. I would love it if Wikipedia pages came with their own Anki decks that anyone could download. I don't see this happening, though, because I don't think flash card systems will every be popular enough to warrant the effort and screen real estate on wikipedia. So I'm forced to make cards myself, and force my students to make them in classes.

I call the kind of reading I do "active reading." When I read something important, I force myself to figure out what to do with it. I do come subset of the following:

Flag the page it's on with a sticky plastic flag
Mark the passage with a pen (or highlight if it's a PDF)
Create flash cards so that I'll never forget it
Incorporate what I read into a book I'm writing
Put a note about it in one of my various "literature review" documents, which keep track of everything I've read about particular subjects
Forward the information to other people

Making these choices requires decisions about how the information's importance and urgency. I also have to make a call about whether I need to memorize it or merely have it easily accessible with a computer. Every time I put a fact into Anki is a commitment to reviewing it, albeit more and more sporadically as time passes, for the rest of my life. It's a big commitment.

It's hard when I read something interesting, but not important enough to warrant a note nor an Anki card. Such ideas are little more than pure entertainment. By not committing them to some memory system, either external or internal, they are doomed. I enjoy the something, and then read on, knowing, kind of sadly, that I'll probably forget it.

Pictured:

A chameleon, b

y steffen (fRedi); andreas (andi.vs.zf) (originally posted to Flickr as the modern pet) [CC-BY-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

How Do You Know You're Unconscious?

2011-07-11T15:55:00.000-07:00

a: I have a problem, doctor. I'm not conscious.

b: How do you know?

a: The same way you know you are conscious. It's self-evident.

b: Being conscious is self-evident. Being not conscious is not. My diagnosis is that you think you're unconscious even though you're not.

a: Being conscious is self-evident?

b: Yes.

a: It is not evident to me that I'm conscious. I've got to be unconscious. What other alternative is there?

Pictured: an incubus,

coloured aquatint, 1870

Building names in MIT seem like they're in a competition to be the location where a supervillain is created

2011-07-07T14:49:00.000-07:00

by my man Daniel Saunders.

The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc.
Schlumberger-Doll Research
Akamai Technologies
Novartis Institute for Biological Research
Francis Bitter Magnet Lab
Plasma Science and Fusion Center

Note from Jim: Imagine if they combined forces to create the Draper Biological Doll Bitter Plasma Fusion Center? (Shudder!)

What Is the Purpose of a University Education?

2011-06-23T16:32:00.000-07:00

I just read an interesting New Yorker article about the history and future of the university education, particularly in America: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand?currentPage=all

What I found most interesting about it were the three theories of education people have. Which one(s) do you prefer?

3. University is for job training.

This is the opinion of most university students, who are always asking about what jobs they can get with this or that major, and who ask questions like "why do I have to learn this?" What is interesting to me is that few people actually have jobs that are directly related to their majors, and people tend to switch jobs every two years. Needless to say, I'm not a fan of theory 3.

2. University is to give you the kind of education and general skills that you a) probably won't learn elsewhere, and b) are good for all people to have.

People vote, interact with other people, decide what products to buy, donate (or don't) to charities they think are valuable (or not), and raise children. To do these things well, they need certain mental capacities, especially of critical thinking, comprehension, and communication. Otherwise, we are unlikely to get the kind of society that we value. The hope is that university helps people with these skills. Whether or not they do is questionable (see the article). And it's certainly true that many students don't want these skills. People who like theory 2 (I'm one of them) think that we need to force students to learn certain things even though they don't want to. Yes, I'm saying that the establishment knows what students need more than students do.*

1. University is there to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Some students are alarmed to hear that some people, professors included, see university as a big mental competence test, designed to weed out the inferior students and reward the competent students with failing, grades, graduation, accolades, etc. According to this theory, university's job is to communicate to the outside world (primarily the workforce) student quality. I would hope that no professor believes only in theory 1, because it implies that it doesn't matter what tasks the students are given, so long as they differentiate the smart from the not smart. If this is the only thing university is for, there are much, much cheaper ways to do it.

Personally, I mostly believe in theory 2 and believe a bit in theory 3. I believe in theory 1 only for certain majors. As a teacher, the goals of 2 and 1 are sometimes in conflict. For example, I am happy to help students with difficult assignments or concepts, but if I'm holding their hand too much, perhaps they don't deserve the grade they get.

Note that this entry is all about the education part of university. The function of the university regarding the education/research balance is completely separate, and just as interesting. Stay tuned.

Pictured: Università di Genova (facoltà di Lettere) - foto realizzata da Utente Microsoikos. By Microsoikos at it.wikipedia (Transferred from it.wikipedia) [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons

* Some might counter that the students have a right to the kind of education they want, because they are paying for it. Most students are in public schools, however, and are actually paying only for a fraction of the cost to society to educate them. Thus, even by this reasoning, society has a say in what they are learning.

How Software Dies

2011-06-15T09:25:00.000-07:00

It's possible for a book, or a film, or some other work of art to have little impact when it is released, but then get discovered later and capture the cultural imagination. This is possible because books printed long ago can still be read, and film and music created long ago can still be listened to. It's not the case with theater and staged dance. If it is not discovered during its run, it fades into obscurity.*

This is true for software as well. There is a great game that ran on my Tandy 1000 computer called "Blood Money" by a company called Psygnosis. To play this game now, you'd have to buy a very old computer, and find the software on ebay or something. You can experience a bit of the game by watching gameplay videos on Youtube. But watching a recording of someone playing a video game is to playing a video game like watching sports is like playing it. In the case of Blood Money, it's not such a gorgeous game to watch. What was good about it was actually playing it. Here is a gameplay video of Blood Money: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goipyhIU138

I'm not even sure these gameplay videos are legal. At some point there will be no more working Tandy 1000s, IBM PCs, and Commodore 64s, and then this lone video will be all we have. If a game is discovered soon enough, someone might make an emulator for it, or re-release it on a new platform.** But it has to be liked soon enough for this to happen.

This problem was brought to my attention with a review of what appears to be an amazing game, "Pathologic."
This review is a fascinating read, and I recommend it to anyone interested in computer gaming:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/04/10/butchering-pathologic-part-1-the-body/

The problem is exacerbated by games that require social networking for the complete experience. I played "World of Warcraft" for about half an hour, and didn't care for it, but so many people love it that I feel that there's some experience there that I'm missing. And if I don't do it relatively soon, people might stop playing it (perhaps because people move on to another game), and then the experience won't be the same.

Today I came across a neat project description of a system called "Technosphere."
http://beallcenter.uci.edu/shift/games/technosphere.html
In it, you can create creatures and watch them try to survive in a virtual world. I would love to play around with this, but it was a museum installation that has now closed. There is nothing I can do to experience it now. I can't find youtube videos for it either.

This brings up a problem with academic funding and online computer projects. What probably happened with Technosphere was this: the authors had funding to do this project. They created the project. They published. The funding ran out. The project got terminated.

There are two problems. First, the funding models do not support long-term upkeep funds. That is, grants typically last for several years, but do not offer money to keep something online indefinitely. Online software requires hosting, at the very least, and possibly software maintenance as well. It's expensive. The second problem is that the authors don't really have an incentive to keep it up. They published, and what more do they have to gain my keeping the site active? Aside from pride in the project, probably nothing.

Although code can be saved, and printed, there are other factors, such as the hardware the code runs on, and costs for keeping things online, that prohibit the longevity of the experiences they provide. This is a shame, making what should be a lasting artifact a bit more like ephemeral arts such as performances.

* You can document a staged performance, but much is lost.

** One of my favorite Playstation 2 discs is Midway Arcade Treasures.

The Problem With Anthropology and Sociology

2011-05-19T09:08:00.000-07:00

It's natural that scholars will try to understand the world with the tools they are familiar with, just as a surgeon might be more likely to think of a surgical solution to a medical problem. The problem is when your tools have an implicit theory embedded in them.

Ever heard of the nature-nurture debate? The debate is over whether behavior is caused by a genetic/biological factor or a cultural/learning factor. It's ages old, predating psychology. Philosophers once split themselves into empiricists (nurture) and rationalists (nature). In artificial intelligence there is an analogous debate regarding symbolic knowledge (nature) and probabilistic and numeric learning (nurture). There's a good reason this debate is important-- for many behaviors, there are genetic and cultural factors.

Cognitive science tries to understand intelligent systems, and the nature/nurture debate rages in it. This is very fortunate. We end up with useful findings, such as that 60% of your happiness is due to a predisposition, and the other 40% are based on your environment. See The How of Happiness.

Unfortunately, (cultural) anthropology and sociology do not have means to study genetic predispositions in their methodological toolbox. As a result, predictably, they tend to be very dismissive of "nature" explanations. They seem to have a knee-jerk reaction against them. This is a shame. At its worst, they end accusing scientists of being sexist, stupid, or racist.

Here is how I believe it works: an anthropologist, say, becomes an expert in studying culture. She thinks in terms of culture. She sees its vast effects. She is familiar with cultural explanations of why things are. This triggers the availability heuristic, which is that we tend to think things that are easily brought to memory to be more probable, common, and plausible. Genetic explanations suffer from this heuristic, and the anthropologist has (unconscious) factors making them seem useless. In addition, their lack of understanding of genetics and and the methods used to study them make them unqualified to even judge their quality, just as I'm not qualified to dismiss a physics theory based on what I know of cognitive science.

There are other factors at work here, of course: anthropologists tend to be liberal, and equality is a strong liberal value. Anthropologists (as with others in the humanities and social sciences) might be reacting against the harder sciences because they feel marginalized by them. They might resent how quickly the media picks up, distributes, and overstates genetic findings.

None of these are reasonable excuses, however.

The research on the genetic component to behavior is strong enough that outright dismissal of the resultant theories is unacceptable. It is particularly troubling because there are many instances of behavior triggering genetic expression (that is, some genes will start working (making proteins) when triggered by some environmental stimulus.) A great example of this is stress.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16214025
See also the book The Agile Gene. If a whole field of science is on the nurture side, these fascinating, important, and subtle ways of our world will remain undiscovered, at least by that field.

The debate will continue its healthy rage in cognitive science. Anthropology and sociology should have their own nature/nurture debate, rather than dogmatically always being on one side of it.

PS: I love anthropology; I cite it and have done anthropological and ethnographic work. I am only quibbling with this one aspect of it.

Pictured: Sébastien Toutant, a snowboarder, at the downtown Québec big air competition. He won the event. He inherited powerful genes from his distant snowboarding ancestors, and might have had a bit of practice, too.

"Filter Bubbles" are So Much Better Than What We Had Before

2011-05-15T19:10:00.000-07:00

Several people I know have told me about a TED talk online about content filtering on the web. The thesis of the talk is that if content is personalized when delivered to you (depending on what you like, etc.), you'll be missing out on important information.

You can see the talk here: http://youtu.be/B8ofWFx525s

He complains that algorithmic editors do not have the "embedded ethics" (time 6:30) that human gatekeepers of information do.

How does he say that with a straight face?

Traditional editors for journalism have their eyes on the bottom line. They might mean well, but all news, anyway, is biased toward things that are timely, changing, and negative. Thus, if the war in Chad is still going on with no change, it won't make the front page, even if it is the most important problem facing the world day after day.

The traditional media make us hear about new things, sensational things. And since we have a bias to think important those things that we see often (the availability heuristic), we get a skewed notion of what's important.

At least with algorithmic customization, you have some influence on what you see, and you can often "dislike" something, be it with an explicit command, by not clicking on it, etc. Some of us will still drift toward the sensational and fluffy, sure, but others won't.

The other problem with human gatekeepers of information is that they decide what masses of people will see. We all end up with the same information. This is much worse than everyone getting different things, from a societal point of view. I conjecture that the situation in which everyone knows the same information, even if it's broad, is worse than if everyone knows different information, even if it's narrow. If we all know the same stuff, we'll all think in more similar ways.

He advocates imbuing the algorithms with a sense of importance and of challenging the content consumers. I think the importance idea is good, and possibly practical. I sure hope that if it happens it uses better guidelines than what traditional editors have (someday I'd like to write about book defending my loathing for all traditional news sources).

However, I fear that people, in general, do not want to be challenged, and content gatekeepers that force on us challenging views will lose eyeballs to those that do not.

That's a fancy way of saying they'll go out of business.

So I partially agree with him, but I guess I'm not emotionally with him. I find traditional media so infuriating, and content filtering so wonderful, that I'm still riding the initial wave of bliss.

The next time I see an article about a newspaper going bankrupt, I'm going to make sure I click "like."

False Imagination, Madonna's "Express Yourself," and Lady Gaga's "Born This Way"

2011-05-09T09:34:00.000-07:00

Note: people viewing this blog entry through Facebook might not be able to see the videos. I recommend going directly to the blog entry at
http://jimdavies.blogspot.com/2011/05/false-imagination-madonnas-express.html

You might have heard of false memory-- it's when a suggestion by an interviewer or therapist is mistaken for an actual memory. Elizabeth Loftus, one of my heroes, pioneered research in false memory and found that many well-meaning therapists were accidentally planting memories of child abuse in their patients.

Less well known is false imagination, or "cryptomnesia." This is when you mistake a memory for something you've imagined. My man Joe Kraemer is scores films (he did the awesome and influential score for The Way of the Gun-- you can purchase the soundtrack on iTunes.) He told me that a danger was when he would have a melody in mind, and he would wonder if he'd invented it or accidentally remembered something he'd heard. That's cryptomnesia.

You can even have cryptomnesia with yourself, in a kind of inadvertent self-plagairism. Howard Ashman and Alan Menken created the song "Part of Your World" for The Little Mermaid before realizing that it was a rip-off of their earlier song "Somewhere That's Green" from their own Little Shop of Horrors. Having a sense of humor about it, they started calling the Mermaid song "Somewhere That's Dry."

It's relevant to a recent controversy in the music world. Lady Gaga recently came out with a single called "Born This Way." You can watch it here:

It's been accused of being a rip-off of Madonna's "Express Yourself." This video is worth watching-- it's one of my favorite videos of all time. It's directed by David Fincher of Fight Club, The Social Network, and Three Kings fame. All great movies.

The songs are indeed similar, as you can hear in this great mashup (it's audio only):

Did Gaga rip off Madonna? Maybe, but even if she did it might not have been deliberate. It might have been cryptomnesia.

There are only so many notes, so many chords. So-called rip-offs in music happen all the time. The Ghostbusters theme was accused of ripping off Huey Lewis and the News's "I Want a New Drug" which was accused of ripping off M's "Popmuzik." They all have very similar basslines. It's inevitable that people will independently come up with the same things once in a while.

Indeed, "Express Yourself" itself was accused or ripping off The Staple Singers's "Respect Yourself."

Coincidence, intellectual theft, or cryptomnesia?

When It's Okay To Be A Bit Materialistic

2011-05-06T06:07:00.000-07:00

The video above is an interesting challenge to the morality of how we live our lives day-to-day in the industrialized world. It plays upon a bias we all have-- that we do not have the same moral obligations to people who we don't interact with. We all have this bias, but the question is whether or not it is ethically justified.

If you accept that that bias is not, then it makes ethical sense to do your part in helping the less fortunate. Some go to extremes, such as George Price, as described in this fascinating podcast episode of Radiolab:
http://www.radiolab.org/2010/dec/14/equation-good/

Why do I say Price went to the extreme? Because he was a brilliant man who could have helped the world in better ways than simply by donating his money.

I'm one of those people too. Science is good for the world (I am not going to argue this here, but I have my reasons for thinking it), and I'm a scientist. And the fact is that a certain amount of material stuff helps me be a better scientist.

For example, I do most of my work on a computer. If my computer is old and slow, then my productivity is hindered. This happens for two reasons: 1) I get frustrated with the computer, which makes me less productive and more distracted, and 2) even if I were completely unemotional, a slow computer slows down everything I do. So for me to maximize my good effect on the world, I should have a good, fast computer.

In general I try not to be materialistic. I try to remind myself that I have everything I need and more. I try to think of people who are as happy as I am, but who have much less. Thinking like this helps keep me from buying too many things. I try to donate a percentage of my income every year to a good cause. Last year it was "Kenya Help," run by a trusted friend in Kingston, Ontario. If you are looking for something to donate to, I recommend this.
http://www.kenyahelp.ca/

But I don't put on the brakes so much when I want something material that will help me be a better scientist. Computers, books, travel to conferences, etc. are things that cost money. Purchasing them hurts the environment (in the short term) and sometimes is a waste. But if I'm too risk averse with such purchases, I'll hinder my scientific impact.

My conclusion is this: try not to be materialistic. It's bad for the environment, usually, and doesn't lead to happiness. Donate the money you'd spend on things to people in need. This, it turns out, actually does lead to happiness. But if you are doing something really good for the world that requires stuff for you to work at capacity, then go ahead and buy what you need.

Using Zen Brush for an Advertisement

2011-05-04T08:53:00.000-07:00

I am in charge of publicity for the Creativity & Cognition Conference. As a member conference of the ACM, we got a free full-page advertisement in the ACM magazine. I gave the design of it a go. I'm pretty happy with it.

The background image, which appears to be done with ink and a brush, was actually done using one of my favorite iPad and iPhone applications, Zen Brush.
http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/zen-brush/id382200873?mt=8

It mimics East Asian brush painting. I can do it from my sofa, and there's no cleanup.

I've practiced calligraphy and brush painting for a long time, but it still amazes me that I was able to make the design above in about one minute on my iPhone. Then I emailed the image to myself and made this advertisement by adding text, which was finished in Adobe Illustrator.

Here is the background alone:

Deja Vu (Movie Poster Version)

2011-04-20T18:18:00.000-07:00

Harry Potter and Enemy Mine.

My Talk on What Makes Experiences Compelling: May 12, 2011

2011-04-13T10:23:00.000-07:00

Mind Matters
Why You're Compelled By Certain Experiences. A Conversation with Jim Davies

May 12, 2011 | Carleton University | 6:30 p.m.

Why is it that your attention lingers on certain works of art? What makes you want to keep listening to a song, and then want to hear it again? What makes a conspiracy theory so engaging? Jim Davies has an idea.

Davies, a professor in the Institute of Cognitive Science at Carleton University, studies what makes certain experiences undeniably compelling. He is the director of the Science of Imagination Laboratory at Carleton and is a card-carrying member of both the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science. He is compelled by computational analogy, visual imagination, and creativity as well as the potential of the human mind.

Using concepts and examples from his forthcoming book, Davies will explain how a few key elements of human cognition explain a great deal of what we find compelling in art and ideas.

On Thursday, May 12, this outstanding Carleton researcher will deliver a special talk as part of Alumni Week 2011, an annual celebration of the outstanding achievements, lifelong connections and exceptional ideas brewing at Carleton University. For more information and a full list of events, visit carleton.ca/alumni.

The Carleton University Alumni Association invites you to An Evening with Jim Davies.

Thursday, May 12, 2011
Cognitive Science Seminar Room, 2203 Dunton Tower
Carleton University
Reception: 6:30-7:30 p.m.
Presentation: 7:30 p.m.

Register in advance online.

Paid parking is available in Lot P1. (Campus map)

Letting the Audience off Easy

2011-04-06T05:54:00.000-07:00

Last night my beloved and I went to see a show at the National Arts Centre called Lauchie, Liza, & Rory. To give a brief review of this play, it was funny, clever, and takes excellent advantage of the theatrical medium. If you live in Ottawa I recommend seeing it. If you plan to see it, come back and read the rest of this blog entry only after you have, as it contains spoilers.

I had a criticism of the script, and it's a criticism I have of a lot of scripts, and that is that it lets the audience off too easily. What I mean by this is that the story sets up a tragic situation, and rather than making the audience really feel the tragedy, the plot somehow concocts an unrealistically positive outcome. I'll discuss a few examples.

In Kill Bill, Vol. 1, the protagonist, Kiddo, murders a mother as her young (5 years of age or so) daughter watches. In the film, the daughter watches, wide-eyed and frozen in shock. This choice lets the audience off easily. Rather than dealing with the terrible anguish of a child seeing her mother murdered, which would have been done by having the child screaming and crying, Director Tarantino allows us to continue to enjoy the memory of the fight scene without the uncomfortable pain that tends to come with murder. He's letting us off easy. We can sort of believe that the child would be in shock, so it kind of works, but it allows the violence on screen remain enjoyable.

In the play Lauchie, Liza, & Rory, Liza marries Lauchie but is in love with his twin brother Rory, who also loves her back. She stays with Lauchie for 20 years, until their son is off to college, and then takes off with Rory. Much of the play takes place over the course of these 20 years. It's a bit hard to watch. There is never any cheating, physically, anyway, but there are lots of longing looks and references to crying (however, there is no crying). It's a terrible situation for people to be in, and one that, in the real world, would cause enormous pain. But what happens at the end? When Rory and Liza take off together, leaving Lauchie without his wife, he says something along the lines of how it was all for the best and should have happened long ago. It literally takes a line or two to wrap up what I was expecting, hoping, to be an enormous amount of pain. What is this play trying to say? That if you leave your husband after 20 years, he just might be fine? That if you steal away your twin brother's wife, he'll say it's for the best?

I think one of the things narrative art can do is teach us about the world. We learn from narratives. And anything we learn from has the potential to teach us things we should know, and things we shouldn't. Narratives that portray human beings in ways that are unrealistic teach the audience things about the way human beings interact that are wrong. This can lead to problems. Readers of romance, for example, probably believe more strongly in the ``swept away by romance'' trope. This is possibly why they have negative ideas about using condoms, have used them less in the past, and plan to use them less in the future (Marsh & Fazio, 2006).

I don't like what this play is teaching. Situations like this, choices made like this, have enormous moral and emotional consequences. I'm not saying that Liza and Rory should not have been together. Maybe they should have been. What I'm saying is that just because something has a good net effect does not mean that there won't be collateral damage. I think a narrative has a responsibility to show that damage.

Tim Burton's film Corpse Bride has almost the exact same problem. Victor is going to marry a human, but falls for a dead woman who's a lot more fun. In the end, he decides that he needs to be in the world of the living, and the Corpse bride actually agrees with him.

I'll finish with a third example of letting the audience off easily, but narrative arts are rife with these problems. In Disney's Beauty and the Beast, there is a final battle to the death. Battles to the death are serious. Most people think it's ok, but not ideal, to kill someone in self-defence. But what happens at the end of this film is that the bad guy, Gaston, kills himself in trying to kill the protagonist. What a nice ending. The good guy never actually kills anyone, even though the story kind of demands it, and he gets just lucky that the bad guy does himself in. What if he hadn't? If the good guy maims the villain, causing a permanent disfigurement, that's even harder to watch than a clean death.

Disney loves these endings. In The Lion King, Simba throws Scar off of a cliff. Not to his death, mind you, but to his... wound. At the cliff bottom Scar is killed by hyenas. The Little Mermaid is a good counter example-- Eric impales a giant Ursula with a boat. This kind of kill is easier to pull off in a kid's movie when the villain looks like a monster. That's how Hercules gets away with it too.

I think that if an author sets up a tragic, complicated situation, she owes it to the audience to display the complications of whatever resolution she comes up with in a realistic way. We learn from narratives, as the Marsh and Fazio study shows (2006), even when we don't mean to.

Authors have a moral responsibility for psychological realism in their stories. You can't string two people in love along and get away with one of them being okay with it when you finally make your choice.

I want to see that corpse bride wailing in pain. Now that would be a satisfying ending.

Pictured: A publicity shot from Lauchie, Liza, & Rory, and a still from Corpse Bride.

References

Marsh, E. J., & Fazio, L. K. (2006). Learning errors from fiction: Difficulties in reducing reliance on fictional stories. Memory & Cognition, 34(5), 1140-1149.

Why I don't use Linux Very Often

2011-03-28T05:38:00.000-07:00

My housemate re-installed Windows on my laptop with an Ubuntu partition for me for Christmas. Ubuntu is a version of Linux, which is a free-software version of Unix. I like Linux, but I'm finding that I'm not using it as much as I hoped, for two reasons.

First, I do a lot of collaborative writing, and most people use Microsoft Word. I actually kind of like Microsoft Word because of the "track changes" function. When someone else is in charge of the paper, it's nice to send them a copy in which they can see what you have changed. I also grade student papers this way. Unfortunately, the free software version of Word, OpenOffice, does not have this feature (while we're on the subject, I don't think I can do this with LaTeX either). Either that or I have not figured out how to do it so that it looks as good.

Second, one of the main things I do on my laptop is read PDFs. But when I read, I like to make occasional notes and mostly highlight. For this I use Adobe Acrobat Pro, which is incredibly expensive, but my school has a group discount so I get it very cheaply. I have not found a good Linux program that can highlight PDFs for me.

One thing I do enjoy doing on Linux is writing in LaTeX. I like the ease of getting to the command line, I like using Emacs in a Linux environment.

Currently, at home, I have Windows, Linux, iPhone OS, and Mac OS, and I use all four pretty regularly.

Pictured: Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux. Thank Linus!

Jim Davies Performs at the Ottawa Improv Festival, 2011

2011-03-16T08:53:00.000-07:00

I will be performing Thursday night (March 16, 2011) at 9:30 at the Arts Court Theater as part of the Ottawa Improv Festival. Tickets for all the shows at $8 or $30 for a five show pass.

http://www.ottawaimprovfestival.ca

Here is my group's promo for last year's festival:

Here is a great book on improv.

Photographing Ottawa

2011-03-14T05:55:00.000-07:00

Watawa Life is a blog I love that features photos of the city I live in: Ottawa, Ontario.

The other day I saw the man who does this blog outside my townhouse complex and told him how much I liked his blog. I recognized him because he and his bicycle are often in the pictures. After he left, I grabbed my iPhone 4 and I took a picture of what he had been taking a picture of. I made it as good as I could, and thought I'd compare the two when he posted his to his blog. Here are the two pictures-- guess which one is mine. :)

Answer: http://www.robink.ca/blog/fresh-snow/

A Few Bad Men, Two Bad Cultures

2011-02-28T05:37:00.000-08:00

A recent article tells that the Catholic Church knows that there has been a good deal of sexual assault on nuns by priests, particularly in Africa.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/vatican-confirms-report-of-sexual-abuse-and-rape-of-nuns-by-priests-in-23-countries-688261.html

In a world plagued by AIDS, nuns are sometimes singled out as victims because they are perceived as safe. Anyway, it's a horrible thing. Your instinct might be to blame and want to punish the priests who did this. I know I get that feeling. However, I get another feeling too.

There are social forces going on here that exacerbate the problem. The systemic problem is sexism, both in many African countries and in the Catholic Church. The church only allows men to be priests. This would not be so bad, except for the fact that priesthood comes with authority over nuns. There is a built-in sexual power differential in Church culture.

Similarly, in Africa, many countries are very male-dominated (as described in the article). Mixing these two sexist cultures results in a situation that is very bad for women. On top of that there is the fear of AIDS.

If it were just a problem of "a few bad eggs," then you'd expect the abuse rates to be relatively constant across countries. But it is not, pointing to a cultural and geographical influence.

I'm not saying that these men are any less to blame. That's not the point. The point is that if you want to solve this problem, you need to change the systems in which they happen. We live in a time of cultural acceptance, which is a good antidote to the way things were, which was a state of explicit bigotry. However, we should not let the pendulum swing too far in the other direction to complete moral relativism. Sometimes cultures have aspects to them that are bad, given almost everyone's values.

I am reminded of the torture done by Americans. The reaction of the public, and the government, was to bring to justice those who allowed this to happen. Again, it was the "few bad eggs" reaction. As Zimbardo describes in this excellent TED talk, those military people who did these crimes are in part reacting to a system that allows, or even encourages such things to happen.

Pictured: Rollerblading nuns.
By April Sikorski from Brooklyn, USA [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

2010 Book Wrap-Up

2011-02-23T08:49:00.000-08:00

Frost Moon

For me and reading, 2010 was the year I tried to abandon paper. I am already at the point where I will probably ignore a novel that is not available in electronic form. However, for scholarly books, I still prefer paper, for reasons I've discussed in another blog post:
http://jimdavies.blogspot.com/2011/01/citations-endnotes-references-footnotes.html

I got a Kobo e-reader, and loved it until it had a software "upgrade" that ticked me off so much I returned the device. My reasons for this I've blogged about too:
http://jimdavies.blogspot.com/2010/09/why-im-returning-my-kobo.html

I now own an iPad and an iPhone, and I read on those devices. I read novels on the iPhone (using the Kobo or Kindle applications). I actually prefer this to the dedicated e-reading device for a few reasons.

- The screen is self-lit, so I can read in the dark without waking my beloved.
- It's actually very easy on the eyes. I use a black background gray letters. It's very pleasant.
- I can read with one hand, or no hands if it's on a table.
- It's always with me, unlike the Kobo or an actual book.

And although I still like paper for heavy reading where I'm making tons of notes, I use my iPad for the middle ground, where I might want to make a few notes, but not a whole lot. This is mostly for non-fiction that is not too heavy (e.g., books like A Paradise Built in Hell).

For a list of all the books I've ever read since 1993, see
http://jimdavies.org/personal/books-read.html

Here are the books I read in 2010:

Gods of the Word: Archetypes in the Consonants by Margaret Magnus

The first book I read on the Kindle (iPad application). A book for non-scientists about her theory of phonosemantics.

Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation Keith D. Markman (Editor), William M. P. Klein (Editor), Julie A. Suhr (Editor)
This took me a year and a half to read. Full of stuff very relevant to my research.

Frost Moon (Skindancer, Book 1) Anthony Francis

This book was written by a dear friend of mine, and I'm so proud of him. Check it out. It's good!
Read this one on paper. Anthony signed it for me and my beloved when we visited him in California.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War Max Brooks

Excellent world-building. Fascinating. Read on the Kobo device.

The Lightning Thief Rick Riordan

My beloved and I listened to this on CD as we drove up the coast of California. Pretty good.

Under and Alone: The True Story of the Undercover Agent Who Infiltrated America's Most Violent Outlaw Motorcycle Gang William Queen

Interesting insight into motorcycle gangs. Read on Kobo device.

The Diamond Age Neal Stephenson

Read on my Kobo device with great frustration. The chapters are incredibly long, and sometimes when I'd synch the Kobo it would forget my bookmark. As my beloved and I sat by Ashley Pond in Los Alamos, New Mexico, I spent 15 minutes paging through to get to where I was. Infuriating. That said, it's a awe-inspiring book.

Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets Sudhir Venkatesh

Listened to this on CD with my beloved as we drove across America.

The Compleat Academic darley, Zanna, Roediger (Eds.)

My book on how to be a scientist is being reviewed by a publisher-- I needed to read all the other scientist advice books out there.

Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde

The last book on tape I listened to before we sold sold our car. Fascinating world in which you can travel into the realities of different novels. Light-hearted, and creative.

The Mantram Handbook by Eknath Aeswaran

This guy is my favorite author when it comes to meditation.

Pictured: Frost Moon, by Anthony Francis.

What I Watched Instead of the Superbowl: Video Dance

2011-02-07T05:38:00.000-08:00

I love watching dance, which often means watching it live on stage. Video dance, which is dance made for the camera, is relatively rare, but, I believe, a better medium for dance.

Dance performances typically occur on stage with a live audience. Sometimes these performances are documented on video or film. This is not what I'm talking about.

Video dance is dance made for the camera. It's not just a long-shot of a stage. I think video dance is a better medium for dance for two reasons:

Dance is tiring, and this places major constraints on what can be done on stage, unlike traditional theatre, because saying lines is not exhausting. Film is better for dance for the same reason film is better for martial arts.
Choreographed dance requires an enormous amount of rehearsal and effort. There should be more payoff than a few performances. Film can last forever.

It's difficult to describe the concept of video dance to people-- even dancers. They bring up movies like The Company, or the recent The Black Swan, which are not a dance movies, but normal movies about dance. Most video dances that are made are music videos, and occasionally musicals that are made info films, such as West Side Story.

Last night my wife and I had dancer Natasha Royka over for dinner and to watch some video dance. We watched Lodela. You can see it here (24 minutes):

Even if you only watch the first minute or so, you will see how different it is from documenting staged dance. The camera is placed on the head, the camera is put upside down, there are close-ups of eyelids. This stuff you can't do on stage. You can try to get the same feeling by doing other things, but you can't do them like this. It's beautiful. A part of me would love to make video dance.

We also watched this Pas de Deux: http://www.nfb.ca/film/pas_de_deux_en/
Which uses a film technique, but you will note that it is basically documentation: One point of view, the dancers' full bodies are visible for almost all of it.

We also watched some popular dance that I'm a fan of:

Les Twins:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC3iK_sTUjs
We No Speak Americano:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iANRO3I30nM

Saturday we had a much worse dance experience.
We went to see Savion Glover.

Here is a two-minute clip of the kind of stuff Savion Glover does (not from the show I saw, but you'd never know the difference):

Impressive, right? Well, picture that lasting a hour and a half. He has no stage presence, he rarely even looked up, his hands did basically nothing. He was poorly lit, and wore black on a black background. It was a very boring show.

I complained to Natasha, who recommended the Nicholas Brothers. This clip blew me away. This is what I want to see in tap dancing (3 minutes):

Showmanship!

I feel a little bad about dissing Glover, but for the opportunity cost. When I think of all the talent in the world, who was the NAC not showing because they had him?

If you are interested in dance or pilates in Ottawa, check out the Natasha Royka Movement Studio.

Art and Natural Objects

2011-02-04T08:05:00.000-08:00

What do you think of this painting? What does it mean to you?

Now that you have an opinion of it, I'll tell you that it was made by a computer program that knows about color and composition and the structure of the human body, but has no knowledge of human emotion: Aaron (McCorduck, 1991). Does knowing this diminish or increase your appreciation of it?

When I talk to people about AIs (artificial intelligences) and art, I typically get a pretty stiff response. Some people claim that computers* cannot make art, either yet or in principle, or that they can't make good art, or that they just would not be happy with any artworks made by computers. Note that this is an informal influence. Formal aspects of a work of art are aspects of the work itself, independent of its history and context. Who made a painting is information related to the art, but seen to be in a different category than, say, where the lines are and what colors are being used.

Unless you're like me and enamored with computers and AI, knowing that a program made the painting above probably diminished your appreciation of it. Usually this is the effect: if a person made it, it's better, and if a person didn't make it, it's worse.

Take a look at this painting:

What do you think?

It was made by an elephant. (http://www.elephantartgallery.com/paintings/9001.php)

I think people go two ways on this. Some people who like the painting will feel cheated-- that the meaning they thought they saw in it is invalid because the painter had no idea what he or she was doing. Others will be fascinated by the idea that an elephant could do this at all, and perhaps appreciate the painting more.

Like my love for computers, I bet a love for animals, in opposition for a love for art, would determine the direction (positive of negative) of knowledge of the painter.

In some cases, though, having some agent make the object could decrease its value to a person. I came across this parable in De Sousa (2004):

THE PARABLE OF THE PEBBLE
Once upon a time, a man walking on the beach found a pebble that looked oddly like a human face. Amazed at this result of millions of years of random friction by stones, sand, and water, the man took it home. He treasured it: often he looked at it, haunted by its accidental beauty. One day, he showed it to a guest who said "Oh, no, I'm sure it's one of Nick's rejects--that hippie sculptor who carves souvenirs for tourists. He sometimes dumps his botched ones back on the beach." Now the pebble was nothing but the charmless reject of a mediocre craftsman. All the strange wondrous beauty the man had so much loved was gone.

* I'm using computers as a shorthand for computer programs, of course.

References

De Sousa, R. (2004). Is art an adaptation? Prospects for an evolutionary perspective on beauty. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 62(2, Special Issue: Art, Mind, and Cognitive Science), 109-118.

Pamela McCorduck (1991). Aaron's Code. W.H.Freeman & Co Ltd.

What Real-World Problems Can Be Solved with Computer Games?

2011-02-02T06:45:00.000-08:00

Above is a very interesting TED talk about computer games, by Tom Chatfield.

I've written before about serious games, and today I have some more thoughts on the subject. The world has all kinds of problems that need solving. Can we get everyday people working on these problems in the context of a game?

Let's take climate change as an example. Let's suppose we make a computer game in which the goal is to fix the climate problem facing the world today. Players adjust things in the game, and you do well in the game if the climate gets better. Sounds great, right?

The problem is this: we don't understand the world well enough to make such a game realistic. Think of how complex the internal model of the game would have to be, including not only the geophysics and chaotic weather systems of Earth, but also economics, pollution, politics, and industry. Hell, you might even need to model the future of technology, which is impossible.

Even if we were to be able to make such a model, there's a good chance that once we did, we would not need people to solve the problem-- an AI doing a smart search through the space of solutions might be faster. As I mentioned in my earlier post, the task needs to be one that people are good at but computers are not. Usually this means leveraging common-sense reasoning or perception.

The reason existing serious games often require agreement between the players is because the computer can't check to see if the player is right. If it could, we wouldn't need the game.

Perhaps a way to do some of these problems is to have plans automatically generated, and people try to agree on their plausibility or implausibility.

Economics and the Rational Person

2011-01-30T10:11:00.000-08:00

Being in the cognitive sciences, I hear a lot about how economics tends to ignore irrationality in people. Maybe it's the availability heuristic*, but I thought that biases are so well known that most economists had gotten over it.

I've been listening to the Freakonomics podcast, and I generally I like it, but I can't believe how much they buy into this "rational man" hypothesis.

I know that economics is its own science, with its own problems and methodologies, so I don't want to be too harsh, but sometimes they sound like psychologists that have only one theory: that people respond rationally to incentives. Even the way they pose problems reveals this: "How can we change incentives to make politicians act for the public good, rather than just their own?" This irritates me, because it presupposes what form the answer will take.

The field of economics endeavours to study how people deal with scarce resources. I think this is a great subject matter. I also think that economics has a lot to teach cognitive science, and I wish the two fields communicated more. However, any field that is based on a theory, which does not hold in all cases, is doing itself a disservice. It's like saying "we study human behaviour when resources are scarce. Oh, and by the way, the only thing we will consider that could affect behaviour are incentives."

I just listened to a story about how competition has been successfully used to innovate. Well, okay, but they don't mention that competition often stifles creativity. Fear reduces divergent thinking.** This is important, because it limits the usefulness of competition, as a tool, when innovation is the overall goal.

* People use the ease with which something is brought to mind as a measure of how common or probable something is. It's problematic because it's easier to recall lurid and sexual things, and because the mass media doesn't give us a good representation of the world.

** I can't seem to find the reference for this. Anyone?

Pictured: I don't know, but what a great picture!

Who Invented the iPhone?

2011-01-24T09:44:00.000-08:00

I know it's a little silly to criticize superhero comics for being unrealistic, but what Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic) and Tony Stark (Iron Man) couldn't do in real life is come up with tech that is light years ahead of the rest of the science community. It's the genius myth played out in fiction.

Even when there appear to be breakthroughs, such as the iPhone, other companies quickly make copies. It's not like they're in the dark for 20 years trying in vain to figure out how Apple pulled it off.

Who made the iPhone? All of science did. It took hundreds of years of hard work.

Pictured: A man dressed as Mr. Fantastic. His left hand appears large because it is closer to the camera. Trick photography!

ps: I write this blog on blogger, which is owned by Google. Blogger's spell-checker thinks "iPhone" is misspelled. :)

Citations, Endnotes, References, Footnotes. Pick your poison.

2011-01-20T21:50:00.000-08:00

I'm reading a wonderful book right now, but reading it is a bit of a pain, because of the way the notes and references work.

Popular books try to avoid footnotes, equations, and in-line references. I think publishers think, rightly or wrongly, that potential readers will see these things and perceive the book as being difficult, or stuffy, or something. Perhaps they are right. Stephen Hawking's publisher told him something like "every equation you put in the book cuts your readership in half."

So in this wonderful book, Dennett uses end notes. What this means is when he would normally put in a footnote, or a reference (he's a philosopher, so references would typically be in the footnotes) he puts a number in superscript, like this ¹. Then, at the end of the book, he has all of the notes from the whole book. After that, he has the references section. This is a bit annoying, and he knows it. He even says so in the beginning, that books written like this require the scholarly reader to keep two bookmarks. In this case, the scholarly reader, yours truly, really needs three bookmarks-- one for where I'm reading, one for my place in the notes pages, and then sometimes the note will cite something I will have to find in the reference section.

I'm a big fan of e-books, but I'm very thankful I'm reading this one on paper. One thing e-books have not gotten the knack for is this problem. Page turning on a e-paper device, such as a kindle, nook, or kobo, is quite slow. It's impractical to turn back and forth to the notes and references. It would take forever. So you're stuck with just reading the book through, and then getting to the notes section and hoping you remember the context. Good luck.

But, luckily, I am reading this book on paper, and I can keep little stickers and fingers in multiple places and turn to them quickly.

E-books will need to find a good solution to this, and soon. 'Cause paper book are going bye-bye.

I would love cognitive science to be the first to use scientific principles to come up with the best way to write books, papers, and to give presentations. But that's a story for another time.

Pictured: a one-man band. He plays notes with his foot. Get it?

New Year's Resolution 2011: Eat A Blueberry Every Day

2011-01-01T05:54:00.000-08:00

Every year my man Lou Fasulo and I do a new year's resolution. It is some restrictive idea that we only do for a single year. The resolution for 2010 was to eat no cold cereal. So after midnight last night, while everyone toasted to the new year with wine, I toasted with a bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats.

This year we have a positive one: to eat a blueberry every day. No fewer than one.

If you want to know why I do these resolutions, and what my past resolutions have been, to the best of my memory, see the Jim Davies FAQ:
http://jimdavies.org/personal/faq.html

Pictured: January 1, 2010, 1:00am. Eating a bowl of Corn Flakes with my first daily blueberry. Lubricated with soy "milk." Photo credit Vanessa Davies. Overexposure credit iPhone 4.

A Letter to Discover Magazine

2010-12-31T07:06:00.000-08:00

Discover:

I was very disappointed to see that you convened a panel on women in science and engineering and included no experts on the issue from the appropriate fields ("Bridging the Gap", Discover, Jan/Feb 2011). Where was the representation from psychology, anthropology, or sociology? There is excellent science being done to study this issue in these fields. You should have had the scientists doing this work on your panel. It's fine for your magazine to prefer the natural sciences, but if you're going to cover psychological and social issues, you should include people from the social sciences. Just because someone is a woman and a scientist does not make her an expert on women in science any more than a weightlifter is an expert on muscle function.

--
JimDavies
Institute of Cognitive Science
Carleton University
http://www.jimdavies.org/

Our Brain Is Ready For This

2010-12-25T02:36:00.000-08:00

I thought that would be a better title than my first idea: "The Difference Between the Baldwin Effect and Neuronal Recycling." Please don't let either title scare you, the concepts are easy to understand and fascinating.

A Baldwin effect is when the brain evolves not a specific behaviour, but the ability the learn some specific kind of thing. For example, our ability to learn language might be a Baldwin effect. I didn't evolve to speak English, but I evolved to be able to speak something. Evolution provided children with the ability to quickly learn whatever languages we are exposed to. It was able to do this because a language-using culture was reliably present during development.

Walking might be another example. Are we evolved to walk, or are we evolved to learn to walk? If it's the latter, which seems likely, it's possibly a Baldwin effect.

I have recently been reading about another interesting idea that might be confused with the Baldwin effect. Neural recycling (Dahaene & Cohen, 2007) is when a cultural artifact (e.g., writing) reliably takes advantage of the best part of the brain for it. Let me explain.

Writing only appeared about 5400 years ago. This might seem like a long time, but scientists accept that this is too short a time for a species to evolve a new brain structure. It's only 270 generations. Many scientists see this as evidence that we have a general-purpose learning system. After all, if we all can learn to read, and our ability to read could not have evolved, then a generic learning mechanism must be in place.

The mystery is this: the same part of the brain* ends up getting used to read, no matter who it is! This is very curious. If we have a general purpose learning system, and I think we do (Stanovich 2004), then where reading ends up should be in different places in different people. No one place would be better than any other.

The neural recycling idea is that things like reading end up in the parts of the brain that they do because those parts were evolved to learn things that are kind of like reading. That's the recycling part. To make an analogy, mug handles were not designed to keep tea bag strings from falling into the cup, but many people use it that way.

What might the reading area have evolved for? One possibility is that it specializes in detecting patterns of two or three lines. To quote Dahaene and Cohen (2007):

Changizi and collaborators have recently demonstrated two remarkable cross-cultural universals in the visual properties of writing systems (Changizi and Shimojo, 2005; Changizi et al., 2006). First, in all alphabets, letters are consistently composed of an average of about three strokes per character (Changizi and Shimojo, 2005). This number may be tentatively related to the visual system’s hierarchical organization, ...

The difference between these two effects is that a brain area made with the Baldwin effect was evolved for a particular learning experience (the historical origin of language occurred long before the creation of written language). In neural recycling, a cultural artifact is taking over something evolved for another purpose (perhaps with the Baldwin effect).

* the occipito-temporal area

Pictured: Tea of different colors.

References

Changizi, M.A., and Shimojo, S. (2005). Character complexity and redundancy in writing systems over human history. Proc Biol. Sci 272, 267–275.

Changizi, M.A., Zhang, Q., Ye, H., and Shimojo, S. (2006). The structures of letters and symbols throughout human history are selected to match those found in objects in natural scenes. Am. Nat. 167, E117–E139.

Dehaene, S., & Cohen, L. (2007). Cultural recycling of cortical maps. Neuron, 56(2), 384-398.

Stanovich, K. E. (2004). The Robot's Rebellion. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, London.

The Top Five Rap Albums

2010-12-20T20:27:00.000-08:00

How do I get sucked into these things?

I love hip hop, and when I saw this Facebook question about the top five hip hop albums of all time, I could not resist voicing my opinion.

Mine is a list of ultimates.

Ultimate Production: Paul's Boutique (Beastie Boys)

A vast, dense production that will never be equalled, primarily due to the stiffening of sampling laws. The best production on any album, ever, non-rap included. No honorable mentions because, frankly, nothing comes close. The only album on this list and the list of my top five albums of all time in any genre.

Ultimate Defining of an Era: Fear of a Black Planet (Public Enemy)

The ultimate PE album, and the ultimate political rap album, with no weak tracks. Holds up better than almost any album on repeated listenings. Honorable mentions: Raising Hell (Run-D.M.C.), Paid In Full (Eric B. and Rakim), and, of course, It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back (Public Enemy), To The East, Blackwards (X-Clan).

Ultimate Cool: The Low End Theory (A Tribe Called Quest)

If this album is not in your top 20, at least, you obviously do not own it. Buy now. If you do own it, there is nothing that needs to be said. Tribe changed the face of hip hop with the native tongue school; this is the best of the bunch. Honorable mentions: A Wolf In Sheep's Clothing (Black Sheep); 3 Feet High and Rising (De La Soul).

Ultimate Creativity: Mouse & The Mask (Dig) by Danger Doom

A toss-up, for me, between this and Dr. Octagonecologist for lyrical surrealism and humor. Combined with innovative and catchy production, Mouse & The Mask is an underrated classic.

Ultimate Influence: Straight Outta Compton (N.W.A.)

Although Ice-T invented gangsta rap, N.W.A. refined it and made it much what it is today. It was hugely influential in style, content, and bringing the west coast into the spotlight. Honorable mentions (for being hardcore, not for being influential): The Marshall Mathers LP (Eminem), and the most underrated rap album of all time, Guerillas in tha Mist (Da Lench Mob).

Pictured: Chuck D and Flavor Flav from Public Enemy. Thank you. Terminator X is a member of the group.

Write In: How Can I Get More Writing Done?

2010-12-15T10:04:00.000-08:00

Question: Dr. Davies, how can I get a lot of writing done? I tend to procrastinate.

The solution to your problem is clear: you must write for half an hour every day, preferably first thing in the morning.

Here are the benefits:

When you work on writing every day, the ideas never really leaveyour mind. Your unconscious works on it while you do other things during the day. You see connections you otherwise would not. People often say "I need a few good hours to get into writing." This is simply not true if you get to the same document every day. See Boice (1989) for an empirical shattering of this myth.
The routine keeps you doing it.
You are more productive. Boice (1989) found a 70% increase in
writing productivity by doing this, when it was enforced. You also
come up with more good ideas (Boice, 1983).
Because it's such a short time, you are more willing to commit to
it. For the first week or two, don't let yourself keep working after
the half hour is over, else you will not believe yourself when you try
to get your ass in the seat for "only a half hour."
If you only allow half an hour a day, you feel the fear of God in you, and you work.
You have more willpower in the morning. Write with it before you waste it on other things.

Try it, it's amazing.

Recommended reading:
http://www.amazon.com/Advice-Faculty-Members-Robert-Boice/dp/0205281591

Since I started writing this way in 2005, I've written three books (as
of yet unpublished), a full-length play, and numerous other things in that time.

References:

Boice, R. (1989). Procrastination, busyness and bingeing. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 27(6), 605-611.
Boice, R. (2000). Advice for new faculty members: Nihil nimus. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
Boice, R. (1983). Contingency management in writing and the appearance of creative ideas: Implications for the treatment of writing blocks. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 21(5), 537-543.

Pictured: Death found an author writing his life.. Designed & done on stone by E. Hull. Printed by C. Hullmandel. London, Dec. 1827.

Talk by Jim Davies at Google, August 3, 2010

2010-12-08T12:01:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz70tMqnRtc

Thanks to my man Anthony G. Francis for editing my talk last summer at the Google campus in Mountain View, California (buy his awesome novel Frost Moon for a friend this Christmas). The talk is 44 minutes long, followed by questions. In total the video is 53 minutes long.

My webpage for this talk can be found at:
http://jimdavies.org/research/publications/google/Davies2010.html

It's a longer and more technical version of my TEDxCarletonU talk:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caBIboOGSe4

Swing Dancing at The Gladstone's "It's A Wonderful Life" (Ottawa)

2010-12-07T08:57:00.000-08:00

My wife and I will will be swing dancing on stage as a part of "It's A Wonderful Life," a theatrical performance at the Gladstone Theatre. The performance will be staged as though the audience were the studio audience of a 1940s radio show. We performed last year. The show was great and it was a lot of fun. We dance at the start, as the audience files in, and during intermission.

There are evening performances and matinees. We will be performing on the following shows:
Evenings 2010: Dec 10, 12, 11, 17, 18
Matinee 2010: Dec 11

Click here for reservations:
The Gladstone Theatre

Pictured: The Gladstone, where I gave my TEDxCarletonU talk. In case you missed it, you can see the talk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caBIboOGSe4

Write In: How to Deal With Anger

2010-12-02T13:10:00.000-08:00

Someone emailed me a question recently about how to deal with anger. In this case, the anger was at another person's inconsiderate behavior.

My answer:

Dealing with anger is tricky. I think the general advice is to focus on other things and don't let yourself ruminate on what you're angry about. This is the main reason I meditate-- to gain this control.

Buddhists say you should be accepting of your anger, but not let it control you. Think of it as a baby that's crying. You need to soothe it to quiet, but you can't stuff it in a closet. You have to love it, and understand it, but try to have some distance from it. One strategy for this is to try to visualize where in your body the anger is, and remind yourself that your entire being is not angry, just that part of you. The visualization makes this a little more concrete when you try to distance yourself from it.

Unnoticed beauty is all around you, always. Take moments to experience it, especially when experiencing negative emotions.

Another strategy I've come up with lately is to tell myself that I don't have time to live other people's lives for them. You have a mission on this Earth, and spending too much energy trying to control other people is foolhardy. They are on their own path, get back to yours.

Expressing anger, contrary to popular belief, makes it worse. The following quote is from Skeptic Magazine (http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/10-09-01/):

...more than 40 years of research reveals that expressing anger directly toward another person or indirectly toward an object actually turns up the heat on aggression.[1] In an early study, people who pounded nails after someone insulted them were more critical of that person.[2] Moreover, playing aggressive sports like football results in increases in aggression,[3] and playing violent videogames like Manhunt, in which participants rate bloody assassinations on a 5-point scale, is associated with heightened aggression.[4] Research suggests that expressing anger is helpful only when it’s accompanied by constructive problem-solving designed to address the source of the anger.[5][6]
Bushman, B.J., Baumeister, R.F., & Stack, A.D. 1999. “Catharsis, Aggression, and Persuasive Influence: Self-Fulfilling or Self-Defeating Prophecies.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76, 367–376; Tavris, C. 1988. “Beyond Cartoon Killings: Comments on Two Overlooked Effects of Television.” In S. Oskamp (Ed.), Television as a Social Issue (189–197). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Hornberger, R. H. 1959. “The Differential Reduction of Aggressive Responses as a Function of Interpolated Activities.” American Psychologist, 14, 354.
Patterson, A.H. 1974. Hostility Catharsis: A Naturalistic Experiment. Paper presented at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association, New Orleans.
Anderson, C. A., Gentile, D. A., & Buckley, K. E. 2007. Violent Video Game Effects on Children and Adolescents. New York: Oxford University Press.
Littrell, J. 1998. “Is the Re-Experience of Painful Emotion Therapeutic?” Clinical Psychology Review, 18, 71–102.
Lohr, J. M., Olatunji, B. O., Baumeister, R. F., & Bushman, B. J. 2007. “The Pseudopsychology of Anger Venting and Empirically Supported Alternatives.” Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice, 5, 54–65.

Recommended books:

Teachings On Love

Anger

Pictured: Bananas. Be happy about them, if you can't think of anything else.

What Kind of Chemical Could You Spray on My Novel To Fix Its Predictable Conclusion?

2010-11-12T12:11:00.000-08:00

What kind of chemical could you spray on my novel to fix its predictable conclusion?

Sounds like a stupid question, but let me argue for a moment that it's not.

My novel (printed out) is made of ink. The ink is printed on paper. Both things are chemical. Ultimately, everything about the novel (the characters, the mood, the genre, the plot) is a function of a chemical combination. Therefore, the plot problems in the novel are chemical problems.

So let's get to work finding a chemical to fix plot holes.

Okay, this sounds stupid. But think for a minute about why it's stupid.

I mean it. Before I explain to you why it's stupid, I really want you to think about why on your own. When you're done, look below the picture of the breaching orca and I'll tell you what I think.

The argument makes sense in its own sort of way. The problem is, plot problems are not ink-level problems. The plot problem would be the same if the book were on an e-reader, or on a CD audio book, etc. They have to do with the meaning of the words that the ink represents. Fixing a plot problem requires thinking about the novel at a level of organization more abstract than the physical. The vocabulary needed to reason about it involves things like character arcs, and world consistency, and character motivation and history. Even the word level is probably too fine-grained. You could probably re-write the novel using different words and keep the same plot problem.

Even if, ultimately, the changes made to the plot are reflected in changes to ink and paper, this does not mean that we need to think about ink changes to understand or fix the novel.

Now I'll present an analogous argument.

What kind of chemical could a person ingest to fix a problem with their mind?

My mind (in a physical body) is made of neurons and other cells. These are chemical entities. Ultimately, everything about the mind (beliefs, desires, emotions, ideas) is a function of a chemical combination. Therefore the problems with a given mind are chemical problems.

So let's get to work finding a chemical to fix mental problems.

I'm not being completely fair here: lots of psychoactive drugs are very effective and I'm not trying to knock them. There's even an paper out there arguing that these drugs (such as anti-depressants) caused the great crime reduction of the 1990s.
http://www.bakadesuyo.com/you-know-why-the-crime-rate-is-down-drugs

So I'm not saying that looking for psychoactive drugs is a fool's errand. I'm more expressing reason for skepticism that neuroscience will, by itself, reveal an understanding of our entire mind and what we're interested in about it. Some things are, in my opinion, unlikely to make sense when looked at at a neural level.

Trying to understand a complex concept like our conception of our personal identity in terms of neurons will be like trying to describe a character in a book by only talking about ink.

Pictured: Prozac

Imagining Nothing

2010-11-10T13:42:00.000-08:00

Can you imagine nothing at all?
I think you can.

In my laboratory we study imagination. One of the things we're trying to do is get computers to "flesh out" scenes in visual imagination. For example, if I ask a person, or my computer program, to imagine a cat, that cat might be sitting on a sofa in the imagined image. Even though the agent was not asked to imagine the sofa, the agent very well might put one in there anyway.

Recently I was talking to a class about this and I asked them all to imagine a cat. I told them to picture it. Then I asked them if it was inside or outside. My prediction was that most of the students would say that the cat was inside, because in this part of the world, cats are mostly pets that are kept indoors. In India, there are many stray cats, so I would expect a different result.

However, I was surprised to find that over half the students didn't imagine the cat in any context at all. They imagined just the cat.

Computer graphics deals with this kind of thing all the time. The image presented here, of a protein, is on a white background. It's not on no background. It's white. That's because on a screen, each pixel in the given area has to have some color. Different programs deal with this in different ways.

How do you represent nothing on a screen? Some use a checkerboard:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tree_of_maya_languages_PT.svg
Some use gray:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Church_3d_model.jpg

etc.

You really can't represent nothing on a screen, and for a while I had the intuition that you could not do it in visual imagination either. Before I get into this, let me talk a little about imagination and its multiple meanings.

Imagination as supposing facts
One kind of imagination is basically the supposition of facts. These can be propositionally represented. For example, if you imagine owning a patent, it might not look like anything in particular. That is, there is probably not a sensory imagination activated. You just suppose that it is true, hypothetically.

Sensory Imagination
Another kind is sensory imagination, in which you actually picture in your mind's eye (or listen to your mind's ear) some image. The idea is that the propositional imaginings are connected symbols, and the sensory imagination (for vision) is like a bitmap-- in the brain, a bunch of neurons that are spatially organized, where the firing frequency of each one represents a color value for that location. For computer graphics people, it's like the difference between a vector representation (like Adobe Illustrator uses) and a bitmap representation (which the old versions of Photoshop used).

Okay, so if someone imagines a cat without a background, there are a few things that could be happening.

1. They actually are imagining the background and context, but they are not attending to it, so they are not conscious of it. This seems unlikely to me, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

2. They are not engaging in sensory imagination, just propositional imagination. It's very possible to posit with a proposition that a man exists without specifying whether or not the man has a hat on. It's much harder to do with an image. Since the word "imagination" covers these two kinds of thinking, perhaps some of these people just hypothetically imagined a proposition of the existence of a cat. It's also true that people differ in their abilities to experience visual imagination. That is, some people claim to only think propositionally.

3. They actually are using visual imagination, but just not representing the space around the cat. That means that they're not imagining a sofa, or a room, or anything. They're not even imagining black, or white, or gray. For those parts of the mental image, they're just imagining nothing.

Huh?

I'm starting to think this counter-intuitive idea just might be correct. To do so, I'll draw on different intuitions.

Your visual field extends to each side only so far. You can't see behind you. If you spread your arms, and draw your hands back until they are no longer visible, what color is the space that your hands occupy? This space does not look black. It does not look white. It does not look like a checkerboard. It just isn't. Does the space behind your head appear black? When you put your hand behind your head, does it look like it's dark back there, or there is something keeping you from seeing your hand? No, it appears as nothing at all.

Similarly, with hemispatial neglect, people can't see, and so ignore, one half of their visual field. Hard as it is to believe, they eat only the food on one side of their plate, and see nothing on the left or the right, depending. Now, these people don't experience a big black blob. If they did, they'd know they had neglect. It would look like there was something blocking their vision. Just as you don't feel there's something missing because you can't see behind your head, they feel there's nothing missing on their one side.

To me, that's the intuition for representing nothing. So, in V1 (a part of the brain that processes vision, rather early in the process) we have a sheet of neurons that get activated in a retinotopic way, which is a fancy way of saying that the neurons get activated in the same spatial pattern as the retina in the eye, kind of like a computer monitor. We know this from Tootel et al. (1982). Recently Miyawaki et al. (2008) was able to tell what someone was looking at by doing a brain scan (fMRI) of V1! Although this has yet to be done with human imagination, other studies (Kosslyn, 1994) have found that when people engage in visual imagination the visual cortex (of which V1 is a part) is relatively active.

So if each neuron area is mapped to a part of the visual field, mustn't each neuron be representing some color? I don't think so. A neuron is considered active if its firing rate is increased (neurons are always firing; it's how fast that we're interested in). It could be that at low levels of firing frequency, it means nothing to the brain. It also could be that "nothing" is indicated by some particular frequency. If something like this is the case, then the mind's interpretation of this particular firing frequency might be similar to unattended regions, or perhaps what happens in hemispatial neglect.

You like introspection? I thought so. I have a little informal experiment for you to try:

Get in a dark room and close your eyes. Think about whatever. Then, at some point, try to see, while keeping your eyes shut.

What I experience is a randomish mishmashing of gray and black areas, forming little droplets and breaking off, changing intensity suddenly (a bright area turning into a dark one, for example), etc. My mind struggles to make sense of it. The important point is this: whatever I see, it is a markedly different experience from when I was not trying to see. That is, when I was thinking about what I was going to do tomorrow, for example, even if my visual imagination wasn't particularly engaged, I didn't have any experience of these gray and black blobs.

If you try it, comment on this blog entry and tell me what you experience.

What's happening here?

My explanation is that when I choose to attend to my eyes' input (even if there's no light coming in and I'm only seeing my retina's random firing fluctuations) I experience the grays and blacks. I force my V1 to interpret the signal it's getting, garbage though it is, as real input. V1 no longer represents nothing; it represents colors (gray-scale colors, but colors all the same).

The other possible interpretation is that V1 does not change its sensitivity to ocular input according to my will. Rather, V1 is always representing, but it's only when I choose to attend to it do I have the experience of color there.

I don't know yet how to test these ideas.

It seems to me that, unlike external pictures and diagrams, our mind's eye might be able to represent nothing.

Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemispatial_neglect

References:

Kosslyn, S. M. (1994). Image and Brain: The Resolution of the Imagery Debate. MIT Press. Cambridge, MA.

Miyawaki, Y., Uchida, H., Yamashita, O., Sato, M., Morito, Y., Tanabe, H. C., . . . Kamatani, Y. (2008). Visual image reconstruction from human brain activity: A modular decoding approach. Neuron, 60(5), 915-929.

Tootell, R. B. H., Silverman, M. S., Switkes, E., & Valois, R. L. D. (1982). Deoxyglucose analysis of retinotopic organization in primate striate cortex. Science, 218(4575), 902-904.

Pictured: 3-D model of the human androgen receptor protein.

Games That Do Some Good For The World

2010-10-31T15:02:00.000-07:00

People spend a lot of time playing games, especially computer games. I just got an iPad, and I've been playing a lot of puzzle games, and a lot of them are really fun.

But I'm always trying to maximize my productivity, the productivity of everyone I meet, and I'd love to get everyone else on board too. There is a class of games out there that seek to do some good for the world.

Broadly speaking, games that have a function beyond the entertainment of the player are called serious games. These other functions could be education, training, or solving some real-world problem.

I've been very inspired by Luis von Ahn's work. He has a website called GWAP (Games With A Purpose). He's a genius at getting people to do productive work for him. All of the games on the site server collect valuable data for other computing applications. For example, in the ESP game, players have fun but also tag images with meaningful labels.

The ESP Game
Here's how it works. Two online players are randomly and anonymously paired. They both see an image from the web, and their job is to type in the same words. They can't communicate, and the only thing they see in common is the image. So they naturally type in words that have to do with the image. For instance, for the image at the top of this post, I'd type cookies, tetris, green, frosting, icing, wax paper, etc. If my partner types any of the same words, we get points and go on to the next image. Because we agreed on a word, it has a high probability of actually being meaningfully associated with the image. I encourage you to play it a few times.

What's good about it is that the players could be playing Tetris, or solitaire, or something that does no good for anybody. Instead, they're helping web search, and gathering important data for artificial intelligence applications. All of the games on the GWAP site follow this basic design: get randomly paired people to agree on content. It's worked beautifully.

FoldIt
The FoldIt game is downloadable and is based on a different paradigm. In FoldIt, players solve a puzzle, but the puzzle if informationally identical to folding a protein.

DNA creates proteins, and does little else. Proteins run almost everything in molecular biology. They come out as a chain, but fold into its lowest-energy state. This state is very hard to predict, because the space of possible folds is enormous. The behavior of the protein, however, is determined, to a large extent, by its shape. It's a major, unsolved problem in biology, and I even published an AI paper that tries to make some progress on solving it.

The great insight on the part of the FoldIt designers was to recognize that people's perceptual systems might be better at predicting how the protein would best fold than a computer. A player folds the protein on screen and the computer calculates its energy. The lower the better. The hope is that if people play this they'll find new protein structures for us. Big win.

Here's someone playing FoldIt (you don't need to watch more than a few seconds of it): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGYJyur4FUA

The Future
The proportion of games that are serious, in this sense, is vanishingly small. I see an opportunity. The concept of a serious game has blossomed only recently, and I think it's very fertile ground for innovation. Now, when I play fun games on my iPad, (I'm enjoying WizardBlox and Cablink, lately, and of course I have to give a shout out to Makeout Mania) I try to think of what real world problem I could be solving by playing this game.

One of the problems is that for the computer to score your progress, or to determine that you've won, it needs to be able to solve the problem itself. If the computer can solve the problem itself, then we don't need a serious game. AIs can do all of the work for us already.

A productive game needs to do something that computers are bad at, but people are good at. Doing algebra is bad because computers are great at it. A game for solving the Middle East Crisis is bad because people are no good at it either.

von Ahn gets around the problem by making people agree. The computer does not need to check to see if the tag given is actually associated with the image (which is currently not possible), because the agreement between people does it just fine.

In the case of FoldIt, the computer can how good a given fold is, so it can score it automatically, but it's bad at deciding what folds to evaluate. This allows FoldIt to be a single-player game.

So lately I've been thinking about real world problems that can be dressed up into games that are informationally identical.

I've developed one GWAP-style game (it is not public yet), and I have another in the works.

I'd love to hear ideas about what kinds of problems might be amenable to this. Don't worry about the game design-- I can do that. I need ideas for good problems.

This post is related to my philosophy of not wasting student work: http://vimeo.com/6986853

Links:

GWAP site, featuring the ESP game: http://www.gwap.com/
FoldIt: http://fold.it/portal/
Examples of serious games: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_game#Examples Interestingly, all the games here except FoldIt are for educational purposes.
Makeout Mania (iPad and iPhone game): http://makeoutmania.com/

Pictured: Tetris Cookies

Article on Jim Davies in Carleton Magazine

2010-10-29T10:39:00.000-07:00

There is an article about me in the Carleton Alumni Magazine. You can read it at:

http://cualumni.carleton.ca/magazine/fall-2010/total-recall/

Automatic Searching for New Papers

2010-10-28T21:34:00.000-07:00

I'm always on the lookout for new scientific articles that I can use to inform my work, and cite in my books and papers. But what does being on the lookout entail?

I get papers in the following ways:

People recommend them to me
I read about them in secondary sources (popular science books, magazines, and blogs)
I review journals periodically and try to find relevant papers.

I'm sure I'm not getting all of the papers I'd like. These methods are haphazard and prone to missing large subfields, because I simply don't know to look in them.

When I find a scientific article I like, I download the PDF and put it in my "articles" directory. They're all in there. Hundreds of them. Overall, they give a pretty good picture of what I'm interested in.

What I'd like is a bot that can analyze these papers, and use them to find papers that are new (to me).
I also enter the books I read into google books. See my blog post on this topic at
http://jimdavies.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-to-search-your-paper-books-as.html

It's all available. I would love to get recommendations from an AI.

To go one step further, it could use collaborative filtering (like Amazon.com does) to recommend papers to me that others similar to me have downloaded, cited, or otherwise shown an interest in.

Pictured: Tungsten Rods

Marine Reserves Just Might Be The Best Charity Going

2010-10-08T06:43:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of problems in this world, and giving to charities is a potential way to fix some of these problems. Unfortunately, most of the solutions out there involve trade-offs and unforeseen negative consequences.

Just for some examples, giving aid to poor countries has a rather dismal long-term success rate. People become dependent, the charities give things the recipients don't really need, etc. My wife majored in International Development and Globalization, and concluded, like most of her peers, that foreign aid pretty much doesn't do any good.

Donating to medical research has the potential to extend human life, and relieve suffering. For people who think there are too many people on the planet, and that human life doesn't need to be any longer (I'm not one of these people, but I know people who think this), it's a dubious endeavor.

Improving the environment by reducing consumption is a great idea, but of course the drawback is that we have to reduce consumption, which is hard. We get less.

But I know of a cause that appears to have no bad side effects, and involves no trade-offs. It's a complete win: marine reserves, a place where you can't legally fish (the marine park is a related concept, where you also can't fish, but is open for tourism).

I'm getting most of my information about this from the TED talk below, which I highly recommend taking the 20 minutes to watch. Please watch it.

This is the most important talk to see, regarding how great marine reserves are (20 min):

If he's right, and I have not checked to make sure that he is (if you know anything more about it please comment), we have a solution that improves the health of the ocean and increases fishing yields. We get to eat more fish, and there are more fish in the ocean. It works like a bank account. We allow more principle, we live off more interest. In the past 50 years, we've eaten all of the principle, and the oceans are decimated.

I have not know of any organizations that are fighting to get marine reserves in place. If you hear of any, please let me know about them.

This talk is just for those with further interest. It's good, but not necessary. It shows some terrific photographs of the beauty of the ocean and the horror of the overfishing (20 min):

Pictured: Monodactylus argenteus school swims above dead corals near Madagascar.

Write In: Time Management and Catch Up

2010-10-02T10:21:00.000-07:00

Q: Hi Jim,
I have 2 basic "projects" that I spend my time on, and I try to spend 1/3 of my time on one, and 2/3 on the other. I keep track of the time I spend on each, and try to make the minutes balance out. Here's my question: At the end of the week, if I have a surplus or a deficit on one side, should I carry that over into the next week? Or should I start each week fresh - at 0? What do you think?

A: The answer is yes if you are consistently not giving one of the projects its due over the course of weeks. For example, if project B is more boring, and some weeks you never hit it, but it's very important, then catch up is required.

The answer is no if you give project A more attention one week and project B more attention on another In this case it's probably balancing itself out, more or less, and overall you're being more productive because you're working on things that you're more enthused about or have opportunities with (e.g., you just found a great paper related to it and just had to read it and incorporate).

Feel free to write in with your own questions to jim@jimdavies.org, with the subject line "write in."

The Road To Vegetarianism Is Hard. And Uphill. And Rocky. And My Car Keeps Breaking Down.

2010-09-18T14:59:00.000-07:00

Those who know me know that I adore meat. I used to eat it three times a day. I adore milk. When I could drink all the milk I wanted, I think I was drinking a half gallon every day. To me, milk is the greatest liquid in the universe, and I would drink it all day if I could.

However, in the last few years I've become aware of the treatment of animals in factory farms (something that has undergone a good deal of change in the last 20 years), and I no longer think it's okay to eat meat, unless you're sure it got to you by ethical means (this is ignoring the health and environmental benefits of not eating (or not eating so much) meat).

One thing I've done is implement my meat offset program, which is going pretty well (although I have not paid for all the meat I ate on my recent road trip). However, I'm trying to save money, and my offsets are expensive ($1 per egg, $2 for a thin hamburger patty), so I'm just trying to cut down on meat. And I have to say that getting to not eating meat is onerous.

I'm out of ideas for a good breakfast. I used to eat two eggs every morning.* This was a great discovery for me, because I found that if I ate protein for breakfast, I would not be famished by 10:30am. Now I'm eating steel-cut oats for breakfast, which are pretty good, but certainly not delicious without way too much brown sugar. And I'm getting sick of it. What am I supposed to eat that's not pure carbohydrates? (My new year's resolution was to give up breakfast cereal for a year; that's not making it easier.)

Lunches and dinners are getting to be a problem too. I have a few vegetarian meals that I like, but I'm afraid that in a few months I'll get sick of them and there will be nothing left to eat. Even now, sometimes I'm hungry, and I'll go to the fridge, look in, find nothing that looks appetizing, and just go back to typing, hungry. And sometimes typing "hungry."

Hungry hungry hungry hungry.

So what am I eating?

Vegetables in curry. The curry's not vegan, but one jar lasts me about 10 meals, so it's a small offset. Curry also has the amazing ability to make brown rice and cauliflower palatable. It's a miracle!
Vegetables and hummus.
Pasta with olive oil, garlic, capers, and sautéed mushrooms. Starchy, but good in a pinch.
Tuscan white beans with sage. The recipe in the America's Test Kitchen Best Recipes Cookbook (p230) is fabulous (I've figured out how to make it pretty well in a slow cooker, though).
Stir-fried Tofu and vegetables
Ramen with spinach. I eat this almost every day for a snack, or with breakfast.

It's not a huge selection.

Luckily, my milk problem is mostly solved. The local no-name brand of chocolate soy milk tastes enough like chocolate milk to satisfy me. I go through a lot of it. Now I only drink milk if I'm having chocolate cookies or cake. We keep it in the house, though, for coffee and for scrambled eggs.

I need more delicious vegetarian meals, but I'm not sure where to find them. I'm aware that there are millions of vegetarian meals online, but I want particularly delicious ones. And I don't want vegetarian imitations of delicious meaty dishes. They are just disappointing.

A friend of mine was a vegan chef and cooked elaborate meals at her house. I not only didn't like the food, but I got a stomach ache later. And she was considered to be excellent at what she did by the other people there.

* I imagine people saying to themselves "but vegetarians can eat eggs!" If you're cutting down on meat for ethical reasons, you really need to cut down on anything from animals, including milk (my favorite drink), cheese (my favorite cheese), yogurt, eggs, and fish. That is, be vegan. I mean, come on, do people really think dairy cows are any better treated than beef cows? I find it kind of baffling that in this culture you can get away with calling yourself a vegetarian and still eat eggs, cheese, milk, and fish.** To me, it's like going to a culture where a person will claim he or she is faithful to his or her spouse, but will let oneself get to third base with strangers met in bars.

** Fish are, in my opinion, ethically treated, but the decimation of our oceans due to overfishing is such an enormous problem, I really hate eating non-sustainable seafood. So the environmental reason for vegetarianism kicks in here. For hope, see this great TED talk about ocean reserves:

Pictured: Miso soup, a vegan dish I actually adore.

I will be in the Radio Saturday Morning

2010-09-08T14:35:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in an earlier post that my artwork will be for sale at the CATwalk:
http://jimdavies.blogspot.com/2010/09/jim-daviess-art-will-be-part-of-catwalk.html
I will have 31 pieces for sale.

My interview about my artwork will be on the radio Saturday morning, for anyone who wants to tune in.

The show is:

In Town and Out, hosted by Michael Bhardwaj
Saturday Morning, 6 -9am, Eastern Time

CBC Radio One

91.5 fm in Ottawa

You can tune in online at

http://www.cbc.ca/listen/

Why I'm Returning My Kobo

2010-09-08T14:12:00.000-07:00

I bought a Kobo in April, and I loved it. I'm totally sold on the whole e-reader thing. At the end of my first day of having it, I picked up a print book I was in the middle of and got irritated with it, for these reasons:

You need two hands to hold it open.
You need two hands to turn pages.
It's heavier than the kobo.
The binding was tight and it put strain on my fingers.

I read Stephen King's Under The Dome with it, mostly walking back and forth from work. Try that with the hardcover and I can refer you to a good hand specialist.

So I was lovin' that Kobo. I even talked my cousin, who thought she'd never like an e-reader, into buying one. A lot of people are using iPads now for reading, and they are good for that, but there are three major problems with the iPad for reading-- it's too heavy, the battery does not last as long as an e-reader's, and it's not good in very bright light (too much glare) or very dim light (screen is too bright.)

However, I quickly had a problem with my Kobo. You have to synch the kobo with desktop software, kind of like how you have to synch old iPods. Sometime when I'd synch I'd lose my bookmark. I was reading Stephenson's The Diamond Age, which has incredibly long chapters. I once spent 15 minutes turning pages on the kobo, looking for the page I was on. Very infuriating.

But then the doozy... They had a software "upgrade" that featured an auto-shut-off function. After 20 minutes, the machine would power down. Before I explain why this is so bad, let me explain why it was so good before.

E-readers don't draw power unless they are changing what's on the screen. That means that it takes no power to keep something on the screen. When the battery would run out, for example, it would just display the last page viewed until it was recharged. So sometimes I'd be just sitting around, I'd see the kobo on my coffee table, pick it up, and start reading. I didn't even have to open a book! This might sound strange, but that was my experience.

So not only does the device no longer show the page you're on, nor the cover of the book you're reading, but a "You Kobo is powered down" message. Okay, whatever. Here's the problem: it took me 60-90 seconds to get from powered down to reading. 30 or so seconds to boot the machine, and then you had to click, and load the book you're reading, which took another 30 to 60 seconds.

Oh my God this drove me crazy. I used to go to bed, pick up my kobo, and instantly start reading. When I was in line, I'd pull out the kobo and read for two minutes. Now, I start booting, go brush my teeth, come back to bed, click on the book I'm reading, put on my PJs, and by that time I'm ready to read. This made me incredibly angry.

I complained to customer service. I posted complaints on their website. I don't expect it to change. It was a designed software upgrade. They had two reasons. The first one was to save energy. This makes little sense to me, since it only draws power when page-turning. If I have to boot it up everytime I start reading, it takes, over time, more energy. Second, it was how people expected the device to behave. I guess I can understand this. I bet people were calling in complaining that their device was not going to sleep when they left it, like their computers do. They probably got sick of trying to explain to them that it didn't matter.

Well, they're doing worse than losing my business. I am returning my Kobo. I called customer service and they put in a note to allow me to do it (you're not supposed to be able to after 30 days of purchase... I guess their return policy has an auto shut off too...). The customer service was good.

What's next? A iPad or a Kindle. Kindles are now almost as cheap as kobos, and I'll get a dedicated e-reader again sometime soon, but the iPad does a hell of a lot more cool stuff. We'll see.

Pictured: the black kobo, in full sunlight. Perfectly readable!

You should write every day

2010-09-08T08:46:00.000-07:00

Professors who engage in binge writing (where they
only write when they have major blocks of time) produce, on average,
.32 pages per week. If they write 15-60 minutes per day, instead,
they produce 1.2 pages per week. If someone check up on them and
makes sure they do it, they produce a staggering 3.025 pages per
week! Boice (1989) shows experimental evidence that writing a bit every day
increases your scholarly writing output.

Myths:
1. You need half an hour just to get into it.
Not true if you write every day. Your mind stays in it.
2. Your writing is bad if you only do it for a short time.
3. You need to be inspired to write or write well.

Reference:

Boice, R. (1989). Procrastination, busyness and bingeing. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 27(6), 605-611.

(this is a great paper-- let me know if you want me to email you the pdf.)

Negatives Are Hard To Understand

2010-09-07T17:42:00.000-07:00

The clip above is a funny skit from "Mr. Show," featuring grocery stores competing with advertisements. One says "no rats," implying that the other has them.

A study presented participants with two glasses of water. They watched sugar get poured into both. Then, after that, one glass was labeled `poison' and the other `sucrose.' People were averse to drinking the one labeled poison. Interestingly, a condition in which the glass was labeled `not poison' was also avoided, suggesting that the subconscious does not understand negatives (Rozin, Millman, & Nemeroff, 1986).

I recall once at Georgia Tech there was a water fountain that had a sign on it saying that the water from it was safe to drink. A colleague came into the building and asked me if the water was safe. Interesting that she'd ask when the sign clearly said it was safe. The sign gave her reason to suspect something was amiss.

What am I doing with this? Well, I think that the default value of any proposition encoded in your mind is "true." I think it takes effort to encode a negation, and it takes effort to recall it. I would love to do an experiment that tested this, showing that people under cognitive load would mis-remember false propositions as true.

In real life, Fairsley's "no rats" statement would probably hurt sales at Fairsley's too.

Reference:

Rozin, P., Millman, L., Nemeroff, C. (1986). Operation of the laws of sympathetic magic in disgust and other domains. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50(4), 703-712.

Jim Davies's art will be a part of the CATWALK, Sept 12, 2010

2010-09-06T05:38:00.000-07:00

I'm a part of a coalition of artists in centretown, Ottawa. Each year we have a walking tour of the artists' houses. It's the Centretown Art Tour Walk, or CATWALK.

It's Sunday, September 12, 2010, from 10am - 5pm. If you live in Ottawa, please stop by! I believe almost all the art will be for sale.

For my part, I'll have my calligraphy, pac-man art, and others.

http://catwalkottawa.ca/

SIGGRAPH 2010 Animation highlights

2010-08-30T12:56:00.000-07:00

I went to SIGGRAPH this summer (a computer science conference about graphics) and they have an animation festival. My favorite three are

1. The Wonder Hospital.
This awesome video won the best student film award, and it deserved it.
The whole video is not available, yet.. Keep looking at Shimbe.com
Here is a clip:

2. MRDRCHAIN
Creepy, surreal and terrifying, there is only a clip online:

3. Logorama
Funny and clever, it presents a world made of logos.

Logorama from Marc Altshuler - Human Music on Vimeo.

Porn: You don't always know it when you see it

2010-07-13T10:39:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty tired of people quoting whomever said that he can't define porn, but knows it when he sees it. The quote has two essential implications.

First, that the classification of pornography is intuitive rather than explicitly rule-based. I agree with this.

Second, that there is no fuzzy border between porn and non-porn. This I take great issue with. If you take all of rated-R movies, nude photography, sculpture, and the websites calling themselves the "pig-butt nastiest site on the internet", you see a great variety of stuff, much of which is very hard to classify as porn or non-porn.

And the thing is, most of what people say is like porn in the way quoted is also that way. That is to say, when someone says "like porn, I know x when I see it," he or she is probably wrong about x. Fuzzy boundaries are everywhere.

pictured is porn. Or is it?
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Annemarie_Heinrich_-_Desnudo_II_La_Paloma_-_1945_noir.jpg

My Pac-Man Art Will Be On Display At The Atomic Rooster

2010-06-16T08:36:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow will be my art opening at the Atomic Rooster Restaurant for about 25 of my paintings, several of which are based on the Pac-man theme.

Click here for the facebook event:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/event.php?eid=117461331630140&index=1

Date:	Thursday, June 17, 2010
Time:	7:00pm - 10:00pm
Location:	The Atomic Rooster
Street:	303 Bank Street
City/Town:	Ottawa, ON

If you are in Ottawa, I hope you come and say hello.

You can see all of the Ghost Culture paintings and read about them at http://jimdavies.org/art/pac-man/
but there will be many paintings at the show that are not on this page.

You can see my (short) visual arts resumé at
http://jimdavies.org/resume/visual-arts/jim-davies-visual-arts-resume.pdf

I will also be interviewed by Alan Neal on CBC Radio 1,
91.5FM on his "All In A Day" show tomorrow at 3:20ish.
You can listen online at http://www.cbc.ca/listen/

Cities and Brains

2010-05-24T16:40:00.001-07:00

I was reading an interview with neuroscientist Henry Markram (Kushner, 2009), in which he says

"Even though the neocortex is the most is the most advanced region, it's got more order and organization and therefore is actually more tractable. If you go into the brain stem or other subcortical areas of the brain, the neurons have no distinguishing features. They're all kinds of shapes."

This reminds me of cities. Old parts of cities are convoluted, haphazard. They were made for the conveniences at the time and had no planning. Newer parts of cities are planned. They are often sensible grids. You can see this in the pictured map of Manhatten.

I don't know if this analogy means anything, but analogies like this have made scientific advances in the past. Older parts of the brain are more haphazard, just like older parts of cities. Was there some analog to planning going on in brain evolution?

References

Kushner, D. (2009). The Discover interview: Henry Markram. Discover, December, 61--63, 77.

Just Because You Meditated for 30 Years Doesn't Mean You See the World As It Truly Is

2010-05-17T06:08:00.000-07:00

Buddhists claim that through meditation you can achieve enlightenment. A part of that enlightenment is seeing the world as it truly is. Meditation reduces activation in your brain's parietal lobe, which is the area that allows you to distinguish your self from your environment. Let's say that long practice of meditation allows you to willfully reduce parietal lobe activation.

Why do Buddhists think the feeling of a loss of self, that the world is one, is the true reality? Why is the world as experienced after arduous meditation and getting your brain to work differently, thought to be the way the world is?

Let's say I created an exercise that allowed you to turn off your visual areas. Would you let me claim that this is evidence that the world, or at least light, doesn't really exist? And that doing this exercise allows you to experience the world as it really is?

In both of these cases you're training your mind to shut off the detector in your brain that makes certain distinctions. Shutting down a part of your brain doesn't tell you anything special about the world.

The attributionist view holds that we have a bias to misattribute psychological experiences to supernatural ones. This occurs with sleep paralysis and the belief in aliens and succubi, near-death experiences, and, I believe, in meditation too.

Are we in a never-ending cycle of new social networking sites?

2010-05-13T16:11:00.000-07:00

I remember loving Friendster. I remember liking Myspace. Now I love Facebook. Each time it kind of feels like there's no room for any other. And each time it gets replaced (for the most part) by something new.

I read a theory (I think it was in Wired, but I can't find it now) that held that we go to a new social networking site when too many people are on the one you're currently using. So you go to a new, up and coming one, where you'll just connect with your real friends. Of course, eventually, everyone goes to the new one, and the cycle repeats. I don't know if this is true, but it's an interesting theory.

So now I read
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/nyu-students-aim-to-invent-facebook-again-weve-got-your-back/
which is reporting as news that someone is trying to make a new social networking site because "Facebook is so...Facebook." The developers don't like how Facebook is using our personal data to monetize Facebook. I suppose they think social networking should be free.

It was only in September, 2009, that Facebook actually started making any money.
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#Financials
That's 5 years and many millions of dollars later. Just in time for people to get sick of it!

Maybe Facebook is selling information about us that it shouldn't. But I get the sense that people feel entitled to free social networking sites, complete with email and video and image hosting.

But they've got to make it profitable, or we won't have it anymore, folks.

Of course, maybe soon after it's sustainable everyone will have jumped ship to a new site that feels like an exclusive club.

For now.

Pictured: A composite photograph of Italy. Why not?

postscript: I realize this entry is not as good as my usual ones. Thank you for bearing with me. Even Einstein expressed trivial opinions once in a while. But not John von Neumann. Now there was a genius!

What To Do With Your Zillion Conference Bags

2010-05-10T18:11:00.000-07:00

As an academic, I'm going to conferences all the time, and just about every time I do I get some canvas bag, often with the logo of the conference on it. Not knowing quite what to do with them, they pile up at my house.

One easy thing to use some of them for is groceries. Save the ocean and don't use disposable plastic bags, please.

One of the bags I particularly liked, so I started using it as my daily bag, what I use to get from school and back every day. I didn't like the logo on it, though, so I painted over it. When I make acrylic paintings, I always end up with some paint left over on the palette, and I use that for random things like binders and boxes. I threw some of that paint on this bag, and now it looks very cool, with abstract colors. A designer recently complimented me on it.

I thought about the excess bag problem and came up with a partial solution. Whenever there is something in abundance, try to think of some way to use it. One thing that's really annoying is emptying and filling bags every time you go someplace.

What I've done is dedicate certain bags to certain activities, and always keep them packed with the stuff for that activity.

I'll give you some examples of what we're using bags for in my household.

1. Singing. My wife is in a choir, so we have a bag for it. It contains her binder with her music, a pencil, and a water bottle. When she goes to rehearsal, she just grabs the bag and goes.

2. Art. I keep a bag with a pad, pens, pencils, erasers, pencil sharpeners, etc. When I go visit the art museum, or the park, I often take it with me for when I feel inspired.

3. Role-Playing Games. I have a group of tabletop role-playing gamers. We're about to play a game of "All Flesh Must Be Eaten," a zombie survival game. I keep in it sunglasses (for the walk over), a bag of dice, a folder with my character sheets in it, a notebook for taking notes, and chocolate.

4. Busking. My wife and I sometimes go swing dancing in the Byward Market for fun, and get a few bucks in tips while we're at it. We have a backpack with the boombox, a bottle of water, a hat, sunscreen, etc.

5. The Car. There's a bag in the car that is always in the trunk. It holds things for the dog (collapsable water dish, dollar-store collar and leash, poop bags), a handheld fan, equipment for listening to the ipod on the radio, a wrench, flashlight, etc. (While I'm at it, here's another tip for the car: keep a phone book in it, for getting phone numbers but more importantly for getting addresses to put into your GPS. Use last year's if you use the new one in the house.)

6. I still have lots of bags left over, so I'm making another bag now for the car as an overnight bag. It will hold underwear, toothbrush, etc. in case we get stuck somewhere overnight, or want to spend the night for whatever reason.

7. Picnic. Blanket, plates, Frisbee, travel chess set, etc.

We keep most of these bags lined up in a space near our door, near the umbrellas. It has the following benefits a) it makes use of these endless bags, 2) it serves as a physical reminder of what you need for these activities, so you don't have to remember, iii) it's very convenient to just grab the bag and go on your way out the door.

Using the same idea, I keep everything I'd ever need to travel with in my suitcase. When I go to take a trip, I take out the thing I won't need (don't need a universal stopper and bungee cord for washing clothing if I'm just going to Atlanta). When I get back home I put them back.

pictured: A southern elephant seal in South Georgia, probably howling in anguish because he doesn't know what to do with all his seal conference bags.