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Statistical inference
Imagine that a statistical reasoner was trying to build an appropriate model of when I go to the gym. What would such a model entail? In a very general sense, it would be some kind of prediction about...
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The Mystery of Sixteen
What's with Sixteen and Facebook?Background 1: Facebook recently released an app called Lexicon, that counts the occurrence of upto five words on Facebook wall posts and shows their relative usage over...
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I use features
What I tried to say:"Greek place"What I ended up saying:"Breek ... errr..."What this means:The initial consonant of word 2 lent it's [place] feature to the initial consonant of word 1; BUT, word 1 kept...
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Astrocyte Computing
The term is supposed to parallel 'Neural Computing', and is intended to work out how astrocytes in the brain are capable of doing computations. In the past, I've wondered about astrocytes in relation...
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Illusiontime
Here's a nice illusion:Stare at the central dot in the image. Wait for the image to switch over to the color-inverted version. Keep staring at the dot.Now, when the image switches back, you should see...
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Buddhist monks and post-modernists on a rollercoaster
So, a while ago I go on my first rollercoaster, and as it sends us hurtling to a certain (p < 0.001) death, I spent some time reflecting on physics equations. Followed by that, I paid homage to...
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I'm a skeptic
Your result for The What's Your Philosophy? Test...SkepticThe skeptic constantly lives in a state of denial - everything is false until proven otherwise. Skeptics refuse to follow religion, since it...
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The plan
Me and Katherine are working on an anticipatory looking paradigm, and we've designed a system for creating and analyzing Tobii experiments. Starting from this system-level design, Johnny Wen has...
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iPhone!!
Since it's not yet possible to jack into the matrix, at least there's the iPhone :) Mobile Blogging from here.[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]_MossFeed_
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Featured!
I got featured in the Observer magazine of the Association for Psychological Science!Also, I realized I haven't really been blogging in a while. Which is not to say there hasn't been anything...
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Backup systems on spaceships
Watching old Star Trek: Next Generation. In this episode (Disaster) the Enterprise collides with a quantum filament (whatever that might be), and things aren't very spiffy anymore aboard the vessel....
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Or, who has seen the wind?
Finally the special issue is out, and it looks like balance, intelligence, a broad biological perspective and just plain good reading habits lose to rhetoric, misrepresentation and... and I really do...
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Innovations: Segway to language
A signboard on my way home: "High-tech gadgets repaired."What really is a high-tech gadget anyhow? Take the Segway. Nothing like it existed before it did. It would be hard to argue that this was not a...
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Probability of finding a four-leaf clover
Short answer: around 1 in 2,000.(Clarification: this is the probability that, if you pick up a single leaf at random, it will have four leaflets.) Here is my collection of four four-leaf clovers (out...
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Teh
I'm sorely vexed with 'teh'. For those who think that frequency is teh everything, here is a conundrum inside an enigma: what explains the frequency of 'teh'?The graph shows the log frequency for all...
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Why a watched pot never boils
Simple answer: phase transitions are relatively rapid.Let the time when you set the pot/kettle on the fire to be t_0. Let the time when the contents are at a rolling boil be t_b.Imagine you're watching...
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Primates and walking
In a previous issue of the lovely journal Mindfields, I wrote an article about baby robots. In this, happily ignoring various dynamical systems approaches to the issue, I wrote:Do we think that the...
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PRAAT script to extract sound tokens
The problem:You have recorded a single long sound file with many tokens (words, syllables), separated by silence for your fantastic upcoming experiment. You want to now segment the long recording and...
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The question of dumb rats (and smart babies)
Some scientists seem to believe that rats predicting when the next foot shock happens is all we need to know to understand how babies learn language. Should you?I came across an interesting blog post...
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Matlab boxplot notch "error" resolved
Use Matlab? Try this:>> load carsmall>> boxplot(MPG,Origin,'notch','on')See something weird? Something that looks like this image with the boxes folded over? It's been driving me crazy for...
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A rule by another name...
Is this a rule or is this a little portion of an HMM?Imagine some rule-based system, that has the following:x -> {x | y}It's in a made-up notation, but the meaning should be clear enough: 'x' can go...
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Why do some language universals have exceptions?
In a recent article, Evans & Levinson argue that there are no language universals, because for almost any universal, one can find exceptions. Of course, if you're a Chomskyan-like linguist, the...
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Downgrade Lion to Snow Leopard on new iMacs
Got a new iMac? Came pre-installed with Lion? Want to go back to Snow Leopard for whatever reason? (Unlike the Fanboy, I realize we have different needs). I've been trying to migrate everything off of...
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Encyclopedia Brown
One of the reasons I knew early that I was destined for all things Science was my fascination with Encyclopedia Brown and the intense frustration when I'd not solve the cases. Just read that the author...
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