Remember the 1000 paratroopers who dropped into Northern Iraq and seized an airfield earlier this week, to "open up a Northern Front". This Article from The Age asks what I asked when I first heard about it: Why the hell to they have to "seize" this airfield? It's in a Kurdish controlled area - semi-autonomous "Iraqi Kurdistan". According to the article, the closest Iraqi forces are 200 Km away, and there was no resistance encountered at all, upon landing. posted by Miles 3:11 PM
New "listening" posted - the last 25 songs played from my "top-rated, unrecent" iTunes smart playlist, set to random. I was diggin' it - iTunes rocks. My own radio-show full of songs I groove to that I haven't heard in a long while. Oh, yeah.
I'm still here, in my office, 11 stories above Cambridge, trying to write. I pledged a draft of the to-be-submitted paper on my fMRI number studies of the last two years to Nancy Kanwisher, my prof at MIT, by tomorrow, Friday. It's not looking so good for actually making that deadline. But I'm pushing.
If you're interested, email me (using the "you" link under "stimuli" if you want to humor me) and I'll send you the powerpoint slides from the talk I gave last week, on the fMRI stuff I'm writing up now. And / Or explain it all in person.
One day, I will post a link to a PDF of a publication of it. So the story goes, anyway. Here's hoping. Null results can, I guess, be kind of a bitch to publish, even if you do everything right experimentally, and even if they are theoretically relevant. Fundamental bias of science, rant, rant, rant.
One day, too, I'll update the "reading" link, because I'll actually have time to be reading something other than news websites for pleasure. One day.
Either that, or I'll spend that time takin' naps in the sun, down by the Charles, like I did the other day with Jess, and screw books and this blog, cause there's heaven-on-earth to be had out there, it being spring time in Boston. :-)
Jess reads msnbc.com for news, and though I used to be primarily a cnn.com guy (for mainstream coverage, anyway) I've kinda' been sold on the msnbc thing. Yeah, despite the microsoft connection. I've been checking their war photo slide-shows daily.
And for more photos, check this out. It's not my car, but it looks almost exactly like it. Yes, mines is jus as beautiful. I think I need to go out and drive on Storrow tonight.
I would kill for the following mp3: Mae Moore, "Bohemia". My Mac does not allow me kazaa acess, only limewire, and I have not been able to find it. I am too poor to pay $20 for an import CD, for just one (great) song. :-(
Quoted from an interview with Robert Fisk, a reporter with the Independent:
AG: Last question- have you been to the hospitals of Baghdad?
RF: Yes; quite a few of them. The main visit I made was to one of the main government hospitals on Saturday morning after a pretty long night of explosions around the city in which of course quite a lot of these cruise missiles exploded right on their targets. Others missed them and crashed into civilian areas. I went to one hospital where-the doctors here are not Ba’ath party members- the chief doctor I spoke to was trained in Edinborough where he got his FRCF. He went very coldly down his list of patients and he had 101, whom he estimated 16 were soldiers 85 were civilians, and of the 85 civilians, 20 were women, 6 were children.
One child and one man had died in the operating theater during surgery. Most of the children were pretty badly hurt, one little girl had shrapnel from an American bomb in her spine and her left leg was paralyzed. Her mother was, rather pathetically, trying to straighten out her right leg against it as if both the legs, if pointed in the same direction, she’d somehow regain movement in the left side of her body, which, of course, she did not. Other children were on drip feeds and had very serious leg injuries. One little girl had shrapnel in her abdomen, which had not yet been removed. They were clearly in pain, there was a lot of tears and crying from the children, less so from the young women who had been hit- one woman was actually 17, they weren’t all young. In one case a woman and her daughter were there. The woman said to me that she had gone to see a relative and she had gotten out of a taxi, her daughter, whom I also spoke to, was standing in front of her and there was a tremendous explosion, noise, and white light, as the woman said. The girl was hit in the legs and the woman was hit in the chest and legs by shrapnel. They were lying next to each other in hospital beds. This is not the worst kind of injuries I have ever seen, and I’ve seen just about every injury in the world including people who’ve virtually got no heads left and are still alive, and I didn’t see that. But, if you’re going to bomb a country, you will wound and kill civilians; that is in the nature of warfare. We bomb, they suffer, and nothing I saw in that hospital surprised me.
I'm back from a long weekend in N.J. and Philadelphia - with a beautiful new (old) car: a 1987 Volkswagen Scirocco in great condition. I'm psyched. I will post pix as soon as I borrow a digital camera.
The weekend was highlighted by the concert my dad took us to on Sunday Night, at the new Kimmel Center in Philadelphia. The building is amazing (try the virtual tour), and the music was amazing. "Birds of a Feather" - headlined by Christian McBride, with old-timer Roy Haynes on drums, and a trumpet player who made my head explode, Nicholas Payton. When I get inside jazz, I get so high - I can't stop grinning, my head is spinning, the music is visual and 3D . . . just, fireworks. I love that.
I also met Jess' parents (very friendly), visited Princeton for the first time (gorgeous), and, eh, got whooped by my dad in Scrabble (as usual - he hit me with 317 points over one 7 turn span, which is just crazy.)
And now, I must go take care of insurance/title/registration etc. paperwork for my new car. Woo-hoo!
In several ironic twists, (a) the threat of terrorism has enriched me to the tune of $400 in the last two days, as shares of HGSI have soared on news that they're developing an Anthrax drug, and (b) I spent last night playing Medal Of Honor for the first time, instead of preparing for the class I know I'm going to miss on Thursday because I'll be walking out in protest of the war.
Pogue Colonel: Marine, what is that button on your body armor?
Private Joker: A peace symbol, sir.
Pogue Colonel: Where'd you get it?
Private Joker: I don't remember, sir.
Pogue Colonel: What is that you've got written on your helmet?
Private Joker: "Born to Kill," sir.
Pogue Colonel: You write "Born to Kill" on your helmet and you wear a peace button. What's that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?!
Private Joker: No, sir.
Pogue Colonel: You'd better get your head and your ass wired together, or I will take a giant shit on you!
Private Joker: Yes, sir.
Pogue Colonel: Now answer my question or you'll be standing tall before the man.
Private Joker: I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir.
Pogue Colonel: The what?
Private Joker: The duality of man. The Jungian thing, sir.
The thing is, I do feel a kind of excitement, right alongside my feelings of apprehension and sorrow, and totally independent from my intellectual analysis and criticism of the (lack of) justification for war. War is compelling. Especially, I guess, when you don't have to actually participate. If the U.S. government wanted to, it could pay for this war in its entirety by selling it as a pay-per-view reality TV show. As is, we do get Ted Koppel Embedded in the Army's Third Infantry Division, but we won't actually get the good stuff live, due to, you know, concerns about giving away {troop positions / tactics / evidence of us killing civilians}.
When it comes down to the reality of war that we're facing, I (like most, I think) simply hope for a quick war, with as few casualties as possible . . . and, uh, some really cool video montages from tank battles and dogfights and Marines shooting it out with snipers in Baghdad and . . . and "what the fuck am I saying?", right? - but it is what it is.
I think a little more gambling on the world stage could dramatically improve things. For instance, what if Chirac, Putin, et al. - instead of criticising Bush for not having offered compelling evidence for the existence of the WMD he claims Iraq has - said "Okay, we BET you One Hundred Billion Dollars that you can't show us the WMD after you take over Iraq! We'll send in our troops, go in as Allies, and if, after we take out Saddam, we find the WMD then we were wrong, and we owe ya' the $100,000,000,000. If not, then you owe us $100,000,000,000."
That would be too cool. I wonder what would happen. There's just no accountability when a world leader doesn't have to put his money where his mouth is.
Jessica took me away for the weekend, to a (may I say) charming bed-and-breakfast on the cape. It was exactly what I needed, after the crazy work/school stress of last week, with midterms and all. We had an absolutely mind-blowingly good dinner Saturday night at The Naked Oyster. Fresh bay scallops in a champagne cream sauce, so good that I was closing my head and nodding with a grimace of intense pleasure, on every bite. I'm sure I looked like a complete dork. But it was that good. And, so, maybe the wine was having some influence on me, true. That's okay. The food, still, was that good.
It adds a lot to life, to - just occasionally - eat something that is that incredibly delicious.
I must, too, give mad props to Zen (see link on left) for the groovalicious set of discs he loaned us for the trip. Zen, you da' man.
Jess and I drove back to Boston in beautiful 60 degree weather on Sunday, and took our bikes out for a 12-15 mile trip from Arlington to somewhere past Lexington (I think). That felt good.
* * *
I went with her for her tests, this morning. I wanted to be there - I'm scared for her, though I'm trying to do my best to stay calm and confident and warm, for her sake - and I know I wouldn't want to face those tests alone. I sleepily read papers for class, while the doctors did what I (used to, anyway) do all the time - took pictures of her brain, in different ways. An MEG, and then an EEG. What surprised me - though it shouldn't have, I guess - is that she won't know any results or interpretations until Thursday. When I went in the scanner as a subject, in experiments for my old lab, I could always see the scans as soon as I got out. For some reason it hadn't registered with me that in a clinical situation, it would be completely different.
Today is another beautiful spring-like day. And I'm stuck indoors, working on touching up the talk I give on my imaging work, tomorrow, to my department. Not, to be honest, terribly able to focus on the tasks at hand.
Like reality TV, except different; your peek directly inside the life of a Harvard Psychology PhD Student . . .
My midterm / partial in-lieu-of-quals exam: 7 essays, 36 hours.
(Yeah, it's pretty laid-back, huh?)
1) Aging is associated with recognition memory impairment in humans and animals. For example, aged monkeys are impaired on the delayed nonmatching-to-sample (DNMS) test of recognition memory. If aged monkeys were tested on some of Buckley et al.'s or Bussey et al.'s perceptual tasks (e.g. discriminations with high feature ambiguity), would you expect them to be impaired on those tasks? If so, would you expect their impairment to correlate with their DNMS impairment? Why or why not?
2) The cognitive functions of the amygdala are difficult to characterize. Can a "non-static"/interactive view of memory systems (or cognitive systems in the brain more generally), like some of the interactive memory systems briefly discussed by Kim and Baxter (2001), be applied to understand the function of the amygdala? That is, does it make sense to think of amygdala function as changeable depending on what the rest of the brain is doing? Does this put us in a better position to understand what the amygdala is doing, than considering it as a center for affect or emotional learning?
3. Provide an example of a structure/process tradeoff and a suggestion about how to circumvent this problem.
4. In what ways can Sternberg's additive factors analysis be related to Marr's approach to characterizing computational systems?
5. Write an essay on Norman and Bobrow's 1975 paper. Considerable choice as to scope and content but it would be useful to cite/describe at least some material covered on visual attention and/or visual surface perception.
Pick two of the following 4 questions:
A. Describe how the visual system uses assumptions about the world in
order to build a representation from sparse or ambiguous visual data. Pick
one example each from motion and lightness domains.
B. Compare and contrast the limits of visual resolution and visual
attention. How might the disparity between the two be beneficial or
detrimental to human perception?
C. Discuss the concept of sprites. How could they benefit our perception
of motion and what are some drawbacks of this theory?
D. Apply signal detection to your own research and discuss some of its
advantages.
Huh. Here's a new one, fresh off the A.P. wire. Somehow, it's the French who are "ensuring there will be a war" . . . by refusing to budge from their anti-war stance.
LONDON - The dispute between Britain and France over disarming Saddam Hussein exploded into open hostility Thursday, as furious British officials accused the French of all but ensuring there will be a war. In shockingly blunt language for allies, British officials assailed their French counterparts for blocking efforts to set a deadline for Iraq to disarm. Britain accused France of rejecting its proposal without considering it.
Works for me. Those cheese eating surrender monkeys have always been no-good warmongers, and only want a fight. Fuck 'em, we're declaring peace. Wait, now I'm confused.
Wow. Joni Mitchell is just amazing. I think I've listened to "Dog Eat Dog" (the whole album) three times, tonight, and now I'm listening to "Miles of Aisles". Deadly beautiful. Our generation has no music to compare.
at·ten·tion NOUN: 1. Concentration of the mental powers upon an object; a close or careful observing or listening. 2. The ability or power to concentrate mentally.
Some thesaurus entries: thorough, diligence, industriousness, interest
When I first encountered "attention" as a major field of cognitive science, my response was "what the hell is the big deal?" The more I study it / deal with it, the more important and interesting it gets.
Attention, in cognitive psychology, is thought about in many different ways: as the active allocation of general-purpose "cognitive resources"; as a passive filter of incoming stimuli; as the process of selecting what enters "awareness" or "consciousness"; as a "spotlight" that "illuminates" (in a metaphorical sense) a subset of sensory input.
The best antonym, I think, for "attention" is "distraction". At first glance, this might not make a lot of sense with the psychology-specific meanings of attention. But. What I think is that the psychological definitions grant (maybe unreasonably) a capacity for attentive cognitive control - the choice (by who? are there homunculus issues here) to direct attention towards one thing or another . . . and that they don't regard stability over time as important; if you're "distracted" it's not a reduction in attention, it's a re-direction of attention. Attention, in the non-specific definition is studied within psychology - but by clinicians, in the context of things like ADD & ADHD, not by cognitive psychologists (that I'm aware of.) I don't know, maybe I'm wrong; maybe it's just called "cognitive control", and not "attention".
This comes up, a lot, because I feel like I'm so easily distracted. Or rather, that I can focus effortlessly on some things, and not others. And that, unfortunately, my work too frequently falls into the "not others" category.
I didn't know anyone who used Ritalin as a "performance enhancer" in college, at Caltech, but I've heard that it's relatively common, some places. As much as I would never do it, I can kind of understand it; if I could achieve the same effects via another path - say, meditation - I definitely would.
Definitely check out Jessica's blog for today, with some excellent photos from last night's party. :-)
My girlfriend is cool. Damn. I wish I was that cool.
There was some very cool lindy-hopping going on at the party; I learned East Coast swing, some while back, but I'm too self-conscious and out of practice to really be willing to try it out, in a crowd. (I gained this self-consiousness when I was dating an ex-competitive ballroom dancer, who just kind of laughed at my efforts. Arghh.) Lindy looks cooler. Maybe I should try to learn . . . but I have a lot of trouble, learning steps. I can fool non-dancers into thinking I'm a decent dancer, by doing sorta' complex spins and turns and even (at one point) a few lifts . . . but beyond the very basic East Coast swing step I seem not to have much success learning to properly dance. I just, essentially, bullshit. Which is fun. But.
Aside from that? I have been working all weekend. I have been forgetting-to-eat working, all weekend. I am, at the moment, starving. I am a boring grad student. I apologize.
Stress day is over. Now I have to decide what to do, now.
To "qualify" as a doctoral candidate, in my department, you take some bitchin' core-course exams in lieu of more traditional "quals". I have one coming up, one week from now - a midterm in my CBB Proseminar. Thursday 9:00 am to 9:00 pm, Friday 9:00 am to 9:00 pm. 24 hours, in two 12 hour chunks. Four essay questions each day. Go.
The reading for the course so far is 67 papers/chapters, in six weeks. A three-inch binder, full, double-sided. Ayah.
I ran into two old friends from MIT, last night. Nathan said "hey, you look like a grad student, now, all weary and frazzled." Yeah.
So, then, anyway, the most stressful thing about today was meeting with my advisor, and having to say "I'm sorry, I don't have anything new to tell you - I haven't made any progress at all on my first year project (3-5 y.o. kids representation of large approximate number) since we last talked, because I've been spending all my time on classwork, and my MIT fMRI work." I was dreading going into that meeting. It went alright - she didn't rip me apart or anything. But I feel like I'm letting too much time slip away from me. Like my time spent working isn't spent working productively enough.
(cough) blog (cough)
On the plus side, Travis Waddington, a bud from Dabney (Caltech) is in town this weekend, and might be coming here permanently next year - he's a prospective student in mydepartment at MIT, I think in Sebastian Seung's lab.
Today's brief essay: The computational metaphor in cognitive science, specifically in terms of "bottlenecks".
I spent a substantial amount of time trying to determine the "bottlenecks" in fMRI data analysis, when I was buying/setting-up our new server in the Kanwisher Lab, at MIT, last year. In pretty much any complex "process" you will have "rate-limiting steps"; the whole thing will only go as fast as the slowest bit. Most people using PC's, for instance, are most likely to be memory-limited; for most applications, the CPU (who's speed is what you see referenced as 2.2 GHz, or whatever) is often plenty fast, and it's running out of RAM, and being forced to use "swap space" (which is much slower) that will bog you down. If you're doing stuff on the web, you're instead "network i/o" limited (usually) - you have to wait for data to come into your machine through it's network connection, but your CPU and everything else can pretty easily handle the flow of what's coming in. With high-end stuff like the fMRI data analysis we were doing, it turned out that we were actually frequently i/o limited, in terms of hard drive bus speeds and read-write capabilities - even with a 160 Mbps SCSI bus RAID - because of filesystem/linux issues, in the end (afs is slow and secure, nfs is fast and not.)
Anyway, the point is, with computers it's relatively easy to define the different (and orthogonal) potential bottlenecks, and, while not trivial, it's possible to test them and figure out what's holding things up.
Cognitive scientists like to think about human cognition in terms of computational metaphors; this is a great idea, very useful, probably the key ingredient that sets cognitive psychology apart from all the bullshit you more traditionally think of as psychology, etc. - it's a great demystifier. What does the brain do? It solves problems. How do you solve problems? Computation on (in this case perceptual (in origin)) information.
So, even way back in the 70's, people said "hey, we should think about rate-limiting processes in cognition, just like we do in computer science!" Predictably, it's not as easy to figure out what even makes sense to think about as potentially rate-limiting "parts" of cognition. The context in which we are studying it (in CBB proseminar) is visual attention. Norman and Bobrow (1975) suggested thinking about early visual processing in terms of "data limited" and "resource limited" tasks. "Resources" here essentially refers to "attention" - or, how much (high-level?) processing power you're focusing on the task. Kinda' makes sense. "Data limited", they say, has to do with noisy data ("Signal data-limits") or memory access. Anyway, so if you plot performance vs. resources, it will be flat (no improvement in performance with increased attention) when processing is data-limited, and you'll get task-interference only when two processes are both "resource-limited" (because they'll be competing for the same resources.)
The latter half of this - "resource" limits - makes sense to me. The idea that anything or everything may require some "attention" - that a failure to observe task-interference doesn't mean the tasks are entirely attention independent, but rather just not attention-limited - this makes sense, too.
However, the "data-limited" argument seems pretty lame: it should really be classified "everything-else-limited". Which isn't so helpful.
So in what other dimensions does it make sense to think about cognitive bottlenecks?
There are certainly perceptual task limitations: If you present stimuli fast enough, your perceptual systems wont be able to handle the data flow, and performance may fall apart. This is kind of an i/o limit, but it has nothing to do, really, with stimulus degredation (like Norman and Bobrow talked about.)
There certainly seem to be short-term (working) memory limitations on a lot of high-level, symbolic processing kind of tasks (adding numbers, e.g.) If I could give myself a magical genetic modification, I'd definitely go for extra RAM. Unfortunately, we can't do that, so - since this is probably a hard-wired capacity limit - you're kind of limited in terms of what you can do, experimentally, to see when tasks might be working memory limited ( . . . well, you can work around it, with conflicting memory tasks, or whatever, but then you're mixing it up with attention, etc.)
New York was, as always, fun. Almost everyone flaked on Jordan, so the treasure-hunt / ditch-day-ish part of the day just didn't happen. New York twentysomethings, apparently, do not wake up by noon on Saturdays, and when they do get up, are not interested in doing anything active. The theory, I guess, is that (a) they're exhausted from excessive work-weeks in the finance world, and (b) there are so many entertainment options in N.Y. that no one commits to or necessarily attends friends' parties. In any case, I felt pretty bad for Jordan, who had put a lot into the day's planning.
We just kind of wandered, most of the day . . . to a little shop in Chinatown for some cheap, delicious dumplings, to DUMBO (down under the manhattan bridge overpass) in Brooklyn, for the view of the bridges & some pool, drinks, & appetizers at a sweet little bar there. For the evening, we rented a movie, smoked some cigars from Cuba Cuba that Jordan had ("from his contact at the Italian embassy" . . . and a first for me) and drank some fine, fine scotch. To top it all off, we had some oh-my-god-delicious mochi red-bean ice cream balls. I definitely need to get Anh to pick me up some of those from Super 88.
Today Jimmy K comes back home, from his 3.5 month trip 'round the world. Bonus.
Arrest This Man, He Talks In Maths 
Monday, March 31, 2003