http://www.idiolect.org.uk/notes/ en-us 2004-07-23T08:23:39+00:00 http://www.idiolect.org.uk/notes/archives/cat_psychology.html#000167 Recommended items to pack a fresh brain: 1. Put the fresh brain (A) 2. In a ziploc bag (B) 3. Wait! Don't just ziploc - double-ziploc (C) Pack with ice and post! Continue reading the shipping information for fresh brains at the New York Brain Bank website (also availale in PDF)... psychology idiolect 2004-07-23T08:23:39+00:00 http://www.idiolect.org.uk/notes/archives/cat_.html#000166 Thanks to Kat for this, from oztam.com People … often do not have a good sense of the limitations of sample-based research. Warren Cordell, chief statistical officer at Nielsen for many years, devised a wonderful visual explanation for [the United States] Congress, which went as follows. The picture (below) is comprised of several hundred thousand tiny dots (the population). The three smaller pictures contain 250, 1,000 and 2,000 dots (the samples). They are 'area probability' samples of the original picture, because the dots are distributed in proportion to their distribution in the picture. If we think of homes [or persons, consumers] instead of dots, this is the sampling method used for most media research studies. Now move back 30 inches or so. When the eye stops trying to read the dots, even the smallest sample provides a recognisable picture (you can use top-line data). But you would have trouble picking her out of a group of women based on the 250-dot sample (do not try reading demographic breaks). At 1,000 dots, if you squint to read the pattern of light and dark, you would recognise her in a group (now you can read major demographics). At 2,000 dots, you see her more clearly - but the real improvement is between 250 and 1,000 - an important point. In sampling, the ability to see greater detail is a 'squared function' - it takes four times as large a sample to see twice the detail. This is the strength and weakness of sample-based research. You get the general picture cheap, but precision costs a bundle.... idiolect 2004-07-22T10:04:42+00:00 http://www.idiolect.org.uk/notes/archives/cat_books.html#000165 Shamelessly stolen from the inside cover of Stanley Donwood's 'Catacombs of Terror!'... books idiolect 2004-07-22T09:48:58+00:00 http://www.idiolect.org.uk/notes/archives/cat_links.html#000164 Illusions of apparent motion - the only word to describe these is 'trippy' Gallery of Neurons NeuroWiki - Wikipedia for computational neuroscientists. Le Poulet Noir If I was a moral philosophy lecturer I'd do this experiment on my class via Crookedtimber Sizes.com - The Online Quantinary Clay Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality- 'Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality' Guardian Profile of Zygmunt Bauman Guardian review of Identity by Zygmunt Bauman 'trust is homeless' Guardian article by Zygmunt Bauman on inequality, morality and globalisation Boxing advice mindreadings.com - control theory and psychology helmintholog on a theory of relgion - 'the overdetection of agency... links idiolect 2004-07-19T22:56:19+00:00 http://www.idiolect.org.uk/notes/archives/cat_books.html#000163 I wanted to post this as a comment on onemonkey's post about cool german words but i couldn't get it to work so... Weltschmerz, literally "world-pain" [OED] 'A weary or pessimistic feeling about life; an apathetic or vaguely yearning attitude'... books idiolect 2004-07-19T20:56:38+00:00 http://www.idiolect.org.uk/notes/archives/cat_politics.html#000162 It would be prejudicial to the national interest and the conduct of the government's foreign policy if the English courts were to express opinions on questions of international law concerning the use of force by the United Kingdom and other states which might differ from those expressed by the government and advanced by it in the conduct of international relations. - Permanent Undersecretary of State Sir Michael Jay, July 1st As James said, "Come again? Government accountability? Separation of judiciary and executive? Wishy-washy liberal nonsense..." Or as Michael Jay might have said "The government does what it likes and we do what we're told" Will chips in If there's any hope for America, it lies in a revolution, and if there's any hope for a revolution in America, it lies in getting Elvis Presley to become Che Guevara Phil Ochs, musician, 1940-76... politics idiolect 2004-07-16T01:44:01+00:00 http://www.idiolect.org.uk/notes/archives/cat_quotes.html#000161 When the Tao is lost, there is virtue. When virtue is lost, there is morality. When morality is lost, there is the law. The law is the husk of true faith, the beginning of chaos. - Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 38... quotes idiolect 2004-07-15T16:38:27+00:00 http://www.idiolect.org.uk/notes/archives/cat_links.html#000160 Global Rich List - you're on it To PhD or not to PhD? at plasticbag.org. "She's only Two Cats Mad on the Spinster Eccentricity Index" Steveberlinjohnson.com on Fahrenheit 9/11 Corante.com/loom on Machiavellian Monkeys, social intelligence and cortex size Online lectures from the Obidos Advanced Course in Computational Neuroscience 2003 Notes on all (DSM-IV) psychiatric disorders from psychnet-uk.com neurodiversity.com - honoring the variety of human wiring Citation space map of the most cited papers on autism Psychcentral blog (mostly mental health) Butler's Fork - either Blair lied or he was criminally reckless in invading Iraq The Dark Side of Numbers: The Role of Population Data Systems in Human Rights Abuses via apophenia... links idiolect 2004-07-14T23:57:33+00:00 http://www.idiolect.org.uk/notes/archives/cat_science.html#000159 UpdateYour metabolic rate while watching TV may not be less than while unconscious, but in children it is less than other resting activities (less fidgiting): Ref: Effects of television on metabolic rate: potential implications for childhood obesity.... science idiolect 2004-07-14T22:59:54+00:00 http://www.idiolect.org.uk/notes/archives/cat_science.html#000158 The young sea squirt swims the oceans. When it finds a comfortable rock to settle down on it attaches to it by the head and proceeds to digest its own brain - a brain which would be of no further use during an uneventful future of filter-feeding. Sea Squirts, aka tunicates, also aka urochordata, are more than just a curio from marine biology. Sea squirts are more closely related to humans than any other invertebrate group - evolutionary biologists reckon that they resemble the ancient last common ancestors of all vertebrates. The brains they have in the larval form are really just a rod of nerve cells, a notochord. But it's this notochord, found in its most primitive form in the sea squirts, which defines the phylum to which all birds, fishes and mammals belong. We humans could, ultimately, be just a development on the larval form of these slimy plankton eaters. Nicol suggested to me that this means there might be a genetic switch which could still be flipped in humans, and would give us a strong urge to press our heads to the nearest rock face, digest our brains and move no more. I think maybe it's already happened, except that the switch is memetic, not genetic. The rock is a sofa and the digestive juices responsible for atrophying our brains are the emissions from the TV. An additional curious note about tunicates is that they use a rare metal, vanadium, to bind oxygen in their blood, rather than iron (like humans) or copper (like squid). What this means for the sofa/TV/brain digestion analogy I don't know.... science idiolect 2004-07-13T19:37:19+00:00 http://www.idiolect.org.uk/notes/archives/cat_books.html#000156 Something about Leunig at his best leaves me speechless. It's the expression of that idea, but without leaving me any referrent I could pass on to anyone else. I'm left, dumb, pointing, mouthing "look! look! That's it!"... books idiolect 2004-07-11T20:46:26+00:00 http://www.idiolect.org.uk/notes/archives/cat_misc.html#000155 Five years ago there was a Kronenberg 1664 advert with a fantastic french hip-hop track on it. I promised my girlfriend I'd find out what it was and get a copy. Well, thanks to this site and my housemate's CD collection i've found it. Apologies for the small delay, but, Naomi, if you still want the track I now have a copy and it's Mc Solaar's A La Claire Fontaine from his album Prose Combat.... misc idiolect 2004-07-09T17:02:18+00:00 http://www.idiolect.org.uk/notes/archives/cat_politics.html#000154 Stumbled upon this spoofed vid of George Bush and Tony blair singing a duet of 'Enduring Love' to each other this morning. It set me looking for more spoofed vids and i came across this vid of Dubya drunk at a wedding. Lots has been made of Dubya's drug and alcohol problem, and all the sites I found hosting this video held it up in mockery and/or condemnation. But i have to say, loath him as I do, i found myself warming to him during the inpromptue interview he inadvertently gave at the wedding. George, please drink more and bomb less.... politics idiolect 2004-07-09T02:09:39+00:00 http://www.idiolect.org.uk/notes/archives/cat_psychology.html#000153 The order in which different brain areas reach maturity must be crucial to how activity-guided development creates functional specialisation (there's good stuff on this in Rethinking Innateness). Here's a maturational timetable (via) for different brain areas: Notice that it's areas associated with audition that finish myelination first (in the womb), and the neocortex which finishes last (about 25 years later). Ref: Elman, J., Bates, E., Johnson, M., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Parisi, D., & Plunkett, K. (1996). Rethinking innateness: A connectionist perspective on development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.... psychology idiolect 2004-07-08T07:33:30+00:00 http://www.idiolect.org.uk/notes/archives/cat_psychology.html#000152 Like a dutiful embodied cognitivist i believe that what we're doing affects how we think. Or, on a more mircoscale, that the task we're engaged in affects the how we process the stimuli we're sensing. Not just how we process the stimuli in the sense of the parameters of the processes used to deal with it, but that the actual processes themselves alter - and not always in ways we have personal insight into. So, as part of my duties i was re-reading Goodale & Milner's (1992) classic paper "Separate visual pathways for perception and action". They discuss research that shows that motor systems aren't fooled by various illusions - so that with things like the muller-lyer illusion, our fingers reaching to grab the object are not fooled in the same way as our eyes are fooled in providing us with information on size. They go on to say: The functional modules supporting perceptual experience of the world may have evolved more recently than those controlling actions within it But that's just an aside. The question that jumps out at me is, if the type of response affects stimulus processing, what kind of response is conscious experience? Ref 1. Goodale MA, Milner AD (1992). Separate visual pathways for perception and action. Trends in Neurosciences, 15(1), 20-25.... psychology idiolect 2004-07-07T23:15:09+00:00