Month: February 2009

omg.

Rosch speaks again about concepts:

Gabora, Liane M.; Rosch, Eleanor & Aerts, Diederik. (2008) “Toward an Ecological Theory of Concepts.” Ecological Psychology 20(1-2): 84-116. http://cogprints.org/5957/

Abstract: Psychology has had difficulty accounting for the creative, context-sensitive manner in which concepts are used. We believe this stems from the view of concepts as identifiers rather than bridges between mind and world that participate in the generation of meaning. This paper summarizes the history and current status of concepts research, and provides a non-technical summary of work toward an ecological approach to concepts. We outline the rationale for applying generalizations of formalisms originally developed for use in quantum mechanics to the modeling of concepts, showing how it is because of the role of context that deep structural similarities exist between the two. A concept is defined not just in terms of exemplary states and their features or properties, but also by the relational structures of these properties, and their susceptibility to change under different contexts. The approach implies a view of mind in which the union of perception and environment drives conceptualization, forging a web of conceptual relations or “ecology of mind”

How I wish I’d had this article when I did my lit review… I’m too tired to read it now, but tomorrow!

mind the gap.

Fodor on why Clarke and Chalmers’ Extended Mind Thesis is all wrongheaded.

Which leads me to want to underscore that when I talk about external or outboard brains, I do not mean that these things are actually part of brains (a term I am sloppily using to mean “minds” and not jiggly bundles of nerves).

I mean that the creation of external representations is epistemic action that lightens the cognitive load required to achieve our goals (1). The external representation is the product of mind + action; it is not mind.

Notebooks and iPhones and such are mind prostheses (2). A prosthetic, no matter how customized, is still “other.”

I put things in my .org files so that I do not have to remember them. I offload the task of memory because either I can’t remember or I don’t want to expend the effort to remember.

I create concept maps. I offload the cognitive work of holding a complex representation in working memory. This allows me to focus on thinking about the representation and what it represents, rather than trying to keep the representation itself in clear mental sight.

But my .org files and concept maps are no more a part of my actual mind than my dishwasher is somehow part of me standing at the sink doing dishes while I’m upstairs writing a blog post.

These things are just tools.

Just sayin…

p.s. Did you know there is a genus of moth named Prosthesis?
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1. Kirsh, David & Maglio, Paul. (1994) “On distinguishing epistemic from pragmatic action.” Cognitive science 18(4): 513-549.

2. Prostheses isn’t the exact term that I want because it means a replacement for something lost or missing, and most of us are augmenting our cognitive processes, not replacing them. The most accurate term would be mind extension, but a) that is too easily confused with the Extended Mind Theory, and b) it sounds too much like spam I receive already.

as i always suspected…

Mind Hacks post reporting study finding that:

groups select natural leaders on the basis of how much each person contributes to group discussions, even when their contributions have no relation to their actual competence.

In a group solving math problems…

Repeatedly, the ones who emerged as leaders and were rated the highest in competence were not the ones who offered the greatest number of correct answers. Nor were they the ones whose SAT scores suggested they’d even be able to. What they did do was offer the most answers — period.

Feh. The regularity with which I read or hear things that basically say I’m wasting my time trying to do anything of depth and quality starts to become rather depressing and discouraging: “HEY! That’s nice and all but you’d be a lot more successful if you’d just churn out crap.”

sigh.

In less depressing news, this is the sexiest web thing to really turn my head in a while: TermCloud search

TermCloud Search is a search mashup that generates a “termcloud” to present and navigate a search query. It is built on Yahoo BOSS, the Yahoo Site Explorer API and Google’s RESTful Web Search API. It makes use of the beautiful jQuery JavaScript library and was written by Bernhard Rieder.

TermCloud Search is part of an ongoing research project on the social and political dimensions of Web search. As stated in this blog post, the main idea was to turn the search process into an act of learning in itself instead of just a means for getting quickly to another site. The term cloud (generated from 250 results via Yahoo BOSS’ keyterm feature) is a way to explore a subject area, getting an overview over the central terms surrounding a query. The project is currently beta.

academic papers as spam.

Luis von Ahn writes about two of my current frustrations:

1. The inefficient, bloated, repetitive academic writing formula, or, my recent absolute boredom at having to write the same thing over and over again in slightly different words.

2. The effect of “publish or perish” on the literature of a field: we are spammed with nearly identical papers on the same research project. Or, rather, we are salamied.

I have spent far too much time comparing papers from the same (or similar) author(s) in order to figure out:

– if they are reporting on the same data;
– if one is reporting on the same project after a bit more data has been collected;
– if they are written from different angles on the same project;
– if either makes any important points or reports findings not present in the other one;
– which one to mark as the preferred one to cite

von Ahn writes:

Given the number of people working in computer science and the fact that publishing papers is considered the goal of our work, there is an insane number of papers written every year, the vast majority of which contribute very little (or not at all) to our collective knowledge. This is basically spam. In fact, for many papers (including some of my own), the actual idea of the paper could be stated in one paragraph, but somehow people manage to write 10 pages of it.

Further, the goal of research should be research, not papers. We need to communicate the results of research, but the existing model is not the best way.

via Academic Productivity