Monthly Archives: October 2007

Motor learning rate

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Here’s an interesting idea, and one I’m in a position to test to boot!

Over several iterations of performing a simple motor task, an interesting pattern of activity occurs in the frontal cortex of the brain: the amount of activity diminishes with each iteration until a certain threshold is reached, indicating what appears to be motor learning behavior. It’s more or less linear, but I believe that the slope differs between subjects.

Now, my hypothesis is this: that the motor rate from a simple motor task could in fact be used to estimate the rapidity of motor learning in general. In other words, if I could stick you in an fMRI scanner for a few seconds and have you twiddle your thumbs, I could predict how fast you would be able to type or how long it would take you to learn to play the piano, for example.

But that’s only the beginning: that this is taking place in the frontal lobe rather than the cerebellum suggests that the processing may be somewhat unified with the process of normal cognitive learning, and thus may be a form of intelligence.

So can we build an IQ test from this? Maybe. I’m going to perform some quick experiments on data that we already have at the lab as soon as I can. Since I don’t have test data from the subjects, the initial analysis will be clustering, but if that succeeds, I may attempt to test them and perform regression.

If both of these hypotheses are true, Gardener’s theory of multiple intelligences may need to be amended.

Dissertation – Week 0

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There’s only one good answer to the situation I’m in – leave as quickly as possible. So long as I am at Temple, particularly when I am not free, I believe I will never achieve my full potential. Thus, I am moving my original 3 year graduation goal up to 2 years – that is, I’d like to have my Ph. D. by the end of this year. My productivity in other areas will probably be attenuated, but I will NOT completely abandon other fields; I’ll just work on them less until I finish. Yes, that includes the “Treatise on the Objective Reality of Ideas”. Sorry.

After graduating, I will likely never publish anything again, nor participate in formal academia, since I am sorely disappointed with (a) the constant gatekeeping and (b) the lack of objective and original thought. I will most likely do what Einstein did: work at a relatively unchallenging job that leaves plenty of freedom to imagine (Programming? That’s fun, but hasn’t been a challenge since I was a teenager, so it may be perfect), refining my own ideas while doing so until they are hopefully revolutionary. It’s how I’ve done my best work to this point, so why would I abandon this strategy? Look what abandoning it did to me this past year!

I have completed my literature search and have a general idea of what I specifically want to research. I am starting to write right now. I’m going to San Diego for a conference over the weekend, so this week doesn’t count, but I am going to set my target for 10 pages per week starting next week (right now, my writing is just taking care of the preliminaries: topic, ToC, etc.). I anticipate a 150 page dissertation (I don’t believe in being long winded in a research paper, even a dissertation; even that is too long, but it’s the minimum I can get away with), so at this rate it will take me 15 weeks, which is approximately the length of one semester, giving me an ETA sometime around February. Provided my advisor doesn’t attempt to stop me simply because I’m trying to graduate too quickly (the way Temple operates, it wouldn’t surprise me if the faculty tried to keep me doing their research as long as possible) and that I pass the writing and preliminary exams (I’m already past quals so long as I don’t completely screw up the class I’m in now, which is possible because the midterm is scheduled the day I come back from San Diego and the professor won’t reschedule it), I should have this done well in advance of when I need to graduate. My effulgent hatred of what my life has become (I call it “the dark year”) motivates me.

I’ve already filled out all of the paperwork; even though I haven’t formed my committee yet, I know who is going to be on it.

Now, dates. I do this for my own benefit because it gives me a solid framework to work within (I need deadlines to operate):

The graduation date I am going to shoot for is August 31, 2008. This makes my final thesis due date August 1, 2008, which makes my defense deadline roughly July 15, 2008. This means I have to finish my thesis by July 1 and pass Prelim II by approximately June 17, 2008, though I should pass the Prelim by May if possible because I need six credits of CIS9999 (Dissertation research) between Prelim II and the defense and the Summer I and Summer II semesters would be good opportunities to take these courses. This should indicate a Prelim I completion date of approximately April 15, 2008 at the latest and completion of the writing exam (which by now I should have no problems with) during the first week of February.

This brings us roughly back to the present.

So there’s the strategy: work backwards from the final deadline, get everything but writing and research out of the way, and set regular goals. If all else fails, I’ll take another semester and have a very easy Fall (and a December ETA, which I can definitely meet).

No need to keep ideas to myself

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I don’t need to worry about withholding any ideas from an unworthy society. An unworthy society will do that all by itself.

We can detect breast cancer with 96% accuracy. It’s not as if this is a fluke of the classifier, either; our research methods are fine. But innocent people are very likely going to die because we can’t get our results past peer reviewers who won’t give us reasons for their decisions.

I’m blameless here, but it makes me wonder why I bother.

The Research Classroom

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The idea is simple, but should be effective: A class that meets solely to do research. It puts 30 or so minds on a project at once, and has everyone collaborating. Some people are naturally more effective in this environment too. It’s win/win.

Keeping scientists is harder than initiating them

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While perusing the NY Hall of Science website, I discovered an effort to interest children in science and mathematics that took the form of a TV show called “Cyberchase”. While I applaud the idea, I think it may be missing the point somewhat. It serves the purpose of initiating children into science, but children tend to be natural scientists anyway. What we really need to do to keep children interested is:

a. Stop pressuring them to stray from science in the later years of their childhood and their adolescence. Anyone who fell into the “nerd” group in high school (and face it, most scientists did) should know that a desire to do science runs very much against the ability to remain popular.

b. Bring science and mathematics into the public consciousness. The only times people hear about scientists are when they have results, which are invariably communicated in the form of “scientists have found an x% link between y and z”, and they almost never hear about mathematicians. Ask any random person on the street whether they’ve heard of the recent proof of the Poincare conjecture. You won’t find many who know that it was proved (or even what it is!) or the name of the mathematician who did it. People know who Einstein is because his name became synonymous with genius. However, if ordinary scientists and mathematicians could be brought to the same level of public awareness as other occupations (forget celebrity status; it happens in other countries, but will not happen here for a long time, if ever), then people might consider taking careers in science.

How this would be done is up for debate, but it wouldn’t be done by a TV show. Still, every little bit counts, to kudos for the idea.

More on the Objective Reality of Ideas

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My philosophy came up in an online discussion today. I decided to copy the explanation I gave:

Question:

Post #18
1 reply
“So basically, you believe there are ideas out there, and it’s just a matter of time before we discover them…

And so they are not original ideas, or ideas that we “create,” but instead truths that already exist that we simply discover and recombine according to our own principles.

So creativity, then, is making connections.

I wonder if an original idea could ever be “wrong”

Response:

Post #19
Essentially. It’s sort of like Platonic idealism, in that the things in the real world are simply combinations of some set of absolute concepts, such as “has branches”, “is green”, etc. Theoretically, if we had an infinite amount of time to do so, we could describe the entire universe in terms of how these ideas come together. (We don’t have an infinite amount of time, so what we get is “knowledge”: an approximation to the truth that becomes more and more accurate with time. Not just science, either; we’re also part of the universe, so the humanities and arts are just as valid. If you’re familiar with calculus, think integral vs. sum. They’re equivalent in the limit).

However, because we exist within the material world, the ideas also have a subjective component. Even though we can perceive the same ideas differently, our perceptions are still both true; it’s not as if we are seeing different “shadows on the cave wall”.

The example I like to use is a photo of a tree. Say we take two photographs of the same tree with different exposures. They’re going to appear differently, but that does not change the fact that they *are* (in an absolute sense) photos of the same tree. A person may or may not *identify* them as the same tree, however; this is where the subjectivity comes in. However, because the subjective component of an idea is not inferior to the absolute one, whether the response is “this is the same tree” or “this is not the same tree” is irrelevant; they’re both correct.

That’s actually the logical conclusion of this whole philosophy – there’s no such thing as an idea that’s truly wrong. Of course, how useful it is is still up for debate (though most people tend to be very bad at judging how useful an idea is; in general, people tend to underestimate). Even blatantly contradictory ideas such as “the sky is green” are useful because they allow us to refine our approximation of the truth by discarding inconsistencies.

The first online election will be the end of democracy

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Politicians are already up to some dirty tricks online, including phishing, spam mail with misleading information, and Joe jobs. This indicates to me that the first online election (and one will have to happen sooner or later) will be the end of democracy in this country, to be replaced by a society in which the person most able to hack the election wins.

In effect, a technocracy.