October 2008 Archives

MC is best known for his writings about flow.

Wiki: In his seminal work, 'Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience', Csíkszentmihályi outlines his theory that people are most happy when they are in a state of flow-- a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation. The idea of flow is identical to the feeling of being in the zone or in the groove. The flow state is an optimal state of intrinsic motivation, where the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing. This is a feeling everyone has at times, characterized by a feeling of great freedom, enjoyment, fulfillment, and skill--and during which temporal concerns (time, food, ego-self, etc.) are typically ignored.

Dory exhibits her short-term memory problem...

Patients with memory loss are being taught to use PDA as a way to better remember the things they should be doing

Reverse graffiti is form of street art that involves carving into the dirt and dust that surrounds us. Artists subtract from a surface in order to create a negative image within the positive, often quite dark layer of grime.

The National Republican Congressional Committee is running an ad in Minnesota that local officials suggest distorts the skin color of the Democratic candidate for the seat, Ashwin Madia. Basic visual evidence seems to back them up.

Madia, a son of East Indian immigrants and a marine veteran, is pictured in the spot with a darker face and long shadows cast upon it. The ad accuses him of wanted to raise taxes, but the superficial aspects are the ones that have jumped out to observers.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/30/did-gop-ad-darken-skin-co_n_139182.html

"We can change what we do for the better." "The rat is always right." Contengency (if - then) relationship. Shaping. Not S-R as with Pavloc, but R-S. The consequence drives the behavior. Three term contingency (discriminitive stimulus, response, consequence). From animals to humans. To restructure social behaviors though behavior analysis. (4min)

Here are a variety of supernanny clips:

The naughty step technique

Bed time (5min)

family sit down (4min)

Discipline Technique

This clip discusses how some emotional behaviors are unintentionally reinforced. Misconceprions about negative reinforcement, punishment creates negative feelings, resentment and fear. (4.5min)

This is a really cute clip set to good music that shows how parents teach a little girl to put her toys away by reinforcing each link in a behavioral chain with M&Ms.

A little girl is trained to say "Thank you" and then is tested to see if it generalizes to other circumstances/Contexts

This clip shows pigeon in an operant chamber learning to discriminate signs, discusses deprivation of food, cumulative recorder (graph), schedules of reinforcement, gambling and why people gamble, free will as a fiction, external reasons (not internal) reasons for behavior...

This clip is about Skinner and some of his work. It mentions his social engineering, his inventions, his work with operant conditioning, and his learning machines. There is some nice narrated stock footage.

Embedding is siabled so you have to go to youtube to see for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm5FGrQEyBY

In this clip the rat is trained to put a marble in a ring, push a rod, then press a lever to receive reinforcement. There are 3 links in the behavioral chain. It is backwards chaning because the last link, the third (the one that is reinforced) is trained first. Then the second, pushing the rod, is added. And finally the first link, picking up and moving the marble, is added.

This is a study where Watson shows that simple reaction to the world are learned though experience with the world. The study was not without controversy.

Spoof on Little Albert (turn the volume down - (4min)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aG6A66iV5tk

A man with a hand tremor undergoes brain surgery to fix the twitch.  He plays his banjo throughout the surgery to check for success of the operation and to rule out any extra tingling, etc.

Based on the Pavlov's Dog Theory, Jim offers Dwight a seemingly innocent altoid every time his computer reboots and makes the patented bell sound. Jim continues this for weeks and waits for the perfect time to strike.

In our lab we have developed a model that examines cross-racial identification and have linked it basic cognitive processes. The model makes clear predictions about how faces of famous individuals who are of other-races will be processed. This is a clip from a blog that Kim sent as it is relevant to our model.

I hesitated about posting this section as I have concerns about even copying and pasting something that has the "N" word in it. However, since the text comes directly from Eric Deggans and I presume it is a direct quote from a movie...well I decided to edit the quote anyway.

Ask the white person nearest you whether these ideas make any sense.
The Do the Right Thing effect - I named this for the moment in Spike Lee's legendary film where he confronts a racist pizzeria operator with the observation that the guy makes awful comments about black people but loves Prince, Eddie Murphy and Magic Johnson.

"It's different," John Turturro's Pino Frangione insists. "Magic, Eddie, Prince are not [ivylea]iggers...They're not really black. They're black but they're not really black. They're more than black. To me, it's different."

And that's a dynamic no one can measure. It's been my experience as the occasional object of racism that there are some folks who feel badly about the idea of black people, but those attitudes can change for specific black people they feel they know.

So there are probably some Democratic voters who don't see Obama as a typical black person, and don't transfer those negative, generic feelings onto him -- particularly because he doesn't fit the easy stereotypes, even of black politicians. And as long as Obama has been running for president, there are many voters who didn't really get to know him until he clinched the Democratic nomination in July.

It's something people of color face every day: you're a symbol to the world until you get famous enough that you're not.

Rules, algorithms, and heuristics. Depending on the strategy you take you may have a different out come....

Politics Page...

But as strong and as clear as Biden was tonight I am not in anyway advocating taking a victory lap. Yes, Obama is six to eight points ahead in many polls and yes, McCain has chosen a radical religious right unqualified VP and yes, the economy is in bad shape because of exactly the kinds of policies of deregulation that McCain has prided himself on. But still, the corporatists own the media, and I'm sure as I'm writing this they are talking about how it was a victory for Palin because she didn't repeat the Couric interview debacle or because she didn't say that troops were on their way to Russia right now. No, this isn't over. Many Americans are still freaked out about gradients in skin tone and voter caging and fraud are very real threats. And fear and lies are always hard to combat no matter how disconnected from reality they are. The good news is, we've got a decent chance. But I can't shake the feeling our system is more messed up than we know and we could still lose this thing.

Surgeon attpemts to control Tourette's syndrome with electrical stimulation.

Jill has an extraordinary mamory for autobiographical memory (8min)

Clive Wearing cannot make new memories (9min45sec)

Clive Wearing, Part 2a,b,c: Living Without Memory

Part of our perceptual and cognitive system tasks is to identify objects and to avoid colliding with them.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=bPWZ7ASnhiE&feature=email

Nice Bike - I like the simple details (infinity Otto isn't bad either)

Prosopagnosia, also called face blindness, is an impairment in the recognition of faces. It is often accompanied by other types of recognition impairments (place recognition, car recognition, facial expression of emotion, etc.) though sometimes it appears to be restricted to facial identity. Not surprisingly, prosopagnosia can create serious social problems. Prosopagnosics often have difficulty recognizing family members, close friends, and even themselves. They often use alternative routes to recognition, but these routes are not as effective as recognition via the face.

http://www.faceblind.org/