Early in the summer Fiona and I took 10 days holiday, first touring on the West Coast of Scotlad, south from Ullapool and then over the Skye Road Bridge to spend a few days on Skye. As well as visiting various wool-related shops on the way and a spectacular drive over the pass from Applecross, I managed a little writing, some work on regret modelling1. And, as well as writing and regret modelling, quite a lot of reading.
This was my holiday reading:
The Talking Ape: How Language Evolved, Robbins Burling (see my booknotes and review)
In Praise of the Garrulous, Allan Cameron (see my booknotes)
A Mind So Rare, Merlin Donald (see my booknotes and review)
Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit (see my booknotes)
- At last! It has been something like 6 years since I first did initial, and very promising, computational regret modelling, and have at last got back to it, writing driver code so that I have got data from a systematic spread of different parameters. Happily this verified the early evidence that the cognitive model of regret I wrote about first in 2003 really does seem to aid learning. However, the value of more comprehensive simulation was proved as early indications that positive regret (grass is greener feeling) was more powerful than negative regret do not seem to have been borne out.[back]