As I just wrote about a Tibetan spaniel I thought I ought to add a picture of our Tibetan spaniel, Tansy, in case she gets jealous.
drawing by Fiona at LoveFibre
online image manipulation
I was looking around for online image manipulation programs. I found a few and all seemed quite basic (no real turbocharged web2.0 one), but iaza caught my eye … basic but lots of pictures of the site developer’s Tibetan spaniel Niro!
The other one that seemed interesting was wiredness which is quite basic in functionality, but clearly aiming to be zappy in its interface … and has an API so you can send images to it from other sites for manipulation (what I was looking for).
Single-track minds – centralised thinking and the evidence of bad models
Another post related to Clark’s “Being there” (see previous post on this). The central thesis of Clark’s book is that we should look at people as reactive creatures acting in the environment, not as disembodied minds acting on it. I agree wholeheartedly with this non-dualist view of mind/body, but every so often Clark’s enthusiasm leads a little too far – but then this forces reflection on just what is too far.
In this case the issue is the distributed nature of cognition within the brain and the inadequacy of central executive models. In support of this, Clark (p.39) cites Mitchel Resnick at length and I’ll reproduce the quote:
“people tend to look for the cause, the reason, the driving force, the deciding factor. When people observe patterns and structures in the world (for example, the flocking patterns of birds or foraging patterns of ants), they often assume centralized causes where none exist. And when people try to create patterns or structure in the world (for example, new organizations or new machines), they often impose centralized control where none is needed.” (Resnick 1994, p.124)1
The take home message is that we tend to think in terms of centralised causes, but the world is not like that. Therefore:
(i) the way we normally think is wrong
(ii) in particular we should expect non-centralised understanding of cognition
However, if our normal ways of thinking are so bad, why is it that we have survived as a species so long? The very fact that we have this tendency to think and design in terms of centralised causes, even when it is a poor model of the world, suggests some advantage to this way of thinking.
- Mitchel Resnik (1994). Turtles Termites and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds. MIT Press.[back]
visualising vocabulary
Fiona just pointed me to Visuwords a lovely visualisation of word association using WordNet data. The image below is of the word ‘human’ and you can see two clusters one corresponding to the noun human and one to the adjective meaning humane/caring
[[full size image]]
Visuwords is Flash front-end and PHP backend. It appears to use some variant of spring and ball visualisation. You can download the source … so could use it as the basis of visualisation for other kinds of data such as web sites.
multiple representations – many chairs in the mind
I have just started reading Andy Clark’s “Being There”1 (maybe more on that later), but early on he reflects on the MIT COG project, which is a human-like robot torso with decentralised computation – coherent action emerging through interactions not central control.
This reminded me of results of brain scans (sadly, I can’t recall the source), which showed that the areas in the brain where you store concepts like ‘chair’ are different from those where you store the sound of the word – and also I’m sure the spelling of it also.
This makes sense of the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon, you know that there is a word for something, but can’t find the exact word. Even more remarkable is that of you know words in different languages you can know this separately for each language.
So, musing on this, there seem to be very good reasons why, even within our own mind, we hold multiple representations for the “same” thing, such as chair, which are connected, but loosely coupled.
I was just sent a link to an article in The Psychologist “Sleep on a Problem… It works like a dream” by Josephine Ross
The article gathers loads of anecdotal evidence of creativity in dreams … including, inevitably, those benzine rings!
Personally … while I’m sure that some things happen unconsciously and during sleep, my guess is that 90% of these creativity stories have simpler reasons through selective memory or semi-random inspiration.
spell with flickr
I just found a wonderful service spell with flickr that makes images like:
It is built from a pool of letters on flickr which have been collected independently (there are also pools for digits and punctuation), a lovely example of Web2.0 in action!
I’ve added it to Snip!t, so now if you snip a single word ‘spell with flickr’ gets suggested as an action.
surprised by Microsoft
I had thought I had got used to the ineptitude of Microsoft programmers, that nothing would surprise me any more. However, yet again their inventiveness in producing obscure yet damaging effects has once again amazed me.
tagging … I am not alone … or am I?
I’ve noticed that I reuse very few tags … and thought I was just a poor tag-user. However, I read the other day a reference to a paper at the CSCW confernce last year; it reported that the average number of re-uses of a tag was just 1.311 . I thought this meant that most tags are never reused … I am not alone 🙂
Having downloaded and read the paper it turns out that this is the average number of users who use a tag – that is most tags are used by only one person, in fact individuals reuse their own tags a lot more … so I am no-good tagger after all 🙁
Incidentally, I use ultimate tag warrior plugin for wordpress and it seems OK. Only drawback is that if you want tags displayed with your post, they really get inserted into the post itself. This is not a problem for tags at the end, but would mess up an RSS feed if you like your tags above the post. I guess this is because wordpress does not have a handle for plugins to add things to display loops, so the only way to ensure the tags are displayed are to make them part of the post.
Also Nad sent me a link to a neat tag visualisation by Moritz Stefaner.
- Sen, S., Lam, S. K., Rashid, A., Cosley, D., Frankowski, D., Osterhouse, J., Harper, F. M., and Riedl, J. 2006. tagging, communities, vocabulary, evolution. In Proceedings of the 2006 20th Anniversary Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work {Banff, Alberta, Canada, November 04 – 08, 2006}. CSCW ’06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 181-190. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1180875.1180904[back]
digital culture
I was at futuresonic last Friday doing a panel keynote at the Social Technologies Summit. I talked about various things connected to imagination: bad ideas, regret modelling and firefly/fairylights technology. On the same panel was a guy from Satchi and Satchi who created television adds for T-mobile and a lady from Goldsmiths who described a project for Intel where they studied a London bus route. The chair Eric introduced the session with a little about blogging and other web-based technologies and in general we were immersed in the ways in which digital culture pervades the day to day world.
In my way home on the train I sat opposite a father and son who were playing hangman. The boy was about 6 or 7 and the father had to help him and sometimes correct him. Every so often I noticed the words they chose, but just before I got off the train there was obviously the father’s hardest challenge yet. I gradually noticed the hightened excitement in the voices … it was a word with ‘X’ and ‘Y’ in it.
As I stood to get up, the boy eventually got the last letters and completed the word …
F O X Y B I N G O . C O M