multiple representations – many chairs in the mind

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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.

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  1. Andy Clark. Being There. MIT Press. 1997. ISBN 0-262-53156-9. book@MIT[back]

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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.

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tagging … I am not alone … or am I?

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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.

  1. 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

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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

omnignorance, the future of the web

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The dream of the web seems a form of omniscience, unlmited and universal knowledge available at the vlick ofof a button or least at the click of a Google ‘Seach’ button. However, last night I was on a site that empitomised the problems of the web.

I was pointed to a blog entry about a presentation that the blog said was “Simply the best presentation I’VE EVER SEEN!“. I was intrigued and and followed this to the Identity2.0 site and in particular a page about a keynote at OSCON 2005.

The entry about the talk mentioned ‘Identity2.0’ and ‘digital identity’ so guessed this was something to do with single logins (like MS passport) or open authentication, which has long been an open issue (with many ‘solutions’ but so far little success). However, was this person and this site talking about one of these such as plain open authentication, or something deeper.

Well it is fine for the page about the talk not to say clearly, it is written within the context of the Indetity2.0 site, so I looked for an ‘about’ link or something like that … nothing I stripped the url back to plain identity2.0.com and of course simply got to a stabdard blog front page (I guess rather like this one), with the latest news, but nothing to gove over context or background.

In fact by chasing yet more links to other sites, by half guessing from various abstracts, blog entries, etc. I managed to pick out half a story about what this was about … but why so hard?

This reminds me of the problem I recorded a month or so back when trying to find last week’s (as opposed to yesterday’s) news. Really easy to find the latest item or even the hotest item, but really bad at getting to the background that gives context and turns buzz words into meaning.

At the risk of sounding like a codger at a cafe table, the same is true of much software documentation. If you have seen the software grow and develop over the years it makes sense, but to students trying to make sense of Java packages, AJAX, Mac/Windows APIs, it is like fumbling in the dark. Good signpoosting at every street corner, but no roadmaps.

In all these cases there are real questions we want to ask, this is not like meandering around Flickr or YouTube, travelling just for the journey. However definitive statements (I’ll not say answers) give way to half-overheard conversations in a coffee shop.

It is often said that experts know more and more about less and less untul eventually they know everything about nothing. It seems we are turning into a generation who know less and less about more and more until we know nothing about everthing – omingnorance rules.

one aim, one business, one desire

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My Macintosh has a list of recently accessed files, but when I want to re-visit a file I have used earlier in the day it is never there. I have many folder windows open, but again the folder I was earlier working on is never one of them. This seems a sad measure of not multi-tasking but over-tasking, too many interruptions upon interupptions, too many disparate things and a singular lack of single purpose.

When I was in school we studied the Scholar Gypsy by Matthew Arnold. It is a tale of an Oxford scholar who foresakes his studies and joins the gypsies. As I always admired and desired the gypsy life this combination of the intellectual and nomadic appealed immediately. When Arnold writes it is 200 years since the scholar started his wanderings, but there are still occasional reports of sightings and Arnold concludes that his longevity is the result of his singleness of purpose, he has “one aim, one business, one desire”.

The stanza I still recall almost word perfect comes near the end as Arnold expresses his wish for this simpler life … and remember he is writing in 1850, not the days of email and IM:

O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,
And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;
Before this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its heads o’ertax’d, its palsied hearts, was rife

film – waking life

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Last night watched ‘Waking Life‘ a strange film all about dreaming

We ordered it from amazon video (their subscription lending library), but not quite sure how we managed to do it. Certainly when it arrived and I read the description it sounded a little too arty … I of course like James Bond and Famous Five!

However, it was very enjoyable and has most stunning animation. It looked as if it had been filmed live, but then, either by hand or using computer, reduced to comic book effect. It chronicles a young man’s day or dream as he discusses (mainly listens) to various people talking about the philosophy of dreams and reality – I assume taken from lots of real philosophers, but I’m not well read enough to recognise many! All of this in a constantly shifting animation as if each object were half floating. Sort of Disney meets Derrida.

Two things struck me … well actually many more, loads of lovely quirky asides, but I forget most already 🙁

First is how lacking in grounding so many of the philosophical ideas are; sitting somewhere between mysticism and reason. I’ve recently been reading Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis and got a similar feel there – lovely stuff for a novel, almost poetic … but without solid ground. An age that has forgotten or rejected God and lost faith in rationality, but struggling to find something in the void.

The other thing was a point when one of the characters said to the protagonist (I misquote!) “your sneakers aren’t real, your feet inside your sneakers aren’t real, you are a mental model” … the character is referring to the fact you are not real in a dream, but to some extent this is precisely the self we experience, my mental model of me is the ‘I’ I know, so (and this was said elsewhere in the film), to some extent aspects of dreams are as real as anything in waking life.

toes in the mediterranean

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I am in Tirrenia, one of the resorts on the Mediterranean outside Pisa. February is not the normal tourist month and the palm trees are all wrapped in sacking or plastic to protect them from the rain.

It was overcast when I arrived and yesterday was bleak with heavy rain, but this morning the sky was open from edge to edge, the unfettered wind blowing the waves clear from the coasts of Spain.

Dabbling my toes in the waters edge, or wading deeper having to run as the larger waves threatened to wash me clear to my waist. Icy feeling, but I’m sure still just the chill of cool water, air thrown through the night, no Arctic currents penetrate here.

To my back are the shuttered beach buildings, and tall rectangular pillars of plywood I assume enclosing the summer showers. Also sprinklers along the beach edges. I’d wondered at these when I’d walked at dusk when I’d first arrived, but not realised they were along every beach side – presumably to dampen the sand and keep it from blowing and burying the resort.

The sand slopes steeply towards the sea, and on the water’s edge a huge driftwood log, like a seat deliberately placed to watch the sea, but now periodically half covered then left stranded by the flow of waves.

On the map it is an contained sea, the Mediterranean, but here I see open sea – if there are boundaries they are far away and the waves long enough to build and be as terrible and awesome as those that had crossed the whole atlantic a few months ago when I was in Brazil. These waves though are less uniform, not the slowly growing and breaking of surf beaches, but more a tumbling boiling ferment.

To the north the jagged edges of snow flecked mountains mirror the wave crests, sharp edged against the clear morning sky. Further north they will become the marble-shot mountains of Carrera from which the best stone in the world is quarried. Marble not unlike the frozen surface of these surf flecked seas.

The sun just breaks over the land. It must be a marvelous place for sunsets over the sea. Slowly as the orange edge rises over the beach buildings the first rays touch the white wave crests, shining above the grey troughs between, then gradually the grey surface turns slate green.

I retrieve my sandals from under the pile of flotsam where I’d left them earlier, then reluctantly turn my back to the sea.