Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Quantum Question Equality
Quantum theory reveals puzzling pattern in how people respond to some surveys
phys.org, June 2014
Researchers used quantum theory – usually invoked to describe the actions of subatomic particles – to identify an unexpected and strange pattern in how people respond to survey questions.
"Human behavior is very sensitive to context. It may be as context sensitive as the actions of some of the particles that quantum physicists study," said Zheng Wang, lead author of the study and associate professor of communication at The Ohio State University.
"By using quantum theory, we were able to predict a surprising regularity in human behavior with unusual accuracy for the social sciences in a large set of different surveys."
These new findings involved an issue that has long faced researchers using survey data or any self-report data: question-order effects. Scientists have known that the order in which some questions are asked on a survey can change how people respond. That's why survey organizations normally change the order of questions between different respondents, hoping to cancel out this effect.
"Researchers have thought of these question-order effects as some kind of unexplainable carry-over effects or noise," Wang said. "But our results suggest that some of these effects may not be mere nuisance, but actually are something more essential to human behavior."
Take, for example, one of the surveys used in the study. This was a Gallup poll that asked Americans, among other questions, whether Bill Clinton was honest and trustworthy and whether Al Gore was honest and trustworthy.
The survey changed the order in which these questions were asked between respondents and, as expected, there were question-order effects found. When respondents were asked about Clinton first, 49 percent said that both Clinton and Gore were trustworthy. But when respondents were asked about Gore first, 56 percent said that both were trustworthy.
The pattern that quantum theory predicted – and that the researchers found – was that the number of people who switch from "yes-yes" to "no-no" when the question order is reversed must be offset by the number of people who switch in the opposite direction.
Indeed, in this case, the number of people who said "no-no" – that both Clinton and Gore were not trustworthy – went from 28 percent when the Clinton question was asked first to 21 percent when Gore was asked about first.
That 7 percent decline essentially cancels out the 7 percent increase in the number of people who said "yes-yes" when the question order was reversed.
Likewise, the number of people who switched from "yes-no" to "no-yes" was offset by the number of people who switched in the opposite direction.
The researchers called this phenomenon "quantum question equality." They found it in every one of the surveys studied. [marked as suspicious]
"When you think about it from our normal social science perspective, the finding is very bizarre," Wang said. "There's no reason to expect that people would always change their responses in such a systematical way, from survey to survey to create this pattern."
But from a quantum perspective, the finding makes perfect sense, Wang said. "It is exactly what we would have predicted from quantum theory. We mathematically derived this precise prediction of quantum question equality from quantum theory before we looked at any data. This had to be true if our theory is right."
"Usually, in the social sciences we're talking about parameters: If we can predict that one factor is always larger or smaller than another, we consider that a strong finding," she said.
"But here we found a quite precise answer that is always nearly zero – the number of people who switch an answer one way are always offset by the number of people who switch in the opposite direction. That number never changed. In other words, their difference is always nearly zero. And that level of exactness is almost never found in social science research."
The larger question brought up by this study is "why?" Why must the number of people who switch from "yes-yes" to "no-no" when question order is reversed be offset by the number of people who switch in the opposite direction?
Wang said there is nothing yet proposed in standard psychological theory that would explain why this is true.
Paper: Context effects produced by question orders reveal quantum nature of human judgments
PNAS
Provided by The Ohio State University
Magical Quantums
aka on words and meaning
Study finds weird magic ingredient for quantum computing
phys.org, June 2014
[^THIS IS NOT clickbait; it is the original title from a phys.org article]
"Quantum devices are extremely difficult to build because they must operate in an environment that is noise-resistant. The term magic refers to a particular approach to building noise-resistant quantum computers known as magic-state distillation. So-called magic states act as a crucial, but difficult to achieve and maintain, extra ingredient that boosts the power of a quantum device to achieve the improved processing power of a universal quantum computer."
Magic states offer surprisingly low error rates for quantum computing
phys.org, Mar 2015
Making quantum computers that are noise-resistant, or fault-tolerant, is one of the biggest challenges facing their development.
Currently, the leading approach to fault-tolerant quantum computing involves "magic states." First proposed in 2005 by Sergey Bravyi and Alexei Kitaev, magic states are quantum states that contain an acceptably low level of error. In order to create magic states, physicists take noisy quantum states and use a process called distillation to derive a smaller number of improved, i.e., higher fidelity, states. This process is repeated as many times as necessary until the states reach the target fidelity.
Study finds weird magic ingredient for quantum computing
phys.org, June 2014
[^THIS IS NOT clickbait; it is the original title from a phys.org article]
"Quantum devices are extremely difficult to build because they must operate in an environment that is noise-resistant. The term magic refers to a particular approach to building noise-resistant quantum computers known as magic-state distillation. So-called magic states act as a crucial, but difficult to achieve and maintain, extra ingredient that boosts the power of a quantum device to achieve the improved processing power of a universal quantum computer."
Magic states offer surprisingly low error rates for quantum computing
phys.org, Mar 2015
Making quantum computers that are noise-resistant, or fault-tolerant, is one of the biggest challenges facing their development.
Currently, the leading approach to fault-tolerant quantum computing involves "magic states." First proposed in 2005 by Sergey Bravyi and Alexei Kitaev, magic states are quantum states that contain an acceptably low level of error. In order to create magic states, physicists take noisy quantum states and use a process called distillation to derive a smaller number of improved, i.e., higher fidelity, states. This process is repeated as many times as necessary until the states reach the target fidelity.
On the Illusion of Intent and Mass Conspiracy
A spook’s guide to the psychology of deception
Mind Hacks, Aug 2014
[blog author critiques the information used according to conventional literature on the overarching psychologically-related topics synthesized. He concludes in critiquing the tenor of government-directed psychological operations (and conspiracy theories as well)]
"We tend to think that the secret services are super efficient experts with an infinite budget, but they probably just work like any other organisation. HSOC were probably told to deliver an Online Covert Action Accreditation course with few resources and not enough time and came up with the most sensible thing in the time allowed."
Mind Hacks, Aug 2014
[blog author critiques the information used according to conventional literature on the overarching psychologically-related topics synthesized. He concludes in critiquing the tenor of government-directed psychological operations (and conspiracy theories as well)]
"We tend to think that the secret services are super efficient experts with an infinite budget, but they probably just work like any other organisation. HSOC were probably told to deliver an Online Covert Action Accreditation course with few resources and not enough time and came up with the most sensible thing in the time allowed."
Magical Thinking
light paintings - Janne Parviainen |
Andrew Crumey, 2014, Aeon
While scientific theories can become increasingly technical and abstract, the brains that struggle to interpret their meaning haven’t evolved much in the past 50,000 years. If our own brain is a kind of living fossil, it’s hardly surprising that so much of what we do with it is metaphorically fossilised too.
light paintings - Janne Parviainen |
Labels:
consensual reality,
corroboration,
illusion
Note to God
Sunday, September 14, 2014
On Polymathism and Macguyvering
Anyone can learn to be a polymath
Robert Twigger, Aeon MAgazine, 2013-11-04
the division of labor vs. the synthesis of polymathism
Carrying too many tools is a sign of a weak man; it makes him lazy. The real master has no tools at all, only an unlimited capacity for using the resources at hand.
On Metacognition
Starting from scratch: RIT program teaches first-year students how to learn
Oct 2013, phys.org
Rochester Institute of Technology is launching a $900,000 National Science Foundation-funded program to improve the retention of deaf, hard-of-hearing and first-generation undergraduates majoring in science, engineering and computer science. Between five and 10 percent of RIT's students are deaf or hard of hearing. Many attend the National Technical Institute for the Deaf or receive support services—such as interpreting and notetaking—from NTID while enrolled in one of RIT's other eight colleges.
RIT's Project IMPRESS (Integrating Metacognitive Processes and Research to Ensure Student Success) seeks to teach students self-reflection and self-assessment skills—key components of metacognition, or thinking about how one thinks and learns.
Oct 2013, phys.org
Rochester Institute of Technology is launching a $900,000 National Science Foundation-funded program to improve the retention of deaf, hard-of-hearing and first-generation undergraduates majoring in science, engineering and computer science. Between five and 10 percent of RIT's students are deaf or hard of hearing. Many attend the National Technical Institute for the Deaf or receive support services—such as interpreting and notetaking—from NTID while enrolled in one of RIT's other eight colleges.
RIT's Project IMPRESS (Integrating Metacognitive Processes and Research to Ensure Student Success) seeks to teach students self-reflection and self-assessment skills—key components of metacognition, or thinking about how one thinks and learns.
Flesh-Searching
"milk tea girl" - a positive sample of the flesh engine - source: BBC |
China's internet vigilantes and the 'human flesh search engine'
BBC, Jan 2014
mobs of web users who turn on individuals and make their lives a misery
Thousands then banded together online to track down the perpetrator.
Hours later, they zeroed in on Yin, whose license plate number was a partial match, and posted his mobile number online.
The internet vigilantes were wrong, Yin insists. He tried to defend himself
"flesh-searching" phenomenon is cyberbullying on an epic scale, sometimes involving hundreds of thousands of anonymous
government believed the human flesh search engine was "illegal and immoral"
scrutinizing politicians
Some targets of flesh-searching have already taken their cases to court, but it's hard to blame a single perpetrator.
Duality of the Mind
One of the most inconceivable things in the nature of the brain is, that the organ of sensation should itself be insensible. To cut the brain, gives no point, yet in the brain alone resides the power of feeling pain in any other part of the body. (p19)
My guardian angel I believe is taking upon himself the trouble to think for me.
-quoted from a patient, in The Duality of the Mind, Arthur Ladbroke Wigam, 1844, p130
On Irony Ad Infinitum
Curtis Kullig, LoveMe, on the subject of intellectual property and consumerism:
…all literally my exact Love Me lifted. No permission, no compensation, no deviation from what I had made. … the only real way to perfect what I created is to launch it in larger platforms. … I had to start putting out product in different categories in order to prevent someone from taking it. The irony is that there are critics who will tell you I’m a sellout, or that I came up too quick, but really, am I just supposed to bend over and let massive brands co-opt what I created without even asking or paying?
“No way”, he says….
Juxtapoz, March 2013
On Entropy and Nations
image source:
"Global Inequality in Energy Consumption from 1980 to 2010," Scott Lawrence, Qin Liu, and Victor M. Yakovenko, published online at Entropy, 16 December 2013 http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/15/12/5565
Provided by Joint Quantum Institute
The entropy of nations: Global energy inequality lessens, but for how long?
Jan 2014, phys.org
Saturday, August 16, 2014
Face Swap
Geraldo Rivera w Cheetos Features |
New algorithm uses subtle changes to make a face more memorable without changing a person's overall appearance
Dec 17, 2013, phys.org
makes subtle changes to various points on the face to make it more memorable without changing a person's overall appearance
lead author Aditya Khosla, a graduate student in the Computer Vision group within CSAIL. "This is a very subtle quality, because we don't want to take your face and replace it with the most memorable one in our database, we want your face to still look like you."
Graffobots
Graffiti artist Katsu |
This Open Source Graffiti Drone Will Give Cops Nightmares
WIRED, Apr 2014
no need to explain - it's a remote-controlled graffiti machine.
Overlords
hands_Tom Humbertone_illustrator |
Superfast rock-paper-scissors robot 'wins' every time
Matthew Wall, BBC, 4 November 2013
A robot developed by Japanese scientists is so fast it can "win" the rock-paper-scissors game against a human every single time.
It uses high-speed recognition and reaction, rather than prediction.
Technically, the robot cheats because it reacts extremely quickly to what the human hand is doing rather than making a premeditated simultaneous action as the rules state.
Taking just one millisecond (ms) - a thousandth of a second - to recognise what shape the human hand is making, it then chooses a winning move and reacts at high speed.
Eyeborg
The first person in the world to become a government-recognized cyborg
Annalee Newitz, io9.com, 02 Dec 2013
Neil Harbisson is the first person on the planet to have a passport photo that shows his cyborg nature — in his UK passport, he's wearing a head-mounted device called an eyeborg. The color-blind artist says the eyeborg allows him to see color [by translating it into sounds], and he wants to help other cyborgs like himself gain more rights.
totally unrelated |
Labels:
cyborgs,
eyes,
humans,
machines,
perception,
sensation,
superceptionto,
synaesthesia
Thursday, June 12, 2014
Self-Numbing
Second in line is the fact that we have had to build structures to keep the Alaskan pipeline from sinking into the earth due to global warming.
Lastly, 'synthetic musk' is the thing in dryer sheets that make you want to make love to dryer sheets.
The Panopticon is Among Us
via heliocentra tumblr |
Ultra tiny camera has no lens – uses algorithm to develop pictures
Mar 28, 2014, phys.org
An extremely tiny lensless camera, developed by Rambus, has been slowly making waves over the past year. Researchers for the company, David Stork and Patrick Gill won a Best Paper award at last year's Sencomm 2013 for describing what the company has created. They spoke again at last month's Mobile World Congress, describing their new type of camera—one that might someday soon be used to give virtually any digital device, some degree of vision.
Instead of a lens, a pattern is etched into the glass above the chip—the imager reads the light that is received, processes it using an algorithm developed by Rambus and converts it into a recognizable image. What's amazing is that the etched pattern on the glass and the chip are both roughly the size of a period at the end of a sentence.
Particular etched patterns allow for light to be intentionally refracted in different ways as it passes through the glass—images made from them would appear unrecognizable to the human eye, but the algorithm makes use of refraction properties to reconstruct the light received into a recognizable image.
Trying to grind ever smaller lenses has reached its limits, thus something new had be developed.
Making a camera so tiny opens the door for its use in a whole host of new applications, allowing them to become aware of their physical surroundings, all at a very low cost—perhaps just pennies per chip—that means they could be embedded in clothes, toys, mirrors, security systems, etc., bounded only by the imagination of device makers. On the other hand, such tiny cameras could also open a Pandora's box if they are used to invade privacy or for control purposes.
More information: Lensless Ultra-Miniature CMOS Computational Imagers and Sensors
PDF paper
PDF presentation
New surveillance technology can track everyone in an area for several hours at a time
Craig Timberg, Washington Post, 5 Feb 2014
Maurizio Galimberti_photographer |
[This system, stationed miles above an area, can watch many square miles, for hours at a time, where 'targets' are single blips on the area below, being followed for the duration of time. All data can be stored indefinitely.]
Now You Can See Which Websites Are Tracking You in Real-Time
vice, 25 Nov 2013
Labels:
automation,
perception,
surveillance,
vision
Self-Replicates - First Attempts
Google patents robot help for social media burnout
BBC, 22 Nov 2013
If maintaining your presence on social media is becoming a burden, Google may be able to help.
The search giant has patented plans for software which slowly learns how you react on social networks.
The software can mimic your usual responses to updates and messages from friends and relations to help cope with the daily data deluge.
The software also analyses continuing interaction and flags messages that demand a more personal response.
Global Emotional Synchrony
that is all
Social networks like Facebook can spread moodsBBC, 13 Mar 2014
taiwanese army |
'Emotional contagion' sweeps Facebook
phys.org, Jun 2014
"People who had positive content experimentally reduced on their Facebook news feed, for one week, used more negative words in their status updates," reports Jeff Hancock, professor of communication at Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and co-director of its Social Media Lab. "When news feed negativity was reduced, the opposite pattern occurred: Significantly more positive words were used in peoples' status updates."
(editor's note)
I do believe that the article above dated March 2014 is referring to the same research as the June 2014 article. Said research caused a major uproar due the ethically questionable but legally solvent 'experiments' done on a set of Facebook participants. So, what I would like to see next is the data showing what happened between the first release of the study's conclusions (in April) and the next burst of media coverage that took place months later. Why the lag and through what channels did it eventually reach mass media?
On Closeness, Distal Perception, and the Medium
grandma's got a point |
When people say, about the weather, “It’s close out”, meaning, “It’s humid”, it’s because some things, in a relative way, actually are closer.
Deep sounds, with longer wavelengths, like a rumbling train; and “base note” smells, with larger molecules, like the mercaptans of cigarette smoke, are – relative to our ‘normal’ range of distal perception – closer to us, because they can travel more easily on the excess moisture in the air.
Informational Cascades and the Bubble of False Causation
Information technology amplifies irrational group behavior
Apr 11, 2013, phys.org
...information technologies can mislead us by magnifying social processes that distort facts and make us act contrary to our own interests.
Informational Cascade
Curiously, an old book entitled Love Letters of Great Men and Women: From the 18th Century to the Present Day, which in 2007 suddenly climbed the Amazon.com bestseller list, provides a good example of group behaviour set in an online context:
"What generated the huge interest in this long forgotten book was a scene in the movie Sex and the City in which the main character Carrie Bradshaw reads a book entitled Love Letters of Great Men – which does not exist. So, when fans of the movie searched for this book, Amazon's search engine suggested Love Letters of Great Men and Women instead, which made a lot of people buy a book they did not want.
...review goes on to talk about group polarization, echo chambers, and radicalization via information selection algorithms in online forums or searches
via
"Infostorms", Pelle G. Hansen, Vincent F. Hendricks, Rasmus K. Rendsvig, Metaphilosophy, Volume 44, Issue 3, pages 301–326, April 2013
DOI: 10.1111/meta.12028
see also:
Margaret Heffernan: Dare to Disagree
ted.com, Aug 2012
Research funding has become prone to bubble formation
Nov 22, 2013, phys.org
...past decade's massive investments in cognitive neuroscience as a potential bubble
"These investments have been preceded by a dramatic rise in fields that attach 'neuro' to some human behaviour or trait with promises that the techniques of neuroscience will explain it – and into game-changing explanations of the human mind," Budtz Pedersen
due to ... traditional scientific incentives such as academic capital and reputation are being replaced by monetary incentives and competition
These structural reforms of research management may amplify social phenomena like "pluralistic ignorance" and "lemming effects" ...
"When researchers choose to ignore their private information and instead mimick the actions of researchers before them, they initialise a so-called lemming effect in which everybody publishes in the same journals and applies for funding for the same type of projects. Such a scientific bubble will eventually bust when the programmes' scientific explanations are put to the test, but the problem is that they may already have drained the research system from resources. And then the system will be faced with an investor confidence crisis."
"Science Bubbles", David Budtz Pedersen, Vincent F. Hendricks. Philosophy & Technology, Nov 2013
Labels:
autopoiesis,
culture,
information,
memetics,
not science,
science
Pseudoscience, Forgeries, and Faking It for Real
tech support |
California lawmaker wants teens to learn to spot fake news
Jan 2017, Associated Press
Science publisher fooled by gibberish papers
phys.org, Feb 2014
Publisher of science journals Springer said Thursday it would scrap 16 papers from its archives after they were revealed to be computer-generated gibberish.
Sokal's Pseudoscientific Hoax
The Sokal affair, also called the Sokal hoax, was a publishing hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor and, specifically, to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies – whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross – [would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions".
The article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", was published in the Social Text Spring/Summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist. On its date of publication (May 1996), Sokal revealed in Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax, identifying it as "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense...structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernist academics] he could find about mathematics and physics".
wiki
"Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" proposed that quantum gravity has progressive political implications, and that the "morphogenetic field" could be a cutting-edge theory of quantum gravity (a morphogenetic field is a concept proposed by Rupert Sheldrake that Sokal characterized in the affair's aftermath as "a bizarre New Age idea"). Sokal wrote that the concept of "an external world whose properties are independent of any individual human being" was "dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook". ... footnotes conflate academic terms with sociopolitical rhetoric...
[Sheldrake is himself known in the scientific community as a pseudo-scienctist.]
Sokal, Alan D. (May 1996). "A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies". Lingua Franca. Retrieved April 3, 2007.
In the second paragraph I declare without the slightest evidence or argument, that "physical 'reality' (note the scare quotes)... is at bottom a social and linguistic construct." Not our theories of physical reality, mind you, but the reality itself. Fair enough. Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. I live on the twenty-first floor.
Gross, John, The Oxford Book of Parodies, Oxford University Press, 2010, pg. 307
The Annals of Improbable Research (AIR) is a bi-monthly magazine devoted to scientific humor, in the form of a satirical take on the standard academic journal. AIR, published six times a year since 1995, usually showcases at least one piece of scientific research being done on a strange or unexpected topic, but most of their articles concern real or fictional absurd experiments, such as a comparison of apples and oranges using infrared spectroscopy.
Naked Came the Stranger is a 1969 novel written as a literary hoax poking fun at contemporary American culture. Though credited to "Penelope Ashe", it was in fact written by a group of twenty-four journalists led by Newsday columnist Mike McGrady. McGrady's intention was to write a deliberately terrible book with a lot of sex, to illustrate the point that popular American literary culture had become mindlessly vulgar. The book fulfilled the authors' expectations and became a bestseller in 1969; they revealed the hoax later that year, further spurring the book's popularity.
Fictitious entries, also known as fake entries, Mountweazels, ghost words and nihil articles, are deliberately incorrect entries or articles in reference works such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, maps, and directories. Entries in reference works normally originate from a reliable external source, but no such source exists for a fictitious entry. Copyright trap is a specific case where the motivation for the entry is to detect plagiarism or copyright infringement.
Fictitious entries on maps may be called phantom settlements, trap streets, paper towns, cartographer's follies, or other names. They are intended to serve as traps for identifying copyright infringements.
The fictional town of Agloe, New York, was invented by map makers, but eventually became identified as a real place by its county administration because a building, the Agloe General Store, was erected at its fictional location. The "town" is featured in the novel Paper Towns by John Green.
Google, alleging its search results for a misspelling of tarsorrhaphy started appearing in Bing results partway through the summer of 2010, created fabricated search results where a hundred query terms like "hiybbprqag", "delhipublicschool40 chdjob" and "juegosdeben1ogrande" each returned a link to a single unrelated webpage. Nine of the hundred fraudulent results planted by Google were later observed as the first result for the bogus term on Bing.
[wtf does this even mean?]
Disumbrationism was a hoax masquerading as an art movement that was launched in 1924 by Paul Jordan-Smith, a novelist, Latin scholar, and authority on Robert Burton from Los Angeles, California.
Annoyed at the cold reception his wife's realistic still lifes had received from an art exhibition jury, Jordan-Smith sought revenge by styling himself as "Pavel Jerdanowitch", a variation on his own name, and entering a blurry, badly painted picture of a Pacific islander woman brandishing a banana skin, under the title "Exaltation". He made a suitably dark and brooding photograph of himself as Jerdanowitch, and submitted the work to the same group of critics as representative of the new school, "Disumbrationism". He explained "Exaltation" as a symbol of "breaking the shackles of womanhood."[1] To his dismay, if not to his surprise, the Disumbrationist daub won praise from the critics who had belittled his wife's realistic painting.
loser of one of the competitions |
Since 2006 there has been held a yearly painting contest in memory of Paul Jordan-Smith and the disumbrationist school of arts: the "International Pavel Jerdanowitch Painting contest".
[how in the world do you make a fake painting for a contest about fake paintings where all the judges know that all the paintings are meant to be fake? furthermore, how do you spoof THIS contest? by making real paintings?]
Entrants do not strive to "win"; they want to lose: "Badness is the fraction of the voters which selected the painting as the worst. Each voter was shown five randomly selected paintings. Therefore the average badness is 0.2. The maximum possible badness is one and the minimum possible badness is zero."
see some samples here
spot the forgeries, take the quiz!
Vermeer or Meegeren?
On Hindsight and Blindness, 12-2012
background on the Vermeer forgeries, the most famous story of forgeries in art, which spawned the science of art forgery forensics
The Postmodernism Generator is a computer program that automatically produces imitations of postmodernist writing. It was written in 1996 by Andrew C. Bulhak of Monash University using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text from recursive grammars. A free version is also hosted online. The essays are produced from a formal grammar defined by a recursive transition network [graph theoretical schematic used to represent the rules of a context-free grammar].
Racter: Writing Robots, 03-2012
linking to a book written by a computer - The Policeman's Beard Is Half-Constructed (1984)
[suggested reading]
List of topics characterized as pseudoscience
[news on forgeries]
Belgrade researchers view art as self-organization process
phys.org, Jun 2015
"Our approach is based on the premise that the creativity is a process of artist's self-organization on the mental level reflected in the self-organization of forms, patterns, textures and brush strokes of the painting which determine the aesthetic quality of the artwork."
They wrote that "complexity and self-organization are numerical quantities which could be used to differentiate between an original, creative, artistic intension and realization from the technical process which produces a copy of the work of art."
Labels:
authenticity,
fake,
faux science,
forgery,
gibberish,
hoaxes,
intentional pseudo science,
pseudo science,
science,
writing
Monday, March 17, 2014
Color-Brained
Smeared Sky Sunset - Timestacks - Matt Molloy |
An Anthropologist on Mars. Oliver Sacks. Vintage, 1996.
“The Case of the Colorblind Painter”
“Individuals may only “see” a color (or make a perceptual categorization) if there is an existing cultural category or name for it. But it is not clear whether such categorization may actually alter elementary color perception.” (footnote 9 on page 17)
Chromatophenes (colored rings or halos) can be induced by the magnetic stimulation of the brain (the V4)
-Semir Zeki, neurophysiologist, 1970s; found in Sacks p28
Some particular part of the brain may be discovered as the generator of color, “But color vision, in real life, is part and parcel of our total experience, is linked with our own categorizations and values, becomes for each of us a part of our lifeworld, of us. … It is at higher levels that integration occurs, that color fuses with memories, expectations, associations, and desires to make a world with resonance and meaning for each of us. (p29)
The power of expectation and mental set in the perception of color is clearly shown in those with partial red-green colorblindness. Such people may not, for example, be able to spot scarlet holly berries against the dark green foliage, or the delicate salmon-pink of dawn – until these tare pointed out to them. “Our poor impoverished cells,” says a dyschromatope of my acquaintance, “need the amplification of the intellect, knowledge, expectation, and attention in order to ‘see’ the colors that we are normally ‘blind’ to.” (footnote 20 on page 29)
Cultural Evolution of Basic Color Terms
JULY 10, 2012
Seeing Red
JUNE 3, 2013
The Extended Phenotype
It hit me like the Ecstasy of St. Theresa:
The miniature yellow pages is an extended phenotype of the internet.
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