Personal website – any views expressed herein are my own unless otherwise obvious
‘… there are more red flags here than in a People’s Liberation Army parade. To critique this paper is not quite “shooting fish in a barrel,” because the fish are already dead before we’ve reached the end of the abstract.’
– Scott Aaronson, commenting on a paper on a paper from HSBC and IBM claiming to use a quantum computer to get a 34% advantage in predictions of financial trading data
Fun video, in case you were running out of applications of the Fibonacci sequence,
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, …
(each term is the sum of the previous two; start at 0, 1).
You could use it to convert between miles and kilometre thanks to the ratio of consecutive terms (1.618, as you go further long the sequence) being close to how many km there are in a mile (1.609).
The approach doesn’t work so well for 1 mile (it would say, 2km 🙃). It gets better for larger numbers. If you wanted to convert, say, 89 miles to km, you’d get 144 by going one step along the sequence. The correct answer is 143.232 km.
Clarissa: You are one naughty husband, George.
George: You asked how it works. To be with someone in this business. This is how. You each know what you know, and you know what you’ll do, and you never discuss certain things again. I watch her. I assume she watches me. If she’s in trouble, even of her own making, I will do everything in my power to extricate her. No matter what that means. You understand?
Clarissa: My God, that’s so hot.
George: That’s how it works. It’s the only way.
I completed my MSc and PhD through the Neuroinformatics Doctoral Training Centre at the University of Edinburgh, hosted by the Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation in the School of Informatics. I was also part of the School’s Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems, now named the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation.
My office was in the Psychology department (different School) and I was part of the Human Cognitive Neuroscience group there. My computer was supplied by Informatics – hand-delivered in a bin bag (cf. Dijkstra, “Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes”).
My thesis was in cognitive science and officially my degree was in Informatics, which makes sense according to how Edinburgh divides up the disciplines:
Informatics has many aspects, and encompasses a number of existing academic disciplines – Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science and Computer Science. Each takes part of Informatics as its natural domain. In broad terms:
The psychologists would have located my research somewhere between individual differences psychology and cognitive psychology. A Psychology department administrator once declared in the staff room, “I thought you were a psychologist, but you’re not.”
This is what interdisciplinary means.
Will McPhail [@realmikejfox] (2019, October 20). “Listen to me. Gender is a construct, society is a construct, money is a construct. But bedtime is very, very real.” [Instagram photo]. Retrieved from instagram.com/p/B32EjQKD7UT/
Post by @skeletor@mas.to
The Dodo bird verdict asserts that all effective psychological therapies are equally effective and work because of shared “common factors”. It is heavily debated.
Another Dodo bird verdict could also be said to apply to evaluation methods. I don’t believe that all methods are equally good; however, some do, and it might be handy to have a name for the position.
Here’s the section of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that inspired the term:
“What I was going to say,” said the Dodo in an offended tone, “was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race.”
“What is a Caucus-race?” said Alice; not that she wanted much to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that somebody ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.
“Why,” said the Dodo, “the best way to explain it is to do it.” (And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)
First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (“the exact shape doesn’t matter,” it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no “One, two, three, and away,” but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out “The race is over!” and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, “But who has won?”
This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”