Category Archives: Other science

aka stamp collecting

Get Back To Me Later

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‘Sleeping on a problem’ may be the best way to solve it

A research has suggested that the best way to solve a complicated problem is to distract yourself for a few minutes with something else or sleep on it overnight.

However, as with most summaries of psychological studies I read, the actual experiment described seems somewhat limited, and the conclusion is an extrapolation from specific to general, without clearly showing that other factors have been eliminated. But that may just be a limitation of the reporting.

Calibration is a Cold Dead Fish

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But did you correct your results using a dead salmon?

With the sheer number of images, can certain voxels light up as false-positives? You betcha. Is every voxel significant? Well, to answer that, Craig Bennett and his colleagues took a dead Atlantic Salmon, and placed it in an fMRI. The salmon was then shown a series of photographs depicting humans in various social situations. The (dead, remember?) fish was asked to determine which emotion each individual has been experiencing. They scanned the salmon’s (did I say it was dead?) brain, and collected the data. They also scanned the brain without showing the fish the pictures. The images were then checked for change between the brain doing picture recognition tasks, and the brain at rest, voxel by voxel. They found several active voxel clusters in the (yes, still dead) salmon’s brain.

Rush Hour, Anytime

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Traffic simulator

I think the ring road is the most accurate; it shows the density fluctuations that appear and is a good match to actual traffic. The other situations have left out some details — I’ve noticed that when a lane closure is upcoming, where people will change lanes varies greatly, even when traffic in both lanes has slowed to a crawl. When that happens, you’re supposed to go all the way to the merge point, and then merge, but many people will force their way into the other lane well before, and some people will simply not let a car into the gap in front of them. In the uphill grade I didn’t see much of the behavior I observe on I-81 in northern Pennsylvania: a truck going 55 mph passing another truck going 54 mph, and screwing a long procession of cars behind them, all of whom want to (and can) do at least 65.

Still, it’s a simulation, and I see there’s a “politeness factor” slider, which I presume controls letting people in rather than someone in the simulation flipping a virtual bird or honking a horn.

The Sure Thing

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The Allais Paradox

[I]f we don’t make decisions based upon a complete set of information, then what are our decisions based upon? Which factors were actually affecting our choices? Kahneman and Tversky realized that people thought about alternative outcomes in terms of gains or losses, and not in terms of states of wealth. The gambler playing poker is only concerned with the chips right in front of him, and the possibility of winning (or losing) that specific amount of money. (The brain is a bounded machine, and can’t think about everything at once.) This simple insight led Kahneman and Tversky to start revising the format of their experiments. At the time, they regarded this as nothing but a technical adjustment, a way of making their questionnaires more psychologically realistic.