Tag: lecture

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Adrian’s crazy day

Today I had to give two presentations; one summarising a paper about systems consolidation in memory, and another covering my research project this year. The research project presentation had been prepared for quite a while in advance, but as luck would have it, yesterday afternoon we struck on a different way of statistically analysing my data which completely changed all of our conclusions. So last night I had to revise the best part of my project presentation.

As for the paper presentation, well, I had to prepare that from scratch last night as well because I’ve been really busy all week. I managed both perfectly well and just before going to sleep I uploaded both to the Internet so I could download them from the room I’d be giving the presentations at.

Fast forward to this morning. It’s a grey and dreary day as usual in Cambridge, and when I get to the Anatomy department, which is where the presentations sessions are, I think to myself, ‘Why hasn’t anyone bothered turning the lights on.’ Grumbling a bit, I walked up the stairs into the team rom and flicked the light switch on. Nothing happened. It turned out that power had been lost to the entire site.

This didn’t prevent my workshop group from doing their presentations; a few people had brought laptops and others had theirs on disk. Alas, mine was too big to fit on a disk and I don’t like the idea of burning a new CD every time I make a new presentation*. Because, of course, without power, we had no Internet connection.

As luck would have it, the power turned on before I had to give my paper presentation. Except the net connection was still down. Since I didn’t have any notes on me for it, I had to spend the tea break rapidly drawing diagrams on the whiteboard and trying to remember what I was supposed to be talking about; it didn’t help that the first presenter didn’t talk about the study results, which meant that I had to do some quick thinking.

So this was about 11:30am. I had to give my project presentation – the important one – in about an hour. I jumped on my bike, cycled back to college and burned a CD with my presentation on it. On a whim, I decided to test it on my normal CD drive to see if it worked. My computer hung for a few minutes while it mulled over whether it wanted to read it (during which time my urge to throw it out of the window reached startling proportions) and eventually I just manually ejected it. I then burned another CD, which produced the same results. At this point, I was feeling a bit hard done by.

Finally, I decided that given my CD writer is professional grade and that my CD reader is quite temperamental, it was probably the reader that was wrong. So I took the two CDs and zoomed back to the Anatomy department, where the ageing iMac put my own computer to shame and read the CDs without a hitch. Which is how the presentation ultimately went – without a hitch – although I was literally battered with probing questions about my results, interpretation and conclusions. Interesting questions all of them, and I was quite pleased to find that I could respond to them all.

And now I’ve just discovered that my Orange SPV phone has finally been repaired. So maybe things will calm down now.

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A few good ways

Yesterday, I went to an interesting talk by Simon Conway Morris (Professor of Evolutionary Paleobiology at Cambridge) – it was one of those great lectures that starts off from a simple premise, in this case convergent evolution, and then takes that idea on a wonderful journey that touches upon the inevitability of intelligence, culture, social systems and the Fermi Paradox.

What he was saying wasn’t completely new to me – that there’s a phase space of ‘possibilities’, whether they be biological, social or cultural, and that some points within that space are more stable than others – has been said before. However, Morris was much more convinced about the idea that if we were to ‘rerun evolution’, things would not necessarily turn out to be as different from what we have today as you might expect. In other words, chance events (e.g. the first hominid falling off a tree and breaking its neck, or the K/T impactor) are vanishingly small influences on evolution when compared to the relative sparseness of stable configurations of molecules/individuals/bone structures, etc.

One interesting example which I intend to look into when I have more time (i.e. probably never) is the assertion that the structure of DNA is so good that it is not simply ‘a bit better than everything else’ – it is that all the alternatives are so crashingly rubbish that DNA is one of the only ways in which to create a decent molecule capable of carrying large amounts of genetic information reliably, given the starting materials of amino acids and suchlike.

So, it’s not that Morris believes that there is some kind of directionality to evolution, but he does believe that there are only a few good ways to do certain things. Another good example is the social organisation of beehives.

As far as we can tell, the whole ‘hive’ structure has evolved independantly a few times, indicating that it is a pretty good structure. However, apparently the fossil records indicates that in the past, bees and insects used a whole panoply of social organisations completely different from hives, but of course none are around any more, so hives are not just slightly better than the rest, they are much better. Morris then mused about how this might be due to the aggressive pursuit of resources and their efficient distribution, and what this implies about other ‘successful’ societies…

So it turns out that Matt Webb is talking about the same thing today; he is taking issue with New Scientist’s treatment of essentially what I’ve mentioned above – that there may be some constraints (this is a bit of a strong word, but anyway), biochemical or otherwise, that could ‘guide’ evolution (guide is not the best word either). Now, I’m the first person to get irritated with New Scientist’s sensationalisation of science, and I too am a bit bothered about how the scientists seem to be tracing out an inevitable path of evolution (selective quoting may be the culprit here). I suspect that they only said that to try and make things easier for the the public. In any case, the central thesis remains the same.

Matt is not happy with the idea that evolution is somehow deciding where to go next – but I don’t think anyone is claiming this. What’s being claimed is that there are only a few good ways to do certain things (like see, or move), and yes, you’ll end up trying all of them through random mutations, yes, and you’ll choose the good ones through natural selection. But important thing is that if you were to repeat the process again, because there are only a few good ways to do a certain thing, you’ll end up with organisms taking those very same routes again. That’s the new idea. And I don’t think that Matt’s ubiquitous ‘push’ and ‘pull’ dichotomy does not sufficiently describe this subtlety well enough.

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Spiritng Neal Stephenson Away

Yesterday was a busy day for me; it began with meeting a friend from London, and then a talk by the ever-elusive Neal Stephenson. We progressed on to a spot of Laserquest, had dinner, and finished with watching ‘Spirited Away’. Since there’s a lot of interesting stuff there, I’m making this a ‘massive’ entry.

Meeting up with Lal (the aforementioned London friend) went quite well until we were ensnared by the siren call of Waterstones. Lal, bedazzled by their 3 for 2 offers, proceeded to buy Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, both by Neal Stephenson, in addition to the copy of Cryptonomicon that he’d brought with him. I volunteered to buy the books for him in case there was a student discount, but apparently Waterstones have stopped doing that sort of thing (probably because of people like me).

A hundred metres further down the road, we ducked into Galloway and Porter, my favourite seconds bookstore. Galloway and Porter has an almost universal effect on heavy readers of any genre; they’ll walk in, and exclaim that this didn’t look like a second-hand bookstore, because everything was in good condition. Then they’ll find several books that they’ve bought within the last year being sold significantly cheaper than what they paid. Once that stage has passed, they’ll proceed to a Terminator-like state, they methodically scan the titles of every single book present to see if they are worth buying for �1 or �2 – this usually requires quite a bit of mental rejigging, since you’re used to paying at least �6 for a book. In book calculus, does this mean that a book one-third the quality of a book you would buy for �6 be worth paying �2 for, or is book quality perhaps a logarithmic scale? Such questions keep the best thinkers of Cambridge awake at nights…

After we left Galloway and Porter, Lal dropped his bags off in my room, and we went out to meet Rich, who’d be joining us for the Neal Stephenson lecture. We found Rich on the Trinity backs (the ‘back’ of Trinity College, next to the river, also confusingly called the ‘backs’) and went to the lecture.

Now, Stephenson’s lecture was the second of a weekly six-part lecture series, and the first lecture was by George Dyson, which I wrote about earlier. I think only about ten students turned up to that talk, meaning that we were outnumbered by the dozen or so fellows present. I assumed that this would be the same for Stephenson’s lecture – granted, Stephenson is a world-famous bestselling science fiction author, but Trinity had done (perhaps deliberately) such a poor job of publicising the talks that I felt it wouldn’t make any difference.

I was wrong – someone on the Cambridge University Science Fiction Society (of which I am not a member) had posted a note about Stephenson’s talk to their mailing list. As a result, the place was full by the time we got there. Not wanting to sit at the back of the room, we grabbed a few chairs and proceeded right to the front, along with a few glasses of wine for good measure.

Stephenson was looking particularly (and some might say, unusually) respectable, what with the nice suit and the neatly tied ponytail. When the room had become sufficiently packed, the lecture series organiser introduced Stephenson’s talk, on ‘Newton/Leibniz’ and Stephenson warned us about the length and esoteric nature of his lecture. If we wanted to leave, we were told, he wouldn’t be offended.

Neal Stephenson looking respectable after the lecture

I didn’t take notes for the lecture, so I won’t be able to go into detail about its content.

Stephenson started off by giving us a quick overview of the Newton/Leibniz controversy; these two people developed calculus seemingly independently in the 17th century, and sparked off a huge argument about who developed it first. The short answer is that Newton was first, and the long answer would include how Leibniz also contributed much to our use of calculus today, including the integral and differential notation.

But that’s not what Stephenson wanted to talk about – that story has been dealt with by many scientific historians. Instead, he took us on a typically Stephenson-like meandering of thoughts and facts relating to why this argument developed in the first place, what the historical context was, and the personalities of Newton and Leibniz.

As I said, I’m not prepared to go into detail because I’d inevitably make a dreadful hash of it. Suffice to say that Stephenson had done his homework, plus that of many others, and that if I could find any fault with his lecture, it was that he spent perhaps a little too much time reading directly from 17th century texts.

If you’re familiar with Stephenson’s writing, you’d expect his lecture to have some wonderful and bizarre tangents in them that defied all imagination. You wouldn’t be disappointed. For several minutes he talked about how some scholar (John Wilkins) tried to create a new language using only a few thousand words that he deemed essential; he placed these words into a matrix, and people would refer to them by their co-ordinates within the matrix. In the course of creating this language (and the book about it) he had to compose the world’s most comprehensive list of organisms at that time.

This posed a problem; he was implicitly casting doubt on the veracity of Noah’s Ark by saying that there were so many animals in the world, and this was not a good idea at all in the religious climate of the time. So Wilkins decided to go and explain exactly how, with the use of diagrams, all of these animals would fit into Noah’s Ark. Wilkins listed a number of tricks he could have used to do this, namely the ‘six cubits equals one cubit’ trick, and the ‘all animals were vegetarians before the Ark’ trick, and then delcared that he didn’t want to use any of them.

It appeared that Wilkins succeeded, although he did have to fit about 1800 sheep into the Ark as food for all the carnivores.

Naturally, I completely forget why Stephenson got onto this, although there’s a strong possibility that a good explanation simply does not exist – you just can’t be sure with Stephenson. Another of his short tangents involved comparing the Jedi Knights to the Knights Templar, which I think you’ll agree is much more straightforward.

Anyway, the rest of the lecture swirled around alchemy, myths of secret societies, universal libraries, theories of the nature of the universe, monads, and other such things. Thus it is not surprising that Stephenson overran his alloted time by an impressive 30 minutes. Due to this, there were only two questions asked. The first was whether Stephenson considered himself a dualist or a materialist; Stephenson replied saying that much of the materialist argument is based on the brain being a Turing machine, which he is not so sure about, and so he’s a skeptic.

The second question, asked by myself, addressed what I believed to be the burning issue of the night:

“Can you tell us about your next book?” I said. After the room burst into laughter, I added, in an effort to appear on-topic, “Is it related to what you’ve been talking about this evening?”

I already knew a little about his next book, but it’s always fun asking. Stephenson told us that it would be set in the 17th century, which was a great time because it had all these mathematical and cryptographical shenanigans going on (which was the subject of his lecture), plus it also had real life pirates, plenty of swashbuckling, and swordfights galore. What more could you ask for? The book will also visit people such as Newton, Leibniz, the Royal Society in London, and I imagine the royal intrigue going on at the time.

The lecture organiser helpfully added that the book would be called ‘Quicksilver’. Stephenson then added that his publicist would have killed him for not mentioning the name of the book, and that it was coming out in August.

Most people left after that and maybe a dozen people hovered around the front of the room evidently wanting to talk to Stephenson, probably for book signings – but none of them wanting to be first. I didn’t really want to go first, because I thought I might talk to him for a while and it wasn’t fair to keep other people waiting. However, this didn’t seem to work so after Stephenson told the President of the Science Fiction Society that he, alas, could not present a talk to them because he was leaving tomorrow, Lal and I had a brief chat with him about his website, which screams ‘Don’t talk to me’ to all visitors, and his time in Europe visiting Versailles.

“Was that for research?” asked Lal.

“Yeah, for ‘research’,” replied Stephenson, with audible quotation marks, and then went on to talk about how authors get to have lots of fun researching things.

There was a bit of a chat about doing publicity for new books, and I executed a shameful segue by saying, “Well, if you want to get back into practice for signing books, why not start now?” as I whipped out my copy of Cryptonomicon. He agreed, in good grace, and wrote a little message at the front:

“To Adrian. Thank you for staying awake through my talk, Neal S.”

Lal also had his three books signed, although he didn’t get a message. We later theorised that this was probably because he didn’t manage to stay awake through the talk.

I did ask Stephenson whether he was doing anything that night, in an unlikely effort to get him to come out with us, but unfortunately he suspected that plans had already been made for him by Trinity College; undoubtedly true, although we berated ourselves afterwards for not having pretended to be the ‘Trinity College Welcoming Committee’ and kidnapping him.

I’m going to skip over Laserquest now, since this account has already gotten too long and you probably don’t want to hear about it anyway. Neither will I talk about dinner, which we had at a nice Italian restaurant with another of my friends, Zizhen; instead I’m going to talk about the film ‘Spirited Away’ that we saw afterwards.

‘Spirited Away‘ is Japan’s most successful film ever, and could be superficially described as a children’s anime fantasy. Its producer, Hayao Miyazaki, commands such respect among the Japanese that they look forward to his new films with the same kind of expectation (if not more) that we have for the next Harry Potter book.

You might think, as a friend of mine confessed, that you don’t want to watch a cartoon movie. Maybe you really don’t. But if you miss ‘Spirited Away’, which should be released in the UK next year, you’ll be missing one of the most magnificent and wonderful films ever made. It has meticulously crafted and beautiful artwork along with a sensitive score; and of course, the story is enchanting; it’s about a young girl who has to save her parents and make her way in a strange and fantastic world.

What I loved about Spirited Away was the way in which they really utilised the power of animation. Several scenes were literally breathtaking, and unlike the identical Disney movies we’ve had in recent years, Miyazaki didn’t simply use animals – he created all sorts of strange creatures that morphed and shapeshifted.

When I left the cinema (actually, it was a college film society, but anyway) I saw that everyone was smiling. It was one of those movies that really delighted you; it wasn’t what I’d simply call a feel-good movie, and it was darker than most Disney movies, although certainly not as dark as Miyazaki’s other great work, ‘Princess Mononoke‘. The story and setting was much more adventurous than most movies these days as well, with a rich universe that had some excellent concepts that progress far further than the ‘dwarfs and elves’ that seem to characterise most other fantasy movies.

I intend to buy the score of the movie, and also the DVD when it is released – it’s just one of those movies that I really have to own.

And that’s about it for me, I’m not going to write any more now since I have to leave for the lab and do some programming. I might add some stuff later though.

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An Evening with George Dyson

[This is an extended version of an email I sent to the Culture list, hence the slightly bizarre structure. I thought it was a bit long to put in ‘Middling’].

So I was walking through Trinity College Great Gate when I see none other than the overlord of all evil, Rich Baker, who was also coming to see the lecture that evening by George Dyson. Rich presented me with one of his new business cards after we’d had a glass of wine, whereupon I made some remark about American Psycho and the business card scene (I haven’t seen the movie but I’m informed that said scene is very amusing). Apparently I was the second person that day to make an American Psycho, which prompted me to ruminate on the likelihood of this (high, I ventured, because Rich’s circle of friends is very film-literate and I certainly don’t receive that many business cards from friends).

The talk was excellent; George Dyson is actually the son of Freeman Dyson, a fact which laudably was not stated on the (two) promotional posters in existence. Under the enormous pressure of having a world-famous physicist as a father and the director of the Royal College of Music as a grandfather, he went and lived in a tree for a few years, and then became a world-famous kayak builder. George wrote a book, then wrote another book about Project Orion. Project Orion was the codename for a US spaceship powered by nuclear bombs.

Some interesting factoids: One of the Project Orion plans specified an 8 megaton advanced spacecraft that would use 2500 nuclear bombs. As these things happen, it got shelved due to safety concerns and political reasons, although for a while the militar kept it knocking it about as a contingency plan ‘in case the Russians occupied Jupiter’.

Also, George Dyson seems to have the largest collection of Project Orion materials in the world. When NASA wanted to get a copy of the original ARPA contract to initiate multimillion dollar Project Orion (~20 pages long), he had to sign a NASA contract for the single figures dollar transaction (~30 pages long).

There were plans for a related ‘Doomsday’ weapon by the US military which would have several spacecraft outside the orbit of the Moon, 1 day away, with enough nukes to flatten the entire of Russia.

During almost every stage of Project Orion, the researchers were allowed to do essentially whatever they wanted as long as they were being supervised by a responsible physicist. George rather wisely pointed out the flaw in this, namely the ‘responsible physicist’ part, and then went on to tell us about how the Project Orion team used large amounts of C4 to launch a demonstration craft (blowing lots of other stuff up in the process).

He also showed us a diagram of how to make a shaped nuclear charge, which he told us was technically classified and illegal, but it didn’t matter since someone had sent it to him by mistake in the first place and he just put it in his book.

Before George finished, he remarked that it was well worth our time coming back next week to see Neal Stephenson, who he said was never seen in the US, so a public appearance by him in the UK was amazing. The Trinity don who’s organising the lectures said, well, it wasn’t quite public, was it, since Trinity is a private college. He then laughed heartily in a matter I found mildly unsettling, as if saying ‘Foolish mortals, only Trinity College members may gaze upon the visage of the slow-to-write one you call ‘Neal Stephenson’!’.

I had a few words with George after the lecture, asking him about other forms of nuclear propulsion (he isn’t so hot on them) and whether attitudes might change sufficiently in the future to allow nuclear propulsion in space (he thinks so). He also said that his father, Freeman, holds an interesting if politically-incorrect view about nuclear proliferation. Apparently Freeman thinks that if Hitler used a nuclear weapon in WW2, they would’ve been so stigmatised to have been abandoned by the world. Perhaps.

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The BA Festival of Science

Thanks to a generous grant from Trinity College at Cambridge University, I was able to attend the full week-long British Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Festival of Science in Leicester this year, from September 9th to 13th. Curiously enough, no-one uses the acronym BAAS while in America they do use AAAS – instead we simply call it the ‘British Association’ which no doubt causes some confusion.

Anyway, the BA Festival of Science is a week long event that can’t really be described as a conference as it doesn’t have a particularly focused nature aside from being about ‘science’ – and even that isn’t accurate, since there were plenty of lectures given outside the traditional remit of science, such as economics and philosophy. The lecture schedule consists of several parallel tracks that tend to last from half a day to a day covering distinct topics, for example, ‘Life and Space’ or ‘Radioactive waste – can we manage it?’ In addition to the lectures were debates and workshops.

This year there was quite a spread of topics such that on some days I had a very hard time trying to decide which to attend; in retrospect I think I managed a decent spread.

I originally intended to write up some of my notes made during the Festival as a series of pieces in the ‘Middling’ weblog, until I realised that I simply didn’t have the patience for that. So this article will attempt to string together my thoughts on some of the more interesting lectures I attended.

Visualisation using sound
Professor Stephen Brewster, University of Glasgow

This was a fairly interesting lecture summarising the work Brewster’s group has been doing with the MultiVis project. What they’re trying to do is to give blind people access to data visualisations, such as tables, graphs, bar charts and so on. Current methods include screen readers, speech synthesis and braille; these have the (perhaps) obvious problems of presenting data in a serial manner that is consequently slow and can overload short term memory, thus preventing quick comparisions between different pieces of data.

A good example of this is how blind people would access a table.

10 10 10 10 10 10
10 10 10 10 10 10
10 10 10 10 20 20
10 10 10 10 20 30

To access the table, item by item speech browsing would probably be used, so you can imagine a computer voice reading from left to right, ‘Ten, ten, ten, ten, ten…’ etc. This has the serious problem of being extremely slow, and currently there is no way for a blind person to get an overview of this table and importantly, be told that the interesting information is in the bottom right hand corner.

The solution? Multimodal visualisation, and in this case, sonification – that is, the use of sound other than speech. Sonification offers fast and continuous access to data that can nicely complement speech. Prof. Brewster demonstrated a sound graph, on which the y-axis is pitch and the x-axis time, so for the line y=x you would hear a note rising in pitch linearly. This worked quite well for a sine wave as well.

Multiple graphs can be compared using stereo, and an interesting result is that the intersection between graphs can be identified when the pitch of the two lines is identical. So, imagining that you are trying to examine multiple graphs, you might use parallel sonification of all graphs in order to find intersections and overall trends, and serial sonification in order to find, say, the maximum and minimum for a particular graph.

3D sound also offers possibilities for the presentation of multiple graphs; different graphs could be presented from different angles through headphones. Continuing this further, soundscapes would allow users to control access to graphs simply by moving the orientation of their head. Access by multiple users is possible, so you could have one person guiding another through the soundscape.

Such sonification aids can also be used together with tactile stimuli such as raised line graphs; by placing sensors on a user’s fingertips and connecting them to a computer, users could naturally explore a physical graph while a ‘touch melody’ would indicate (for example) the horizontal or vertical distance between their two fingers. External memory aids could be built in by allowing users to place ‘beacons’ on graphs, perhaps by tapping their fingers – as the user moves away from the beacon, the beacon sound diminishes.

Of course, sonification can also be used for sighted people.

I don’t doubt that these concepts have been explored before, but this presentation was the first I’ve encountered that has dealt with them in such a comprehensive manner and also produced practical demonstrations.

Information foraging and the ecology of the World Wide Web
Dr. Will Reader, Cardiff University

This was perhaps the most interesting Internet related lecture at the Festival of Science; I was impressed by the way Dr. Reader drew upon previous research, which is something that I think many web pundits forget to do. My notes:

Some background: information foraging occurs because people have a limited time budget in which to find answers. According to a recent survey, 31.6% of people would use the Internet to find the answer to any given question – this is the largest percentage held by any single information resource on the survey. However, if you collect together all the people who would use other people as an information resource in order to answer their question (i.e. not only friends and family, but also teachers, librarians, etc) then the humans still win.

H. A. Simone once said something along the lines of ‘Information requires attention, hence a wealth of information results in a poverty of attention. What is then needed is a way to utilise attention in the most optimal manner.’

To use a traditional metaphor, you could call humans ‘informavores’ (eaters of information). When humans read in search of an answer, we are trying to maximise the value of information we receive over the cost of the interaction.

What is meant by the value of information? The value of a text relies principally on relevance, reliability and the difficulty of understanding. Examining the latter factor in detail, it’s theorised that the amount learned from a text (or any information resource) follows a bell curve when plotted against the overlap between the person’s own knowledge, and the information in the text. So – if there is a very small overlap (i.e. almost everything in the text is new) or a very large overlap (everything in the text is already known), little is learned. When the overlap is middling, the amount learned is high.

Dr. Reader carried out an experiment to test this theory in which subjects were given a limited amount of time to read four texts about the heart (something like 15 to 30 minutes). They then had to write a summary of what they’d learned. The texts varied in difficulty, from an encyclopaedia entry to a medical journal text.

The results of the experiment showed that people were indeed adaptive in choosing which texts to spend the most time reading according to their personal knowledge on the subject; in other words, they read the texts that contained a middling amount of information overlap the most. However, the subjects did act surprisingly in one way – they spent too long reading the easiest text.

Is this a maladaptive strategy? Maybe not – it could be sensible. Given the time pressure the subjects were under, they may have simply been trying to get the ‘easy marks’ by reading the easy text.

It turns out that there are two different access strategies when reading multiple texts on a single subject (or accessing multiple information sources). There’s ‘sampling’ in which subjects choose the best text available. They do this by skim reading all of the texts quickly and then deciding on the best. It sounds easy enough, but it’s very demanding on memory if you have several texts to read. People spontaneously use the sampling strategy only 10% of the time.

The majority strategy is called ‘satisficing’ (yes, that’s the right spelling), the aim of which is to get a text that is ‘good enough’. Simply enough, a person will read the first text, and then move on if they aren’t learning enough.

All of this changes when people are presented with summaries of texts. Now, sampling is the majority strategy. These summaries, or outlines, are judged by people to be reliable clues to the content of the text – an information ‘scent’, if you will.

This begs the question, why don’t people use the first paragraph of a text as an impromptu outline? It’s because the first paragraph is not necessarily representative of the rest of the text; we all know how texts can change rapidly in difficulty, particularly in scientific journals.

Outlines can sometimes be misleading. In a study carried out by Salmoni and Payne (2002), when people use Google for searching, they can sometimes be more successful at saying whether a fact is on a given page if they do not read the two line summary/extract in each link in a search result page. This suggests that the Google extract is not as useful as we might believe.

Another experiment by Dr. Reader confirms what many of us anecdotally know. Subjects were asked to research a subject using the Internet through Google. They were given 30 minutes, and then had to write a summary afterwards. The results:

Mean unique pages viewed: 20.8
Mean page time visit: 47.6 seconds
Mean longest page time visit: 6.43 minutes

This shows that some pages were only visited for a matter of seconds, whereas others were visited by several minutes.

Dr. Reader concluded with a few suggestions for improvements to search engines. They could index the difficulty and the length (in words) of search results, and also the reliability of a page. This is already done in Google via Page Rank (essentially calculated by the number and type of pages linking to the page in question), but Dr. Reader also suggests using annotation software (like the ill-fated Third Voice) and interestingly, education. We should educate Internet users in how to quickly and accurately evaluate the reliability of a page.

All in all, an interesting lecture.

The march of the marketeers: invasive advertising and the Internet
Dr. Ian Brown, University College London

I didn’t learn much from this lecture, but that’s only because I’m very interested in the subject anyway and keep abreast of all the latest developments. However, it was a very comprehensive and up to date lecture, unlike some of the reporting you see in the mass media. One thing that I did find interesting was Dr. Brown’s claim that some digital TV channels have ‘unmeasureably small audiences’.

Since audiences are measured by sampling a few hundred or thousand people who have little monitors attached to their TVs, if no-one in the sample group watches a programme or channel, then as far as the survey company is concerned, no-one in the entire country watched it. Even for supposedly popular programmes such as the Nationwide League Football matches on ITV digital, there were zero viewers in the sample group. This is understandably causing problems with advertisers.

Dr. Brown went on to talk about Tivo and all the rest, but I’m not going to cover that.

And all the rest…

I’m giving a very skewed view of the Festival here because I only took notes on things that were completely new to me and that I felt would interest people here. Consequently, I didn’t take any notes in the space lectures I went to, even though some of them, such as ‘Living and working in space’ by Dr. Kevin Fong and the lecture given by Sir Martin Rees were excellent. The former was a very entertaining and information lecture about space medicine on long duration space missions, and the latter was all about posthumans and the Fermi Paradox.

I was actually stunned by Sir Martin’s lecture; not because of its content (I read lots of SF, thank you very much) but because it was coming from him – the Astronomer Royal, no less! In the past, such respectable people wouldn’t touch esoteric subjects like posthumans with a bargepole.

Then there was the talk on DNA nanomachines by Dr. Turberfield from Oxford University; I hadn’t quite grasped the possibilities of DNA assembly before that lecture, and neither did I truly understand how DNA computing could be used to solve a variant of the travelling salesman problem, but afterwards I did (in other words, it was a good lecture). Dr. Turberfield also showed a model of his current work in trying to construct a DNA nanomachine motor, which he confesses probably doesn’t have much immediate practical use but certainly is fun.

Most of the lectures I attended were pretty good; some were excellent, of which I’ve only mentioned a few above. If you ever find that the BA Festival is taking place nearby one year (next year it’s in Salford) then it’s probably worth getting hold of a programme and attending for a day or two. You’ll learn a lot.

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Neuro and Psych

There were two things that caught my attention today in lectures. The first was a list of symptoms of mania (an abnormal emotional state, the opposite of depression):

i. Unfounded elation
ii. Hyperactivity
iii. Talkativeness and “flight of ideas”
iv. Distractivility
v. Impractical, grandiose plans
vi. Inflated self-esteem
vii. Reduced sleep

…and I thought, ‘I wonder if I know anyone who has those symptoms…’

The other thing that caught my eye was this passage from a lecture handout:

If the brain was organised logically and economically, then the neural systems responsible for the control and initiation of writing should be located close to the primary langauge systems. Therefore hand dominance (left or right handedness) and language laterality (whether your language centres are located in your brain’s right or left hemisphere) should eb tightly correlated, with the dominant hand being contralateral to the language dominant hemisphere.

If you got all of that, good. But I have some real problems with that passage. Firstly, we only started writing a few thousand years ago, and indeed literacy only became widely prevalent in the last couple of millenia, so frankly writing could not have had any realistic impact on human evolution. Note that I’m only talking about writing, I’m not talking about hand dominance (e.g. which hand you throw with, which hand you use for complex tasks) which incidentally would make much more sense.

Secondly, what’s all this talk about the brain being organised logically and economically? Evolution is a powerful thing, to be sure, but it’s not perfect and it’s entirely possible that there are many good reasons why the language systems would not have to be next to the writing (or dominant hand control) centres. In fact, as far as I can tell, there are only two reasons for why people believe this. The first is that there is a significant correlation between language system lateralisation and dominant hand control lateralisation.

The second is that some people thing, ‘Well, language is a complex task and so is hand control. They both need lots of processing power, so obviously they should be put in the same place.’ This argument is so terrible that I need not discuss it further.

Anyway, I suspect that all of this is down to the lecture handout being rushed, but I do wonder if lecturers realise that making even the smallest typo or factual error in their handouts can cause unlimited amounts of grief to all revising students.