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One Thousand Days Later
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10–15 minutes·
No comments on One Thousand Days LaterWith the image of immersive fiction games becoming increasingly negative, and the competiton to attract players for massively multiplayer online games becoming increasingly fierce, how can the genre survive? Other than improved content and organisation, it needs to use new technologies and modes of thinking to its full advantage, and the prize is creating a…
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Rewarding Behaviour
While browsing through hot-shot Cambridge lecturer and security expert Markus Kuhn’s homepage, I came across these two articles about the detrimental effects rewards can have on performance: For Best Results, Forget the Bonus and Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator. While some may view these articles as part of the backlash against behaviourism, I do…
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Pattern Recognition
A major part of my project involves me taking recordings of a signal (in this case, electrochemical spikes from a neuron) and discriminating them from the noise inherent in the system…
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Reprise
Saw Donnie Darko a second time today, with a friend from Leeds; it survived rewatching quite well. Afterwards, I described my ‘Dance Dance Revolution’ theory of cognitive development to her. It’s a little like Piaget’s controversial theory (although obviously much sillier). Jean Piaget was a psychologist who believed that children when through qualitatively different levels…
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Email
It used to be that I’d reply to all personal email as soon as it arrived. Those days, alas, have been gone for some time now. While I do receive more personal emails, response time has not increased proportionally – more likely it’s increased logarithmically. I’m not entirely sure why this is so. It’s not…
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Driving simulators
Something I’ve been idly wondering about on and off for a while is why there aren’t any decent driving simulator/trainers for PCs (or consoles). Surely there must be a market for this sort of thing? If you sold a package with force-feedback driving wheel, pedals and gearstick, together with a fairly up to date and…
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The Decline of Metafilter
Once again, Metafilter has me worried. Far be it for me to predict the imminent demise of one of the Internet’s most popular and well-known weblogs when it has confounded the predictions of countless others, but this time I think there’s a real problem.
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Probabilities
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2–3 minutes·
(Warning: Ramble ahead) Earlier today, I was listening to a guy describe a project I might do next year for neurobiology, trying to figure out some of the characteristics of Golgi neurones in the cerebellum. The way you can identify these neurones, other than looking at them under a microscope, is to insert a super-thin…
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Writing
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1–2 minutes·
Something popped into my head today as I was scribbling down some notes during a supervision: does the fact that I write with a pencil (as opposed to a pen or biro) affect my writing style, and on a higher level, my method of thinking? Pencils provide a much less constrained and linear way of…
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