June 8, 2009
How people find a common language
Humans carrying out a task together find a common language, sooner or later. Even communities of speakers do this, and in fact this how they may come up with natural languages over time. At Carnegie Mellon University, we have now simulated this process in a cognitive computer model, tracing the steps that humans take to learn the elements of a graphical language, to forget them, to re-learn, and to arrive at a common language in a small community. Psychological research provides a pretty precise picture of how human memory works. In this paper to be presented at the International Conference on Cognitive Modeling, we describe the combination of two worlds: multi-agent and evolutionary simulation on the one hand, and psychologically validated models of memory and cognition to simulate the evolution of a domain language. The model explains the empirical data pretty well, but also makes a prediction: that human communication between two partners needs to go both ways in order for us to learn and to converge.
David Reitter and Christian Lebiere.
Towards explaining the evolution of domain languages with cognitive simulation. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling (ICCM), Manchester, UK, 2009.
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June 5, 2009
Recession Era Victory Garden in Oakland, Pittsburgh
Here's a great little Recession Era Victory Garden providing seedlings for everyone who likes to take some and plant them in their yard.
(Found on Forbes Ave, Oakland, Pittsburgh.)
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May 20, 2009
Oh my, UI: Evolution of the dialog from hell
Various friends have been pointing out that Aquamacs features in blogs these days, which is great. They're all pointing out our (rarely seen) dialog from hell, which has too many buttons in a not-so-logical arrangement.
Luckily, we've already thought of something for this dialog that has been in Emacs for a long time. The current Aquamacs version (1.7) uses this one:
Still, this is a far cry from what it's supposed to look like. More improvements are on the way for Aquamacs 2.0, whose Cocoa-based framework will allow us to design an appropriate dialog much more easily.
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May 17, 2009
Airbus A320: what does this sign mean?
I found this signage in a US airways A320 EOW, at the emergency exit door.
I imagine some French and German designers must have pondered for days about how to come up with a drawing for what they wanted to convey, but somehow the message got lost on the way. Suggestions appreciated.
Posted by dr at 3:19 AM | Comments (4) - Leave a comment now!
April 30, 2009
Mad bike skills in Edinburgh
Friends from the other Burgh (Edin-) will recognize the locations - real bike skillz to see.
On a related note: my trick bike, stolen four years ago in Edinburgh, has now been offered back to me in a reader (thief) comment on this blog. Not for real, I guess. To my regrets, requests for an interview with the bike thief were turned down.
(Thanks to Gregor for the link.)
Posted by dr at 3:40 AM | Comments (1) - Leave a comment now!
