Voice Recognition Elevator

Voice Recognition Elevator is a wonderful video on haha.nu, the lifestyle blog. This clip is from Burnistoun, a comedy show from BBC Scotland, season 1, episode 1. Hysterical! Thanks and a hat tip to RER. (P.S. Load time for the haha.nu website can be long, but it is worth the wait.) (Note: A faster loading version can be found on YouTube.)

Science Blogging

Now that I have returned from my summer journey to Russia, and have also dealt with some urgent work-related matters, I have a little time for IS Group blogging. Instead of writing, I have been reading other science-related blogs. There are lots out there, and many are a lot of fun. There has been a lot of Hausermania and science v. religion discussion of late, but there are also other fascinating topics to read about.

Here is a list of some of the various blogs that I usually check in on. Language Log, by Mark Liberman, Geoffrey Pullum and many others; Three-Toed Sloth, by Cosma Shalizi; Why Evolution Is True, by Jerry A. Coyne; Neuron Culture, by David Dobbs (now on Wired Science Blogs); IEEE Spectrum Tech Talk; Child's Play on Scientopia; Greg Laden's Blog; john hawks weblog (paleoanthropology, genetics, and evolution); Neuronskeptic; Open Parachute, by Ken Perrott; and The Bubble Chamber.

Some additional general sites include Big Think and ScienceBlogs. A related blog of interest is Schneier on Security, by Bruce Schneier. And, of course, I would be remiss if I did not end with some relentless self-promotion for the IS Group blog.

The End of Human Specialness

Jaron Lanier is one of those people who always make me ask "What exactly does this guy do for a living" while also making me think, "Man, this guy really knows what he's talking about!" So I was delighted to see his response at the top of the list in the "What's the Big Idea?" piece in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education Review. In a nutshell: Lanier sees through all the hype surrounding "transformative" technologies like Facebook and Twitter, and he shows the overall negative effect they have on the quality of our lives as human beings.

Why We Need Vector Symbolic Architectures

A couple months ago I gave a talk at Haskins about Vector Symbolic Architectures, a new approach to knowledge representation and computing that is very robust to even large amounts of noise. This blog post describes how a classical (von Neumann) computing architecture can fail from the random flipping of even a single bit. Whatever organizing principles the mind/brain is using, they can't be anything like this!

Long Compound Noun Alert

When I was a grad student at Brandeis, I always enjoyed the sign that said Volen Center for Complex Systems Building -- a single noun consisting of six words. From today's Slashdot comes Chinese Internet Addiction Boot Camp Prison Break. Not only is this compound noun seven words long; it doesn't even use a preposition! The number of possible bracketings (word groupings) of such a string is 429, as determined by the Catalan number with n = 7; however, the bracketing that makes the most sense to me is

[[Chinese [[internet addiction] [boot camp]]] [prison break]]

Avatar: Best. Review. Ever.

Best smackdown review yet of a disappointing movie that I couldn't even make it through.

Cognitive Science vs. the Zombies

Place your bets.