AW

ChatGPT-assisted analysis of quality of life and university rankings - This morning, I was having breakfast in London when I came across this Visual Capitalist post on quality of life in cities.

Psychonomic Society blog covers our research - In addition to the excellent g-distance paper, recently published in Psychological Review, the other main output from Lenard Dome’s Ph.D. was a paper on the effect of concurrent load on the inverse base-rate…

What research culture in UK universities has lost, and what will replace it. - I’ve been based at the University of Exeter this week, a place I worked for 12 years and where I’ve maintained good relationships with several people ever since.

Industrial Action in UK Higher Education - TL;DR: Due to Industrial Action, I am currently limiting the number of new, external, unpaid peer-review jobs I take on.

You have done something you consider to be impossible, what do you conclude from this?

It seems to be increasingly common to use the price of a take-away cup of coffee as a way of saying something is affordable - the most recent example I came across is that COVID tests, which were free in England until today, are now “less than the price o…

The difference between knowing that it fails, and why it fails. - In a peer review I got a while back, someone wrote “Sometimes understanding why a simple model fails is far more informative than showing that a complex model succeeds”.

Kruschke's EXIT model and the inverse base-rate effect - I’m happy to announce that Human Brain Mapping published our paper on the neural correlates of the inverse base-rate effect on Friday; it’s available as open access here.

A new formal theory of category learning - I’m pleased to announce that our paper on the CAL model has been accepted for publication, at Psychological Review (lead author: René Schlegelmilch).

Basic object classification still hard for AI - In recent years, there have been quite a few claims that state-of-the-art AI has reached human levels of performance in object recognition.

Take back control - Having recently acquired a ‘regular’ Android phone, after several years either without a smart phone or with a de-Googled one (that’s a whole other story…) I got a slice of the default behaviour of these devices.

Global model analysis - Lenard Dome, currently a graduate student in my lab, has just released an R package for parameter space partitioning onto CRAN (psp).

Drift into the horizon with precision melodies... - Today, I’m listening to Myrakaru’s excellent Tammetoru - again.

Business models in a post-scarcity digital world - Just got my Patreon invoice for June, which reminds me to blog briefly about patronage as one business model when what is being produced is digital, and hence has basically zero marginal cost per addition…

The gender data gap - I came across this 2019 book in a second hand bookstore in Salisbury in the summer of 2020, and rediscovered it on my home office bookshelf a month or so back.

Or...the hyperactive hive mind - I heard Cal Newport talking about his new book, A World Without Email on Lex Fridman’s podcast, where Cal said the book really should have been called The Hyperactive Hive Mind, but that wouldn’t have sold as many copies.

Twenty-seven stories from the Campbell years - Bought this three-volume set in The Book Cupboard shortly after first lockdown, and finally finished them (in between several other books) last night.

Very, very hard - Patricia Rich and colleagues (Rich et al., 2021) ask us to imagine what, for most theorists in cognitive science, would seem to be an ideal working environment.

Another decade, another web technology... - I’ve maintained a personal website since 2000.