Change blindness

Yesterday, my co-supervisor Jason Mattingley gave an excellent summary of the role of attention in human visual processing. He showed a couple of excellent clips.






Does this really occur in real life? Yes

And not included in his talk, but another interesting demonstration of change blindness in real life with some explanation about what it teaches us about attention is here.

On being sane in insane places

I recently came across the Rosenhan study (Science, 1973, 179:250-258 - see Wikipedia summary). This was an attempt to quantify type I and II errors in diagnosing mental illnesses. But it also exposed the stigma we attach to mental disorders and the inhumanity of many mental institutions.

It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals. The hospital itself imposes a special environment in which the meanings of behavior can easily be misunderstood. The consequences to patients hospitalized in such an environment-the powerlessness, depersonalization, segregation, mortification, and self-labeling-seem undoubtedly countertherapeutic. I do not, even now, understand this problem well enough to perceive solutions. But two matters seem to have some promise. The first concerns the proliferation of community mental health facilities, of crisis intervention centers, of the human potential movement, and of behavior therapies that, for all of their own problems, tend to avoid psychiatric labels, to focus on specific problems and behaviors, and to retain the individual in a relatively non-pejorative environment. Clearly, to the extent that we refrain from sending the distressed to insane places, our impressions of them are less likely to be distorted. (The risk of distorted perceptions, it seems to me, is always present, since we are much more sensitive to an individual's behaviors and verbalizations than we are to the subtle contextual stimuli that often promote them. At issue here is a matter of magnitude. And, as I have shown, the magnitude of distortion is exceedingly high in the extreme context that is a psychiatric hospital.) The second matter that might prove promising speaks to the need to increase the sensitivity of mental health workers and researchers to the Catch 22 position of psychiatric patients. Simply reading materials in this area will be of help to some such workers and researchers. For others, directly experiencing the impact of psychiatric hospitalization will be of enormous use. Clearly, further research into the social psychology of such total institutions will both facilitate treatment and deepen understanding. I and the other pseudopatients in the psychiatric setting had distinctly negative reactions. We do not pretend to describe the subjective experiences of true patients. Theirs may be different from ours, particularly with the passage of time and the necessary process of adaptation to one's environment. But we can and do speak to the relatively more objective indices of treatment within the hospital. It could be a mistake, and a very unfortunate one, to consider that what happened to us derived from malice or stupidity on the part of the staff. Quite the contrary, our overwhelming impression of them was of people who really cared, who were committed and who were uncommonly intelligent. Where they failed, as they sometimes did painfully, it would be more accurate to attribute those failures to the environment in which they, too, found themselves than to personal callousness. Their perceptions and behavior were controlled by the situation, rather than being motivated by a malicious disposition. In a more benign environment, one that was less attached to global diagnosis, their behaviors and judgments might have been more benign and effective.

The science of gender

Over the weekend I had the chance to watch a highly interesting debate between professor's Stephen Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke. The debate, held in 2005, was part of Harvard's Mind/Brain behavior initiative.

You can watch it here (requires Real player)

Google App Engine

Okay. I've just spent a couple hours playing with Google App Engine (see here or here for my results).

I am impressed! It comes with a tutorial which is easy to follow and in about 2 hours from start to finish even I managed to make a scalable (simple) web app. The free limits on usage that Google offers are ample for a not-too-popular webservice.

I think something missed in a lot of coverage is how tight the integration is with Google Apps for My Domain (GAFMD). I added my app to my GAFMD and it appears at just another service. This makes it possible for example, for a company to have email etc. hosted by Google and then have their own in-house apps also hosted by Google and managed through the same interface. I expect we'll see companies offer paid 3-party services soon.

Basically, Google has just moved the barrier of entry for scalable web-apps to nil. Yes there are some limitations, for instance, complete lack of offline processing. But they say that will change soon.

Oh. And if all you need is statically hosted websites - with two lines of code you can get that. So expect to see low-end website hosting slowly going out of business as people start to realize this.

This of course paves the way for Google to own even more of the web. But, for all the talk of lock-in, Google gives away a lot of the wrapper code for this service, so there is nothing stopping someone else from setting up a Google App Engine-compatible server farm.

PS My favourite application so far: an AJAX python shell.

Free (no signup) tool for browser shots

I've just discovered Browershots, a nice tool for viewing your webpage in a number of different platforms/browsers. Unlike many equivalents there is no need to sign-up etc.

Link: Protecting the internet without wrecking it

A thoughtful essay on both the benefits and pitfalls of general purpose PCs that anyone can program.

I found it informative, interesting and well thought-out.

Python machine learning resources

Elefant - Python OSS machine learning library

Pyrex - a Language for Writing Python Extension Modules

OSS for machine learning