Book Reading #32 - Opening Skinner's Box

Chapter 9


Summary:
This chapter starts of with the tale of a tragedy in which a doctor tries to cures a patient's epilepsy by performing surgery. In doing so, he cures the boy of epilepsy but also takes the boy's ability to form memories. Kandel then uses this story to research memory and how it works. He uses sea slugs as his subjects and discovers that memories are best made by electrochemical produced in the brain. Through further research, he hopes to one day may a drug that will enhance memory.

Discussion:
This seems like the plot to some Hollywood blockbuster. It seems like an interesting concept, pills that increase memory. I can see these as being considered only as a subscription medication and not for everyday use. I think it would follow the same paths of Ritalin and Adderall.

Book Reading #31 - Coming of Age in Samoa

Chapter 10


Summary:
This chapter dwells on the life and personality of the average Samoan girl. It mostly focuses on the average girl's individuality. Mead studies and gains insight on different girls and their personality and even mentions how death and other mature topics have intruded on their lives without the parents even protecting them or comforting them. It seems the average young Samoan girl must learn to mature early on.

Duiscussion:
It seems shocking that the subject of death is not that big of a deal as it is here. It makes me wonder what else had different emotional charges that they may not see as a big deal. The rest I feel is covered in the earlier chapters discussing the young girls.

Book Reading #30 - Emotional Design

Chapter 3

Summary:
The chapter discusses the three levels of emotional design. The first is visceral.  This deals with the physical aspect of a design. This includes look, feel, sound, touch, and any other initial impacts a design may have on a person. The second is behavioral design. This deals with the function of the object and most closely related to his views of Design of Everyday Things. Lastly, reflective design focuses on the meaning of the design and product and what message it conveys.

Discussion:
This book was a contrast of what Norman wrote in his Design of Everyday Things. This has a more subjective tone and deals with emotions more than functionality. I enjoyed this book because it was a nice change of pace.

Ethnography Results, Week 4

We went all as a group this week to observe the movie theater in College Station. We observed a large group of students who we could not tell if they were freshmen in college or local high school students. They had 2 chaperons and were all minorities. It was hard to decipher if they were a group at school or some sort of organization. I also witnessed a mother and her older son who could have been in his last year in high school or a freshman. We also saw a few older couples, which was very high for what we expected, and some even had their grandchildren with them. There was also the usual college student couples as well as 2 friends going either male-male or female-female. There was 2 couples that appeared to be locals and not college students. Upon entering the movie, we noticed that most of the people, besides the older folk, were in our theater watching the same movie. We also noticed that operas were being advertised in the theater and this might change the lobby culture. This took place at about 1:45 which proved difficult to tell if students were in high school, being that they should be in school at the time.

Paper Reading #12 - Gestalt: Integrated Support for Implementation and Analysis in Machine Learning

Comments:
Joe Cabrera
Stuart Jones

Reference Info:
Gestalt: Integrated Support for Implementation and Analysis in Machine Learning
Kayur Patel, Naomi Bancroft, Steven M. Drucker, James Fogarty, Andrew J. Ko, James A. Landay
UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology


Summary:
Gestalt provides users a graphical way to display and perfect the field of machine learning. Gestalt allows users to implement the learning, analyze data and provide easy transitions from implementation to data. Widgets were also added that gave different abilities to the users such as parsing data or train and test models. There is also a table with shared analysis so that developers may see what attributes were used to classify things in the learning. Test data was presented was used to test against the learning code.

Discussion:
I enjoyed this paper because I feel I understood it more having taken AI and a good foundation of machine learning. This tools seems like a great way to test machine learning, especially when one needs instant results of the code displayed. I feel like this if a big step forward in machine learning and hopefully will help out the field alot.

Book Reading #29 - Opening Skinner's Box Ch 8

Chapter 8

Summary:
This chapter deals with implanting false memories into a subject and seeing if manipulation of that memory could happen. The experiment is done by having subjects read off accounts of them being lost in the mall. These stories are written by their family who write 3 real stories and one false one. Ofn the subjects tested, 25% of them seemed to recollect these false memories and were able to describe them in greater detail as time went on. Some argue that this experiment proves nothing as traumatic events are stored differently in the brain than regular memories.

Discussion:
I really enjoyed this chapter. I have implanted false memories in myself and it sometimes becomes difficult to remember that I made the scenario up and it did not truly happen. I know they are false but i catch myself instinctively saying 'Oh, that happened to me once."

Book Reading #28 - Coming of Age in Samoa Ch9

Chapter 9


Summary:
This chapter focuses on exploring the personalities and attitudes of Samoans. Once a Samoan is unwilling, it is left at that and not questioned. The word used for this is "musu". Another thing Mead notices is that when A Samoan describes a person, their description usually follows a pattern of sex, age, ect. It is almost like a cookie cut-out description where just one fills in the words for the person. Alot of times when asked question "I don't know" was the answer most of the time but Mead explains this is used to protect the little privacy they do have.



Discussion:
I found it interesting that people do not question "musu". I could just say not to everything and I wouldn't be hassled by it. I am assuming a psychologist would not be liked in the Samoan village asking and questioning your emotions.