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Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a
nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a
"Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed
considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense
initiatives more successful? Can such an application of
science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable,
necessary or impossible?
Read Debates, a new
Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published
every Thursday.
(3943 previous messages)
rshow55
- 05:19pm Aug 23, 2002 EST (#
3944 of 17697) Can we do a better job of finding
truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have
done and worked for on this thread.
When I say that I think lchic and I are
doing important work on "connecting the dots" - I mean
"important, in my opinion, judging from what I know based on
these references, some others like them, some thought and some
experience."
Sternberg, R.J. INTELLIGENCE, INFORMATION PROCESSING,
AND ANALOGICAL REASONING: The Componential Analysis of Human
Abilities Erlbaum, Hillsdale, N.J. 1977
Thomas, R.M. “Transfer of Learning” in The
Encyclopedia of Human Development and Education: Theory,
Research and Studies Pergamamon Press, Oxford, N.Y. 1990.
Thorndike, E.L. “Mental discipline in high school
studies” Journal of Educational Psychology , 15:
83-98 1924.
Tseng, G.F. and Haberley, L.B. “Deep neurons in piriform
cortex. I. Morphology and synaptically evoked responses
including a unique high amplitude paired shock
facilitation.” J. NEUROPHYSIOLOGY . 62: p369-385
(1989).
Turow, S. One L: what they really teach you at Harvard
Law School Putnam NY 1977
Tufte, E.R. Envisioning Information Graphics Press,
Cheshire Conn, 1990
Turennout, M, Hagoort, P, Brown, C.M. “Brain Activity
During Speaking: From Syntax to Phonology in 40
milliseconds” SCIENCE v. 280, 24 April 1998. pp
572-574.
Von Neumann, J. The Computer and the Brain Yale U.
Press, 1958
Vygotsky, Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE newly revised and
edited by Alex Kozulin MIT Press, Cambridge, 1986.
Weber, E. Ideas Influencing Early Childhood
Education Teachers College Press, NY. 1984
Wertsch, James V. VYGOTSKY AND THE SOCIAL FORMATION OF
MIND Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1985.
Wittrock, M.C. Education and the Cognitive Processes of
the Brain Chapter 3 in EDUCATION AND THE BRAIN: The
Seventy-seventh Yearbook of the National Society for the Study
of Education part 2 Jeanne S. Chall and Allan F. Mirsky,
eds. 1978,
rshow55
- 05:59pm Aug 23, 2002 EST (#
3945 of 17697) Can we do a better job of finding
truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have
done and worked for on this thread.
Brent Staples describes major problems and some available
solutions vividly and perceptively in Mayor Bloomberg's
Test: Teaching the Teachers How to Teach Reading by BRENT
STAPLES http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/23/opinion/23FRI4.html
Is it possible to do much better than we've done? Maybe.
3925-3926 rshow55
8/23/02 10:29am
3931 rshow55
8/23/02 4:55pm describes random presentation drills, which
can work for letters or words, according to the following
pattern:
Words in frequency order 1-6 - the, of, and, a, to, in
, randomly presented:
of a to the in of and the a of the a in and
to of to a and in of the of the a in in to of in to of the
to in and and of the of and and in and of and the to the to
and in the to in the a in a in and to a and in the of in a
in the to the in to of to a in of a the to of to of to the
and in a of a to the to and the to and
Since some words are MUCH more common than others -
and provide the "skeleton" of the language readers have to
interpret -- perhaps these words are worth learning by
"see-say" drills.
Whether they are or are not is a question of fact -
- and a question connected to some key issues at the interface
between the statistical and the symbolic in psychology.
In the 1950's, Herbert Simon and others developed
"artificial intelligence". With computers that are laughably
small by today's standards, they were able to prove very many
of the proofs in Russell and Whitehead's Principia
Mathematica -- do much other logic -- and play games like
"the Towers of Hanoi" and Chess.
Simon, H.A. MODELS OF THOUGHT Yale U.
Press, 1979
AI did a great deal - and very economically - and then this
"symbol based" approach stalled - though it remains useful,
and central to "intelligent" computer programs that are
actually used.
Nobody doubts that symbol processing, when it is set up,
can do things VERY efficiently. But it couldn't "learn." By
the mid-1970's people were casting about for other approaches
(approaches that Rosenblatt, of Cornell, pioneered in the
1960's). And so an essentially statistical approach
arose - and came to command truly huge levels of attention and
funding. Key results in the field of "connectionism" are set
out in
Rumelhart, D.E. and McClelland, J.L.
PARALLEL DISTRIBUTED PROCESSING: Explorations in the
Microstructure of Cognition (two volumes) MIT Press 1988
By the early 1990's "connectionism" was becoming
disappointing to some - because it was computationally
very expensive to so things people and animals did much
more easily. And impossible - in a strict mathematical sense -
to use the approach to do a lot of things that people did
without much effort.
Judd, J.S. NEURAL NETWORK DESIGN AND THE
COMPLEXITY OF LEARNING MIT Press, 1990.
Even so, the importance of statistical approaches at the
"microscale of cognition" is plain to just about everybody --
and the POWER of statistical approaches has been clearly shown
- and embodied in search engines on the web.
Landauer T.K. and Dumais, S.T. “A
Solution to Plato’s Problem: The Latent Semantic Analysis
Theory of Acquisition, Induction, and Representation of
Knowledge” Psychological Review, v 104, n.2, 211-240,
1997 --- draft: http://lsi.argreenhouse.com/lsi/papers/PSYCHREV96.html
The connection between the statistical and the
symbolic in human reasoning remains a key problem. Perhaps
the key problem in understanding how reason can work as
well as it does. A problem that has concerned philosophers
since Socrates, and to the present day.
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