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Showing posts from November, 2010

The ethical robot

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/4341 An article on this appeared in October Sciam 2010. The scene of the robot getting from the lying position from the ground is really good.(3 minutes to 3 minutes and 10 seconds)

The Brain The "Router" in Your Head—a Bottleneck of Processing

http://discovermagazine.com/2010/nov/15-the-brain-router-in-our-heads-processing-bottleneck/ Telford speculated, the brain needs time to reset itself after a pulse of thought before it can carry out another one. If we don’t have enough time between two tasks, we slow down on the second one—a lag known as the “ psychological refractory period .” Each time we perform a task we perform it in three steps. Step 1: Take in information from the senses. Step 2: Figure out what to do in response. Step 3: Carry out that plan by moving muscles. The mental activity that takes place in Step 2 includes some of the most sophisticated forms of thought we are capable of: weighing lots of information, thinking about our short-term and long-term goals, and figuring out how to meet them. But when we have any two simple decisions to make, we must wait for the first task to move through a bottleneck before taking on the second. Instead of carrying out many steps simultaneously, we have to do them one at a t

The Skeptic's Skeptic

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-skeptics-skeptic

What does procrastination tell us about ourselves?

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/10/11/101011crbo_books_surowiecki?currentPage=all

Brain's default mode network

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-brains-dark-energ y

How much math do we really need?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/22/AR2010102205451.html