I just had to post this because I found two news articles in a row that failed in the same interesting way.

I’ve heard a lot of people mentioning that Google has lots of links to them because they are a website that link to lots of people. I don’t think so.

No, I don’t mean I don’t believe that websites with lots of links end up being linked by lots of people… More specifically, I do believe the abstract mathematical finding that if you build a digraph in such a way that the probability of linking a node to another depends on the number of links from the destination node, we will have a power law in the number of nodes with different number of edges. What I don’t believe is that this tells anything close to the whole story about what goes on in the web.

This is a letter I sent to Nature (rejected as usual, but I never lose hope!) regarding the article series on music and science, and then some further comments on the interview at the 02/07/08 nature podcast.

This is an attempt to explain what the recent memristor research is all about, and a harsh criticism of what was broadcast around regarding the subject.

People like to invent conflicts within science. I hate this. I am from a totally opposed movement that thinks things are just the opposite of what this other movement says…

I believe most of the time these big disputes are mentioned, there is actually no dispute. Generally it’s just one group saying that there are two groups, and nobody actually fights for the other side. Also, it’s often a false dilemma. There is no real conflict, just orthogonal or unrelated choices.

One such naïve dichotomic fight that people like to describe is the famous one between reductionism and holism, about which I wrote here once. There are three more others I’ve been dealing with recently: the GOTO and structure programming controversy (wrote about it too), the Perceptrons and neural networks controversy, and finally the probability controversy (classical vs frequencialism vs bayesian). I want to write about all of them, specially because in all cases I defend the view that the conflict is fictitious.

The Perceptron is a very interesting entity that deserves the attention of all. The legend says that it was a great invention that were maliciously disregarded by Marvin Minsky, the merciless, who wanted to become the dominant alpha male of AI. This would have delayed scientific advance for decades. I will talk about how I find this concept ludicrous.

This is part one of the article. (It is huge, sorry.)

Today Nature released the result of its pool about use of “cognitive enhancing” drugs. Although the magazine took the care to always say how it was not a serious research, the newspapers didn’t care to simply go on saying that 1/5 of “the scientists” (that mysterious entity, “the scientists”, who are always taking decisions and doing strange stuff that are reported indirectly in the papers) make use of such drugs.

But let’s not care for the general media and try to return to a high-level debate, as the one that was started when the poll began. When reading the new article at Nature, with the poll results, I started to understand that we are mixing two subjects: that of transhumanism, related to other possible advances such as BMI, and on the other side the discussion of the current use of drugs such methylphenidate (Ritalin).

While I often support the idea of transhumanism, after reading that article I realized I am strongly opposed to the way people seem to be using Ritalin in the academic world, and consequently the way they are proposing that other such drugs should be used in the future. I’ll try to explain those concerns of mine below.

I am starting my doctoral studies, and my adviser keeps telling me decide my research topic. I already tried to tell her and other people what are my main concerns in contemporary research in my field, and what is the problem I would like to contribute to, but I haven´t succeeded in convincing anyone yet. I am writing this here to see if anyone can comment on my ideas, and help me explaining what I believe in.

My field is computers, signal processing, AI and mobile robotics. For one side, I like neuronal networks and other said “connectionist” structures of computation and methods of learning. But I’m not a NN guy, I like complex computers, and complex programs and mechanisms. I like the shape of the computer structures that the so-called “symbolic paradigm” uses. But I don’t see the wall between the two areas, and I want to make a study to help bringing the two together. The way to do this is mainly studying the performance of different systems, and analyzing them “from the outside”, peeking at the computational structures a bit like a biologist and using tools like dynamical system analysis, and information theory.

A: We are devo.

Happy anniversary, Nature Network!… And happy day of the Saint Valentine’s massacre!… (many hearts get pierced by arrows this day) Here is my contribution to the 14/02 collective blogging effort… But unfortunately I don’t believe it is quite the positive funny contribution you might expect……..

This blog post is to report an interesting problem I’ve found while working with a school assignment. I’ve studied a number of Adaptive Finite Automata , doing a research similar to what Wolfram did to binary unidimensional CAs in 1981.