Entries for March 2005
Notacon slides, first cut
Notacon is coming up, and I'm looking forward to it. My lab-mate Sean and I will be giving a talk about biologically-inspired AI, which will partly be an introduction to what we do in our lab. I'm reasonably satisfied with the first draft of my half of the talk, so I think it's time to post it here for feedback: first draft slides [warning very large file; around 4 megabytes]. I recommend looking at them in one of the views that includes notes, because they'll make more sense that way.
It is a rough cut, so the only formatting I've done is approximate positioning of images and shrinking the figure caption text. There are also a few placeholders left. Still, any feedback on what is there is welcome, and I hope it gets some people interested.
There's going to be a lot more at this con than just a bunch of science geeks talking about what we do for a living. Take a look at the full speaker list, and if you're interested you should definitely come along. It's in a couple of weeks, registration is cheap, a lot of very sound people are involved in organising it, and it will be both a fun and useful weekend.
What Summers did wrong
Having written all that I did in defence of Summers' argument, I still don't have a great deal of sympathy for him. He did make several very important mistakes, which are things he should know better than to do, and go some way towards explaining the depth of hot water he's ended up in.
Continue reading "What Summers did wrong"
What Summers actually said
I've been following the Larry Summers controversy with some interest, but I didn't want to say anything about it myself until I had read his actual words. I finally got around to reading the transcript of the speech on the weekend, and to my less than complete surprise the whole thing seems rather overblown.
Continue reading "What Summers actually said"
Maturing field
In a lot of ways my field is really not very mature. We have too many studies that are best described as cute but pointless
, too many studies that are statistically naïve or just avoid mentioning that they report the one successful run out of 1000 failures, and too few universities that really expose undergrads to what we do. At the same time there are some signs that this is changing.