Is integer arithmetic fundamental to mental processing? the mind’s secret arithmetic, A. W. Snyder, D. J. Mitchell:

In contrast to the popular views discussed above, the unique aspect of our perspective is that the mechanism and information drawn on for savant mathematics resides equally in us all but it cannot be recruited by us for mathematics. In other words, we believe that mathematical savants, like all autistic savants, arise from their privileged access to lower levels of raw information.

Why is it that savants have privileged access to lower levels of information ? Perhaps it is promoted by a loss of those centres that control executive or integrative mechanisms (…)

An intriguing question remains. Although we do not normally have access to lower levels of information as do savants, is there nonetheless some artificial means to promote this access, say via induced altered states of consciousness?

A reference to the theory of hierarchical memory (Jeff Hawkins, On intelligence, see earlier post).

From the point of view of this theory savants would be somehow unable to develop higher level memory patterns.

On the flip side, a normal person cannot recognize lower level memory patterns anymore, and therefore doesn’t have access to savant-like abilities, which are based on this raw access.

Development focused on custom solutions designed to tackle specific, narrowly defined problems. The books I read so far tended to be technical reviews of various types of neural networks, which are of course inspired by the brain’s circuitry, but share little with it in terms of flexibility and adaptability.

Hawkins’ book is a rare attempt to come up with general view on how brain really works. In the process, it uses concepts from both biological and technological sides. Its general idea is not obscured by technical jargon, which makes it easy to follow.

In summary, the book offers a glimmer of hope, that some kind of breakthrough in the field might be around the corner.

(on a separate note, while watching the video I realized that till now I didn’t know how to spell pivot correctly)

From the video, it seems that new Pivot does the same thing as it’s desktop older brother in Excel, namely allows to slice a collection of data along available dimensions.

What new Pivot seems to offer on top of that is a more immersive way of exploring data sets, especially those whose items can be visualized somehow. So it’s like a very visual drill-down capability.

Perhaps days of fragmented but free-for-all web are coming to an end, as the gravitational pull of proprietary platforms – Facebook, iPhone, Google services – steadily increases.

On the other hand, many of these platforms in fact broke open spaces that were previously off limits to anyone but owners of the closed ecosystems and the few who bought their way in.

iPhone allowed everyone to write and distribute apps without mobile carrier’s blessing, and Facebook granted access to its social graph, allowing third party apps to take advantage of it.

http://senseable.mit.edu/obama/index.html

I find visualizing data to be such a cool topic – which can easily be seen from the number of posts related to statistics on Ogito blog, like this one.

But there is often a gap between aesthetics and usefulness of advanced visuals.

To be useful we typically require easy access to lots of context, to be able to draw any conclusions from the data, for example:

• ability to drill down – investigate what contributes to the variable value
• ability to compare variable level through time
• ability to compare variable level in case of different objects (e.g. competitors, regions, etc.)

(Ogito statistics for cities — registration required to see the charts — use simple Google Charts and tables with links to underlying sets of objects, and this is already enough to get the basic understanding outlined above)

Sometimes complex visualizations add difficulty to perform these basic operations rather than reduce it.

In my family it was always the case, with stuff like VCR and computers.

I was always curious if that situation will remain with my generation, or if perhaps we are different – world is so much about learning something new all the time, that we simply cannot afford to fall back on getting used to new things quickly.

I got my first feeling that I was behind a kid (10 years old daughter of a friend) a couple of days ago, when we were skyping and she used XD emoticon (written form), and I didn’t know what she meant.

First sparrow?

Wave is an attempt to redefine and merge communication media, possibly replacing email, IM and others.

The demo looked really cool. Sadly Wave is not available yet – but I am really eager to check it out when it opens.

Demo lasted more than an hour, the video is available at project’s homepage.

Briefly, Wave aims to replace exchanging messages back and forth, which is the current practice, with single threads, called waves.

Different stuff can be added to waves – messages, but also photos and instant messaging.

In fact they implemented IM in a way that allows to follow each keystroke of the counterpart – like in good old days of Talk sessions on unix systems.

Meanwhile, Microsoft rebranded its search engine to “Bing” and tries to promote it as a “decision engine”, tailoring search results layout depending on the recognized query context (e.g. travel related search) and presenting structured information on its own page, rather than rely on user to go to any of the results.

I like the direction Microsoft is taking, but at this point I would be more excited about Wave’s ability to change my daily routing rather than Bing.

Bing is at most evolutionary step in the right direction, while Wave has more revolutionary feeling to it.

Note: this doesn’t bode well for Microsoft, which is an underdog compared to Google. In this position it should be Microsoft coming up with revolutionary ideas, not Google. Microsoft fails to show real innovation for all the dollars it sinks into search (for years already).

Another note: Wave makes me think of tremendous advantage Google has thanks to it capabilities in mass scale, real time processing. Building a system like this would be a challenge for a small startup.

The event was used to showcase some of the things we can expect from the browsers in the (near?) future. Screenshot from one of the demos:

All this purely browser computing (javascript and html). Soon things like video and location will be available in the browser without any plugins.

Check out the rest of the demos.

Notes from the event at Techcrunch.

The browser is going to be really powerful, and the promise of writing software that can run anywhere without need of any installation will inspire developers to push the envelope ever further.

Browser apps, which now often look quite rudimentary, might evolve rapidly.

All this erodes value of the underlying OS, so it’s not surprising that Microsoft is dragging its feet in this area.

Ogito uses links looking like this:

http://www.ogito.eu/en/place/polska/warszawa/luna-marszalkowska

http://www.ogito.eu/en/directory/contentitem/movies/2003/bialy-krol-czerwony-kauczuk-czarna-smierc

The idea in itself is ok – links include context information like city and country, so that they are more meaningful.

Much better, in my opinion, than links like /places/4652. Not even from the point of view of SEO, but rather of users who are given additional hint if the link is relevant to their search or not.

However, the purpose doesn’t really justify the way I implemented them, that is by defining plenty of custom routes like this:

  map.place_edit          'place/edit/:country_id/:city_id/:place_id', :controller => 'places', :action => 'edit'
  map.place_destroy       'place/delete/:country_id/:city_id/:place_id', :controller => 'places', :action => 'destroy'
  map.place_add           'place/add/:country_id/:city_id', :controller => 'places', :action => 'new'
  map.place               'place/:country_id/:city_id/:place_id', :controller => 'places', :action => 'show'
  map.places              'places/:country_id/:city_id', :controller => 'places', :action => 'index', :defaults=>{:country_id=>nil,:city_id=>nil}

Complexity is created mainly by having countries and cities as part of the route, which has additional downside of having to provide all these objects when creating a link.

Instead I could use simple resource-based routes with some nesting, which would look more or less like this:

map.resources           :cities do |city|
    city.resources        :places, :only => [:index]
end
map.resources           :countries do |country|
    country.resources     :places, :only => [:index]
end
map.resources           :places, :except => [:index]

Nesting resources allows index links to include country or city, for example:

http://www.ogito.eu/en/countries/polska/places

I could go extreme with nesting, since for example place belongs to city which belongs to country, but I think the links would be too long as a result.

Urls of individuals objects are not nested, but they can include all the details in the id string:

http://www.ogito.eu/en/places/1161-adria-torunska-bydgoszcz

The result is the same, but there is no deviation from Rails standard and the application is much easier to develop and maintain.

Often being a novice brings benefit of fresh perspective and new ideas, but in this case I would prefer to have enough experience to get it right first time. Making changes now is not a big problem, but Google already indexed something like 3,000 subpages, so some redirection strategy will have to be in place.

Uff just hope it’s the final version this time.

Original PC Witcher game was a resounding success and the console port had a chance to steer the project into a much wider market.

CDP release cites quality as a reason behind the decision, meaning specifically that a French contractor they hired for the job, Widescreen Games, didn’t deliver neither on time nor appopriate quality.

WSG in press release defends their “propriety technology” and blames CDP for missing payments.

There is an interview with CDP founder at Polygamia (Polish), in which he explains in detail quality issues with WSG and asserts payment delay were only linked to WSG missing the milestones, with last payment not to be made since the milestone was not completed and the contract canceled:

We put an enormous effort to make sure the production goes the right way, and still the plans were becoming invalid, and there were new delays? After a few such incidents, we sent a large team over to Lyon. The group consisted not only of people involved in the project, but also of technology managers from RED and Metropolis. They spent one whole week to examine thoroughly the whole project and its technology.

As a result, we found out that WSG’s promises had no grounds in reality and that the game’s premiere date and quality cannot be guaranteed. So, after a long discussion, we decided to suspend the cooperation with WSG, because we understood there is too much risk in it. And actually we haven’t paid for the last milestone, but only because it wasn’t complete and we have already started the termination of the contract.

Michal claims that redundancies and savings at CDP, though they are unpopular and generate lots of gossip, will allow the company to continue its key projects.

In any case, the situation is pretty sad. The only good news is that CDP claims that their current flagship project, kept in secret but assumed to be Witcher 2, is on track.