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"In some environments, agents become stuck looking for patterns in random data -- the so-called 'noisy TV problem.'"

BF Skinner wrote another paper that might be relevant:

'SUPERSTITION' IN THE PIGEON
https://psychclassics.yorku.ca...

1. Is waterboarding torture?
2. Has waterboarding ever extracted useful information?
3. What great harm does waterboarding do to those performing it? Please provide some factual info, not just your opinion

1) Yes
2) No
3) See below

http://trauma.blog.yorku.ca/20...

https://www.psychologytoday.co...

https://www.law.utah.edu/effec...

"In 1986, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton interviewed Nazi doctors who participated in human experimentation and mass killings. Lifton concluded that after years of exposure, many of the doctors experienced psychological damage similar in intensity to that of their victims. Anxiety, intrusive traumatic memories, and impaired cognitive and social functioning were all common consequences."

The specific case was affected by the company being able to make a claim about "stolen games", by which they meant copyright breaches, and that gave them an excuse to claim copying, invoke the DMCA and argue the anti-circumvention clause.

Cases in the US have narrowed the law to eliminate schemes such as DMCAing print cartriges, and we just ameded the "Combines Investigation Act" to cover similar cases: see Exclusive Dealing and Tied Selling under the Amended Combines Investigation Act

This case tries to narrow the defenses against and widen the power of the DMCA, and needs an appeal and a good set of amicus briefs.

We just expanded the law to deal with variation on the scheme: an academic paper on it is at http://digitalcommons.osgoode....

66 percent of elementary students and 58 percent of middle school students regularly use a tablet. In 2013, 52 percent of elementary school students and 43 percent of middle school students reported that they regularly used a small or full-size tablet. While 75 percent of high school students regularly use a smartphone, only 42 percent of high school students regularly use a tablet at home or school.

The kids already have the devices - they just don't use them all that much for school work. Why? Because laptops in the classroom results in lower grades. And the distraction of smartphones is even worse.

Just because one is a physical limitation and the other is a psychological one doesn't make them different

Yes, actually, it does. That the idea of so-called "mental illness" obscures this is one of the problems with mislabeling various problems of living as diseases.

I haven't given up yet in my classes. The "no electronics unless used for class materials" rule is still in force because I still catch students completely oblivious to the lecture because their head is pointed down to their lap where they're obviously fiddling with their phone (well, I hope that's what they're doing down there). Those are the students I will ask questions of sometimes, and they're completely clueless about what's being discussed. They aren't there in the class. They're focused somewhere else. I haven't been able to stop it no matter what I do.

By tracking which students it is, I can see these are usually the students that are destined to fail. They consistently do more poorly. It could be self-fulfilling, because if they aren't interested in the class it is hard to do well in it (i.e. a symptom of the problem rather than a cause), but I'm sure it's plenty of both. I suppose that my inability to discourage electronic distractions could be an indication I should give up trying to get them to focus, but I'm also concerned about the effect on everyone else who is trying to pay attention. If they want to spoil their own attentiveness, that's fine, but it does impact other people. It's as bad as second-hand smoke, and there's now ample research documenting that fact. It's like a halo of distraction around them, even if students aren't themselves using the device.

They're adults. If they can't figure out that they are being distracted and figure out ways to deal with it, that's their loss. But I can't get over the fact that the impact is wider than the single student using the device. I have to think of the broader effects on the class of individual bad choices. It would be pretty bad if a student does themselves decide to put things away and stay focused, but they're surrounding by people fiddling away.

In spite of Torontoís good record on school integration, racism was not completely absent. As one man reported to the American abolionist S.G. Howe, "I must say that, leaving the law out of the question, I find that prejudice here is equally strong as on the other side [in the United States]"

After 1850 African Canadians were refused admission outright to common schools in towns such as Charlotteville (southwest of Hamilton along the Lake Erie shore), Malden, Windsor, and Sandwich, where the people were said to have ìa strong old-fashioned English hatred of oppressionî.76 If a black child attempted to join a class, the white students were often taken out of school by their parents, or teachers dismissed their classes.77 When certain teachers in Sandwich, Windsor, Charlotteville, and West Flamboro (north of Hamilton), expressed a desire to admit black students, school trustees in these areas threatened to withhold the teachersí salaries or fire them unless they refused admission to black students.78 In the Hill case of 1854 the Supreme Court ruled that, if a separate racial school had been established, black students had to attend it, no matter the quality of the school or its distance from home

Not even God himself can.

In the article Forbes regurgitates two neoclassical myths - first, that money evolved naturally out of barter systems, and second that money is an expression of fixed material values grounded in processes of production.

On the first point, there is no evidence in history that money evolved out of barter systems, and a great deal of evidence that it did not. As the anthropologist Caroline Humphrey says:

No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing. (Quoted in David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years).

David Graeber adds to this:

We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around. What we now call virtual money came first. Coins came much later, and their use spread only unevenly, never completely replacing credit systems. Barter, in turn, appears to be largely a kind of accidental byproduct of the use of coinage or paper money: historically, it has mainly been what people who are used to cash transactions do when for one reason or another they have no access to currency. (David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years)

On the second point, Forbes' asserts that money is "optimal when fixed in value", that "money has only one purpose ... buying and selling products", and that it is a fixed unit on the same order as material units (ala "hamburgers"). Here he is recanting the whole neoclassical bible, which states that economics and politics are separable, that government should stay out of economics or (our future standard of living will suffer), and that money is a natural expression of processes of production grounded in material value. The castle of neoclassical theory is, however, far from complete, as the 2008 crash so clearly demonstrated. Worse, Forbes ignores this and continues to repeat neoclassical tenets as though they are fact.

Take Forbes statement that money is "optimal when fixed in value." At the limit case, this is clearly false. Assuming for a moment that money could be fixed in value, like a kind of physical unit or a determined expression of material value. Of course, this raises two issues: First, there is the problem of which material value to anchor to. Then there is conversion problem: how do we convert all other values into this fixed material unit? Assuming these could be solved, this would suggest that prices remain constant, much the same way the speed of light remains constant. How then do you explain profit, or any market at all for that matter? Clearly, Forbes must allow for at least some level of price setting, which then in turn suggests variability or "floating" of pecuniary value. Unsurprisingly, in empirically terms, no modern democratic currency is based on fixed values. The opposite is the case: currency itself is treated as a commodity that can be bought and sold on markets, and this is only possible because money does not have a fixed value.

But if monetary value is variable and not linked to material goods, what are the units of money? The answer, in neoclassical terms, is to base definitions of money on a fictitious unit, the util. Since the util is abstract and not observable directly, there remains the problem of how to measure it. Current definitions are claimed to be "reasonable" and "generally accepted" but economists. But utils remain an idealization, and hardly the known unfloating physical quantity Forbes suggests. Forbes simply glosses over or ignores the of the uncertainties and shortcomings of marginal utility theory. Nitzan and Bichler make this case convincingly in their excellent if controversial Capital as Power. They summarize:

Neoclassical theory remains an edifice built on foundations of sand. The most questionable of these

Animals don't tend to do pointless things without a good reason.

Really?

Sometimes it helps to actually click on the articles on google, and see what they cited. A two minute search turned up:
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Munster/Industrial/chap17.htm
http://www.worklessparty.org/timework/chapman.htm
http://www.igda.org/why-crunch-modes-doesnt-work-six-lessons
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/5190.html
http://isme.tamu.edu/JSCOPE97/Belenky97/Belenky97.htm

I'm sure a more thorough search would turn up that much more. There's certainly something on JSTOR, for example.

The medal of honor part is still hyperbole, but the administration is working on that - perhaps because of the research that shows humans given tokens of insignificant value (such as bits of tin on ribbons) are more likely to justify their actions psychologically than humans given significant rewards (like, say, $20K per victim, which is supposed to be what a good contract killer can make in the free market). If you give a guy a million bucks to kill someone he's never met, he tends to think of himself as a contract murderer, which is not a mindset the government wants to encourage. If you give him low pay, long hours, and some bits of flash, he has to convince himself he's a heroic warrior for freedom, and that mindset is much less likely to cause social problems on the home front. Our government does know a thing or two about psychology.

Never watched Opras sofa and dont give a crap what you saw there.

He's an actor, I liked some of his movies, and whether he is a loon or not isnt going to affect my appreciation of his acting, either for good or ill.

And I have seen him rant on a morning news show some time ago about psychiatry. He's not entirely wrong. Psychiatry amounts to little more than a state-supported cult, armed with police powers to enforce compliance. He is not wrong in what he is saying, but the irony is heavy, since his own cult is so similar in practice and subject to most of the same criticisms. He focuses mostly on worthless prescriptions (a problem scientology doesnt have, since they arent allowed to prescribe) but that is just a surface symptom.

Rather than listen to a scientologist who is compromised by his own cult trying to attack psychiatry, I would recommend the more robust criticism that has come from competent psychologists, starting with the link above.

and no explanation in terms of self-awareness was used to explain it:

Citation:
https://www.sciencemag.org/content/212/4495/695.short

Full:
http://drrobertepstein.com/downloads/Epstein-Self_Awareness_in_the_Pigeon-Science-1981.pdf

So now robots can do what pigeons can do. Self-awareness is a hypothetical construct http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Skinner/Theories/ which may not be very useful.

Sounds like this guy has been reading a little classic from the good Dr. Szasz.

Um, they did, and published it in a whole lotta journals. But you didn't read them, did you?

Nope, haven't heard of it at all. Then again I did read about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs in A Theory of Human Motivation and his book Motivation and Personality as well as several other scholarly texts on motivation.

I tried searching for a text version of the presentation and only came up with the animation, do you have a link to a non-multimedia version?

Why just carbon emissions? Fossil fuel based transport also causes considerable externalities through accidents, congestion, noise, health damage from local pollutants and damage to buildings and crops through pollutants and vibration. These are often larger in cities than less densely populated areas, further pushing the balance towards trains there. This: http://econ.yorku.ca/~jametti/4080/Parry_etal_06.pdf (page 54, PDF page 57), for example, estimates that the greenhouse gas costs are much smaller than these other costs. I can't vouch for it's accuracy and I haven't read it thoroughly, but it's a good bet that the other costs are very significant even if not on that sort of scale.

R is an excellent language to learn for just about every field. It's ability to import and export data to MS based resources such as Access, Excel, MS-SQL and other non-MS sources makes it a versital tool. It's commerical parent is S-PLUS and is nearly syntax identical with minor variations. Buy the book, use the tool, impress your Eve Online players by pinning down the July Tritanium prices and hitting the weekly averages within .5 ISK by doing time series analysis using regression plus ARIMA on the residuals. Find out cool things like Hulkageddon impacts frigate prices more then exhumers and MORE! FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY (Except your big sister because she's icky and into boys....) For those what want to do google searches but find 'R' difficult there is the rseek.org site and a few quick links to get you started while you wait for the nutshell book to arrive in the mail. R Intro : http://www.itc.nl/~rossiter/teach/R/RIntro_ov.pdf Programming in R: http://manuals.bioinformatics.ucr.edu/home/programming-in-r R Graph Gallery: http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/ Big Resource I use: http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/StatResource.html The Little Handbook: http://www.tufts.edu/~gdallal/LHSP.HTM The Big N: http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/ There are hundreds of PDF references out there that can help as well, too many to list. Good luck, have fun.

This seems like a good summary of what the Commander-in-Chief needs to understand.

It may look like indecipherable spaghetti but we'll have something like a 3D browser representation with a page for each concept in our minds. Do we look at the internet and say "OMG that's too complicated"? 7+/-2, remember?

So the problem is primarily trying to put too much information on to one page.

It also reminds me of Ender's Game where a certain victory was achieved by denying the player the big picture... so they could focus entirely on the process.

Everyone always wants me to have labels on the graphs. I don't put them there unless you roll over the data, because I want you to see the patterns in the data without bias first.

Why? The only reason for that would be so you could go, "Whoaahh, it's crazy looking." You've proven that. Anonymous data with no points of reference has no meaning. If you honestly think your graph has more value to the viewer than this graph from 1880 showing the population of Sweden over time, I think you're kidding yourself.

It is actually pretty simple and makes it quite clear what is going on

That's debatable. I've argued that it could be much, much clearer.

Finally, I am not interested in producing graphs which show you everything "at a glance". Use a pie chart for that. I am making graphs which facilitate a deeper understanding of larger amounts of data than Tufte dreamed of showing using his 2D paradigms.

Careful. If you're trying to get into the data visualization business, it's a bad idea to make it known that you're completely ignorant of Edward Tufte.

For starters, anyone who knows the slightest thing about Edward Tufte knows that he hates pie charts. So he would never say "use a pie chart for that."

Second, contrary to your assertion, Tufte advocates for extremely data-rich graphics wherever possible. He does not advocate abridging large data sets out of laziness. He does, however, advocate data compression when it will reveal data, and he does not like "wasted ink." Your graphs appear to have miles and miles and miles of plotted data -- none of which is identifiable without mouse interaction -- but relatively few points of interest. As you scroll through the data set, half your movie seems to feature the text "empty" hovering in midair above the graph. In other words, your dataset may indeed be large, but your visualization of it is not particularly informationally dense.

Finally, until such a time as your product can reach out of my flat-screen monitor and tweak me in the nose, you're every bit as tied to a "2D paradigm" as Tufte is. All you're doing is making it possible to adjust what is plotted in real time. Tufte would probably argue that it's better to get the plot right the first time. Allowing viewers to take their time to absorb a lot of data points is fine, but they shouldn't have to waste their time fiddling around with the plot to reveal those data points.

Since it's not in the summary, Brendan Quine is an associate professor at in Space Engineering at York University in Toronto, Ontario (Canada). He is responsible for the Argus micro-spectrometer on the CanX-2 nanosatellite, currently operating on orbit. The satellite was developed by the University of Toronto's Space Flight Laboratory.

Aikon-

I'd have expected Mr Quine to be an android who builds androids, actually.

Since it's not in the summary, Brendan Quine is an associate professor at in Space Engineering at York University in Toronto, Ontario (Canada). He is responsible for the Argus micro-spectrometer on the CanX-2 nanosatellite, currently operating on orbit. The satellite was developed by the University of Toronto's Space Flight Laboratory.

Aikon-

I'd have expected Mr Quine to be an android who builds androids, actually.

Since it's not in the summary, Brendan Quine is an associate professor at in Space Engineering at York University in Toronto, Ontario (Canada). He is responsible for the Argus micro-spectrometer on the CanX-2 nanosatellite, currently operating on orbit. The satellite was developed by the University of Toronto's Space Flight Laboratory.

Aikon-

Since it's not in the summary, Brendan Quine is an associate professor at in Space Engineering at York University in Toronto, Ontario (Canada). He is responsible for the Argus micro-spectrometer on the CanX-2 nanosatellite, currently operating on orbit. The satellite was developed by the University of Toronto's Space Flight Laboratory.

Aikon-

You are quite right that this is different from Phorm but there are also other reasons why tracking at the ISP level is bad. As a website owner, I can choose whether I want to be a part of the Google tracking network, but with Phorm I am automatically opted in. This means my website content can be used to identify a user's interests and may later be used to serve up an advert for a competitor. Also, there is no reliable way for Phorm to distinguish between public and personal data on a web page - it's possible personal information will be processed, particularly on dynamic web pages.

Phorm (previously 121Media) also has a terrible track record regarding the reliability of its software. In earlier versions the ISP embedded a Javascript program in webpages to summarize web page content and then send the results as an HTTP GET request to the 121Media servers for analysis. On occasions this information leaked to 3rd party websites in the HTTP referrer header when a subsequent link was followed.

There's an example of this leakage at http://www.ats.yorku.ca/www_reports/log.refs.html (search for sysip.net).

open office, IBM Lotus Symphony

I didn't even read the the rest, dos not seem worth it. Why can't these list articles have sofware like this.

I know I'm posting late, but you can find the paper that was published in Pediatrics here:

http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/faculty/caa/abstracts/2005-2009/08ASGISYNK.pdf

The researcher is Dr Craig A. Anderson from Iowa State University.

Have a look at the paper. You don't need to be an expert in behavioural psychology to see some significant problems. Here's four of them:

1. The study's sample is small, and so not generalisable. It's also not clear from the report how the sample was selected.
2. The way game playing and violent behaviour was assessed differed in each sample, and so they are not comparable
3. The derivation of the score used to denote violent games is suspect
   (in the largest group of some 1,000 Japanese students aged 13-18, students were asked what 'types' (ie: genres) of games were their favorites, and what were the three next most favorite. They were given a score between 0 and 5 based on how many genres they selected were deemed violent. Behavioural scientists define violence more broadly than most people would. The Sims contains violence, for example, because people can have brawls. This 0-5 score was then moderated by the number of hours each player spent playing video games. This was the base value that was used to define how much violent material each player was exposed to.
4. 4) The measure of violent behavior is debatable
   To determine violent behaviour in the largest sample, students were asked to fill out a survey based on the Buss-Perry scale, which you can find an example of here: http://www.yorku.ca/rokada/psyctest/aggress.pdf This told the researchers how aggressive/violent the student 'actually' was.

Now, I have serious concerns about behavioural psychology research at the best of times, but this study isn't even a good example of it.

I'd say the study's methods (and thus its results) are dubious at best. Do games or other media cause violence? Maybe. We just can't answer the question through studies like this. I would point out however that since the early 1990s violent crime in the United States has been declining:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States

So, if games do in fact make people more aggressive or violent, it doesn't seem (yet) to have translated into actual physical violence.

We can add this study to the heap of dodgy behavioural psych research on media effects which lazy journalists or ideologues can wheel out whenever they want to make a statement like "xxxx causes violence, and there's a lot of research to support it".

Yeah, there is a lot of research out there - bad research. But a pile of shit doesn't smell any better just because there's a lot of it. Problem is, if you're preaching to the converted, your audience will all agree they're smelling roses, and if you say it with enough confidence and can slap a PhD on the end of your name, a lot of people will assume their noses are wrong.

Too bad more people aren't educated in the basic art of critically assessing what they see, hear and read.

Does anyone have a timeline chart for this sequence (or for other Silicon Valley companies). Our history teacher used to have this timeline chart (Rand McNally Histomap of World History) for the nations of the world.

This makes sense. If you look at this random website with a graph of spectral sensitivity of the eye's cones and rods vs. wavelength you can see that blue sensitivity is broad, while red and green sensitivity are more narrow. Red and green are also much closer to each other, and far away from blue sensitivity, with rods somewhere between blue and green but closer to green.

So, the blue light strongly activates the blue cones, and not much else. The yellow light activates the rods, green cones, and red cones, while not activating blue cones very much.

The background activates only one cone, and the text activates two other cones and a rod. Seems like a good recipe for nice, high contrast.

All those problems can be solved with religion. Religion is a tool to create order, to make people work together and to keep large groups of people from fighting each other for resources. Every single religion (at least the successful ones) made it an important point that God (or whoever) doesn't like it when you kill your fellow man or steal from him. And since they had no surveillance cams back then, God was usually allmighty, omnipresent and omniscient, so you could rest assured that you'll get your punishment, if not in life then in death.

You have cause and effect backwards.

Early religion arose by necessity, as a way of explaining what was at the time beyond people's ability to explain and as a side-effect of our pattern-seeking abilities misfiring. See also: the development of common superstitions (some very interesting experiments have been done on "lower" animals in that regard, like Skinner's pigeons). Early religions are basically just collections of superstitions and just-so stories about things like thunder and sunrise.

The major modern religions are religions that have survived for thousands of years, and the reason they survived for that long is because they developed traits that ensured they would be passed on and expand, like prohibitions against killing fellow believers (but not, generally, unbelievers) and injunctions to go out and convert people. These aren't inherent traits of religion, they're inherent traits of long-lived religions, which is a very small minority of all religions in the history of mankind.
They essentially co-opted preexisting social structure (like morality, which ironically many believers today believe to be solely the purview of religion) for their own survival. It's simple memetic evolution.

Religion didn't survive because it's good for humanity, or even because it's good for individual believers; it survived because it's good at surviving. It exists for its own sake, and anything else is just a side-effect.

Watchit, or I'll raise my dipthong to ya.

Depression is not illusionary, it's a real disease.

Depression is certainly not illusionary, and is certainly a real problem.

Whether it is helpful to call depression, and other "problems in living" that are not directly diagnosed as neurological lesions or malfunctions, "diseases" or "illnesses", is questionable. I suggest reading Thomas Szasz's The Myth of Mental Illness (available also in an expanded book form, but the original paper gives the gist of it):

...In actual contemporary social usage, the finding of a mental illness is made by establishing a deviance in behavior from certain psychosocial, ethical, or legal norms. The judgment may be made, as in medicine, by the patient, the physician (psychiatrist), or others. Remedial action, finally, tends to be sought in a therapeutic -- or covertly medical -- framework, thus creating a situation in which psychosocial, ethical, and/or legal deviations are claimed to be correctible by (so-called) medical action. Since medical action is designed to correct only medical deviations, it seems logically absurd to expect that it will help solve problems whose very existence had been defined and established on nonmedical grounds. I think that these considerations may be fruitfully applied to the present use of tranquilizers and, more generally, to what might be expected of drugs of whatever type in regard to the amelioration or solution of problems in human living.

I'm not sure whether I agree with him entirely or not. I do think that "mental illness" is at least in part a social construct - but the same is true of a lot of physical illness.

http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~jgryn/research/wacv_dirmaps.pdf

music depends on very specific ratios of frequencies to be gauged and produced accurately real time. You are in effect doing a Fourier transform of the music, finding the strongest peaks, and reproducing them and/or scaling them by fairly exact amounts

Respectfully disagree. Matching a sound you can hear is simply a matter of listening closely to the "beats" that occur when the frequencies don't quite match up in tune.

Similarly, chords and harmonies sound pleasant because the frequency ratios are small. The twelve-tone scale develops neatly from this fact.

It's like catching a ball: nobody is projecting a parabolic arc through three-dimensional space to compute the precise point where the ball will arrive. The brain takes an educated guess, based on previous balls caught, and keeps adjusting that guess in real-time. When an uneducated singer is trying to match a tone, they're doing the same thing.

First paragraph of the Neuron article (which is paraphrased in Ars Technica):

Historically, there have existed two alternate perspectives for understanding brain function (Llinas, 2001). The first conceptualizes the brain as an input-output system primarily driven by interaction with the external world. The second suggests that the brain operates on its own, intrinsically, with external factors modulating rather than determining the operation of the system. The former perspective has motivated the majority of neuroscience research, but accumulating evidence is emphasizing the importance of the latter.

Does anybody who has spent more than 2 minutes thinking about the human mind really believe that first argument? Somebody should introduce these guys to William James:

It is astonishing what havoc is wrought in psychology by admitting at the outset apparently innocent suppositions, that nevertheless contain a flaw. The bad consequences develop themselves later on, and are irremediable, being woven through the whole texture of the work. The notion that sensations, being the simplest things, are the first things to take up in psychology is one of these suppositions.

The experiment may well be scientifically interesting, but not for the reason advertised.

Copyright infringement is part of criminal law. Patent infringement is part of civil law. That is why you can go to jail for copyright infringement, but not patent infringement.

Canada: "Either civil or criminal penalties can be imposed for copyright infringement. Criminal penalties can include fines and/or imprisonment and depend on the seriousness of the infringement."
ref - http://www.yorku.ca/univsec/documents/copyright/te xt9.htm

US: see paragraph 506 called "Criminal offenses"
ref - http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html

Britain: ditto

In other jurisdictions it is similar. So get off your high horse and actually READ the law or maybe google for it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringemen t

Honestly... no structure, no planning, no discipline, nothing but planning not to have a plan.

Googling turns up:

http://www.yorku.ca/yfile/archive/index.asp?Articl e=7247

I find graphing in Microsoft Excel to be completely unacceptable. I know that Excel will export data to the applications listed here and I wonder if Open Office's Calc program will do the same.

Of course maybe Open Office Org could see if they cannot find a means by which they could create a competitor to something like Wolfram's Mathematica .

Well... first you need a lawyer. Which costs $$.

Pro Bono

>self actualization

Well said! As Maslow put it in A Theory of Human Motivation:

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization....The specific form that these needs will take will of course vary greatly from person to person. In one individual it may take the form of the desire to be an ideal mother, in another it may be expressed athletically, and in still another it may be expressed in painting pictures or in inventions.

Technology facilitates these needs in two ways.

Technology lowers the transaction costs. It's easier for me to write with a keyboard (and, ahem, spellcheck) than with a quill pen. Also to the degree that communicating with other people helps in the creative process (e.g. /. encourages me to think and to write about subjects like this, which might otherwise pass me by.)

Technology makes it easier to more broadly disseminate the products of creativity, both in space and time. The near-annihilation of geographical limits is obvious, but what may be of greater interest to persons seeking self-actualization is the knowledge that once something goes into the Internet Archive and its various commercial analogues, e.g. Google's database, the creation may last longer than humanity itself. That's not immortality, but perhaps as close as we can get with current technology!

If you want another example of statistical analysis in games, see this paper:

Is Bayesian Imitation Learning the Route to Believable Gamebots?

http://www.cs.yorku.ca/LAAV/pubs/file_BayesianImit ation.pdf

Abstract:

As it strives to imitate observably successful actions, imi-
tation learning allows for a quick acquisition of proven be-
haviors. Recent work from psychology and robotics sug-
gests that Bayesian probability theory provides a mathemat-
ical framework for imitation learning. In this paper, we in-
vestigate the use of Bayesian imitation learning in realizing
more life-like computer game characters. Following our gen-
eral strategy of analyzing the network traffic of multi-player
online games, we will present experiments in automatic im-
itation of behaviors contained in human generated data. Our
results show that the Bayesian framework indeed leads to
game agent behavior that appears very much human-like.

My opinion is based part on the characters not being scifi and part based on their depth (or lack of)

I just got more of a sense of self-worth and true character personality from Samantha Carter (Amanda Tapping) and Aeyrn Sun (Claudia Black) whenever I saw either show, and both seemed to grow with the depth of story lines from each season. If I had to choose role models from the mainstream visual media - as we must increasingly do - then I am drawn much more to these characters than to Buffy, Xena, and Lara Croft.

Buffy has also received a significant amount of academic attention. According to this there are now six North American universities offering Buffy courses and several peer reviewed academic journals.

Nor is it news that this involves neurons. Hint to cnet: all of mental life involves neurons.

What's scientifically interesting is which neurons are involved. The researchers are trying to map out the circuits involved in order to better understand the underlying process. That is at least potentially interesting.

My followup question is, is it possible to break these patterns, ever? Or are we destined for eternity to be creatures of our own habits? Should we stop buying self-help books?

One way to break an association is to develop a competing association. If Stimulus A triggers Response B, then you develop a new association between Stimulus A with Response C. That makes it harder to fall victim to the savings-in-relearning effect when you're faced with Stimulus A in the future, because you won't just be left hanging to try to suppress your impulse to respond with B.

And yes, you should stop buying self-help books.