Calculate the probabilities p(spam|word) for each word in spam. The formula is a modification of the standard bayes rule to account for new words not found in corpus. As the the number of emails containing the word increases it does tend to the standard Bayes rule.
Combine the probabilities for all the words in the email. This step is where
the Chi squared test comes in.
A lot of the debate seem to on precisely what we mean by Bayesian.
It true to say that Bogofilter is not a Naive Bayes classifier, but it does use techniques of Bayesian inference.
Calculate the probabilities p(spam|word) for each word in spam. The formula is a modification of the standard bayes rule to account for new words not found in corpus. As the the number of emails containing the word increases it does tend to the standard Bayes rule.
Combine the probabilities for all the words in the email. This step is where
the Chi squared test comes in.
A lot of the debate seem to on precisely what we mean by Bayesian.
It true to say that Bogofilter is not a Naive Bayes classifier, but it does use techniques of Bayesian inference.
This is why there is a Non-Commercial version of the license. And this is also why having a work distributed under a CC license doesn't prevent you from ALSO licensing it under other licenses! That's the whole idea of the NC versions of the license: if someone wants to use your work commercially, they can contact you to work out another arrangement so that you would get some form of compensation for the profits that they might make off of your work.
Having a clear Non-Commerrcial clause is the main reason I've chosen CC over other open source licences for text like GNU Free Doc Licences. I feel perfectly happy letting other hackers use my work
to do as they want. I use their material just as much so its a mutually benifical arangement. But if someone is going to make money from my work then I want my cut (through using some other comercial licence).
Really I'd like a open source code licence, which would do the same as the CC-NC clause. GPL does not seem to do this. Anyone know of a good equivilent to CC-BY-SA-NC for code?
Web-site advertising. The data I've got to work with is a text database of plant information (7000 records). Under CC its fine for people to use the data on their own websites, but could they put a google ad on it?
The question I've got is whether having adverts on such pages classes as commercial?
Oh dear, oh dear, if this is the best VC's can come up with, I pitty America.
Most of these ideas will fail for the simple reason that they can't start small and build from there.
Mobile ID for Credit Card Purchases. Only workable if it can gain sizable market share, if it gains 5% share its useless. Not suitable for a startup could work for the big players with the resources and contacts to make a global standard.
Back Office Bank Syndicate. So your really expecting all the banks to throw away all their code. Persuade banks to turn over their proprietary code to a team of software buffs who will repackage and debug the apps and then sell them as a subscription service to participating members. Is this guy serious?
The Ultimate Online Upsell. $5 Million for Software to handle user recomendations to basically do what Amazon does with market cap of $x billion!
I guess some companies would by this, but only if it fits with the existing software they have got. I suspect this stuff is already in the included in most packages in the field. Patents anyone?
Subscription PC's for Seniors. Could work I know my Mum would just want a PC which works and does the basic stuff. Does not need VC funding as your local PC shop could offer such a service.
AN EVEN SMARTER SMARTPHONE. a software platform for cell phones that allows consumers to make purchases or open doors by waving their phones in front of tiny infrared or RFID readers. Security nightmare, steal the phone make the purchace. Breaks fundamental properties of security. Another idea which only works with golbal standards.
OPEN-SOURCE IT CENTER. A startup that can create a suite of open-source applications for maintenance and upkeep of a company's IT backbone. It would give away the programs to corporate clients but charge for service and upkeep at a substantial discount off current rates. Redhat? I can see a market for this sort of thing.
SOCIAL NETWORKS MEET THE TOWN CRIER. There are a thousand and one site already doing this.
CUSTOMER SERVICE OVER IP. Security, basically sending your personel details.
Wake me up when Google a) starts being remotely monopolistic
Well may be this article is a sign of that starting to happen. Google is now becoming a dominant player in the market, they are playing the game well a good brand, a cool image, using their impresive financial and technical resources to
give them an competative advantages in many areas.
Google IS buying up a lot of companies, and compeating for the new key sectors
in an IT world where the desktop is no longer so important. Since flotation
shareholders will be keen to see financial reture so their will be preasure to gain as much market share as posible. If they manage to keep their hold on the strategically important search market they are well placed to be close to monopoly.
Seeings as I didn't see a link to scotts site
Here it is.
As to whether Scott is some poor bastard certain well
know comic figures seem to think a little higher of his work.
Neil Gaiman in Scott.
For a more interesting look at what a comic really is, I highly recomend Understanding Commics, by Scott Mc Cloud. It really is worth the read and makes you think. Theres about a chapter exploring what commics really mean, with many different definitions, he finally comes up with "sequential art", refelecting the intergration of time into the commic experience, this is its main distinction from other forms of art which don't have the time element.
Theres also lots to read about the creative process, which has relavance to us hackers, hew shows it as a multly level thing. Where you can focus on details, form, structure etc.
Probably the most vunrable time for any email user is in the first week when they haven't experience all the dastardly ploys. After that they will no what to weed out. So on any introductory IT course send all the students
The viral nature of GPL may actually work gainst the goals of creating a global commons of reusable code.
Consider this senario: you want to convice your boss to open source. To do you could first show him all the other open source code which is available to use.
Without the viral clause this would work fine, your boss would see all this code, use bits of it and a year down the line might actually consider contributing some of their own code.
The viral clause means this senario won't happen. Your boss will read the GPL and notice that by linking in that code they will need to also release their code under GPL. For an open source newbie this is not something he'll be willing to do. The consequence of this is that the boss will instantly dismiss the ideas of open source and never get to see the advantage. In essence the viral clause creates a block to acceptance.
To get around this block, hunt out LGPL code or the other open source licences which do not restrict the freedom to distrubute products incorperating open source code under their chosen licence.
Alternativly consider becoming a contractor. The rules of engagment of different here. As a contractor you have more freedom to develop your own code base. Employers pay you for the knowledge (and code) you have built up over the years and be more understanding of your need to continue building that.
p.s. Yes I know viral probably not the best term to use here (see slashdot passim), just can't think of a better term.
Well I supose the sun will die a heat death some time. However much of our energy does basically come from solar. Biomass, solar energy captured by plants.
Coal/Gas solar energy captured by plants millions of years ago.
Wind energy basicially created by convection created by solar energy.
If you wanted to be pedantic, you could say that even nuculer energy has basically come from the fissionable material produced by our sun.
These discussions always seem to come down to an either or type sitiation. In reality I think we should look at all solutions, rather than a single magic bullet which will solve all our energy needs. Thats a bit like one OS for all machines.
To prove once and for all that an artificial intelligence can emulate and even exceed the capabilities of human thought I have written an UNBEATABLE pong AI.
paddle.Y = ball.Y;
A nice example of one of the problems with AI you don't want to make it too good. You could say this is a god-like AI which is perfect. A harder task is to make non-godlike AI's: enemies which miss some of the time.
Whilst I don't disagree with going to space and extracting materials there, this needs to be done in a manner which does not threaten a lot in the mean time.
Any sort of significant resource extraction from space is I guess 100 years away. Its those 100 years which could be a very tricky time for the planet, climate change and all that. Space does not offer a short term solution for the next 100 years, indeed it provides a short term risk.
High altitude vapour trails and other pollution are a very different problem to surface pollution and little is known about the consequences. I've read somewhere that such pollution has a disproportionate effect. A lot more research like in the article, will be needed before we can really assess the feasibility of collecting resources from space.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but figuring out the trajectory of a ballistic object was figured out long, long ago. Just because an equation is quadratic doesn't mean it's very hard to solve
I should explain why this hard to solve in a machine learning context.
Whilst I agree that quadratics eqns have long had explicit solutions this may not be relevant if you use a machine learning approach. For current AI the game is not to program in the explicit equations themselves, but more construct a system in which the machine can learn through trial and error, using a positive feedback mechanism such as neural networks. Most of the work I saw in this domain five years back, when I was working in the field, used a strictly linear approach so would fail here. It is an interesting computational challenge to have a system which can "learn" the equations of motion.
I mean, if you consider that a ballistic trajectory in a vacuum in a uniform gravitational field (such as experienced to a good approximation by a ball thrown across the surface of the Earth at reasonable speeds) is completely determined by the just three parameters (position, velocity, and gravitational acceleration)
But in reality we are not working in a vacuum, as well as these effects we also have viscosity, wind resistance, and wind to take into account. Strict adherence to a quadratic equation would fail every time. In some respects having a fast moving ball makes the computational question easier as there is less contribution for these effects, it does make it more of an engineering challenge though. I'd actually be more impressed by a slow moving ball with lots of spin on it over a greater distance.
In the video, the ball has a very visible parabolic flight curve over the 2 meters distance.
The parabolic flight curve actually makes this a harder task. If the equations of motion were purely linear, then it would be a simple task to calculate future position. The second order nature of the trajectory mean that a little more maths is needed to predict where to catch it. Much of the maths for this sort of thing uses matrices (read linear algebra) which would fall over for this task.
I seem to recall that human cricketers use a simple technique for solving this problem. As they are running to catch the ball they move so the ball is kept at a constant angle in their field of view. Keeping this angle constant
ensures that the ball will neatly arrive in their hands. Or so the theory goes.
I've long thought that catching a ball would be a great research project, mainly due to the quadratics calculations involved, great to see it realised.
Could one of our EU slashdotters enlighten?
Speaking for most of us, no we can't:-(.
Mod parent up. The single most insightful comment on the state of EU government.
Probably also the biggest reason the referendum on the constitution in France and the Netherlands was lost. Why vote for something when you don't understand it.
They can go very nicely together. Take the idea of all the plugins and extensions available for firefox. These add enormous value to a product yet are often small below the level of commercial viability. Creating a good community of developers who are working as hobbist builds the buzz for a product and also adds a lot of code which makes a better product.
To this add the dual-licence approach of MySQL. This creates the right environment for the plugin developers and also pulls in the bucks. Dual licence works for me, I'm very happy to open source my code to the hobbist and developers, they provide a great bug checking service and also submit most feature requests helping to improve the product. And then there are commercial companies who seem happy to pay cash to use the product. Everybody wins.
What I'd really like is a software licence closer to the Creative Commons
by-nc-sa explicitly prohibiting commercial use. I'm happy for the dev community to use my product, but if you want to make money out of my work, then I'd like a cut.
In particular, Gates said finding recruits who have project management skills is difficult. Management overall is an area of need, he said. Indeed Gates said he welcomes students coming out of engineering management career tracks.
I've got to agree with Bill here there is no real training in IT project management offered by most CS degrees. There could be a good gap in the market for some smart uni here.
To me there are several questions which should be asked of any biometric system.
Do you know what information is being recorded?
Do you know who can use that information?
Do you have the ability to decline?
If neither 1) or 2) is satisfied then there are significant problems for liberty.
Consider the case of entering a private space, in entering that space you are making a contract with the owner. Part of that contract involves their use of biometric information about you. I believe you should have the right to know
how that information is used. In particular: is their covert survelance - hidden cameras? Which third parties have access (could images of you be sold to private investigators etc)? At the very least there MUST be a sign informing you and a contact number for more information.
Whether you can decline is a simple matter for a private space: you simple do not go in. It is a tougher problem in public space or when not entering deprives you of a fundamental liberty (say preventing you from getting medical treatment). Just as there should be prevision for wheelchair there should also be provision for those who decline.
For public spaces there is also essentially a contract with you and the government. This is where the moral arguments come in.
I was involved in the Computer Vision field about 5 years ago and this sort of technology was a hot research interest. Theoretically its a very difficult problem
acuratly transforming a set of 2D image into a 3D model. There are dificult problems: identifying matching points and computational instability.Lots of very smart maths in the solution.
Even identifying a face is hard. Its one of those things which is so easy to for humans to do, but computers have really struggled at this. I was using a person tracker, trying to find people in a sceen, it quite happly identified trees as people!
I got out as the whole big brother side scared the living daylights out of me.
Hunting around the links it seems that VisionSphere make the kit.
Authentic assessment, alternative learning styles, etc., are ruining basic instruction.
From my experience learning styles are very important. I've been doing my teacher traing this year and have noticed how I learn. For me a picture or diagram on the board really helps me understand a concept. Another chap on the course was also a visual thinker and he'd come out of class completly blank, not having been able to absorb the large amount of spoken words.
There is a very good case to make is that the very high number of kids who fail at school is due to not paying attention to the way they learn. Are the kids looking board in class? Change the style of deliveray and see what happens.
I think this issues is of particular relavance to the slashdot crowd. There is probably a higher than average number of visual and tactile learners here. Probably also a good number of dyslexics and aspergics who do learn in very diferent ways.
I would couple this with the need for critical thinking and analysis.
In Europe and some places in the US the international bacularet is the main 16-18 course. This has a good percentage of time devoted to critical thinking. There is also a critical thinking A level on offer to the same age group at by local college in the UK.
Its always seem to me that all these new fangled computer games like Doom and Diablio took the wrong bit of D&D. The lifted all the rules, dice roling,
Hit Points, Strength points, lots of wapons, magic and monsters, but missed the heart of D&D. What made D&D was the fact that you could spend three hours talking to a Dragon, or with a sutibally lenient dungon master you could add a bit of imagination, say take one clock of flying and two wands of fire and pretend to be the red barron. Computer gamres have so far to go if they are ever going to match D&D for the posibilities. GTA getting closer in the fredom aspect but still so limiting. Computer RPGs don't deserve the title Role Playing.
Fine, let's see the math. Let's see the trajectory calculations. How about those calculating the space? Calculating the number of dimensions the space has, and how fast that number changes over time?
I guess you'll need to read Spivey's publications for this.
Certain models of spoken-language processing, like those for many other perceptual and cognitive processes, posit continuous uptake of sensory input and dynamic competition between simultaneously active representations. Here, we provide compelling evidence for this continuity assumption by using a continuous response, hand movements, to track the temporal dynamics of lexical activations during real-time spoken-word recognition in a visual context. By recording the streaming x, y coordinates of continuous goal-directed hand movement in a spoken-language task, online accrual of acoustic-phonetic input and competition between partially active lexical representations are revealed in the shape of the movement trajectories. This hand-movement paradigm allows one to project the internal processing of spoken-word recognition onto a two-dimensional layout of continuous motor output, providing a concrete visualization of the attractor dynamics involved in language processing.
Trajectories on phase space are soooooooo sexy. But if it's any good, it'll result in something more concrete than more people picking up this flag and waving it while shouting the new slogans and buzzwords. Until that happens I peg this with the study that "calculated" the "fractal dimension" of the cortex just because it has fold and folds in the folds.... so fsking what.
Personally I think this work is quite important in identifying what is really happening in a brain processing. Its trying to test a hypothesis on a continuous model of computing as opposed to a discreet model. This is not really the same as a digitat/analogue distinction (think LP's vrs CD for that).
This has a lot to say about how we make descisions, if our brains were a discreet device then we might expect different behaviour in the experiment.
If we are to fully work with an analogue model then we do need to develop a different set of models for this. The traditional discreet boolean logic of manistreem computing today is inadaquate. Instead we need to bring on a different set of models based around dynamical systems, and related theories, of bifucation, singularities and catastrophy theories.
One question I'm particular interested in is how we convert from the continuous domain of our senses to the making a binary descision move mouse over picture A or picture B. The experiment shows that it seems to be a hardeing process with a tentative guess first which then strentherns. It can be though of as there being two stable atractors, one for each picture and they have an experiment which nicely shows trajectories through one slice of this space. There are interesting links with the Soroties paradox and hysteresis here (email me for details).
I think we'll be seeing a lot more work along this line in the years to come.
Slashdot Mirror
Checkout the end of the mississippi http://maps.google.com/maps?q=New+Orleans&ll=29.13 8968,-89.306488&spn=0.548105,0.962814&t=k&hl=en
just down from Orleans, a lovely fractile.
Have a look at A Statistical Approach to the Spam Problem which as far as I can tell describes the Bogofilter approach. Which seems to be
A lot of the debate seem to on precisely what we mean by Bayesian. It true to say that Bogofilter is not a Naive Bayes classifier, but it does use techniques of Bayesian inference.
Have a look at A Statistical Approach to the Spam Problem which as far as I can tell describes the Bogofilter approach. Which seems to be
A lot of the debate seem to on precisely what we mean by Bayesian. It true to say that Bogofilter is not a Naive Bayes classifier, but it does use techniques of Bayesian inference.
Having a clear Non-Commerrcial clause is the main reason I've chosen CC over other open source licences for text like GNU Free Doc Licences. I feel perfectly happy letting other hackers use my work to do as they want. I use their material just as much so its a mutually benifical arangement. But if someone is going to make money from my work then I want my cut (through using some other comercial licence).
Really I'd like a open source code licence, which would do the same as the CC-NC clause. GPL does not seem to do this. Anyone know of a good equivilent to CC-BY-SA-NC for code?
Web-site advertising. The data I've got to work with is a text database of plant information (7000 records). Under CC its fine for people to use the data on their own websites, but could they put a google ad on it? The question I've got is whether having adverts on such pages classes as commercial?
The Open Source IT centre did seem useful
Well may be this article is a sign of that starting to happen. Google is now becoming a dominant player in the market, they are playing the game well a good brand, a cool image, using their impresive financial and technical resources to give them an competative advantages in many areas.
Google IS buying up a lot of companies, and compeating for the new key sectors in an IT world where the desktop is no longer so important. Since flotation shareholders will be keen to see financial reture so their will be preasure to gain as much market share as posible. If they manage to keep their hold on the strategically important search market they are well placed to be close to monopoly.
Seeings as I didn't see a link to scotts site Here it is. As to whether Scott is some poor bastard certain well know comic figures seem to think a little higher of his work. Neil Gaiman in Scott.
Theres also lots to read about the creative process, which has relavance to us hackers, hew shows it as a multly level thing. Where you can focus on details, form, structure etc.
Overall one of the best books I've read.
Consider this senario: you want to convice your boss to open source. To do you could first show him all the other open source code which is available to use. Without the viral clause this would work fine, your boss would see all this code, use bits of it and a year down the line might actually consider contributing some of their own code.
The viral clause means this senario won't happen. Your boss will read the GPL and notice that by linking in that code they will need to also release their code under GPL. For an open source newbie this is not something he'll be willing to do. The consequence of this is that the boss will instantly dismiss the ideas of open source and never get to see the advantage. In essence the viral clause creates a block to acceptance.
To get around this block, hunt out LGPL code or the other open source licences which do not restrict the freedom to distrubute products incorperating open source code under their chosen licence.
Alternativly consider becoming a contractor. The rules of engagment of different here. As a contractor you have more freedom to develop your own code base. Employers pay you for the knowledge (and code) you have built up over the years and be more understanding of your need to continue building that.
p.s. Yes I know viral probably not the best term to use here (see slashdot passim), just can't think of a better term.
Well I supose the sun will die a heat death some time. However much of our energy does basically come from solar. Biomass, solar energy captured by plants. Coal/Gas solar energy captured by plants millions of years ago. Wind energy basicially created by convection created by solar energy.
If you wanted to be pedantic, you could say that even nuculer energy has basically come from the fissionable material produced by our sun.
These discussions always seem to come down to an either or type sitiation. In reality I think we should look at all solutions, rather than a single magic bullet which will solve all our energy needs. Thats a bit like one OS for all machines.
A nice example of one of the problems with AI you don't want to make it too good. You could say this is a god-like AI which is perfect. A harder task is to make non-godlike AI's: enemies which miss some of the time.
High altitude vapour trails and other pollution are a very different problem to surface pollution and little is known about the consequences. I've read somewhere that such pollution has a disproportionate effect. A lot more research like in the article, will be needed before we can really assess the feasibility of collecting resources from space.
I should explain why this hard to solve in a machine learning context. Whilst I agree that quadratics eqns have long had explicit solutions this may not be relevant if you use a machine learning approach. For current AI the game is not to program in the explicit equations themselves, but more construct a system in which the machine can learn through trial and error, using a positive feedback mechanism such as neural networks. Most of the work I saw in this domain five years back, when I was working in the field, used a strictly linear approach so would fail here. It is an interesting computational challenge to have a system which can "learn" the equations of motion.
I mean, if you consider that a ballistic trajectory in a vacuum in a uniform gravitational field (such as experienced to a good approximation by a ball thrown across the surface of the Earth at reasonable speeds) is completely determined by the just three parameters (position, velocity, and gravitational acceleration)
But in reality we are not working in a vacuum, as well as these effects we also have viscosity, wind resistance, and wind to take into account. Strict adherence to a quadratic equation would fail every time. In some respects having a fast moving ball makes the computational question easier as there is less contribution for these effects, it does make it more of an engineering challenge though. I'd actually be more impressed by a slow moving ball with lots of spin on it over a greater distance.
In the video, the ball has a very visible parabolic flight curve over the 2 meters distance.
The parabolic flight curve actually makes this a harder task. If the equations of motion were purely linear, then it would be a simple task to calculate future position. The second order nature of the trajectory mean that a little more maths is needed to predict where to catch it. Much of the maths for this sort of thing uses matrices (read linear algebra) which would fall over for this task.
I seem to recall that human cricketers use a simple technique for solving this problem. As they are running to catch the ball they move so the ball is kept at a constant angle in their field of view. Keeping this angle constant ensures that the ball will neatly arrive in their hands. Or so the theory goes.
I've long thought that catching a ball would be a great research project, mainly due to the quadratics calculations involved, great to see it realised.
To this add the dual-licence approach of MySQL. This creates the right environment for the plugin developers and also pulls in the bucks. Dual licence works for me, I'm very happy to open source my code to the hobbist and developers, they provide a great bug checking service and also submit most feature requests helping to improve the product. And then there are commercial companies who seem happy to pay cash to use the product. Everybody wins.
What I'd really like is a software licence closer to the Creative Commons by-nc-sa explicitly prohibiting commercial use. I'm happy for the dev community to use my product, but if you want to make money out of my work, then I'd like a cut.
In particular, Gates said finding recruits who have project management skills is difficult. Management overall is an area of need, he said. Indeed Gates said he welcomes students coming out of engineering management career tracks.
I've got to agree with Bill here there is no real training in IT project management offered by most CS degrees. There could be a good gap in the market for some smart uni here.
To me there are several questions which should be asked of any biometric system.
- Do you know what information is being recorded?
- Do you know who can use that information?
- Do you have the ability to decline?
If neither 1) or 2) is satisfied then there are significant problems for liberty.Consider the case of entering a private space, in entering that space you are making a contract with the owner. Part of that contract involves their use of biometric information about you. I believe you should have the right to know how that information is used. In particular: is their covert survelance - hidden cameras? Which third parties have access (could images of you be sold to private investigators etc)? At the very least there MUST be a sign informing you and a contact number for more information.
Whether you can decline is a simple matter for a private space: you simple do not go in. It is a tougher problem in public space or when not entering deprives you of a fundamental liberty (say preventing you from getting medical treatment). Just as there should be prevision for wheelchair there should also be provision for those who decline.
For public spaces there is also essentially a contract with you and the government. This is where the moral arguments come in.
Even identifying a face is hard. Its one of those things which is so easy to for humans to do, but computers have really struggled at this. I was using a person tracker, trying to find people in a sceen, it quite happly identified trees as people!
I got out as the whole big brother side scared the living daylights out of me.
Hunting around the links it seems that VisionSphere make the kit.
From my experience learning styles are very important. I've been doing my teacher traing this year and have noticed how I learn. For me a picture or diagram on the board really helps me understand a concept. Another chap on the course was also a visual thinker and he'd come out of class completly blank, not having been able to absorb the large amount of spoken words.
There is a very good case to make is that the very high number of kids who fail at school is due to not paying attention to the way they learn. Are the kids looking board in class? Change the style of deliveray and see what happens.
I think this issues is of particular relavance to the slashdot crowd. There is probably a higher than average number of visual and tactile learners here. Probably also a good number of dyslexics and aspergics who do learn in very diferent ways.
Have a go at some of the online assesments for learing styles say http://www.csupomona.edu/~jekarayan/brain/brain/ or http://www.vark-learn.com/english/page.asp?p=quest ionnaire.
It would be fun to pool results. Do slashdotters learn in a different way?
In Europe and some places in the US the international bacularet is the main 16-18 course. This has a good percentage of time devoted to critical thinking. There is also a critical thinking A level on offer to the same age group at by local college in the UK.
Its always seem to me that all these new fangled computer games like Doom and Diablio took the wrong bit of D&D. The lifted all the rules, dice roling, Hit Points, Strength points, lots of wapons, magic and monsters, but missed the heart of D&D. What made D&D was the fact that you could spend three hours talking to a Dragon, or with a sutibally lenient dungon master you could add a bit of imagination, say take one clock of flying and two wands of fire and pretend to be the red barron. Computer gamres have so far to go if they are ever going to match D&D for the posibilities. GTA getting closer in the fredom aspect but still so limiting. Computer RPGs don't deserve the title Role Playing.
Fine, let's see the math. Let's see the trajectory calculations. How about those calculating the space? Calculating the number of dimensions the space has, and how fast that number changes over time?
I guess you'll need to read Spivey's publications for this.
In particular the paper Continuous attraction toward phonological competitors who's abstract is
Trajectories on phase space are soooooooo sexy. But if it's any good, it'll result in something more concrete than more people picking up this flag and waving it while shouting the new slogans and buzzwords. Until that happens I peg this with the study that "calculated" the "fractal dimension" of the cortex just because it has fold and folds in the folds.... so fsking what.
Personally I think this work is quite important in identifying what is really happening in a brain processing. Its trying to test a hypothesis on a continuous model of computing as opposed to a discreet model. This is not really the same as a digitat/analogue distinction (think LP's vrs CD for that).
This has a lot to say about how we make descisions, if our brains were a discreet device then we might expect different behaviour in the experiment.
If we are to fully work with an analogue model then we do need to develop a different set of models for this. The traditional discreet boolean logic of manistreem computing today is inadaquate. Instead we need to bring on a different set of models based around dynamical systems, and related theories, of bifucation, singularities and catastrophy theories.
One question I'm particular interested in is how we convert from the continuous domain of our senses to the making a binary descision move mouse over picture A or picture B. The experiment shows that it seems to be a hardeing process with a tentative guess first which then strentherns. It can be though of as there being two stable atractors, one for each picture and they have an experiment which nicely shows trajectories through one slice of this space. There are interesting links with the Soroties paradox and hysteresis here (email me for details).
I think we'll be seeing a lot more work along this line in the years to come.