hat tip to Gibson and the affordances and all that
Still, you're wrong for several reasons: (1) word shape is irregular across fonts and handwriting and thus not a very good clue and (2) how many words versus how many letters in the English language? which algorithm (analytic vs holistic) should therefore be fastest? (3) efficiency is not necessarily the design rationale here. we're talking about the human mind. (4) in evolutionary terms sounds come before letters, hence you might want to consider the role of phonology in reading to be more than last resort (5) algorithms? to shortcut a lengthy theoretical debate (which I've been through ad nauseam) please explain how these rules in my head came to be and what exactly they operate on without making a loan on causality by ascribing them properties of autonomous agents. alternatively, concede that the mind=computer metaphor is just that, a metaphor.
sorry, can't help you there. I began to use the handle after finishing undergraduate training, to honour the most useful but underrated paper out there, because it describes neatly what I do and because it makes a nice insider joke (also because my "firstborn" was meant to be a brmic paper. Unfortunately the second author is still sitting on it). You might consider going from AC to JEP:GEN which AFAIK isn't taken yet. I should warn you though. I recently had to open a new mail account to avoid submitting a paper from a brmic@ e-mail address;)
I'm going off what my psychology professor told me.
I think it depends on the area you're working in. It's next to impossible to unify theories of personality because they start out from rather different philosophical angles. Maybe trying to combine semantics and syntax would be a decent analogy for the scope of the problem. In the more technical area of cognitive psychology the main problems are again more technical. For instance, trying to unify qualitative flow-diagram models or even quantitative models with meaningful nodes on the one hand and parallel distributed neural networks on the other hand is AFAIK technically possible, but very tricky. That said, there is also the problem of fundamental, unresolved conflicts concerning the architecture of cognition, like the question whether "representations" are necessary.
When a basic introductory psychology course routinely displays the kind of methodology I'm seeing, I make judgements based on that, and never once was this notion of falsifiability covered.
even the Gerrig and Zimbardo "Psychology and Life" -and you can't get more basic than that- touches on the idea, admittedly only in passing. I'm sorry, but as someone who has had the concept of falsifiability pushed in his face from day 1 of my study I find it somewhat hard to imagine it is not taught at your place. I'm inclined to believe either (a) the teaching you had was particularly shoddy or (b) you never went to a methodology course.
The parts of psychology dealing specifically with the brain (i.e. removing parts of the brain and seeing what happens) are pursued pretty well, but there are others which simply aren't.
LOL. Neuropsychology has only recently begun to realise that simple additive or subtractive reasoning (Donders subtraction method, Sternberg's additive factors logic) won't get you far in cognition. And they are still prone to point to a correlate (magnetic measurement of blood flow) (that is measuring at a resolution of 1-2 images/per second) of a potential correlate (blood flow=oxygen flow=brain activity) that might correlate with the phenomenon of interest (brain activity=thinking) hoping to derive something meaningful about millisecond processes in a highly networked system from that. Doesn't mean there isn't some decent research done in that area of course.
"Self-actualization" is pure philosophical bullshit. The rest of the hierarchy can be tested objectively, but how can you measure or judge whether an individual has reached his full potential? That's absurdly subjective and can't be falsified. Paying lip service to the scientific method does not mean that you follow it.
Maslow wrote 1943/54/68/70 so you might want to find something more recent to judge the field. That said, theories of personality come in various flavours, and most of them are part of an earlier tradition that considered psychology a part of philosophical science. Considering psychology as a natural science dates back to around 1950, about halfway down the short history of the discipline. The philosophical strand continues to this day, mostly because some problems (in therapy) are too complex to be covered by the findings the more frugal, piecemeal natural science approach has so far yielded (_you_ tell the mentally ill to wait for more rigourous theories). Those qualifiers aside, as far as I know Maslow used to check his theory against available evidence (and self-actualisation isn't the same as reaching your full potential), though of course not in a rigourous fashion. IMHO however, his lasting fame is justified by his idea that we should study successful people and not only mental illness and brain damage. Since you seem to be sympathetic to the latter approach, may I ask you to consider (a) how you justify generalising from the functioning of a damaged brain to normal functioning and (b) in what ways the reasoning from specific impairments to specifi
The problem is that no effort has been made or apparently will be made to develop a complete model for how perception works. The proponents of each model just keep finding things which prove them right, rather than trying to truly test their model by actually finding a way to disprove it. BS, see Jacobs A. M. & Grainger J. (1994). Models of visual word recognition: Sampling the state of the art. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 20(6): 1311-1334.
as for your other points: yes, admittedly all is not well and a lot of psychologists are rather weak on maths. But your sweeping generalisations are just plain wrong, especially since the standard of hypothesis testing in psychology is the Popperian notion of falsifiability. (see e.g. Jacobs, A. M., Graf, R. & Kinder, A. (2003). Receiver operating characteristics in the lexical decision task: Evidence for a simple signal-detection process simulated by the multiple read-out model. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory & Cognition, 29(3), 481-488.)* I suggest you learn some nuance from psychologists, since this seems something _you_ are incapable of.
FWIW I'm graduate working in visual word recognition and with all due respect I'd like to point out that you can slow reading times by hitting people on the head while they read. Not that we do that, but if we did and found it slowed reading we wouldn't conclude that being free from physical pain is essential to reading. Your argument appears to be a effects=module fallacy. That said, AFAIK the effect is conveniently explained using the perceptual frequency hypothesis, that is, assuming one deal with a very low frequency visual stimulus.
erm, sorry, but that emotional Intelligence stuff is mostly bullshit, especially Goleman. He continuously misrepresents facts and his selection of empirical studies is highly biased. Fact is, in almost all cases people who do well at their job are satifisfied and happy, not the other way round. It's charming to believe it might be the other way round, to believe, that e.g. exam anxiety/worry is something that keeps people from getting good grades, but in fact, the anxiety is mostly caused by incompetence. Admittedly, the causalitites in Psychology are not what you expect from say Physics, but at least Goleman is simply a peddler of hope, not of facts.
though i usually resent brain surgery, cause long term effects are usually disregarded in the excitement of the moment (Moniz's and Degas' lobotomy being a prime example) and the joy over apparent short term effects, this seems a minor problem with morbus Alzheimer. Still, the treatment at best will stop the accumulation of plaque in the brain, not restore the "original" state. The major problem with this is imho, that any successful temporary cure of symptoms will draw money from research into causes of m. alzheimer and effective preventive methods. Then again, this seems to be what we do all along, finding a fix and moving on, and look what we've come to.
>Why can't they just do it the Mac way? Put everything for one programm in a single directory and that's it. No more problems with installing, just copy the directory from CD to HD or from HD to HD and you're good to go.
apparently this is actually inefficient, as several other posts seem to indicate. then again, it may be better in the long run. anyway, i really LOVE that mac feature (do i hear some calling it a bug?) i think the true reason why MS is using DLLs is that they've got a much wider range of appplications to provide for (and of course, for the record, because they got a crappy OS) imho the real reason for DLL hell is the wide range of software for Windows, and some sloppy 3rd party programmers who break the system (which argueably is badly desinged from the ground up)
just my 2c of uneducated opinion; perhaps some more tech savy person could clarify?
really? isn't there a law already that makes it illegal to "entice someone to break the law", you know like suggesting theft or murder. I don't remember the correct legalese (and would probably be unable to translate it if did). Anyway, that would make said regulation superfluous, right? Then again, as other posters pointed out, the ASA seems pretty much unable to enforce its regulations.
And the rule which stops car advertisers encouraging anti-social or irresponsible driving has been strengthened - now they must not even condone bad driving.
does it really say that before the Advertising Standards Authority (whoever that is) stepped in, car advertisers in the UK promoted road rage and hoped to sell cars by claiming you could hit children and old ladies without the slightest dent to your cherished chrome bumper?
well i actually did read the site before posting, and i still fail to see any scientific or artistic value. So from my standpoint, the thing is just plain BORING either way. The fact that it's supposed to be artsy doesn't qualify imho. So please, if you like it, just say so and stop the typical/. bashing-of-opinions-I-disagree-with.;-)
... LEDs in a fly, which supposedly can be switched via ethernet. Great, just what we needed, gonna solve a lot of the world's current problems. Take the time to admire this scientific breakthrough.
for the record I'd like to state that: there is life in Europe, and rumours of our recent demise are grossly exaggerated. Admittedly, to Americans we only exist "in words you think you hear" (Adams, D. HHGG) but so do you from our point of view. We are not "merely the products of a deranged imagination".
reminds me of that Calvin & Hobbes cartoon, where Calvin states "I think the best evidence for intelligent life out there is that none of them has come to visit us" (or similar)
>So, are you saying that it's impossible for nice people to be crazy?
I would think that one could be both insane and polite
totally. there's just a difference between psychotic and crazy. in fact hebephrenic schizophrenics (hope this is the correct term in English) are among the nices people out there. they're like permanently stoned, nothing matters, everything is funny etc. Of course it's a terrible condition actually because they can't get out of it, but most staff can't help smiling occasionally. An then there's all those kind souls who struggle to keep their integrity while knowing that at times they can't control themselves. Moving, to say the least.
the Pd scale is still psychopathic deviation (or Psychopathia in Latin). dunno what the K-Scale is these days, can't check on MMPI-2000 yet. probably won't matter what they call it anyway. btw. while being a smartass, i might as well at that the MMPI is constructed according to criterion, that is, almost theory free. they only chose items (questions) that seperate normal from clinic populations. hence its use to diagnose healthy individuals is wholly unjustified. (we'd have to argue about its use for the norm/clinic split)
>what determines? US (or THEM, depending what side your're on)
no really, there are criteria set down in law (at least here in Germany) which basically states that you go to forensic mental hospital if you: a) suffer from some from some sort of disorder (actually it's more precise, but i don't want to translate it now) b) at the time of the crime you were either b1) unable to realize your doings were wrong or b2) unable to act according to that realisation BECAUSE of that disorder. both criteria are necessary to go free of punishment (and get locked up in an institution till pronounced cured)
as to the kind of people tending to end up in either sort of instituion, the dividing line pretty much moves with current politics (and media coverage). basically those who turn psychopathic (hating/despising mankind, regarding others as mere means to their own ends) go to prison, those that develop some other disorder (maniacs, sexual perverts, psychosis) tend to go to the ward. this does not really make sense, but there it is. besides, the difference is small for heavy crimes, patients are just treated better.
Re:Alex should have just waited
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>Life is a sexually transmitted disease.... and inevitably fatal.
>... the scientific community is learning that genetic attitude traits inherited have more to do with the temperment of a person than any other factor.
erm, sorry, but doctors have been saying that all along, and though psychologists tend to disagree, the doctors rightly can point out that their profession was around well before BC (not sure whether this improves their arguments though)
>Once it was thought that a person's character was a result of the way they were raised. This isn't the case, and I am glad science is finally starting to find data on this and publish it.
sorry again, but this IS the case, and even the worst current estimates grant your experience around 40% of your makeup. the impression of gene dominance is merely produced by recent breakthroughs in genetic and neuroimaging and things like the "decade of the brain". At least for neuroimaging i can safely say that most of the stuff is utter crap (like substractive Donder's-style designs) which merely get's publicity because nobody speaks out and puts an end to the cash flow into expensive fMRI machines. (and please don't tell me you believed science was about truth and not money. that's too ridiculous to discuss)
Re:posting before coffee is bunk
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Erratum 1: standardized tests? you believe in what instead? Rorschach? Cattel's "objective tests"? skin conductance, EEG? or were you speaking out for proper diagnostics, which effectively amounts to someone really trying to understand what is going on with the kid (an initiation event to some (analysts and kids))
Re:Aspergers Syndrome (mainly)
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excellent link, great text, but fails to mention the effect of being educated by geeks. it's no ALL in the gene's.
parents working 75 hours plus a mild strand of Asperger/Kanner in your/their genes can produce a really evil interaction effect.
1. you do not have to have a redisposition to psychosis AND be a nerd to filp out with a gun. actually some of those who filipped out are neither psychotic nor nerds. in fact they're pretty nice people. 2. psycho tests will get you nowhere, they can all be cheated. (ALL, by ANYONE, forever)
sorry, but as a psychologist who did an internship at a forensic mental hospital, i just had to correct that.
-------- "But i don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked. "Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad, You're mad." "How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice. "You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
.. aka psychology we use Matlab for curve-fitting and implementation of localist connectionist network models. speed is not an issue, and we found Matlab to be easy to learn and teach, which is essential when in a non-technical area of research. (that is, people know nothing of matrix algebra and PC experience is limited to MS Office in most cases)[-of course, that's why we ARE working in the basement of nat sci]
good idea, I'll e-mail as soon as I can
hat tip to Gibson and the affordances and all that
Still, you're wrong for several reasons: (1) word shape is irregular across fonts and handwriting and thus not a very good clue and (2) how many words versus how many letters in the English language? which algorithm (analytic vs holistic) should therefore be fastest? (3) efficiency is not necessarily the design rationale here. we're talking about the human mind. (4) in evolutionary terms sounds come before letters, hence you might want to consider the role of phonology in reading to be more than last resort (5) algorithms? to shortcut a lengthy theoretical debate (which I've been through ad nauseam) please explain how these rules in my head came to be and what exactly they operate on without making a loan on causality by ascribing them properties of autonomous agents. alternatively, concede that the mind=computer metaphor is just that, a metaphor.
sorry, can't help you there. ;)
I began to use the handle after finishing undergraduate training, to honour the most useful but underrated paper out there, because it describes neatly what I do and because it makes a nice insider joke (also because my "firstborn" was meant to be a brmic paper. Unfortunately the second author is still sitting on it).
You might consider going from AC to JEP:GEN which AFAIK isn't taken yet. I should warn you though. I recently had to open a new mail account to avoid submitting a paper from a brmic@ e-mail address
I think it depends on the area you're working in. It's next to impossible to unify theories of personality because they start out from rather different philosophical angles. Maybe trying to combine semantics and syntax would be a decent analogy for the scope of the problem. In the more technical area of cognitive psychology the main problems are again more technical. For instance, trying to unify qualitative flow-diagram models or even quantitative models with meaningful nodes on the one hand and parallel distributed neural networks on the other hand is AFAIK technically possible, but very tricky. That said, there is also the problem of fundamental, unresolved conflicts concerning the architecture of cognition, like the question whether "representations" are necessary.
even the Gerrig and Zimbardo "Psychology and Life" -and you can't get more basic than that- touches on the idea, admittedly only in passing. I'm sorry, but as someone who has had the concept of falsifiability pushed in his face from day 1 of my study I find it somewhat hard to imagine it is not taught at your place. I'm inclined to believe either (a) the teaching you had was particularly shoddy or (b) you never went to a methodology course.
LOL. Neuropsychology has only recently begun to realise that simple additive or subtractive reasoning (Donders subtraction method, Sternberg's additive factors logic) won't get you far in cognition. And they are still prone to point to a correlate (magnetic measurement of blood flow) (that is measuring at a resolution of 1-2 images/per second) of a potential correlate (blood flow=oxygen flow=brain activity) that might correlate with the phenomenon of interest (brain activity=thinking) hoping to derive something meaningful about millisecond processes in a highly networked system from that. Doesn't mean there isn't some decent research done in that area of course.
Maslow wrote 1943/54/68/70 so you might want to find something more recent to judge the field. That said, theories of personality come in various flavours, and most of them are part of an earlier tradition that considered psychology a part of philosophical science. Considering psychology as a natural science dates back to around 1950, about halfway down the short history of the discipline. The philosophical strand continues to this day, mostly because some problems (in therapy) are too complex to be covered by the findings the more frugal, piecemeal natural science approach has so far yielded (_you_ tell the mentally ill to wait for more rigourous theories).
Those qualifiers aside, as far as I know Maslow used to check his theory against available evidence (and self-actualisation isn't the same as reaching your full potential), though of course not in a rigourous fashion. IMHO however, his lasting fame is justified by his idea that we should study successful people and not only mental illness and brain damage. Since you seem to be sympathetic to the latter approach, may I ask you to consider (a) how you justify generalising from the functioning of a damaged brain to normal functioning and (b) in what ways the reasoning from specific impairments to specifi
for a recent take on word shape see
Perea, M., & Rosa, E. (2002). Does "whole word shape" play a role in visual word recognition? Perception and Psychophysics, 64, 785-794. [pdf] from Manolo Perea's homepage
For a take from someone who used to believe in the importance of letter order (I can't really tell what his opinion is these days), see Max Coltheart's homepage (no downloads, but googling "coltheart pdf" gives some decent results). Max came up with the doual-route-model, and it is actually rather suspicious, that Kevin Larson doesn't quote him, since he is in many ways the godfather of visual word recognition research. (For a takedown of Max's main points see Van an Orden, G. C., Pennington, B. F., & Stone, G. O. (2001). What do double dissociations prove? Cognitive Science, 25, 111-172.[pdf] from Guy Van Orden's homepage (his main opponent, who miraculously also was not mentioned by Larson)
The problem is that no effort has been made or apparently will be made to develop a complete model for how perception works. The proponents of each model just keep finding things which prove them right, rather than trying to truly test their model by actually finding a way to disprove it.
BS, see Jacobs A. M. & Grainger J. (1994). Models of visual word recognition: Sampling the state of the art. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 20(6): 1311-1334.
as for your other points: yes, admittedly all is not well and a lot of psychologists are rather weak on maths. But your sweeping generalisations are just plain wrong, especially since the standard of hypothesis testing in psychology is the Popperian notion of falsifiability. (see e.g. Jacobs, A. M., Graf, R. & Kinder, A. (2003). Receiver operating characteristics in the lexical decision task: Evidence for a simple signal-detection process simulated by the multiple read-out model. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory & Cognition, 29(3), 481-488.)* I suggest you learn some nuance from psychologists, since this seems something _you_ are incapable of.
FWIW I'm graduate working in visual word recognition and with all due respect I'd like to point out that you can slow reading times by hitting people on the head while they read. Not that we do that, but if we did and found it slowed reading we wouldn't conclude that being free from physical pain is essential to reading. Your argument appears to be a effects=module fallacy.
That said, AFAIK the effect is conveniently explained using the perceptual frequency hypothesis, that is, assuming one deal with a very low frequency visual stimulus.
erm, sorry, but that emotional Intelligence stuff is mostly bullshit, especially Goleman. He continuously misrepresents facts and his selection of empirical studies is highly biased. Fact is, in almost all cases people who do well at their job are satifisfied and happy, not the other way round. It's charming to believe it might be the other way round, to believe, that e.g. exam anxiety/worry is something that keeps people from getting good grades, but in fact, the anxiety is mostly caused by incompetence. Admittedly, the causalitites in Psychology are not what you expect from say Physics, but at least Goleman is simply a peddler of hope, not of facts.
though i usually resent brain surgery, cause long term effects are usually disregarded in the excitement of the moment (Moniz's and Degas' lobotomy being a prime example) and the joy over apparent short term effects, this seems a minor problem with morbus Alzheimer. Still, the treatment at best will stop the accumulation of plaque in the brain, not restore the "original" state. The major problem with this is imho, that any successful temporary cure of symptoms will draw money from research into causes of m. alzheimer and effective preventive methods. Then again, this seems to be what we do all along, finding a fix and moving on, and look what we've come to.
>Why can't they just do it the Mac way? Put everything for one programm in a single directory and that's it. No more problems with installing, just copy the directory from CD to HD or from HD to HD and you're good to go.
apparently this is actually inefficient, as several other posts seem to indicate. then again, it may be better in the long run. anyway, i really LOVE that mac feature (do i hear some calling it a bug?)
i think the true reason why MS is using DLLs is that they've got a much wider range of appplications to provide for (and of course, for the record, because they got a crappy OS)
imho the real reason for DLL hell is the wide range of software for Windows, and some sloppy 3rd party programmers who break the system (which argueably is badly desinged from the ground up)
just my 2c of uneducated opinion; perhaps some more tech savy person could clarify?
really? isn't there a law already that makes it illegal to "entice someone to break the law", you know like suggesting theft or murder. I don't remember the correct legalese (and would probably be unable to translate it if did). Anyway, that would make said regulation superfluous, right? Then again, as other posters pointed out, the ASA seems pretty much unable to enforce its regulations.
Anyway, thanks for the info
And the rule which stops car advertisers encouraging anti-social or irresponsible driving has been strengthened - now they must not even condone bad driving.
does it really say that before the Advertising Standards Authority (whoever that is) stepped in, car advertisers in the UK promoted road rage and hoped to sell cars by claiming you could hit children and old ladies without the slightest dent to your cherished chrome bumper?
well i actually did read the site before posting, and i still fail to see any scientific or artistic value. /. bashing-of-opinions-I-disagree-with. ;-)
So from my standpoint, the thing is just plain BORING either way. The fact that it's supposed to be artsy doesn't qualify imho.
So please, if you like it, just say so and stop the typical
... LEDs in a fly, which supposedly can be switched via ethernet. Great, just what we needed, gonna solve a lot of the world's current problems.
Take the time to admire this scientific breakthrough.
for the record I'd like to state that:
there is life in Europe, and rumours of our recent demise are grossly exaggerated. Admittedly, to Americans we only exist "in words you think you hear" (Adams, D. HHGG) but so do you from our point of view.
We are not "merely the products of a deranged imagination".
reminds me of that Calvin & Hobbes cartoon, where Calvin states "I think the best evidence for intelligent life out there is that none of them has come to visit us" (or similar)
>So, are you saying that it's impossible for nice people to be crazy?
I would think that one could be both insane and polite
totally. there's just a difference between psychotic and crazy. in fact hebephrenic schizophrenics (hope this is the correct term in English) are among the nices people out there. they're like permanently stoned, nothing matters, everything is funny etc. Of course it's a terrible condition actually because they can't get out of it, but most staff can't help smiling occasionally. An then there's all those kind souls who struggle to keep their integrity while knowing that at times they can't control themselves. Moving, to say the least.
the Pd scale is still psychopathic deviation (or Psychopathia in Latin).
dunno what the K-Scale is these days, can't check on MMPI-2000 yet. probably won't matter what they call it anyway.
btw. while being a smartass, i might as well at that the MMPI is constructed according to criterion, that is, almost theory free. they only chose items (questions) that seperate normal from clinic populations. hence its use to diagnose healthy individuals is wholly unjustified. (we'd have to argue about its use for the norm/clinic split)
>what determines?
US (or THEM, depending what side your're on)
no really, there are criteria set down in law (at least here in Germany) which basically states that you go to forensic mental hospital if you:
a) suffer from some from some sort of disorder (actually it's more precise, but i don't want to translate it now)
b) at the time of the crime you were either b1) unable to realize your doings were wrong or b2) unable to act according to that realisation BECAUSE of that disorder.
both criteria are necessary to go free of punishment (and get locked up in an institution till pronounced cured)
as to the kind of people tending to end up in either sort of instituion, the dividing line pretty much moves with current politics (and media coverage). basically those who turn psychopathic (hating/despising mankind, regarding others as mere means to their own ends) go to prison, those that develop some other disorder (maniacs, sexual perverts, psychosis) tend to go to the ward.
this does not really make sense, but there it is.
besides, the difference is small for heavy crimes, patients are just treated better.
>Life is a sexually transmitted disease. ... and inevitably fatal.
>... the scientific community is learning that genetic attitude traits inherited have more to do with the temperment of a person than any other factor.
erm, sorry, but doctors have been saying that all along, and though psychologists tend to disagree, the doctors rightly can point out that their profession was around well before BC (not sure whether this improves their arguments though)
>Once it was thought that a person's character was a result of the way they were raised. This isn't the case, and I am glad science is finally starting to find data on this and publish it.
sorry again, but this IS the case, and even the worst current estimates grant your experience around 40% of your makeup. the impression of gene dominance is merely produced by recent breakthroughs in genetic and neuroimaging and things like the "decade of the brain". At least for neuroimaging i can safely say that most of the stuff is utter crap (like substractive Donder's-style designs) which merely get's publicity because nobody speaks out and puts an end to the cash flow into expensive fMRI machines. (and please don't tell me you believed science was about truth and not money. that's too ridiculous to discuss)
Erratum 1: standardized tests? you believe in what instead? Rorschach? Cattel's "objective tests"? skin conductance, EEG?
or were you speaking out for proper diagnostics, which effectively amounts to someone really trying to understand what is going on with the kid (an initiation event to some (analysts and kids))
excellent link, great text, but fails to mention the effect of being educated by geeks. it's no ALL in the gene's.
parents working 75 hours plus a mild strand of Asperger/Kanner in your/their genes can produce a really evil interaction effect.
1. you do not have to have a redisposition to psychosis AND be a nerd to filp out with a gun. actually some of those who filipped out are neither psychotic nor nerds. in fact they're pretty nice people.
2. psycho tests will get you nowhere, they can all be cheated. (ALL, by ANYONE, forever)
sorry, but as a psychologist who did an internship at a forensic mental hospital, i just had to correct that.
--------
"But i don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here.
I'm mad, You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
--------
.. aka psychology we use Matlab for curve-fitting and implementation of localist connectionist network models. speed is not an issue, and we found Matlab to be easy to learn and teach, which is essential when in a non-technical area of research. (that is, people know nothing of matrix algebra and PC experience is limited to MS Office in most cases)[-of course, that's why we ARE working in the basement of nat sci]