I just got this email from the Cognitive Science program at MSU inviting me for their weekly cognitive forum. Turns out the speaker this week is someone called John Dewey! For a moment I thought Dewey was back with us 🙂
The title of his talk is “How do we know when we’re movers and shakers? Perception of causal agency during performance of actions.”
John Dewey! Hmmm… what are the chances that there would be a John Deway getting a Phd. in psychology!
A few randomly selected blog posts…
As I was playing with Wordle (see previous postings here and here) I realized that it could be used for political analysis. So here are John McCain and Barack Obama's acceptance speeches as a word-map. Can you without, my telling you so, figure out which is which? A...
I have been thinking hard about the nature of generative AI, what sets it apart from other technologies that have come in the past. It seems to me there are two key factors. The first is its ability to engage in dialogue, in natural language and the second are its...
I have been haunted the past week or so with the scandal enveloping Penn State. Much as been written about it already - and I really have nothing fundamentally new to offer to this discussion. What I did want to share was a parallel that struck me recently about these...
I was cleaning out my drafts folder and came across this poem. I liked it. A lot. It has my sensibility. My sense of whimsy. But I DO NOT remember writing it. Nor do I remember finding it somewhere and copying it into an email. There is no author attributed - which...
How might we? Three words, and a question mark. At one level it is a simple question—leaving open what it is that we might do. But at another level its openness is its strength. Because inherent within it is a call to action, a discomfort with the way things are, and...
The other day, for one reason or another, I did a Google search for the word "recursion." According to Wikipedia, recursion ... in mathematics and computer science, is a method of defining functions in which the function being defined is applied within its own...
A funny (and yet somewhat sad) story ... So I am in Nagpur airport waiting for my flight, which had been delayed, and I struck up a conversation with a young man there, as one is wont to do. We of course started by complaining about the airlines, then moved on to...
Why I love the Internets 🙂
The next article in our series around mindfulness, creativity, technology and learning focuses on the work of Dr. Erik Dane. (This is part of a larger series that we been working on now for almost 10 years for the journal TechTrends). The first article set the stage...
Thanks Russ. I am sure John is well qualified for a cognitive science career – the coincidence in names was just worth mentioning. Incidentally, I just met with a candidate in Game design and research whose name was Alex Games!!
It’s not too surprising, given that he found the Cognition chapter in my textbook the most interesting (it’s online now at intropsych.com, Chapter 7). John first got his MA in Artificial Intelligence at U Georgia, then spent 2 years working at Frank Tong’s fMRI lab at Vanderbilt, so he is well equipped for a career in Cognitive Science. I’m proud of him! He’s a great kid, too… BTW, he *is* related to the other John Dewey, distantly.
That’s funny and right on the mark!
You know, if we all changed our name to John Dewey, it might frighten people in Department of Education into backing off the strictly standards based philosophy they’ve embraced.