Interleaving and Study/Wait/Study

In this article, my new method of reading several related texts has found favor with the psychologist Robert Bjork.

1. Interleave - Mix several related skills while learning

 “People tend to try to learn in blocks,” says Bjork, “mastering one thing before moving on to the next.” But instead he recommends interleaving, a strategy in which, for example, instead of spending an hour working on your tennis serve, you mix in a range of skills like backhands, volleys, overhead smashes, and footwork. “This creates a sense of difficulty,” says Bjork, “and people tend not to notice the immediate effects of learning.”

Instead of making an appreciable leap forward with your serving ability after a session of focused practice, interleaving forces you to make nearly imperceptible steps forward with many skills. But over time, the sum of these small steps is much greater than the sum of the leaps you would have taken if you’d spent the same amount of time mastering each skill in its turn. Bjork explains that successful interleaving allows you to “seat” each skill among the others: “If information is studied so that it can be interpreted in relation to other things in memory, learning is much more powerful,” he says. There’s one caveat: Make sure the mini skills you interleave are related in some higher-order way. If you’re trying to learn tennis, you’d want to interleave serves, backhands, volleys, smashes, and footwork — not serves, synchronized swimming, European capitals, and programming in Java.

2. Spacing - Study, wait a while, study, wait a while.

But here’s the cool part: If you study, wait, and then study again, the longer the wait, the more you’ll have learned after this second study session. Bjork explains it this way: “When we access things from our memory, we do more than reveal it’s there. It’s not like a playback. What we retrieve becomes more retrievable in the future. Provided the retrieval succeeds, the more difficult and involved the retrieval, the more beneficial it is.”


3. Location - Study in more than one location

4. Take notes AFTER the class is over or the chapter is finished.

The Physics Horserace

Physics is the horse to bet on. That is, in any matter under dispute, the player with the best hand from physics has the winning hand. Included in this argument from physics there exist details regarding all assumption - that is - basic statements about the facts of the matter. Time scales of 10^10 down to 10^-10; twenty orders of magnitude accuracy and precision. Our measurements of 'this physical specious present' have salient facts about all intervals of time (from the variations in duration over that interval) with sufficient precision to catch neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light with respect to stationary human observers. The conclusion of this dispute will be judged by the world wide networked resources of physics. No idea regarding the meaning of the data will be discarded in this man hunt for falsification.

The falsification of theories being the primary purpose of science; the biggest prize in the falsification of the General Theory of Relativity is going to a physicist. No prayers said over this matter will be of any use. The other point being that the entire theory will no be overturned. My bet is on quantum and not relativistic causes. I am betting for one of the many physicists at the black jack table of science.

One Planet - One Architecture

So here is my bet. The ARM ISA is the salient architectural ecosystem for greater performance with lower energy. The big ideas were all tried out on X86 and POWER for system level and application level computing. They threw power at it. The 25 to 100 Watt envelope fills with all the performance that can be squeezed in for bragging rights in Server War I, the ground war over available floor space and the power grid. The metcalfe score for the ensemble of dispositions; Oracle indexing data bases, Google-verse indexing the network, Amazon selling the cloud and Apple being Apple in the cloud reached a set point. This burst of increased imagination in 7 billion pre-frontal corteses crossed the threshold of 'energy per application' that demanded Moore's law re leaf from ARM CORTEX. The intellectual property DNA of the ARM-VERSE suddenly has the system architecture that cuts out all the fat.

The ARM ecosystem grew by self-replication with variations. Each generation only kept a small sliver more of the system energy. That is, on system architecture long cycle of innovation and incremental Moore's law on a short cycle, The various design teams replicated the original with multiple variations. Every avenue in system architecture and silicon feature size was exploited ten different ways and the losers all copied the winner from each contest where possible. This is an ecosystem that could never run inefficient tasks because of severe (from the perspective of big iron) thermal constraints.

The memory management hardware in any ARM is better than the most efficient X86 server configuration. More of the important work is completed with the least possible work. The result is less bad. Less bad is the golden egg for ARM.

Physics is the horse to bet on. We can fill the world with maximum silicon cognition per Joule until quantum computing grows up. And we then improve on the orders of magnitude over which we observe our universe.

Re: Boltzmann Brain Hypothesis, a random fluctuation - an evolved CPU system architecture - emerged at precisely the right time (actually over an interval of time) to push the next emergent random fluctuation at a certain point in time. All because that is what a PDP=11 wants.

Life: Three Words

Self-reproduction with variation. - Edward Trifonov
From this essay by Carl Zimmer.

Windmills are the baby harp seals

My comment to this article in Atlantic.com

"Windmills are the baby harp seals of lowing our carbon footprint. To compare with photo-voltaics. Wind mills do not have a Moore's Law that matches the Moore's law of semiconductors. In fact, the small percentage potential for improvement in windmill technology represents the law of diminishing returns - we simply cannot improve air foils, frictionless bearing, the cost of more grid, etc. Every factor that leads to improved efficiency in windmills is saturated and flat over a very, very long period of time. In 12 years when today's windmills are replaced - the replacements will cost more and have very little improvement for the increased cost. Even the learning curve on windmills is worse. The learning curve is baked into Moore's law but this is anticipates the 'you didn't consider X in your calculations' -- see the confirmation bias at work in the reality deniers who have and will post objections. I did consider X, I just ran out of time and space.

Again. Photovoltaics = Carbon footprint WIN. Windmills = not so much

Nuclear is a much better option as well."

Conceptual Semantics

Steven Pinker in The Language of Thought defines a mental model used by human minds in human bodies as Conceptual Semantics. Ideas are expressed in the 'language of thought'; an ensemble of concepts recruited from the machinery of evolutionary mental processes that emerge as universal semantic rules that produce human speech acts. Pinker is Chomski's star pupil who expertly lays out a construal of Universal Grammar that provides a neutral - but not weak or sugar coated - formulation of many of Chomski's heavy handed conclusions. Universal Grammar 2.0.

Pinker describes three alternative versions of 'the language of thought' that share some few characteristics but more precisely offer distinct departures from his conceptual semantics. He defines a fine grained version of his own theory by showing specific examples of what he does not include in his own model.

Extreme Nativism - Jerry Fodor
There are 50,000 words in the vocabulary of most humans that coincide precisely and seamlessly with 50,000 innate instances of 'universal meaning'. Me, you, kill, run, dance, trombone and carburator are words without definition - they are not an emergent quality of yet lower level concepts - since they simply 'mean what they mean' in human minds. All that is required to understand 'trombone' is exposure to the kind of thing that our kinds of minds already know from our evolutionary past as a trombone.

Radical Pragmatics
derp

Linguistic Determinism - Benjamin Worfe
The language we learn from our parents, tribe and culture at large IS the language of thought. There are thoughts we cannot think outside of the language we happen to learn. Culture determines language and language determines the thoughts that a population speaking that language provides.

Read Your Future

This article

The Cooperative Principal

Paul Grice has outlined these rules which support all spoken exchanges:

Maxim of Quality

Be Truthful

• Do not say what you believe to be false.
• Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

[edit]Maxim of Quantity

Quantity of Information

• Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).
• Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

[edit]Maxim of Relevance

• Be relevant.

[edit]Maxim of Manner

Be Clear

• Avoid obscurity of expression.
• Avoid ambiguity.
• Be brief
• Be orderly.

Stephen Pinker has improved these rules with the concept of the implacature - messages which implicate or suggest hidden messages. Implicature deliberately violate these maxims in the form of irony, sarcasm, humor and veiled bribes or threats. However, the art of clear speech dictates that only one maxim at a time can be breached. To do otherwise is to drone, to bloviate and to bore.

Example 1: The kidnappers in the movie Fargo offer a police officer an implicated bribe

"So I was thinking that the best thing would be to take care of this in Brainard" [while showing the cop his wallet with a $50 sticking out of it]. This violates the maxim of manner - the statement is deliberately ambiguous.

Example 2: The mobster extorts the restaurant owner

"This is a nice little place you have here, it would be a shame if there was a fire in the kitchen." This violates the maxim of quality - the store may be a dump or a palace i.e. the observation could be false.