23 MAR 2013 by ideonexus
You Can Choose Your Memories
In the earliest days of research, memory
was thought to be populated with socalled
engrams, memory traces that were
localized in specific parts of the brain. To
locate one such engram—for the memory
of a maze—psychologist Karl Lashley
taught rats to run through a labyrinth. He
then cut out various parts of their brain
tissue and put them right back into the
maze. Though the rats’ motor function
declined and some had to hobble or crawl
their way woozily through the twists and
turns, the ...Folksonomies: memory mindfulness
Folksonomies: memory mindfulness
We can cognitively choose what memories will be stored longterm and which to let go, but we normally operate on autopilot, allowing novelties into our longterm memory-space.
02 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
Information Retrieval is an Arms Race Between Algorithms ...
IR is the focus for an arms race between algorithms to extract information from repositories as those repositories get larger and more complex, and users' demands get harder to satisfy (either in terms of response time or complexity of query).
One obvious issue with respect to IR over the Web is that the Web has no QA authority. Anyone with an ISP account can place a page on the Web, and as is well known the Web has been the site of a proliferation of conspiracy theories, urban legends, tr...As the web gets larger and data grows more complex, less trustworthy in many regards, algorithms will need to grow more sophisticated to adapt to it.