Category Archives: Memory

Eulogy to David

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Today I found out David has died. In the night. From a heart attack. Bugger.

I have a handful of happy memories of David, my godfather.

I remember him being a lodger in our family home. At the time he stayed in our spare room, which he slowly filled with books.

He had an old green BMW with rusty doors. Then he bought a new BMW in navy blue with sports mode – which made the car so fast it scared him.

We had a party or something in the summer and he pushed me on the rope swing in our garden. I was getting quite high and then the swing rotated around and I went back-first into the tree. I cried a lot, he looked mortified.

Then more recently I went to a pre-selection weekend at the Royal Corps of Signals. There I met this guy who had studied under David at Sherborne School. In his words, “you’re Hedders’ godson?! He’s a LEGEND!”

I really wish I had seen David teach. He spent all his time reading, absorbing new information like a sponge. I never got to see how he put that knowledge and his razor sharp wit to use.

When I think about David, I think of a man I looked up to – and not just because he was so damned tall – but because he was a true academic who instilled in me a thirst for knowledge.

He showed me the value of reflection and quiet time to gather your thoughts.

David, you’ll always be in my thoughts. RIP.

Skilled Readers Rely on Their Brain’s “Visual Dictionary” to Recognize Words

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Source: Georgetown University Medical Centre

Skilled readers can recognize words at lightning fast speed when they read because the word has been placed in a visual dictionary of sorts, say Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) neuroscientists. The visual dictionary idea rebuts the theory that our brain “sounds out” words each time we see them.

This finding, reported at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, Neuroscience 2011, matters because unraveling how the brain solves the complex task of reading can help in uncovering the brain basis of reading disorders, such as dyslexia, say the scientists.

“One camp of neuroscientists believes that we access both the phonology and the visual perception of a word as we read them and that the area or areas of the brain that do one, also do the other, but our study proves this isn’t the case,” says the study’s lead investigator, Laurie Glezer, Ph.D., a postdoctoral research fellow. She works in the Laboratory for Computational Cognitive Neuroscience at GUMC, led by Maximilian Riesenhuber, Ph.D., who is a co-author.

“What we found is that once we’ve learned a word, it is placed in a purely visual dictionary in the brain. Having a purely visual representation allows for the fast and efficient word recognition we see in skilled readers,” she says. “This study is the first demonstration of that concept.”

Glezer says that these findings might help explain why people with dyslexia have slower, more labored reading. “It could be that in dyslexia, because of phonological processing problems, these individuals are not ever able to develop a finely tuned visual representation of the words they have encountered before,” she says. “They can’t take advantage of the fast processing of words using this dictionary.”

Glezer and her co-authors tested word recognition in 12 volunteers using fMRI. They were able to see that words that are different, but sound the same, like “hare” and “hair” activate different neurons, akin to accessing different entries in a dictionary’s catalogue. “If the sounds of the word had influence in this part of the brain we would expect to see that they activate the same or similar neurons, but this was not the case, ‘hair’ and ‘hare’ looked just as different as “hair” and “soup”. This suggests that all we use is the visual information of a word and not the sounds.”

“When we see a word for the first time, it requires some time to read and sound it out, but after perhaps just one presentation of the word, you can recognize it without sounding it out,” she says. “This occurs because our brain first uses phonology to encode the word and match the sound with the written word. Once we do that and encounter the word a few more times, we no longer need the phonology at first, just the visual input to identify the word.”

“We hope these findings will serve as a foundation to examine reading disorders,” Glezer says. “For example, if people with dyslexia have a problem forming this visual dictionary, it may be that there could be ways of helping train children with dyslexia to form a more finely tuned visual dictionary.”

My thoughts on #savelibraries

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Ever since I met the guys behind Voices for the Library at Barcamp Canterbury, I’ve been thinking about libraries. I walk by my local library twice daily and always struggle to actually spot people using it.

I have a simple conclusion. Libraries need to evolve.

Digital copies of texts are treated just the same as the physical paper copy – the number available on loan is limited, and those wishing to borrow / access the content must wait for it to become available. Is that sustainable? Piracy of music and film has come about in part due to there not being sufficiently easy and free access to content. Would books too become something that suffers.

What about Google Books and the blatant and deliberate move to scan books and ignore the copyright on each? And how do libraries expect to survive when Amazon is forever eating into their core activities?

A school librarian I spoke to raised concerns over pandering to the needs of the masses – why on earth does a library need to stock music CDs and movie titles on DVD? These are now so cheap to buy, rent or stream that it seems unnecessary for a library to commit time, money and resources to stocking them.

From this piece in the LA Times titled Librarian’s words are binding:

Libraries, my son says, “Organize, preserve, and provide access to the human record. I’m talking clay tablets, medieval manuscripts in unknown languages, and Nietzsche’s laundry list, not to mention ‘Meet the Fockers’ and tons of other popular and not-so-popular materials of all sorts. They are increasingly one of the last free spaces for people to meet and do homework, hang out and read, attend a free lecture or a reading, or look for a job, and to get assistance along the way.”

Some libraries have made moves into new business activities, such as launching coffee shops or shared workspace. Many co-locate with other public services. What will happen if / when those activities become top priority as they constitute the greatest amount of revenue generation?

I believe that libraries should be hiring and training librarians to become online content curators. Human filters who find quality information online and curate it. A good librarian is widely read and able to guide you to great resources. I’m suggesting they should be digesting online content and packaging related topics into volumes that we can archive.

Google, Facebook, Twitter et al – all provide us with a real-time stream of news and information. Vast quantities of data are created every second that gets forgotten a day later. The Library of Congress is archiving every tweet, so why can’t all libraries play their part globally in archiving the history we’re creating online?

How would this be implemented? With the bookshelf manifesto for guidance, I have some ideas:

- Local libraries could scour the web for data related to their immediate geographic proximity, i.e. generated in the area or written about the area.
- Information should be stored in a format that is open and accessible to other libraries, although perhaps not in a centralised repository, and that will stand the test of time.
- Free from censorship or influence.
- All information stored must be as it was created with attribution to its creator.
- Tagging each item of information with keywords would allow for related information to be easily accessed.
- No priority should be given to any specific topic and the library should have no set agenda. Librarians could become expert curators of topics or areas – just as you’d expect with journalists or historians.

What would this mean? In essence libraries become museums for the knowledge and information we publish online. The back office becomes the focus of library operations and there’s less concern about visitor numbers.

There is a lot that needs to be established and my biggest unanswered question is how would this be funded? I believe that curated content holds a huge amount of value that I don’t doubt private industry would wish to pay for, but would that compromise the freedom (both meanings) of the service?

The Dead Speak

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Technology has given us so many other things; perhaps in the near future, using Bayesian techniques, we’ll be able to post articles in such a way that we’ll be able to automatically reply to comments long after we’re dead. Just like spam programs keep trying harder and harder to look like regular email in order to get past the filters, auto-replying systems will get better and better at exactly imitating what we would have said to the comment had we been alive.

The Dead Speak.

Perhaps some day we will be able to upload our conscious mind to the cloud as we die. Technology would then be providing us with an after-life.

Inspiration

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I was inspired by a piece I read during my Christmas holiday titled “In Defense of the Memory Theater”.

In it, Nathan Schneider describes his bookshelf as a rotating amalgam of whatever my heart desired from the library. Personally, my needs for such a shelf are based much more around being able to quickly retrieve information I unearthed or researched quite some time ago which has suddenly become important to a situation that could benefit from related wisdom.

Nathan presents a hypothetical bookshelf manifesto to cover the basic needs that technology, and more specifically web content management systems, must provide:

for-life, liberatedness, and the pursuit of eclecticism

Look familiar? It should – it’s the tagline of this site.

Break down the manifesto into three parts:

  1. for-life: preserve the collection

    2. “For-life” means the right to keep one’s books as long as one lives and, just as importantly, to pass them on to one’s descendants. They must not be take-away-able by the fiat of a far-away corporation. They must be in a medium and format that will be readable in a hundred years and, if we know what’s good for us, in five thousand.

  2. liberatedness: truly ours, completely free

    3. “Liberatedness” means that the texts are truly ours to do with as we please, short of harming others. We can lend them to enemies and friends. We can mark them up or damage them. We can move them around wherever we like, and wherever the technology allows, freely organizing and categorizing them to all the limits of our private compulsions.

  3. the pursuit of eclecticism: no censorship

    4. Finally, “the pursuit of eclecticism” means that there should be no limit on the breadth of our collections. Plainly, no censorship.

Nathan really nails it describing his own blog and how his collection is pieced together:

The journal I keep on this site is the notes toward an integration still discovering itself—an assembly of thought, education, and experience that is truthful and communicative. My tone and method is precisely speculative: every word is exactly hypothesis. I believe in the importance of free-ranging explanation, while recognizing fearfully that with even the most casual remark we are building ourselves and our world irrevocably.

I, you, we, need to stop committing time and energy to the creation of bookshelves that cannot be sustained. Not if life is really dedicated to building something of grander design than oneself.