Author Archives: Joe Roushar
About Joe Roushar
Former spy, current enterprise systems architect and entrpreneur, camper, canoeist, musician, grandparent, inventor. About Joe Roushar
Former spy, current enterprise systems architect and entrpreneur, camper, canoeist, musician, grandparent, inventor. About Joe Roushar
Former spy, current enterprise systems architect and entrpreneur, camper, canoeist, musician, grandparent, inventor. About Joe Roushar
Former spy, current enterprise systems architect and entrpreneur, camper, canoeist, musician, grandparent, inventor. About Joe Roushar
Former spy, current enterprise systems architect and entrpreneur, camper, canoeist, musician, grandparent, inventor. About Joe Roushar
Former spy, current enterprise systems architect and entrpreneur, camper, canoeist, musician, grandparent, inventor. About Joe Roushar
Former spy, current enterprise systems architect and entrpreneur, camper, canoeist, musician, grandparent, inventor. About Joe Roushar
Former spy, current enterprise systems architect and entrpreneur, camper, canoeist, musician, grandparent, inventor. About Joe Roushar
Former spy, current enterprise systems architect and entrpreneur, camper, canoeist, musician, grandparent, inventor. About Joe Roushar
Former spy, current enterprise systems architect and entrpreneur, camper, canoeist, musician, grandparent, inventor.24 Feb Neural Network Perception
Feedback in Image Processing While the flow of electrical impulses in the brain triggered by visual stimuli travels sequentially through layers I then II then III of the visual cortex, this directional flow does not prevent impulses from other sources, including feedback loops within the visual cortex from contributing to our ability to process images. […]
22 Feb Understanding What we See
Many Japanese kanji characters (originally imported from China) are little pictures of things in the real world. For example 木 (ki) is a tree. You can see the trunk and the branches. By adding a line at the bottom 本 (hon), you get roots or origin. Put three together 森 (mori) and you have a forest. The symbol […]
21 Feb Pattern Recognition in Two Dimensions
Perceptual Grid We live in three dimensional space, and understanding three dimensions is critical to our ability to go places and do things, but we comprehend things in many dimensions. Our senses, however, tend to flatten things out. Images are projected on our light-sensitive retinas in exactly two-dimensional patterns. The rods and cones possess light-sensitive […]
20 Feb Learning Cause and Effect
Sparks of Kinesthesia When does a person begin to learn about the relationships between things that happen? Does the brain have an innate capacity to make the connections necessary to associate outcomes with catalysts? At what point does a person begin to learn that she or he can affect outcomes in the real world? One […]
19 Feb Dichotomy vs. Continuum
Consciousness, it appears from our recent discussion, is not an “on or off” proposition. We have subconsciousness, waking consciousness, consciousness during sleep, and so on. Before that we spoke of the yin and yang of perception and learning. Since the subject of this series is cybernetics, we shall diverge from our discussion of consciousness long […]
18 Feb Insanity, Perception and Consciousness
Have you ever heard voices, seen people and things others can’t see, perceived colors, sounds or sensations that weren’t really there? The human mind has amazing abilities, sometimes giving us more output than is present in the input. Is this insanity, creativity or a fluke? I can’t answer these questions in this blog, but as we […]
17 Feb Call in the Reinforcements
I think of learning like photography. The length of time of the exposure and the width of the aperture determine whether the film or digital array receives sufficient light to capture the image. The focus of the lens is important too. As adults, we can sometimes control the number of times we return to a […]
15 Feb Perceptual Signatures
We will momentarily leave Yorrick in his warm, cozy waterbed, to consider perceptual signatures that take place in the world outside him. This world is characterized by patterns, visual, audio, aromatic, tactile and complex, that each have their own signature. The section of this blog on cognition, which deals with logic and reasoning, explores that […]
13 Feb Remember Yorrick
Mouldering Memories Sometimes dredging up old memories is a major operation in excavation. Yet we have an amazing capacity to retain information learned long ago and not recalled in recent memory. Today, I’d like to address questions of learning, especially in the context of the earliest learned things. In order to recognize something, we must […]
13 Feb Yorrick: Seeds of Knowledge
A Wise Geek once said: “Knowledge acquisition typically refers to the process of acquiring, processing, understanding, and recalling information through one of a number of methods. This is often a field of study closely tied to cognition, memory, and the way in which human beings are able to understand the world around them.” Our exploration begins […]