A few years ago I wrote a research paper for college on neural networks, at the time IBM's Blue Brain was the clear winner. Some rumor went around that they were close to emulating a brain the complexity of a cat; this has been debunked.
At the time their research was groundbreaking and previou...
@Josh I know fidgeting has been found to be a focus aid...should be some research on that if not directly related to leg jiggling, as that's a form of fidget
Thanks anyway. Trying to think of good, objectively answerable questions for the site. That Q is something I've always been interested in but it's sort of "time sensitive"...but so is much research in these fields
I could set an arbitrary date to make the question completely answerable for all points in time but to me that harms the vlaue of the question (and makes it very awkward)
After asking the question What is the most complex neural network... I realized I don't really have a good metric of "complexity" in a general sense. The simplest measure would likely be count of neurons or number of synapses, but that fails to take into account the structure of the network.
A c...
@BenBrocka Nice spin-off question. I noticed questions on this site can often benefit from properly phrased spin-off questions. Perhaps this is worth discussing on meta.
This is slightly left-field, but I am interested in the Cognitive Science implications of this question: Many people, myself included, are "leg jigglers", meaning we often sit jiggling or bouncing a leg -- usually to the irritation of those around us.
The evidence that I have seen is that:
it ...
I think these are the kinds of questions that we can share on various social networks and that might build exposure for the site. funny meets scientific might get a few people interested.
@JeromyAnglim Good idea! They cover common ground in which everyone can be interested. Although it would probably attract more questions and less people who can answer them.
Wow, 673 views? How did that happen! It's already showing up in google then I guess?
We get 114 visit's a day according to area51. This question must have been linked to from somewhere, or performs amazingly well on google.
I agree. It's a balancing act between attracting an audience and attracting the desired answer. I guess more broadly, for any given online community there is a type of question that might interest them. Views are coming from psychology subreddit
@JeromyAnglim I have seen you answer a number of questions and say that "this is not my area of expertise but...", (and then you proceed to give a great answer :-) So out of curiosity what is your area of expertise?
@StevenJeuris Yup, thanks. 7:48 AM here, ready to finish up this project for work and enjoy my weekend!
Example: Jonathan answered "Page generation from PHP Class" http://bit.ly/RIPog
Many sites broadcast (opt-in of course) your activity over your twitter-line, letting your friends/followers know what you're up to, discover content that you find, and participate in events/projects that you're pa...
One way to check if a question has been tweeted is via the edit history (example), so I'm curious if there's another way. For example, what about a question that hasn't been edited?
I thought I'd pitch in a few ideas, particularly picking up on the concerns about being inviting to experts raised by @ArtemKaznatcheev.
So-called non-technical questions are often quite interesting. They can be answered in scientific ways. As an academic, I still see value in a site like cog...
Really great answer @JeromyAnglim
> So-called non-technical questions are often quite interesting. They can be answered in scientific ways. As an academic, I still see value in a site like cogsci.se in helping to bridge the world of scientific journal articles with everyday interesting questions that exist in peoples mind and on the internet (e.g., this question about leg jiggling was a bit of fun to answer, and based on the view count, it interests a fair few people). Of course, non-technical is different to easy.
> I don't know if "easy" questions are really a major problem at the moment. If I have a quick look at the home page, there is a spread of questions of varying difficulty. Almost all involve more than a quick Google search to answer properly. If we've got a reasonable spread of questions at different difficulty levels on the front page, and we have the capacity to answer expert-level questions, then I think we'll be both inviting to experts and to non-experts.
I agree @Jeromy! It's similar to Stack Overflow, where there's a wide variance of difficulty level in the questions
I think we've really greatly improved the quality of the site these past 10 days
This is not my area, but I did a little research and found a few things:
Silverman (2000) has an interesting article discussing children who are gifted but also have a learning disability. The article makes a number of interesting points about how other skills are often developed in order to com...
^^^ Very interesting to me
@JeromyAnglim the numbered list describes one friend of mine very, very well!
I'm trying to share some of our most interesting questions via Facebook / IM / etc
Not sure how many people will actually view them, but I'll do what I can! :-)
This is not an answer but I didn't flag it because I want to give the new user a chance to make it an answer (by adding a reference) before it gets converted to a comment
If the other answer doesn't get edited I will flag it, I just didn't want to scare off the n00bs, wanted to give him a day to edit his answer and add a reference
I am in no way a professional in this area and my answer may seem strange to you but I can see only two possbile main whys here:
1) It is programmed in our DNA in the same manner as the rest of the aging program. Human and other animal bodies, in general, wear off with time. The brain is an orga...
looks like the reddit links are a success for traffic/value added on reddit, so far it looks like they haven't made significant conversions though, except that one user on the leg jiggling one
I asked my mom about that one, she's a psychologist, she responded:
> Habit, tension in the lower extremities....not sure. I always thought of it as a nervous neurologic overflow..like sticking your tongue out when ur concentrating.
General pedagogical ideas around optimal difficulty
Many theories of instruction suggest that learning is optimal when an appropriate level of challenge is maintained. If a task is too easy, there's little to learn. If a task is too difficult, the learner can be overwhelmed. The implication for ...
^^^^ Hahaha @Jeromy quoted the OP's PhD advisor :-D
Now to leave my office and enjoy a beer to celebrate!
I'll be checking in periodically via my mobile phone... so if anyone needs me just @Josh me if (even if I'm AFK, which I'll be a lot over the weekend) and I can help with edits, close votes, etc.
Catch everyone later!
/status away I'll be away from the computer for a while. If you need me @Josh to get my attention and I'll respond later!
This is slightly left-field, but I am interested in the Cognitive Science implications of this question: Many people, myself included, are "leg jigglers", meaning we often sit jiggling or bouncing a leg -- usually to the irritation of those around us.
The evidence that I have seen is that:
it ...
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The Axon Terminal