Overweight People and Discrimination

Overweight people are one of the last openly discriminated-against groups. If they were any other group, they would not allow people to call them the most offensive slur used against them: the "f" word. Imagine swapping the "f" word with any number of racial pejoratives. Well, you may say, it's different. They are overweight because of their own irresponsibility and therefore they deserve ridicule, you might say. Hey, the ridicule may help them and give them a wake-up call, right? Wrong. There are overweight people at every level of society. They have been the richest, most powerful, most disciplined people who have reached every pinnacle of success. They have been presidents, governors, CEOs, film directors, physicians and professors. You think that they are not disciplined? You think that they don't have any will power or self control? The fact is that once you are overweight for any reason, the odds of you losing the weight and keeping it off for 5+ years are exceedingly low. Dieting in some cases is an attempt to defeat a natural instinct as basic as breathing, in a battle doomed to failure. That's no reason to give up hope that they might be one of the lucky ones, but let's face it, some people will not be thin in their lifetimes. They may get to a healthy weight, but it may be unrealistic to get to their ideal weight. This is no reason for overweight people to suffer, or to be derided. Before judging, consider that you might someday become part of a discriminated-against group.

For more information on this subject, check out: bigf**blog.com

Public Research, Public Data

I'd like to express a simple opinion: if tax money pays for research, the research data should be released to the public. Often you will find in university studies that only the abstract is publicly available and any more detailed information must be paid for separately. It is almost free to move information from one place to another, and hoarding research results until others pay clogs up the flow of ideas from one institution to the next.

Invention Idea: Speeding up Speach on the Cell Phone

It seems that cell phones generally cut out when they lose information due to poor signal strength or congestion. One idea here is that they could "catch up" by playing the audio slightly faster for periods of time. Of course, to prevent the sound from sounding strange to the human ear, it should not change the pitch of the sound. It may still sound natural if played at 10-20% faster than the original recording, and allow resynchronization of the time.

Ignorance of the Law is No Excuse

Have you ever heard anyone claim "ignorance of the law is no excuse"? Many Americans grow up understanding the law as a series of traditions and know what is legal and illegal only through word of mouth. Of course, many laws are universal and obvious, going back even to religious traditions. Also, have you ever heard anyone say "judges should not legislate from the bench, it is their job to interpret the law not to produce it." You could go through your whole life not realizing that the majority of detail in US laws are not actually written in the "law books" but written instead in decisions by judges. This is because for every state except Lousiana, the United States uses a system of common law as opposed to civil law. Knowing what the law is, in some circumstances, requires extensive research. It's interesting that in rare cases, the definition of the "law" is not even agreed upon among the top experts, for instance our U.S. Supreme Court judges. Check out Wikipedia:Common_law for more information on this subject.

Memory and the Brain

Although not much is understood about how the brain encodes memories, it is possible that the brain is a network of information with different degrees of connectedness between different nodes in the network. Every time that information it strengthens the connections and forms new connections. It appears that these connections need to be refreshed from time to time or they become completely lost.

If this model of memory is correct for the human brain, then it appears to explain why we remember and forget certain pieces of data. If we review a piece of information frequently and under many different contexts then this creates many more connections to that information. Furthermore, when we attempt to recall the information our brain's context may be similar to when we memorized it. Repetition over a long period of time would appear to be one of the best ways to create more connections. You could also conjecture that the connections are weakened or lost altogether in the passage of time. Also, retrieving appears to strengthen the connections. Finally, it seems reasonable to believe that a particular piece of data could be duplicated in multiple places in the brain.

Intuitively, our ability to remember, or retrieve data, from our brain is determined by:

1) The strength of each connection
2) The number of connections
3) The duplication or redundancy of the data

It would appear that if data is connected in a network then these strategies of memorization should be very good at maximizing long-term retrieval:

1) Repetition
2) Review
3) Learning at a deeper level of detail

The first and second strategy are widely used by virtually everyone. The third strategy is to memorize at a level of detail beyond what one wants to retain. This would intuitively connect the brain in those areas more by allowing the data to become relied upon for other data. I was not exposed to this idea in school although it appears to happen naturally when you study history books and learn all sorts of minutia about George Washington, you tend to not forget who George Washington is.

It is very popular to emphasize mnemonic techniques in a discussion about memory, but I'll have to admit, they have not been very useful to me. For short-term cramming on exams, mnemonics seem to work great. However, despite the hundreds of times I have applied the techniques to convert words into pictures and pictures into stories, this has never resulted in enhancing my long-term memory. In general, mnemonics do not work for long-term memory. At least not in my experience. This isn't to discount certain mnemonics such as Every Good Boy Does Fine and PEMDAS, but for large volumes of information that we need to memorize, rote repetition, disciplined review, learning at a higher level of detail appear to give better retention in your long-term memory and also appear to have a higher rate of retrieval.

Two questions that I'm interested in hearing feedback on:

1) Is this model of memory in the brain a scientific model? Are there inaccuracies?
2) Has anyone had a different experience with mnemonics? Have they worked for long-term (say 5+ years length) memory?