today: Braddock
10am: went to Frederick's proposal. The committee consisted of several philosophers plus Carlos. Many interesting questions.
noon: AI seminar at Pitt. The two talks were somewhat disappointing, although the second one about machine learning of MIDI music was ok. Met Jan Wiebe, who suggested a way to get argument-mapping-like data.
Then met with David Danks, who gave me good advice: the Summer School belongs to the school of thought that people are Bayesian machines. However, I absolutely need to be familiar with this, if I am going to do work in computational cogsci. So it's highly recommended.
ACT-R talk on algebra: boring. I don't think work on ACT-R is necessarily boring, but the lectures always seem to.
Then I rode with critical mass, and ended up in the town of Braddock. It's an amazing place, a ghost town. I chatted with the mayor, Mayor John, a heavily-tattooed man, who poured me some chips and sauce, as he spoke about turning parking lots into urban farms. The town once had 20K residents. Today it has less than 3K. Real-estate is virtually free (the average house costs 10k), and artists have started taking advantage of this. The place reminds me of IJburg (before anyone moved in), but more so of Amsterdam squats, like Ruig Oord.
After meeting several artsy types (and Stuart from robotics), I biked back with Matt (who is a colleague of iole200's) two other Pitt guys. Ran into Alex and Brenda on Forbes, and decided to go to the former's apartment. William joined soon afterwards, and much amusement was had.
noon: AI seminar at Pitt. The two talks were somewhat disappointing, although the second one about machine learning of MIDI music was ok. Met Jan Wiebe, who suggested a way to get argument-mapping-like data.
Then met with David Danks, who gave me good advice: the Summer School belongs to the school of thought that people are Bayesian machines. However, I absolutely need to be familiar with this, if I am going to do work in computational cogsci. So it's highly recommended.
ACT-R talk on algebra: boring. I don't think work on ACT-R is necessarily boring, but the lectures always seem to.
Then I rode with critical mass, and ended up in the town of Braddock. It's an amazing place, a ghost town. I chatted with the mayor, Mayor John, a heavily-tattooed man, who poured me some chips and sauce, as he spoke about turning parking lots into urban farms. The town once had 20K residents. Today it has less than 3K. Real-estate is virtually free (the average house costs 10k), and artists have started taking advantage of this. The place reminds me of IJburg (before anyone moved in), but more so of Amsterdam squats, like Ruig Oord.
After meeting several artsy types (and Stuart from robotics), I biked back with Matt (who is a colleague of iole200's) two other Pitt guys. Ran into Alex and Brenda on Forbes, and decided to go to the former's apartment. William joined soon afterwards, and much amusement was had.