Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Motor Control Summer School

The conference was intense. There was just sooo much stuff to learn, and on top of that the faculty amused themselves by debating philosophical points while the students struggled to grasp the talking points. For example: "Is Principal Component Analysis really the best way of estabilishing the dimensionality of the Uncontrolled Manifold, or does its assumption of linearity limit the interpretation of experimental data?" Yeesh.

So, rather than talk about that sort of jibba-jabba, I'll give you a simple experiment to perform on yourself.

Say "AbCd", where the capital letters are emphasized. Now say "AbCdAbCdAbCd"... you can say it pretty fast, right?

Now say "AbaBabAbaBab". There are only two letters to repeat, but it's so much harder to say them quickly, isn't it?

The difference is that AbCd is repeated exactly every cycle, but the emphases on A and B are constantly being remapped. This has implications on the blah-dee-blah-dee-blah, but don't even worry about that.

On Sunday I played soccer for a couple of hours. I was one of two Americans, the rest were Brazilian, Argentinian, French, Dutch, and Russian. On Monday I couldn't walk. Fun, though!

2 comments:

Will said...

I would say ISOMAP or Locally Linear Embedding would be a better choice than PCA.

Just saying.

megA said...

Now.

I wonder if that is hard in intonationally-based or tonal languages. English has a rather set pattern of expected syllable stress, other languages don't, which is why the Simpson's can so easily make fun of Abu's language skills.

Hmmmm. Linguistical fun this early in the morning. . .