I had the great fortune of meeting David H. Saussy, who is a proud graduate of St. Johns U., and has set up a “symposium” non-profit group in San Francisco. Well, he lives in San Antonio now, and is leading the charge to build Symposium San Antonio, a Great Books study group.

I’ve set up the Symposium.com web site at SDF.org, and we also have Facebook and Twitter pages that are linked to from the main web site.

Please check us out, and if you feel inclined to participate or contribute in any way, please do.

The Star Diamond is an older model from Novag’s table-top chess computer line. It is a very nice chess computer, allowing you to play a game of chess against a fairly strong chess program, all the while moving small plastic pieces so that it is similar to playing a human opponent over-the-board. I really like the Star Diamond, mainly because it has a lot of features to help train weaker chess players, such as myself.

Some of the nice features are based on the fact that the Star Diamond has a built in serial port. This means that it can be connected to a regular computer, and you can then use a terminal program to send and receive text information to the Star Diamond. This is cool, because you can play games on the Star Diamond then save those games to text files on your computer for future analysis, which helps me immensely in learning to become better at chess.

I could not find an online source for the serial cable to connect the Star Diamond to a serial port on a computer. But since it was just a simple serial port, I figured I could build my own cable. I did so, and wanted to post this information online in case anyone else was interested.

The Star Diamond serial port comes in the form of an RJ-11 connector on the back of the device. The RJ-11 connector is wired up to be used with a six-conductor telephone wire. Since most phone wires you have at home or can get at a store are either 2 conductor or 4 conductor, this means you”ll need to go to an electronics supply store and get a suitable 6 conductor telephone wire with an RJ-11 plug on both ends.

Looking at the serial port on the Star Diamond, you can see that it only uses three of the six conductors in the wire, the first, third, and fifth wires. In a standard six-conductor phone wire, these correspond to the wire colors blue, green, and black (respectively).

These three wires make up the serial connection to any computer with a standard RS-232 port. Nowadays, it is difficult to find a new computer with such a port, so you’ll probably need to buy a serial-to-USB adapter, which can be had online quite cheaply.

Any serial-to-USB adapter you purchase will likely have a DB-9 male connector on one end, and the USB connector on the other. All you have to do is to correctly wire the phone cable to the DB-9 connector.

The easiest way to do this is to purchase a female RJ-11 to female DB-9 adapter. Believe it or not, they sell these things. I found mine at Altex, a local electonics shop in San Antonio. When you buy it, the six colored wires in the adapter are NOT connected to any of the female pins, you have to do that yourself. The wiring of the pins is:

• Signal Ground: Blue phone wire -> DB-9 pin 7
• Transmitted Data (from PC to Star Diamond): Black phone wire -> DB-9 pin 2
• Received Data (from Star Diamond to PC): Green phone wire -> DB-9 pin 3

Once you plug the correct pins into the correct holes on the back of the DB-9 female connector, stuff it all into its little plastic housing, plug in the cable into the back of the little plastic housing, and you have completed the construction of your wire.

To use it, plug the DB-9 connector into a serial port or serial port adapter on your computer, then plug the RJ-11 connector into the back of the Star Diamond. Fire up a terminal program on your computer, and set the comm parameters for 57600 baud, 8 data bits, 1 stop bits, no parity, and no flow control. Open a terminal screen, turn on your Star Diamond, and then type “n” then press Enter. This is the command to tell the Star Diamond to start a new game. When you enter this command, the Star Diamond should beep, indicating the start of a new game.

All of the commands for interfacing with the Star Diamond are available in the following PDF document:

www.novag.com/Web%202006/Manual%20download/Star%20Diamond%20Protocol%20ENGLISH.pdf

Good luck!

The purpose of the study was to look at the effects of “self-affirmations” on perceived social rejection. People who are very insecure tend to be very sensitive to rejection by others. This phenomenon is sometimes called “rejection sensitivity”. Since they’re always sensitive, they oftentimes act in ways that drives people away. Thus, these folks end up stuck in a never-ending loop of sensitivity, rejection, and anxiety.

When you’re in this cycle, help seems impossible. You can’t get help from others because you’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for them to “reject” you. If someone else DOES try to help, they inevitably end up committing some sort of perceived offense, and the sensitive person is left alone again. It is a vicious self-fulfilling prophecy that seems inescapable.

The authors of this new study, Danu Anthony Stinson, Christine Logel, Steven Shepard, and Mark P. Zanna, hypothesized that self-affirmations would be helpful to persons sensitive to social rejection. This hypothesis starts with the concept of “relational insecurity”, which in this study is defined as a lack of confidence in feeling valued by the people you are interacting with at any given moment. This relational insecurity seems to come from feelings of inferiority, and manifests itself when the insecure person comes across as cold and standoffish. This standoffish behavior usually puts off other people. Thus, the “sad irony” of the fact that people who crave relationships the most are the ones who act in such a way as to drive people off.

The good news is that there is some earlier research which suggests that these people are aided by certain social cues that indicate the risk of rejection is low. When exposed to these cues, insecure people are quite capable of acting “… in a relaxed, calm, and positive manner, at least in the short term.”

So if these folks are capable of positive social interactions, is there anything that can be done for them to help in the long-term? This is where the power of “self-affirmations” come into play. Self-affirmations are activities that people can use to bolster their impressions of themselves. For example, you can ask people to reflect on positive events in their lives, or positive values that underlie the behavior you’re hoping to influence (e.g., confidence, attractiveness, likeability). There is plenty of prior research showing that self-affirmations work for all sorts of thing like academic performance and weight loss. Thus, the purpose of this research was to see if self-affirmations can be used to assist people in the world of social interactions. Social interactions go beyond a single individual trying to lose weight or stop smoking. However, the authors of this paper hypothesized that self-affirmations might help sensitive individuals by buffering “… insecure participants against social self-threats, and this buffering would be evident in sustained improvements to insecure participants’ relational security (an indicator of resistance to self-threat) and improvements in their social behavior (e.g., reactions to self-threat).”

To test this hypothesis, undergraduate students were asked to rate their relational security with five friends and five family members. They were then asked to rank a set of personal values (e.g., academics) from most important to least important. Afterwards the subjects were randomly assigned to two groups. The subjects in the first group were asked to write a short essay describing why their top ranked value was important to them. This was a clever way to get them to reflect on their values, and develop a set of self-affirmations. The other group was asked to focus on their ninth-ranked value, and write an essay describing why that value would be important to someone else. Afterwards, subjects in both groups were re-tested twice within two months for relational security and also interviewed by a person trained to rate the subjects’ social demeanor.

The results of the study suggested first that relational security is highly stable, because subjects who did not write self-affirmations about their values showed consistent relational security scores across time. The second finding was the most important, in that those subjects with initially low relational security showed a statistically significant increase in relational security. Furthermore, this increase was persistent and stable across the two months of the study.

This is an important finding, because it speaks to a phenomenon that victimizes many people into a state of anxiety and depression. The recent plethora of psychological investigations into social rejection came about as an outgrowth of research on bullying in schools and workplaces. Social rejection is a form of bullying that is commonplace in schools and workplaces, and it is evident that some people are more sensitive to this form of intimidation than others. If we can develop cheap, simple, and effective measures to protect people against the effects of social rejection, this would go a long way in helping to reduce the incidence of anxiety and depression in those suffering from relational insecurity.

Article referenced: Stinson, D., Logel, C., Shepherd, S., and Zanna, M. (2011). Rewriting the self-fulfilling prophecy of social rejection. Psychological Science, 22, 1-5

The first book we will be covering is Homer’s Illiad. Our first meeting is tentatively scheduled for Thursday, 25 August, at 7:00 PM. We’re still searching for a venue.

Keep checking my site here for future updates!

Many of the comments online and in the news were of the “so what?” variety. These commentaries are generally about the fact that Watson is a massive, powerful computer, and, duh, it should be good at quickly answering trivia questions.

These types of comments miss the point entirely about Watson. Watson’s biggest achievement is the fact that the front end is able to parse English with no help from humans. Natural language processing (NLP) is one of the biggest and most complex areas in computer science. The holy grail of NLP is the ability to correctly understand English, with all of its bizarre rules, puns, poems, insults, sarcasm, irony, and clever twists of phrasing. If you are a native English speaker, understanding all of these things is something you do automatically. This is because our brains contain the built-in functionality necessary to learn and understand language. Programming such understanding into a computer has always been a challenge, one that we haven’t done so well. Until now.

So yes, Watson is a big deal. Not because of the ability to quickly answer trivia questions, but because of its ability to take natural language and use that natural language input to drive its searches.

Watson’s technology is still a very long way from being used by regular folks. And the technology still has a long way to go, because Watson can’t actually hear human English, it is just able to respond to typed input. But once those problems are solved, we will have a platform that can be used in a very wide variety of settings, including help desks, financial advice, medical diagnoses, mental health, law enforcement, and a host of other areas.

Keep watching what IBM does in this area. As a former IBMer I am very proud of the accomplishments of this company, and look forward to hearing more and more about the developments coming out of IBM Research.

“There’s a big movement all across the social and natural sciences to look at things in terms of networks. In the neurosciences, increasingly we aren’t looking at only one part of the brain, but seeing how the interactions between different parts make them work together.”

I find this highly amusing, for it follows a pattern that has been around for hundreds of years: That of using the latest-greatest technology as a metaphor for how the human nervous system works.

In the 17th century, Rene Descartes was once enthralled by seeing moving automatons that looked just like real people. At that time, mechanical craftsmanship was exploding, and new technologies based on steam, hydraulics, and pneumatics were being used to create all sorts of wonderful new toys and tools. These new technologies would eventually form the framework for the Industrial Revolution. The automatons that Descartes saw were machines powered by hydraulics and pneumatics, and this led Descartes to propose that animals and humans were nothing more than machines made out of meat. Our nervous systems were simply pathways that pumped our muscles up and down to create movements, and our brain was the central pump. Of course, this theory was wrong, and it was proven so by experiments in the next century.

These 18th century experiments involved a new phenomenon… electricity. It was discovered early on that you could make the muscles of dead animals twitch by apply an electrical current to them via metal pins stuck in the tissue. Experimentation demonstrated that hydraulics had nothing to do with muscle movement, but electricity did, so now the brain and nervous system was viewed as a dynamo connected to a series of wires. Once again, that was wrong, and we moved on to the next century and next technology: the telegraph.

Telegraph networks were pioneered and built in the 19th century and persisted well into the 20th century. People were enthralled with the ability to send information quickly and cheaply across the world. Without fail, this new technology was seized upon as the absolutely correct way in which the brain and nervous system function. Based on electricity, it was thought that the nervous system was a very large telegraph network. Different parts of the body communicated with the brain via a specific code, and the brain responded back with commands to initiate movements, thoughts, and feelings. Did they have it right? Of course not. Researching on the nervous system continued and when it became apparent that there was no way to identify anything that looked like a telegraph system, people moved on until the next great technology appeared.

In the early part of the 20th century, telephone networks were constructed. Early phone networks grew rapidly and became incredibly complex. The complexity was managed by central phone offices manned by switchboard operators. The switchboard operators (usually young women) were the intelligence behind the network. They would receive phone call requests from people and route calls from point to point until the callers were connected. And so, the “telephone switchboard” model of mind and brain was born. The complexity of mental functions obviously involved some complex switching of information at some level, so people imagined the brain as a massive network of inter-communicating cells, being directed by switchboards which responded to sensations, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, what have you. This metaphor actually persisted into the second half of the 20th century, being recounted in many non-scientific publications for adults and children.

A lesser known metaphor to understand brain functions came about as a result of a technology developed during World War II: the electronic servomechanism. A servomechanism is a mechanical or electronic device that uses negative feedback to correct and regulate its operations. For example, the furnace in your house constitutes a servomechanism. The electronic servomechanism served as the perfect theoretical construct to help understand the mysterious “intelligence” that controlled the phone switchboards in your brain. The switchboard operators could now be replaced with arrays of servomechanisms, all operating together to regulate our functions and behaviors. This metaphor worked well with the mechanistic world-view of the behaviorists of the day, such as Clark Hull and Kenneth Spence.

Starting in the 1960s, it became apparent that even an extremely complex network of wires, switches, and servos was no match for the computational power of the human brain. Fortunately, technology came to the rescue with another handy metaphor for us to use in understanding brain function: the digital computer! The 1960s saw an explosion of psychological research all aimed at understanding the human mind and brain as “information processors”. So it was to be expected that people started talking about our brains in terms of “CPUs”, “random access memory”, “disk storage”, and all the other terms associated with computer technology. As computers got smaller, cheaper and faster, they fell into the hands of more and more scientists, who were more than confident that 1) the brain was in fact an information processor just like a computer, and 2) we could use computers to model human cognitive activity. No where was this expressed more confidently and hauntingly than in the fictional HAL 9000 computer from the 1968 movie classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. However, during the latter part of the 20th century, it became apparent that simulating human cognition was a much tougher problem than anyone had imagined, and by the mid 1980s most artificial intelligence researchers had thrown in the towel in terms of being able to do so. There were a few strategic battles won here and there, most notably by IBMs Deep Blue supercomputer, which defeated world champ Gary Kasparov in a series of chess matches. But even though the metaphor of the human mind as an information processor persists to this day, it has not helped much in figuring out the precise mechanisms by which our brains work. We need another metaphor, and thanks to the rise of the Internet, we have one: networks.

So we finally arrive at the 21st century, with a long list of failed metaphors that have helped us slowly but surely understand what the brain does. The Cartesian model of hydraulics and machines helped us to understand that our nervous systems follow some laws of nature. The electrical metaphors helped us to see the electrochemical properties of our nervous systems. Telegraph and telephone metaphors introduced complexity to the mix, helping us to envision the brain as a very massive collection of interconnected parts. The servo metaphor helped us to see ways in which our brains control the functions of our bodies and our minds. Computers gave us a metaphor of information processing, the generic act of sifting through data to arrive at final solutions to problems of cognition. What will the network metaphor give us? I don’t think anyone can say now. As a technology person, I am hopeful that the network metaphor will give us some insight into the “communication protocol” used by networks of neurons to render our experiences. Just as the Internet is based upon the TCP/IP protocol, I am hopeful that looking at the brain as a “network” will help us to begin to understand what the “networking protocol” of the brain really is.

In the meantime, we can take books like Networks of the Brain and use them to help us explore the network metaphor. I doubt that we’ve gotten it “right” now, in that the brain probably operates by some principles we can’t even imagine yet. But let’s hope that this new metaphor will enable us to scratch ahead even a little in understanding how our brains work.

This has been true for decades, at least since the 1980s. The fact is this: Unless you are white, graduating from an Ivy-league or other top school, and have several publications, you’re not going to get one of the few tenure-track jobs that become available every year. That’s just the way it is, and it isn’t likely to change anytime soon.

So if you’re a graduate student, and you’re within sight of getting that coveted Ph.D., you may be asking yourself if it is worth the effort. If you are expecting to get a tenure-track job somewhere, you may be in for a big disappointment. But in my opinion, getting a doctorate degree (particularly in the sciences) is very definitely worth the effort, if you have the right experiences and right attitude.

I earned my doctorate in neuroscience in 1993, from a good, but not top-tier, public university. My graduate program encouraged students to adopt a very broad view of science, one that allowed many of us to integrate other areas of knowledge into our studies. I think that such graduate programs are extremely beneficial, because you get to learn about other areas and expand your knowledge. This becomes critically important after you get your doctorate, because in all likelihood you will be entering the non-academic job market, and the more marketable skills you can demonstrate, the better off you’ll be. In my case, I had the opportunity to learn philosophy and computer programming. The philosophy helped me to be a MUCH better writer, public speaker, and thinker, and the computer programming turned out to be a lifesaving job skill for me.

In neuroscience, it is traditional for new Ph.D.s to work as post-docs at research schools, gaining experience and publications which will ultimately help them land that coveted tenure-track job. In my case I landed a great post-doc job with a very well-known pharmacology researcher. While I was on this post-doc, the pharmacology department I was working in was growing, adding lots of bright new faculty members. Many of these new faculty were persons in their late 30s and early 40s, who had done 2, 3, and sometimes 4 post-doc rotations before they finally landed the tenure-track jobs at the school I worked. That didn’t look like a very promising future for me. I’m a smart guy, but there’s no way, on paper, I could compete with the Harvards, Berkeleys, Yales, Caltechs, and others who were swarming into the academic job market. At some point, I saw the writing on the wall and fell back on my knowledge of computer science, and entered the world of IT consulting in 1996.

I’ve had a great career in information technology, and having a doctorate has definitely helped me more than hurt me. My best job was at IBM, a truly wonderful place to work. They have a strong merit-based culture of collaboration and innovation, and the doctorate definitely helped me over there by saying that, yes, this guy can write and think somewhat. There are other places, however, where the doctorate can set you back. I worked for a couple of years at a large financial institution, where the horrific culture was just the opposite of IBM. Over there, anyone with a doctorate was an outsider, and they didn’t treat outsiders very well.

If you do find yourself in the non-academic job market, be cautious about how strongly you emphasize the fact that you do have a doctorate. Unfortunately, there really isn’t a fool-proof method you can use to guide you along with this. Once suggestion I have is that if you are applying for a job that is even remotely connected with education or your field of study, then by all means highlight the fact that you do have a Ph.D. Otherwise, just bury it in the “Education” section of the resume, and don’t mention it unless someone asks you about it.

So, the bottom line is that you should definitely get your doctorate! While you’re getting it, be sure to expand your horizons and do not end up as simply a specialist in one, small area. Yes, creating a dissertation means you get to specialize in something that only 10 other people in the world will care about. But the rest of your experience, outside of your dissertation, should support your work and give you some skills that you can use anywhere. Also, you need to have a positive attitude about yourself. If you don’t see yourself getting a tenure-track job, then go for something else. Getting a Ph.D. is very, very hard. If you can do that, you can do anything.

• Initial consultation
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I hold a Ph.D. and master’s degrees in the biological sciences and am also deeply knowledgeable about liberal arts and humanities. I’ve 16 years experience working for universities, large corporations, the military, biotech, and non-profit organizations. I very much enjoy sharing my experience with those seeking to better themselves through education, and my prices are very reasonable.

If interested, please click on the “College Counseling” link at the top of this web page.

One of the many things that bugs me about the mostly vapid discussions you see online are the arguments made by folks on both sides of the believers/non-believers divide related to evolutionary theory. Most atheists tend to believe that one cannot be a Christian and simultaneously believe in evolutionary theory of the Neo-Dariwnian sort. Unfortunately, there are a lot of Christians, particularly fundamentalists, who are quite happy to fit right into that stereotype. They’ll argue passionately against Neo-Darwinian evolution, or at best will use the cringe-worthy phrase, “It’s just a theory, not a fact.”

I happen to be a person of deep Christian faith who also happens to be a long-time student and teacher of evolutionary theory. To me, there is no conflict whatsoever between my faith and the paradigm of Neo-Darwinism.

Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a short article about this debate. I wrote this article for a little electronic magazine I was writing on the old StarText system. StarText was a text-based BBS and was one of the first online services and virtual communities in existence prior to the rise of the Internet. The electronic magazines on this system were basically like blogs. You could write whatever you wanted to, and then readers would send you electronic messages with their opinions on what you wrote.

Two copies of my little e-zine (called the “Darwin Times”) have been stored away on the Internet (I’ve since lost the other copies). Given my recent encounters with people who can’t seem to understand how a person of faith can believe in evolution, I’ve decided to reprint a portion of an article here. I’ve not edited it, and paste it here the way it appeared on StarText back in 1991.

* Commentary: Evolution or Evilution?

We have all heard it before for our entire lives. Unfortunately,
many people are under the mistaken impression that to believe
life evolved and IS evolving on this planet is to NOT believe
in God and the Bible. In my view, nothing could be further
from the truth.

These are some of the basic reasons why I feel that modern
evolutionary theory need not contradict religious beliefs or
thought. All of this is simply my opinion. Science and
evolutionary theory deal with the HOW question of life on
our planet. Religion deals with the WHY question of life on
earth. These are entirely different questions, and must be
looked at from entirely different perspectives.

Last June, on the Monday after Father’s Day, I decided to quit my job as a Lead System Engineer at a large financial services company in San Antonio. It was the culmination of 6 months of sheer misery for me, as I had stumbled into a nest of some of the most vile people I have ever encountered in my professional life. As it turned out, the whole company culture was one made up of “good ol’ boy” networks. And if you were not fortunate enough to be deemed worthy to be part of one of these networks, then your co-workers and your managers simply made life miserable for you. You were actively shunned, humiliated, and made to feel as badly as possible.

The canned response to a situation like this is, “No one can make you feel badly without your permission.” I generally agree with this view, but there are sometimes when the old joke is true: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t really out to get you.

My manager turned out to be a classic psychopath, of the sort with a very charming personal style, yet with no conscience or integrity whatsoever. Even with a Ph.D. in psychology, I failed to recognize this until it was too late. I fell out of favor with him, and that was magnified by the fact that I was also out of favor with the reigning in-group. From about March until June, 2009, each day at work was an exercise in subjugation and humiliation for me. I was slowly being phased out of all aspects of my team’s operations, and nothing I did was ever good enough. Every month or so, my psychopathic manager would meet with me and give me his latest non-constructive opinion of what I had been doing wrong lately. On the Friday prior to Father’s Day, we had one of these meetings and he told me that he was putting me on a “performance improvement plan.” At this workplace, a performance improvement plan was simply a method used to begin the documentation process necessary to fire you within the next 3 to 6 months.

After that meeting I called my wife and told her what had happened. We both agreed I was about to be fired. She was also deeply concerned about me, as I had been coming home every day deeply depressed for the past few months. I was earning a nice six-figure salary at this job, and I told my wife I should stick it out for these final months while we cut back our expenses and saved some money. She disagreed, and told me that I needed to quit immediately, and that we’d figure out the financial situation later.

Over the weekend we discussed it further, and by Sunday morning I had made the decision to quit this job. It was a terrifying prospect, since my wife earned less than half of what I earned, and I had no other job lined up. But ultimately I decided that I had been wronged and that I just had to leave a toxic situation. That job had killed me emotionally and spiritually, and it was about to kill me physically as well.

So, on the Monday after Father’s Day, I go into work and await the arrival of the psychopath. When he shows up I sit down at his desk and tell him I’d like to give my 2 weeks notice. His answer: “OK, no problem.” He told me they’d pay me for 2 weeks of work but that I would be leaving there today. As I cleaned out my desk, one of his henchgirls came by and asked me what I was doing. When I told her I had quit, it was obvious that she could barely contain her glee.

A couple of hours later, after all the paperwork was completed, the psychopath escorted me to the exit, and we parted ways without saying a word. I had a tremendous sense of relief that day! That afternoon I started applying for jobs, and because God takes care of me, I found a job that Thursday. Yes, it paid much less than my old job, but it was a job nonetheless, one working with good people.

For the next 3 months or so after I quit that job, I actually experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Sleepless nights, depression, and unexplainable bouts of rage. The rage I felt was sheer hatred and anger, because I had been treated so badly by people who were so blissful. The unfairness of it all made my blood boil.

This whole experience taught me a lot of things. First off, I learned what it was like to work in a pathological corporate culture. I had been spoiled by working for companies like EDS and IBM. Sure, EDS and IBM had their problems, but for the most part my experiences there were very positive. Their cultures were one where creativity, collaboration, and professionalism were the rule, the exact opposite of this workplace I had just left. In order to grow as a professional, as a leader, and as a person, I had to experience a workplace where service, loyalty, honesty, and integrity didn’t matter.

The second thing I had learned from all of this was the power of forgiveness. I could have let my PTSD get worse, and let the rage build up, but that’s something that would have ultimately done me in. That’s what anger and hatred do to you. They eat you up and cause you to die from within. Meanwhile those that have wronged you have completely forgotten about you. As some friends said to me, “Why let those bastards live rent free in your head?” This is where I learned about the power of forgiveness, the power of letting go of your anger, and of letting go of the memories of your past wounds. By forgiving, you start the process of healing yourself, of learning from you past mistakes and of making sure that your anger and rage do not manifest themselves in some horrible way. I had to convince myself that I had simply fallen into a bad situation with some immoral people. Yes, they are immoral, but they’re human beings, loved by God every bit as much as I am. Forgiveness is much more than just rationalizing what happens to you. It is an active process of detaching yourself from your pain, and replacing that pain with love for those who have hurt you.

I can honestly say I have completed half of that process, namely detaching myself from the pain. I see it now as a set of valuable lessons learned, and nothing more. But I am still working on the part of replacing my pain with love for those who hurt me. I think that will take more time. And more prayer. In the end I’ll be a better person for it, one who truly understands the power of forgiveness and one who has grown more as a spiritual being and child of God.