Reinforcement Learning illustrated...

Friends always seems to be on television here, several times a day, every day of the week. Once they reach the end, the whole thing is shown again from the beginning. I was watching an episode this evening, and this little gem of a quote came up:

Ross: I'm really impressed that you were able to memorize all this so quickly.
Joey: I'm an actor. I can memorize anything. Last week I had to say "Frontal Temporal Zygomatic Craniotomy."
Ross: Wow, what does that mean?
Joey: No idea. But the guy I said it to dies in the next scene, so I guess it means, you're going to get eaten by a bear.

From the episode "The one with the fertility test", you can see the clip here (at about 7mins).

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to all :-)

PS I didn't take the photo - I just found it...

A brief update - and Twittering

I've not posted on here for a while now. I'm in the process of writing up my PhD thesis now, and additional writing for this blog is beyond me at the moment. I don't, however, want this blog to die as I wish to continue using it to post notes and thoughts as I (hopefully at least...) begin a career in academia.

Incidentally, I have recently given in to a certain amount of hype, and a personal recommendation, and signed up to Twitter (with the alias one_paulie). Now, at this moment in time, I don't see it being a particularly useful tool (or even a very interesting one), but there was one potential use which I thought deserved further investigation: the use of Twitter as a live-update conference tool. Not been to a conference yet where I've noticed its use, but I'm going to two in September (ECAL and ICAIS if anyone's interested, and wants to have a chat with me there?) and want to see if it actually has some practical use.

I've put a sidebar on this page (on the right hand side of this page) with my Twitter feed, it'll most likely get more activity than this blog for the time being (but then probably mostly focused on conference and/or paper related activities)...

Computers are the bane of my existence: the problem is that they do exactly what you tell them to do, not what you want them to do.

I've just about 8 hours worth of experimental data... :-(

On a more useful note, I should finally be able to get back to posting something more than a rant after this weekend.