Quick: What mood are you in right now? This (loaded) question is interesting because it can help us deeply understand ourselves. It’s not that one’s current mood is highly informative, but that in order to understand oneself it helps to have a helpful mental model of moods. This is something I struggled with until I read Robert Thayer’s Calm Energy, and later, James Russell’s theory of “core affect”.
It is Labour Day week-end! This is a time to celebrate great knowledge work. It is also a time to ask “Have we been using the best conceptual tools?” And “how can we build better knowledge?” Let’s keep these questions in the back of our minds as we consider the following
Fifty years ago this year, Herbert A. Simon published “Motivational and emotional controls of cognition”. There, he expressed one of the most important insights about emotion and motivation (and hence perhaps of psychology) of the last century. Continue reading Fifty Years after Herbert Simon’s Landmark Contribution to Emotion Research: “Motivational and Emotional Controls of Cognition” (1967)
My Cognitive Productivity toolkit makes heavy use of Skim, the ironically named PDF delving app for macOS. Unfortunately, however, in its release of macOS Sierra, Apple introduced major problems for third-party PDF rendering apps like Skim, problems that Apple itself somehow worked around in its Preview app (suggesting that Preview uses some non-public APIs, tsk! tsk!).
The problem causes PDF to be rendered extremely slowly, sometimes taking over a minute!, and inconsistently. I logged a bug on Skim’s Sourceforge project in December 2016.
Continue reading Spinning a Swirly Solution to Skim’s Slow PDF Content Rendering Issue
Last summer I published the mySelfQuantifier spreadsheet-based time-tracking system. It involves inputting events from many sources. As such, it requires desktop time-tracking software that provides a timeline of your activities. For the latter, I previously relied on the old “Track Time” app (which was abandoned long ago by its developer), because there was no other choice. However, Daniel Alm has now released Timing2 with a beautiful and highly functional timeline. Continue reading Timing2 App for macOS Is Available—I Highly Recommend It!
CogZest’s mission is to extend and use broad cognitive science to help knowledge workers thrive in the sea of knowledge. More precisely, we aim to help people become more effective at using knowledge and technology to solve problems, develop products (including new knowledge) and to develop themselves. We lead by example, practicing what we preach.
Our mission, however, is too grand to be accomplished alone. Indeed, we have benefited from deeply insightful help over the years.
Today, I am pleased to announce the formation of the CogZest Advisory Board. Continue reading Announcing CogZest’s Advisory Board
My R&D on sleep onset and insomnia (including the cognitive shuffle / serial diverse imagining) has received several waves of media attention. The last one started c. 10 days ago with the May edition of O Magazine (the print edition of Oprah), and then went crazy from there. Last week, I accepted over 20 interview invitations from TV stations, radio stations, web sites, and a magazine who were curious about this topic. Continue reading Media Responses to the Cognitive Shuffle: Much Ado about a Research Programme
At the Vancouver Arts Club on Friday, I attended the emotion-inducing play, Angels in America Part 1: Millennium Approaches. (Its wikipedia page. One of the characters, Louis Ironson, is a Jewish homosexual consumed by anxiety and guilt. Today, I used this character to reflect upon imperfection, the emotions of guilt, and self-directed learning. I wondered in particular how one can use feelings of guilt and fiction/non-fiction to become more effective. This blog post touches briefly on this problem. Continue reading On Using Fiction and Non-Fiction When Feeling Guilty
On Systematic, Brett Terpstra “explores the idea that all work is creative work, welcoming a different guest each week.”
Continue reading Interviewed by Brett Terpstra on Systematic
Because so many people have complained that the late 2016 MacBook Pro does not support legacy interfaces (except for the 3.5 mm microphone jack), I thought I should write a blog post to give you my impression of this new notebook, which is on the whole quite positive.