The Reincarnation of the Touch Bar

I’m an avid Mac user but I don’t tend to blog about the latest Apple news. Nor do I publicly speculate about future Apple products. So, I don’t participate in 99% of what is written about Apple. However, 24 hours into using my new MacBook Pro M1 Max, I’m already missing the Touch Bar (as I expected). And I can no longer resist the temptation of discussing its demise and predicting its reincarnation.

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Mind Your Emotions! SnoozzZfest 2021 Keynote Address

Tomorrow, I will give the keynote address at SnoozzZfest™: All About Sleep International Virtual Conference (runs October 23-24, 2021). (Join the conference!) The title of my talk is “Mind your Emotions: Mental perturbance matters”.

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My talk is @ 1:10PM–1:55PM EASTERN Sunday.

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CUP’A and The Future of Text: On Assessing and Selecting Information

Earlier this week I submitted a brief chapter called “Beyond the CRAAP test and other introductory guides for assessing knowledge resources: The CUP’A framework” for publication in the 2nd edition of the Future of Text book edited by Frode Hegland. Here’s Table 1 of the chapter:

Table 1

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Layering in the Mind-brain and Why It Matters: An Exchange Between Paul Smolensky and Myself

Guillaume Pourcel emailed me recently saying

I’m quite sure I spotted you in a video at SFU (recognize your voice and your ideas!): https://youtu.be/GGuBz63snLU?t=2733 (45:35). It’s a nice talk on the integration of connectionists and symbolic ideas w/ virtual machines, something I’m quite interested and my PhD advisor did some really nice work on in this area.

Reverse Engineering the Human Mind as a Way to Better Understand Ourselves and Each Other

Last summer, I gave a guest lecture in Dr. Angelica Lim’s course on Affective Computing at the Department of Computer Science of Simon Fraser University. I said I’d publish the presentation on YouTube, so here it finally is:

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Courage, Heroes and Culture

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Well over a decade ago, age (experience) yielded a dividend of wisdom: the resolve to develop courage. I created the montage above, comprised of pictures of my heroes, Winston Churchill, Jacques Brel and Pierre Elliot Trudeau, which I hung prominently in my office. They were emblems of cognitive zest and courage. They were brilliant, perspicuous, hard working men who facing trials did not flinch. I devoured biographies of Winston Churchill. I re-read Trudeau’s auto-biography and some other books about him. I also read books about Brel and got the DVD collection of his videos. I even started “The zest of Brel” project, exchanging emails with Arnie Johnston who holds the right to translate Brel into English (and I drafted ACT in Three Acts). I re-acquired a beautifully bound copy of the play Cyrano de Bergerac. I memorized La tirade du Non Merci :

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