Introduction to relativity

How should one first introduce special relativity to students? Here's a stab at it:

 

Poster sessions

 The Kansas academy of science meeting this April is to be virtual. Posters are to be made available online about a week prior to the meeting. It would be a good idea to keep that practice even when the meetings go back to being traditional face to face.

Introduction to quantum mechanics

How should one first introduce quantum mechanics to students? Here's a stab at it:

 

Chaining case-based reasoners and Asa H

 Chaining of case-based reasoners* was a separate project from Asa and made use of its own software. It is possible, however, to import chained case-bases directly into the Asa H hierarchy. This is most easily done early on before Asa has done much independent learning.

* See my book "Twelve Papers" available on my website www.robert-w-jones.com under "book."

Composing new concepts

 I have spent a good deal of time giving A.s.a. H. the same concepts that humans use.* Donald Hoffman's arguments** are perhaps further reasons to want A.s.a. H. to create new/original concepts. Starting from the concepts A.s.a. already has feature extraction algorithms*** can be used to decompose these. The features so identified can then be recombined in order to produce new concepts.

* See my blogs of 9 May 2020 and 12 September 2020 for example.

** See, for example, The Case Against Reality, W. W. Norton, 2019.

*** Autoassociative neural networks offering one such algorithm.

Student labs

 Science is a group effort, especially for experimental work. Lacking resources over the years we have scrimped and saved by having lab partners work on a small number of experimental setups. Now with covid we can not social distance by simply giving each student their own lab equipment. There are also some experiments that simply require multiple students to operate them effectively. Here again even face-to-face classes are being impacted by covid. 

Concepts in the human brain

 My AI work is not biologically inspired but I do occasionally make comparisons with what is known from neurological studies. When a person is shown various pictures of balls the same pattern of activation is seen across voxels by functional magnetic resonance imaging. When a person is shown various pictures of faces a different pattern of activation is seen.* A person has learned the concept ball and the (different) concept face. Looking at the activation pattern seen by fMRI you can know what category of picture is being viewed. Each layer in the A.s.a. H. hierarchy operates in this same way.

* When Brains Dream, Antonio Zadra and Robert Strickgold, Norton, 2021, pg 88.