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September 26, 2002
The Purloined Letter and scientific knowledge

I just ran across another mind-blowing passage in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He's writing about why it is that some scientists are able see "anomalous" data -- stuff that contradicts all known theories of science. Scientists, after all, frequently stare at anomalous data all day long -- stuff that totally contradicts their ideas about the world. Yet they never really notice or pay attention to it. When you're convinced of one way of looking at things, you see what you expect to see.

This was the basic idea behind a psychological experiment by J. S. Bruner and Leo Postman, "On the Perception of Incongruity," published in the Journal of Personality in 1949. They took a deck of cards and altered some of the cards in subtle ways -- like, for example, making a red six of spades, or a black four of hearts. Then they ran experiments, asking subjects to identify a set of cards -- including a couple of the anomalous ones. They did not tell the subjects that some of the cards were anomalous, though. Thus:

Even on the shortest exposures many subjects identified most of the cards, and after a small increase all the subjects identified them all. For the normal cards these identifications were usually correct, but the anomalous cards were almost always identified, without apparent hesitation or puzzlement, as normal. The black four or hearts might, for example, be identified as the four of either spades or hearts. Without any awareness of trouble, it was immediately fitted to one of the conceptual categories prepared by prior experience. One would not even like to say that the subjects had seen something different from what they identified. With a further increase of exposure to the anomalous cards, subjects did begin to hesitate and to display awareness of anomaly. Exposed, for example, to the red six of spades, some would say: That's the six of spades, but there's something wrong with it -- the black has a red border. Further increase of exposure resulted in still more hesitation and confusion until finally, and sometimes quite suddenly, most subjects would produce the correct identification without hesitation. Moreover, after doing this with two or three of the anomalous cards, they would have little further difficulty with the others.

Cool. But this is even more mind-blowing:

A few subjects, however, were never able to make the requisite adjustment of the categories. Even at forty times the average exposure required to recognize normal cards for what they were, more than 10 per cent of the anomalous cards were not correctly identified. And the subjects who then failed often experienced acute personal distress. One of them exclaimed: "I can't make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn't even look like a card that time. I don't know what color it is now or whether it's a spade or a heart. I'm not even sure what a spade looks like now. My god!" (pp. 63-64)
Posted by Clive Thompson at September 26, 2002 12:51 AM

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Comments

I find that anecdote strangely upsetting. Please do not show me any of these cards.

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Posted by: Online Casino at January 16, 2004 2:57 AM

Since the Heap has no definite rules as to where it will create space for you, there must be some way of figuring out where your new space is. And the answer is, simply enough, addressing. When you create new space in the heap to hold your data, you get back an address that tells you where your new space is, so your bits can move in. This address is called a Pointer, and it's really just a hexadecimal number that points to a location in the heap. Since it's really just a number, it can be stored quite nicely into a variable.

Posted by: Matilda at January 20, 2004 10:47 AM

Seth Roby graduated in May of 2003 with a double major in English and Computer Science, the Macintosh part of a three-person Macintosh, Linux, and Windows graduating triumvirate.

Posted by: Holland at January 20, 2004 10:47 AM

When Batman went home at the end of a night spent fighting crime, he put on a suit and tie and became Bruce Wayne. When Clark Kent saw a news story getting too hot, a phone booth hid his change into Superman. When you're programming, all the variables you juggle around are doing similar tricks as they present one face to you and a totally different one to the machine.

Posted by: Mable at January 20, 2004 10:48 AM

The rest of our conversion follows a similar vein. Instead of going through line by line, let's just compare end results: when the transition is complete, the code that used to read:

Posted by: Emmanuel at January 20, 2004 10:48 AM

The Stack is just what it sounds like: a tower of things that starts at the bottom and builds upward as it goes. In our case, the things in the stack are called "Stack Frames" or just "frames". We start with one stack frame at the very bottom, and we build up from there.

Posted by: Oliver at January 20, 2004 10:48 AM

Being able to understand that basic idea opens up a vast amount of power that can be used and abused, and we're going to look at a few of the better ways to deal with it in this article.

Posted by: Anchor at January 20, 2004 10:48 AM

Inside each stack frame is a slew of useful information. It tells the computer what code is currently executing, where to go next, where to go in the case a return statement is found, and a whole lot of other things that are incredible useful to the computer, but not very useful to you most of the time. One of the things that is useful to you is the part of the frame that keeps track of all the variables you're using. So the first place for a variable to live is on the Stack. This is a very nice place to live, in that all the creation and destruction of space is handled for you as Stack Frames are created and destroyed. You seldom have to worry about making space for the variables on the stack. The only problem is that the variables here only live as long as the stack frame does, which is to say the length of the function those variables are declared in. This is often a fine situation, but when you need to store information for longer than a single function, you are instantly out of luck.

Posted by: Florence at January 20, 2004 10:48 AM

This will allow us to use a few functions we didn't have access to before. These lines are still a mystery for now, but we'll explain them soon. Now we'll start working within the main function, where favoriteNumber is declared and used. The first thing we need to do is change how we declare the variable. Instead of

Posted by: Timothy at January 20, 2004 10:49 AM

That gives us a pretty good starting point to understand a lot more about variables, and that's what we'll be examining next lesson. Those new variable types I promised last lesson will finally make an appearance, and we'll examine a few concepts that we'll use to organize our data into more meaningful structures, a sort of precursor to the objects that Cocoa works with. And we'll delve a little bit more into the fun things we can do by looking at those ever-present bits in a few new ways.

Posted by: Pompey at January 20, 2004 10:49 AM

Posted by: Greg at January 24, 2004 2:21 PM


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