Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] Offtopic - speeding now

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Thu, 4 Dec 2003, Mike Miller wrote:

> On Thu, 4 Dec 2003, Nathan Odle wrote:
> 
> > I was getting ready to throw up my arms in disgust and give my civil
> > engineer perspective on the matter, but Jon took care of it for me.
> > All thanks aside, I'm wondering where a cognitive psychologist learned
> > Intro to Traffic Engineering :)
> 
> I hope he'll tell us the answer.

Oddly enough, I lerned the Intro to Traffic Engineering from the 
first chapters of a book called "Understanding Traffic Systems" 
(Taylor, Bonsall, & Young, 2000).  Now, in response to the 
inevitable "WTF are you doing reading this stuff?" follow-up, here's 
briefly why I did have this out of the library:

A surprising number of research problems in both cognitive
psychology and neuroscience turn out to surround the notion of
limitations in processing capacity. But to read most accounts of
limited capacity in those fields, you'd think that these things had
never been discussed or studied anywhere else.  But queuing theory
folks and traffic engineers have been all over these problems for
decades.  The traffic engineers in addition have had to deal with
working with (and modeling) messy data.  So I have that book out of
the library.

That said, there's approximately nothing deep about the stuff I
posted this morning.  That capacity equals average velocity times
density is like the 47th way to restate Little's Law (albeit in a
spatial rather than a temporal form).  The empirical result about
speed and density is just a figure in the book and makes sense.

Now, the capacity formula from traffic happens to be exactly the
same as one that has been used to estimate the capacity of human
memory by Landauer (1986):

   q = v * T

only now total long term memory capacity is the product of how fast
you learn and how long you learn (T).  This is not rocket science,
but it's interesting that when you plug in empirical results you
find out that the capacity of human LTM is "only" 4 billion bits or
so if you estimate capacity only from raw recall rates.  Now, what
makes you way better than your hard drive is that your indexing is
VASTLY better, which isn't directly captured by this.  

Another amusing fact that is captured by this is that memory is
greatly enhanced by using appropriate mental images over mere verbal
descriptions.  As it turns out, we encode normal verbal info like
words at the rate of about 2 bits per second, but we encode vivid
images at the rate of 10-20 bits per second.  So if you take a word
you need to imagine and can encode it into an image quickly, you can
use the image to encode a list words much more rapidly, because
individual words require 16-20 bits to encode.  (Sidelight: this is
why the game of "20 questions" is a reasonable amusement.)
 
Now, if anybody is still reading this, the question should pop up 
"fine, but how do you retain the images?" and the answer there is 
via some mnemonic device like the method of Loci or the Peg-word 
menomonic.  I can't type all night, so look those up yourself. :-)

> I hope it wasn't "via google, this morning!"

Nope, see above.

Now here's a "strange but true fact": a google search on "peg word
mnemonic" turns up one of my pages as the #1 result.  This is the
only search that works this way, and its embarrassing since the
other top hits are way more useful (for a change...).

And to address Mike's last point (which I've deleted), this is just
not true.  I have to admit to some fairly powerful imagery ability, 
and I am a ruthlessly concrete thinker, but that's about it as far 
as raw talent goes.  Not that this isn't useful, but the profile has 
its drawbacks as well.

jking

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