China Talk

[From Rick Marken (2006.05.31.0830)]

In response to overwhelming demand (well, one person did suggest it) I have posted the talk I plan to give in China this summer at: http://www.mindreadings.com/articles.htm. It's the first entry entitled "A Quarter Century of Research on Perceptual Control Theory".

Comments and suggestions are welcome, though it's too late to make changes to the text. It is now being translated into Chinese. But I may be able to incorporate your suggestions into the presentation itself.

Best regards

Rick

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Richard S. Marken Consulting
marken@mindreadings.com
Home 310 474-0313
Cell 310 729-1400

[From Dick Robertson,2006.06.031246CDT]

Rick,

Just finished reading your China paper. I think it is terrific. It makes me sad (I. e. I experience an emotion that I reference as "sad") however, to think that one more area in which U. S. leadership in science is, in all probablility, being outsourced to a nation that is rapidly closing on U. S. dominance on the world stage. Well, as Jesus said, "Let those that have ears to hear, listen; let those that have eyes to see, look." Hope you have a great time there and don't get sick.

Dick

Rick Marken wrote:

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[From Rick Marken (2006.05.31.0830)]

[From Rick Marken (2006.06.03.2000)]

Thanks Dick.

I neglected to pay the registration fee on my mindreadings.com domain name so my web site (and my e-mail) were down yesterday and early today. So if anyone tried getting to the article and couldn't, it's again available at:

http://www.mindreadings.com/articles.htm

Best

Rick

[From Dick Robertson,2006.06.031246CDT]

Rick,

Just finished reading your China paper. I think it is terrific. It makes me sad (I. e. I experience an emotion that I reference as "sad") however, to think that one more area in which U. S. leadership in science is, in all probablility, being outsourced to a nation that is rapidly closing on U. S. dominance on the world stage. Well, as Jesus said, "Let those that have ears to hear, listen; let those that have eyes to see, look." Hope you have a great time there and don't get sick.

Dick

Rick Marken wrote:

[From Rick Marken (2006.05.31.0830)]

Richard S. Marken Consulting
marken@mindreadings.com
Home 310 474-0313
Cell 310 729-1400

[From Bill Powers (2006.06.05.0740 MDT)]

Rick Marken (2006.06.03.2000)

I concur with Dick Robertson's use of the word "terrific" for your paper at the China conference. There is one small matter you need to attend to, which unfortunately I didn't notice until re-reading the paper today. It is your statement that the model confirms the lack of correlation between e1 and e2 in the two "cause" experiments. I'm afraid that the model would not show that result without certain additions. If you actually simulated this experiment and analyzed the results, you'd find that applying the same disturbance to get the same output would result in exactly the same error signal in both trials.

To produce the low correlation of which you speak, the model would have to be subjected to a second (random) disturbance, either an external one or a disturbance representing internal system noise (or both). Then, when control is reasonably good, there will be fluctations in the error signal that are independent of the main disturbance, and these will be large compared with the fluctations that are due only to the main disturbance. The extra fluctuations represent the error that would be present if the second disturbance alone were acting. It is the presence of these extra fluctuations, uncorrelated with the main disturbance, that accounds for the low correlations between the error and the main disturbance or the output. Your model has to contain the second disturbance if it is to agree with the observations of real human behavior. Note that the second disturbance could exist in the form of small random variations in the reference signal. You could estimate how large the noise portion has to be to account for the observed correlations. The noise could be due simply to unnoticed environmental disturbances, summed with system noise.

I think you should correct this, since the Chinese readers are going to be VERY sharp. Zhang, for example, caught every algebraic error in B:CP. And he claims to be only a philosopher.

It is still a terrific paper.

Best,

Bill P.

[From Rick Marken (2006.06.05.0810)]

Great catch!! Rather than go into all a discussion in this already too long apper about how I got the model to reproduce the human results, I just changed one sentence to read as follows: "It is possible to build a PCT control of input model that behaves very much like the subject in this experiment (as can be seen in the demo)".

I made some other little additions and changes to the paper that make it better (there were a couple of other little mistakes I found, like saying open loop in one place where I meant to say closed loop). The latest version of the paper is up at my site.

Thanks again for catching this.

Best

Rick

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[From Bill Powers (2006.06.05.0740 MDT)]

Rick Marken (2006.06.03.2000)

I concur with Dick Robertson's use of the word "terrific" for your paper at the China conference. There is one small matter you need to attend to, which unfortunately I didn't notice until re-reading the paper today. It is your statement that the model confirms the lack of correlation between e1 and e2 in the two "cause" experiments. I'm afraid that the model would not show that result without certain additions. If you actually simulated this experiment and analyzed the results, you'd find that applying the same disturbance to get the same output would result in exactly the same error signal in both trials.

To produce the low correlation of which you speak, the model would have to be subjected to a second (random) disturbance, either an external one or a disturbance representing internal system noise (or both). Then, when control is reasonably good, there will be fluctations in the error signal that are independent of the main disturbance, and these will be large compared with the fluctations that are due only to the main disturbance. The extra fluctuations represent the error that would be present if the second disturbance alone were acting. It is the presence of these extra fluctuations, uncorrelated with the main disturbance, that accounds for the low correlations between the error and the main disturbance or the output. Your model has to contain the second disturbance if it is to agree with the observations of real human behavior. Note that the second disturbance could exist in the form of small random variations in the reference signal. You could estimate how large the noise portion has to be to account for the observed correlations. The noise could be due simply to unnoticed environmental disturbances, summed with system noise.

I think you should correct this, since the Chinese readers are going to be VERY sharp. Zhang, for example, caught every algebraic error in B:CP. And he claims to be only a philosopher.

It is still a terrific paper.

Best,

Bill P.

Richard S. Marken Consulting
marken@mindreadings.com
Home 310 474-0313
Cell 310 729-1400

[From Bill Powers (2006.06.05.0740 MDT)]

  >I think you should correct this, since the Chinese readers are going to be VERY sharp. Zhang, for example, caught every algebraic error in

B:CP. And he claims to be only a philosopher.

A good and necessary observation. I had the pleasure of dealing with a number of Chinese academics in the early nineties with the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and you _cannot_ be sensitive to criticisim if you are going to deal with them. They will have their own ideas about PCT and if you try to force them to think according to a strict predetermined set of ideas you better have all your ducks lined up in a nice neat row or you will be setting yourself up for failure.

Of course if you eliminate the hard and fast 'rules' of PCT indoctrination and listen to what they have to say, you may actually walk away learning something yourself, even if you don't necessarily like what you hear.

I wish you luck and I truly hope you get what you want out of this conference.

Marc

It is still a terrific paper.

Best,

Bill P.

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-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Powers <powers_w@FRONTIER.NET>
To: CSGNET@LISTSERV.UIUC.EDU
Sent: Mon, 5 Jun 2006 08:08:26 -0600
Subject: Re: China Talk