Epistemology, Cognition, and the Future of Technology

  1. Setting Network Priority Order in Sonoma

    I have a local network set up at my university in the makerspace (called IoT_IRL), but the rest of the university uses eduroam.  I want to auto-connect to both, but IoT_IRL should have priority when I'm in the makerspace, and Apple has made it such that priority is…

  2. Transparency in Videos from After Effects on Mac for Wordpress

    I struggled to get transparent videos working on wordpress for both mobile Safari and Chrome. I was finally able to get it to work by: (1) exporting a full resolution Apple ProRes 4444 file from After Effects. (2) Use the Rotato tool to convert it: Alpha channel tool: Create transparent…

  3. Empatica E4 Teardown

    Before I attempt to open up devices I always like to take a look at some pictures so I know what to expect; for the Empatica E4, there weren't any online anywhere.  I went ahead and took some in case anyone else wants to replace the battery without shipping it…

  4. Handwriting OCR in Python

    I'm working on a project that requires handwriting recognition (sending texts by writing them), and I've been exploring off-the-shelf options to recognize my own writing.  Let's take a look at the contenders: EasyORCEasyOCR doesn't seem to be targeted at handwriting, so I wasn't expecting this to do particularly well.  It…

  5. The Facebook Emotion Contagion Study

    I recently published an essay to help contextualize the data from the famous 2014 Facebook Emotion Contagion study– a study in which Facebook researchers removed between 10 and 90% of either positive or negative emotional content on user news feeds to see if it affected their emotions. The study sparked…

  6. Pop-Science Psychology Books are Untrustworthy

    I recently wrote a post outlining how the popular book Glow Kids undermined its credibility with a fraudulent data.  I also examined an overstatement by New York Times best-selling author Robert Cialdini in his most recent book.   Pop-psychology needs to be approached with a high degree of skepticism. Poor statistical…