Epistemology, Cognition, and the Future of Technology

  1. Quick Note on Rationality

    Rationality has two definitions that I frequently come across– here's a quick note on some important concepts related to the idea. Rationality in EconomicsIn economics, the word 'rational' is used to describe self-consistency– i.e. if you prefer A over B over C, you prefer A over C.  You have…
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  2. The Lever Problem

    The modern academic and journalistic refrain calls out the same arguments– Twitter, Facebook, and Google are radicalizing our political dialog, supplanting our meaningful social connections, and driving us towards predictable consumerist self-medication.  The only solution is more oversight, increased regulation, and tighter control of our communication technologies.  This analysis has…
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  3. Contextualizing Data from the Facebook Emotion Contagion Study

    In 2014, Facebook published their famous Emotion Contagion study, to massive controversy.  This study is still frequently cited as an example of the manipulative potential of social media, which is an egregious characterization.  In this post, I'm going to walk through the statistics so we can see what we can…
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  4. How to Tell if your Eye-Tracking IR Diode is Safe

    Infrared (IR) Diodes are very popular now for illuminating the eye for eye-tracking purposes.  Of course, projecting stuff into your eye comes with hazards, and we want to make sure these things are safe.  I've been working on an IR blink sensor, and while many papers in academia seem to…
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  5. A Basic Example of Firebase React Native

    Below I will walk through the steps to make a simple app with firebase and react native; my goal is to have anonymous but persistent ID associated with each phone, which securely logs into the server and can push/query only it's own data.  This example also takes advantage of…
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  6. Getting Started with STM32WB and BLE Communications

    My goal is to get an example running with FreeRTOS and threads that manages a general BLE throughput to an app in the background.  To build the app, I'm using React-Native, the javascript based development environment that can cross-compile.  Let's jump right in! Running an Example on the STM32WB Nucleo…
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