Re: Australian pinko communists

Patrick Wilken (patrickw@cs.monash.edu.au)
Sun, 22 Aug 1999 21:42:48 +1000

>Tim (sans Mike):
>
>Very bad also that they are now shifting government sponsorship of research
>to the one area that does not need it: applied reseearch. In other words,
>the government sponsors particular firms at the cost of other firms, in
>areas in which those firms woudl have invested anyhow. The one thing that
>firms are unwilling to do (basic research) is left to die on the vine.

How much are we as scientists to blame I wonder. Its a simple truth (and so probably wrong) that Australians don't like research. If the same sorts of energy spent on football and cricket were spent on sicence and technology Australia would already have a base a on Mars and another in orbit around Jupiter. *sigh*.

Changing the subject: I noticed that you are doing work looking on 'g'. For my PhD I have been doing work on capacity limits on the number of items that can be held in visual attention and short-term memory. A casual observation is that people who are very mathematically inclined seem to have a much higher capacity than the average person. Does this make any sense from your own work?

ciao, patrick



Patrick Wilken
Editor:        PSYCHE: An International Journal of Research on Consciousness
Board Member:      The Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness
http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/                 http://www.phil.vt.edu/ASSC/