Bring it on another track:

The biggest contribution of Simon to the local American research of
psychology was that he stood up in the glory days of Behaviorism that said:
"Scientifically speaking A Human is a blackbox, you may only say something
about the things you se, input and output. All the rest is speculation."
(In other countries there were earlier alternatives developed, but these
were not yet translated in English in these days.)
Herbert Simon started to model the internal processes between these stimuli
and responses: to call it more precise, "the manipulation of symbolic
structures inside the human nerv system." 
Over the years it became a very complex information processing model:

Nowadays we believe that in the human nerv system (not only on brain level!)
lots of processes are running in concurrency. It is not clear how or even IF
this is central coordinated..

Some of these processes have serial subprocesses, like the speech-producing
process (which is located in the left hemisphere for 95% of the people..),
but that does not mean that all the other parts of that process are also
serial... (Sometimes people feel this limitation: they want to say so many
things, but can only pronounce it linear sentence after sentence..)


The same for reading: Common sense makes you think that this process is also
serial: someone reads a text letter by letter, assembles these to words,
forms words to sentences etc. 
Wrong: for example: you do not read a sentence word by word. A very simple
and elegant model to show this is the triangle figure with text in it people
use in Holland:

             *
            * *
           *   *
          *     *
         * this  * 
        * is the  *
       * the begin *
      *             *
     *****************

Still how clumsy this triangle is created in ascii, lots of you do not see
the "doubling of THE" , If you were really reading word by word you would
have...

To go deeper:
While you did read this, you maybe did move your head a little, because you
heard a noise.
If you do this with a camera in front of your eye (not the newest models
with movement-corection-processors in it..), the movie would make you feel a
little sea sick, but now somewhere in your system it is registrated that
your head moves, it corrects the processing of the image in such a way that
the text stays in place (.. while your eye muscles keep your eye on the text
and another eyemuscle-set keeps the text in focus and..)

By the way, how did you knew this was a text in a triangle, something you
can read?
Only for this image-recognition part Stephan Kosslyn (Harvard) proposed a
model with at least 15 subsystems in 1987. 

Another question, how did you knew this triangle text was in English? Didn't
I say that is was used in Holland. Somewhere you have a complex set of
background information you mobelize during reading this.. (Metadata-labels,
email-discourse-expectations etc.)

Point that I want to make is that the more you study these processes of
thinking, learning, problem solving etc, the more you get convinced how
complex and flexible the real thinking is even already in a child: they also
have expectations about discourse and problemspaces they are suppost to live
in: lets show it to you in a joke I did refer to earlier:
Ask a child that just learns arithmitic: "How much is 3 Mellons and 2
Mellons?" You will get the answer 5. If you then ask: "How much is 3 Million
and 2 Million? they will say "I don tot know"
(Repeat again and again these two questions, the answers will not change...)

Summarizing: thinking and problem solving in children of all ages is more
complex then we mostly suppose. Respect that and try to concentrate on what
they normally are not that good in: donig it in a systematic approach. So
develop problem-tackling-organisers that DO NOT KIll this flexible behavior.
I remember from the dyas of Logo that this same problem of unorganized
behavior was mentioned and there were project-books developed:

On every page:
1. what will I try to do today?
2. What did i really try today?
3. What will I try tomorrow?
etc.. (was it on the MIT / LOGO site?

For Squeak the same question: what kind of organizers can we develop for
differnt levels?

 
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark van Gulik [mailto:ghoul6 at home.com]
> Sent: zaterdag 27 oktober 2001 9:36
> To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> Subject: Re: Lots of concurrency
> 
> 
> ...and it turned muh peanut butter sandwich intuh tuna-fish!! 
> [for entertainment only]...
> Some people will believe anything.
> 
> 
> On Friday, October 26, 2001, at 09:50 pm, Gary McGovern wrote:
> 
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Justin Walsh" <jwalsh at bigpond.net.au>
> > To: <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
> > Cc: <g.J.Tielemans at dinkel.utwente.nl>
> > Sent: Friday, October 26, 2001 8:41 PM
> > Subject: Re: Lots of concurrency
> >
> >
> >
> >> Please study the whole expression again from the "point of 
> >> view" of the
> > "I"
> >> that is doing the thinking.
> >
> > He he Justin,
> > I cannot resist also.
> > Do you know that some oriental sages are reputed to be able to 
> > divide their
> > "I" into multiple seperate points of view. Some call it 
> > schizophrenia but
> > that would most likely be true if it were out of control.
> >
> > Sound familiar ??? :-).
> > That would be powerful thought.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Gary
> >
> >
> >
> >
> 
> 
>