Cognitive Architectures are broad theories of human cognition based on a wide selection of human empirical data and are generally implemented as computer simulations. They are the embodiment of a scientific hypothesis about those aspects of human cognition relatively constant over time and independent of task (Gray, Young, & Kirschenbaum, 1997; Ritter & young, 2001). Cognitive architectures are an attempt to theoretically unify disconnected empirical phenomena in the form of computer simulation models. While theory is inadequate for the application of human factors, since the 1990s cognitive architectures also include mechanisms for sensation, perception, and action. Two early examples of this include the Executive Process Interactive Control model (EPIC; Kieras, Wood, & Meyer, 1995; Meyer & Kieras, 1997) and the ACT-R (Byrne & Anderson, 1998).

A model of a task in a cognitive architecture, generally referred to as a cognitive model, consists of both the architecture and the knowledge to perform the task. This knowledge is acquired through human factors methods including task analyses of the activity being modeled. Cognitive architectures are also connected with a complex simulation of the environment in which the task is to be performed - sometimes, the architecture interacts directly with the actual software humans use to perform the task. Cognitive architectures not only produce a prediction about performance, but also output actual performance data - able to produce time-stamped sequences of actions that can be compared with real human performance on a task.

Examples of cognitive architectures include the EPIC system (Hornof & Kieras, 1997, 1999); CPM-GOMS (Kieras, Wood, & Meyer, 1997), the Queuing Network-Model Human Processor (Wu & Liu, 2007, 2008),[35][36] and the ACT-R (Anderson, 2007; Anderson & Lebiere, 1998).

The Queuing Network-Model Human Processor model was used to predict how drivers perceive the operating speed and posted speed limit, make choice of speed, and execute the decided operating speed. The model was sensitive (average d’ was 2.1) and accurate (average testing accuracy was over 86%) to predict the majority of unintentional speeding.

ACT-R has been used to model a wide variety of phenomena. It consists of several modules, each one modeling a different aspect of the human system. Modules are associated with specific brain regions, and the ACT-R has thus successfully predicted neural activity in parts of those regions. Each model essentially represents a theory of how that piece of the overall system works - derived from research literature in the area. For example, the declarative memory system in ACT-R is based on series of equations considering frequency and recency and that incorporate Baysean notions of need probability given context, also incorporating equations for learning as well as performance, Some modules are of higher fidelity than others, however - the manual module incorporates Fitt's law and other simple operating principles, but is not as detailed as the optimal control theory model (as of yet). The notion, however, is that each of these modules require strong empirical validation. This is both a benefit and a limitation to the ACT-R, as there is still much work to be done in the integration of cognitive, perceptual, and motor components, but this process is promising (Byrne, 2007; Foyle and Hooey, 2008; Pew & Mavor, 1998).

Group Behavior
Team/Crew Performance Modeling
GOMS has been used to model both complex team tasks (Kieras & Santoro, 2004) and group decision making (Sorkin, Hays, & West, 2001).

Modeling Approaches
Computer Simulation Models/Approaches

Example: IMPRINT

Mathematical Models/Approaches

Example: Cognitive model

Comparing HPM Models

To compare different HPM models, one of ways is to calculate their AIC (Akaike information criterion) and consider the Cross-validation criterion.

Disneyland with the Death Penalty" is a 4,500-word article about Singapore written by William Gibson. His first major piece of non-fiction, it was first published as the cover story for Wired magazine's September/October 1993 issue

The article follows Gibson's observations of the architecture, phenomenology and culture of Singapore, and the clean, bland and conformist impression the city-state conveys during his stay. Its title and central metaphor—Singapore as Disneyland with the death penalty—is a reference to the authoritarian artifice the author perceives the city-state to be. Singapore, Gibson details, is lacking any sense of creativity or authenticity, absent of any indication of its history or underground culture. He finds the government to be pervasive, corporatist and technocratic, and the judicial system rigid and draconian. Singaporeans are characterized as consumerists of insipid taste. The article is accentuated by local news reports of criminal trials by which the author illustrates his observations, and bracketed by contrasting descriptions of the Southeast Asian airports he arrives and leaves by.

Though Gibson's first major piece of non-fiction, the article had an immediate and lasting impact. The Singaporean government banned Wired upon the publication of the issue, and the phrase "Disneyland with the death penalty" became a byword for bland authoritarianism that the city-state could not easily discard.

Synopsis

“There is no slack in Singapore. Imagine an Asian version of Zurich operating as an offshore capsule at the foot of Malaysia; an affluent microcosm whose citizens inhabit something that feels like, well, Disneyland. Disneyland with the death penalty.”
— Gibson, William. "Disneyland with the Death Penalty"
The title "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" refers to the subject of the article, the Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore, whose strictly guarded sterility Gibson describes with horror. After opening the article with the Disneyland metaphor, Gibson cites an observation attributed to Laurie Anderson that virtual reality "would never look real until they learned how to put some dirt in it" in relation to the immaculate state of the Changi Airtropolis, Singapore's international airport. Beyond the airport, he notes that the natural environment has been cultivated into "all-too-perfect examples of itself", such as with the abundance of golf courses. Singaporean society is a "relentlessly G-rated experience", controlled by a government akin to a megacorporation, fixated on conformity and behavioural constraint and with a marked lack of humour and creativity.


William Gibson
Gibson finds it painful to try to connect with the Victorian Singapore, of which few vestiges remained. In an attempt to uncover Singapore's underlying social mechanisms, the author searches fruitlessly for an urban underbelly, rising at dawn for jetlagged walks on several mornings only to discover that the city-state's "physical past ... has almost entirely vanished". He gives an overview of the history of Singapore from the founding of modern Singapore by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819 to the Japanese occupation and the establishment of the Republic in 1965. He concludes that modern Singapore, effectively a one-party state and capitalist technocracy, is a product first and foremost of the vision of three-decade Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. As an aside, he quotes a headline from the South China Morning Post detailing the trial of a cadre of economists, a government official (current Deputy Prime Minister, Tharman) and a newspaper editor for divulging a state secret by revealing the Singaporean economic growth rate.

Skyscrapers in Raffles Place in the Central Business District
Gibson deplores the absence of an authentic metropolitan feeling, something which he blames for the "telling lack of creativity". He gives a psychogeographic account of the architecture of the city-state, noting the endless parade of young, attractive and generically attired middle class through the host of shopping centers, and comparing the city-state to the convention district of Atlanta, Georgia. He finds the selection in music stores and bookshops unrelentingly bland, musing whether this is partially attributable to the efforts of the Undesirable Propagation Unit (UPU), one of several state censorship agencies. Amidst the near total absence of bohemianism and counterculture, Gibson finds no trace of dissidence, an underground, or slums. In the place of a sex trade, the author finds government-sanctioned "health centers" – in fact massage parlours – and mandatory dating organized and enforced by government agencies. "[T]here is remarkably little", he writes of the city-state "that is not the result of deliberate and no doubt carefully deliberated social policy."

The creative deficit of the city-state is evident to the author also in the Singaporeans' obsession with consumerism as a pastime, the homogeneity of the retailers and their fare, and in what he characterizes as their other passion: dining (although he finds fault with the diversity of the food, it is, he remarks "something to write home about"). He returns then to the theme of the staid insipidity of the city-state, observing the unsettling cleanliness of the physical environment and the self-policing of the populace. In detailing Singaporean technological advancement and aspirations as an information economy, Gibson casts doubt on the resilience of their controlled and conservative nature in the face of impending mass exposure to digital culture – "the wilds of X-rated cyberspace". "Perhaps", he speculates, "Singapore's destiny will be to become nothing more than a smug, neo-Swiss enclave of order and prosperity, amid a sea of unthinkable ... weirdness."


An aerial shot from 1989 of the squat enclave Kowloon Walled City, which Gibson contrasts favourably with Singapore
Toward the end of the essay, Gibson briefly covers two applications of the death penalty by the Singaporean justice system; he excerpts a report from The Straits Times about Mat Repin Mamat, a Malay man sentenced to death for attempting to smuggle a kilogram of cannabis into the city-state, and follows this with a description of the case of Johannes van Damme, a Dutch engineer found with significant quantities of heroin with the same consequence. He expresses reservations about the justice of capital punishment and describes the Singaporeans as the true bearers of zero tolerance. After hearing the announcement of van Damme's sentencing, Gibson decides to leave, checks out "in record time" from the hotel, and catches a cab to the airport. The trip is conspicuous for the absence of police along the road, but there is an abundance of them at the Changi Airtropolis, where Gibson photographs a discarded piece of crumpled paper, incurring their ire. Flying into Hong Kong he briefly glimpses the soon-to-be-destroyed shantytown Kowloon Walled City at the end of one of the runways at the chaotic Kai Tak Airport, and muses about the contrast with the staid and sanitized city-state he has left behind. The essay ends with the declaration "I loosened my tie, clearing Singapore airspace."

Impact and legacy


Cover of Wired issue 1.4, where the article debuted
The Singapore government responded to the publication of the article by banning Wired from the country. The phrase "Disneyland with the death penalty" became a famous and widely referenced description for the nation, adopted in particular by opponents of Singapore's perceived authoritarian nature. The city-state's authoritarian and austere reputation made it difficult to shake the description off; Creative Review hailed it as "famously damning", while The New York Times associate editor R. W. Apple Jr. defended the city-state in a 2003 piece as "hardly deserving of William Gibson's woundingly dismissive tag line".

Reviewing the work in a 2003 blog post, Gibson wrote:

That Wired article may have managed to convey the now-cliched sense of Singapore as a creepy, anal-retentive city-state, but it didn't go nearly far enough in capturing the sheer underlying dullness of the place. It's a terrible *retail* environment. The endless malls are filled with shops selling exactly the same products, and it's all either the stuff that kicks Cayce into anaphylactic shock or slightly sad local-industry imitations of same. You could easily put together a smarter outfit shopping exclusively in Heathrow.

"Disneyland with the Death Penalty" was assigned as reading on the topic of "Singaporean progress" for a 2008 National University of Singapore Writing & Critical Thinking course. The piece was included in a 2012 compilation of Gibson's non-fiction writing, Distrust That Particular Flavor.

Critical reception


Architect and urban theorist Rem Koolhaas, who criticized the article as being patronizing towards Singaporeans
The article provoked a strong critical reaction. The Boston Globe characterized it as a "biting piece on the technocratic state in Singapore". It was recommended by postmodern political geographer Edward Soja as "a wonderful tour of the cyberspatial urbanities" of the city-state. Journalist Steven Poole called it a "horrified report", and argued that it showed that the author "despises the seamless, strictured planes of corporate big business" and is "the champion of the interstitial". In a review of Gibson's 2010 novel Zero History for The Observer James Purdon identified "Disneyland" as one of the high points of Gibson's career, "a witty, perceptive piece of reportage, hinting at a non-fiction talent equal to the vision that had elevated Gibson to digital-age guru".

Circuit bending
Probing for "bends" using a jeweler's screwdriver and alligator clips
Circuit bending is the creative, chance-based customization of the circuits within electronic devices such as low voltage, battery-powered guitar effects, children's toys and digital synthesizers to create new musical or visual instruments and sound generators.

Emphasizing spontaneity and randomness, the techniques of circuit bending have been commonly associated with noise music, though many more conventional contemporary musicians and musical groups have been known to experiment with "bent" instruments. Circuit bending usually involves dismantling the machine and adding components such as switches and potentiometers that alter the circuit.

Experimental process

A 1989 Kawasaki toy guitar used in a circuit bending project
Circuit bending is often practiced by those with no formal training in circuit theory or design, experimenting with second-hand electronics in a DIY fashion. Inexpensive keyboards, drum machines, and electronic children's toys (not necessarily designed for music production) are commonly used. Haphazard modifications can result in short circuits, resulting in the risk of fire, burning, or electrocution.

Aesthetic value, immediate usability and highly randomized results are often factors in the process of successfully bending electronics. Although the history of electronic music is often associated with unconventional sonic results, such innovators as Robert Moog and Léon Theremin were electrical engineers, and more concerned with the consistency and sound design of their instruments. Circuit bending is typified by inconsistencies in instruments built in an unscientific manner. While many pre-fitted circuit bent machines are on offer for sale at auction sites such as eBay, this somewhat contravenes the intention of most practitioners. Machines bent to a repeated configuration are more analogous to the well known practice of "mods", such as the Devilfish mod for the Roland TB-303, the famous Speak and Spell toys or various Analogman or Pedaldoc guitar pedal circuit modifications.

Circuit bending an audio device typically involves removing the rear panel of the device and connecting any two circuit locations with a "jumper" wire, sending current from one part of the circuit into another. Results are monitored through either the device's internal speaker or by connecting an amplifier to the speaker output. If an interesting effect is achieved, this connection would be marked for future reference or kept active by either soldering a new connection or bridging it with crocodile clips. Often other components are inserted at these points such as pushbuttons or switches, to turn the effect on or off; or components such as resistors or capacitors, to change the quality of the audio output. This is repeated on a trial and error basis. Other components added into the circuit can give the performer more expressiveness, such as potentiometers, photoresistors (for reaction to light) and pressure sensors.

The simplest input, and the one most identified with circuit bending, is the body contact, where the performer's touch causes the circuit to change the sound. Often metal knobs, plates, screws or studs are wired to these circuit points to give easier access to these points from the outside the case of the device.

Since creative experimentation is a key element to the practice of circuit bending, there is always a possibility that short circuiting may yield undesirable results, including component failure. In particular, connecting the power supply or a capacitor directly to a computer chip lead can destroy the chip and make the device inoperable. Before beginning to do circuit bending, a person should learn the basic risk factors about working with electrical and electronic products, including how to identify capacitors (which can give a person a serious shock due to the electrical charge that they store), and how to avoid risks with AC power. For safety reasons, a circuit bender should have a few basic electronics tools, such as a multimeter (an electronic testing device which measures voltage, resistance and other factors). It is advised that beginner circuit benders should never "bend" any device that gets its power from mains electricity (household AC power), as this would carry a serious risk of electrocution. Circuit bending can also be carried out in interactive electronic audio games. People modify their electronic games to enhance the quality of recordings used for fan-made projects or to change the speed of the game which results in a pitch change. This makes the gameplay easier, especially if the game gets impossibly fast. Adding a knob or a switch to change the pitch of the game can lead to some disadvantages which include the game can change its' pitch slightly when it's lights are turned on, and it can cause the batteries to drain out quickly on high speeds.

Innovators

Although similar methods were previously used by other musicians and engineers, this method of music creation is believed to have been pioneered by Reed Ghazala in the 1960s. Ghazala's experience with circuit-bending began in 1966 when a toy transistor amplifier, by chance, shorted-out against a metal object in his desk drawer, resulting in a stream of unusual sounds. While Ghazala says that he was not the first circuit bender, he coined the term Circuit Bending and whole-heartedly promoted the proliferation of the concept and practice through his writings and internet site, earning him the title "Father of Circuit Bending".

Serge Tcherepnin, designer of the Serge modular synthesizers, discussehis early experiments in the 1950s with the transistor radio, in which he found sensitive circuit points in those simple electronic devices and brought them out to "body contacts" on the plastic chassis. Prior to Mark's and Reed's experiments other pioneers also explored the body-contact idea, one of the earliest being Thaddeus Cahill (1897) whose telharmonium, it is reported, was also touch-sensitive.

Since 1984, Swiss duo Voice Crack created music by manipulating common electronic devices in a practice they termed "cracked everyday electronics

Dumbshow also dumb show or dumb-show, is defined by the Oxford Dictionary of English as "gestures used to convey a meaning or message without speech; mime." In the theatre the word refers to a piece of dramatic mime in general, or more particularly a piece of action given in mime within a play "to summarise, supplement, or comment on the main action".

In the Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, Michael Dobson writes that the dumbshow was originally "an allegorical survival from the morality play". It came into fashion in 16th century English drama in interludes featuring "personifications of abstract virtues and vices who contend in ways which foreshadow and moralize the fortunes of the play's characters".

There are examples in Gorboduc, (1561), throughout which dumbshow plays a major part, and in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (1580s), George Peele's The Battle of Alcazar (1594) and The Old Wives' Tale (1595), Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and the anonymous A Warning for Fair Women (1599). Shakespeare used dumbshow in Hamlet, for the play within a play staged by Prince Hamlet and the players for King Claudius. That, like Revenge's dumbshow in The Spanish Tragedy, suggests by mime the action soon to take place in the main spoken drama. In Dobson's view the dumbshow was becoming old-fashioned by Shakespeare's time, and the playwright's most elaborate dumbshows are in Pericles, a play intentionally constructed in "a mock-medieval dramatic idiom". In the 17th century, dumbshow survived as an element of the courtly masque, and in the Jacobean tragedies of Webster and Middleton dumbshows are featured in masque-within-the-play episodes.

From the 1630s the dumbshow no longer featured in mainstream British drama, but it resurfaced in harlequinades, pantomimes and melodramas in the 19th century. Thomas Holcroft introduced a dumb character in his play A Tale of Mystery (1802), and the device of using a mute to convey essential facts by dumbshow became a regular feature of melodramas. In his Dictionary of Literary Terms (first published in 1977), J. A. Cuddon lists 19th century plays with the titles The Dumb Boy (1821), The Dumb Brigand (1832), The Dumb Recruit (1840), The Dumb Driver (1849) and The Dumb Sailor (1854