I have a confession to make, this week is going to be exceedingly short. This is entirely my fault. Why is it going to be short you ask? Well.. because I did nothing. Now that's not entirely true. I am not the sort to shirk responsibilities and do nothing but it appears everything I DID do amounted to nothing in the end. This is mostly because I harbour one of the most grievous faults of being too proud and stuborn for my own good. I very often don't like asking questions and being made to feel stupid. Not that Renee oranyone I've ever asked for help or for clarification has ever sought to make me feel stupid, I merely have this entirely ludicrous mirror reflection of the real world in my head where seemingly innoculous comments or attempts at help are blown into attacks upon my capabilities. (Side note: one of my other flaws is the tendency to over-exagerate. So while I sound melodramatic, be aware that I DO have a pinch of reason in my brain that recognizes that all of this is silly and tries to quell these impulse to act excessively crazy) But yes. So this week's activities all wound up being silly after my meeting with Renee on friday and so I feel loathsome to report my activities to you here. So I wil try and eak out some report for you here but I may be more brief than usual to spare myself feeling even more silly. For this I appologize.
Last week, Renee, Susan, and I had discussed changing the model Renee wrote for her paper to be more "bottom up" orientated in how it handled intentions. I was given the task of changing it and testing it around. I spent a good deal of the week fiddling with the existing code. Despite having gone over it briefly with Susan and Renee, I believe my understanding was entirely superficial. It is the same way you can pick up a computer language you don't know and read through the code somewhat and figure out the big picture of what is going on without entirely understanding the workings of the language. Essentially this is how I felt. I could look at the code and understand what was going on but I wasn't entirely sure how I could could create my own. So I tinkered. I suppose I shoudln't be so hard on myself, this was very helpful to me in a way, as I became a little more familiar with how Renee writes productions and how that differs from my initial assumption about productions from my work on the tutorial. I also looked more indepth at the model code which is written in Lisp and played a bit. Susan was also a little stumped as she broke some of the code she's using for her project and couldn't figure out how to fix it. As a result I looked at her code a little bit, trying to figure out the error and eventually, despite not finding her problem, developed a better understanding of the beast that ACT-R is.
I think the lesson learned is always to talk to your supervisor. Don't be scared or intimidated. You may think to yourself that even the few minutes it would take to set you on the right track is too much to ask of them. But those two minutes of insight might have taken them a long time to gain. And you're probably going to take three times as long as they did to discover it for yourself. There is little point in the research faculty of not sharing! If everyone had to build up from scratch then it would take years for each person to develope their own ideas. Instead, if they borrow from what someone else has learned and add to it things move along quite quickly. So that is all I have to say. I'm still highly embarassed for having been a ninny. Either way it's highly important to recognize people don't expect you to know everything straight off the bat, but the longer you take trying to figure it out the more silly you're going to look when they have to explain it to you in the end anyways. However my feeling silly reaction is kicking in and I'm going to stop all this yammering. Here's to better luck next week!