Train PhD students to be thinkers not just specialists

To train or not to train.

R ecently there’s been a push among some of our clients to start bringing 3d imaging systems in-house. In the majority of cases the client wants my company to provide some form of training to help them get off on the right foot. Although we are in the consulting business, training is a different animal. We’ve worked for years, continuously refining our processes and tools, investing in R&D and ...

Just to be sure.

I read with interest the recently published online article by Hasegawa et al. It was the title which first triggered my interest, including the phrase ‘double blind’. Wow, a double blinded study on acupuncture! This is of course the ‘highest’ level of research one can achieve in randomised controlled trials, and consequently highly appreciated among acupuncture researchers. However, it has been...

Reasoning Specialists Should Be Logical Services, Not Black Boxes

Neurotic Individuals are not Creative Thinkers.

In the September 2015 issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Perkins et al. [1] proposed that the personality trait of neuroticism stems from individual differences in neural processes that govern the nature of self-generated thought (SGT). They also asserted that higher levels of neuroticism are associated with higher levels of creativity, especially intellectual creativity and creative proble...

The Combining Classifier: To Train or Not to Train?

When more than a single classifier has been trained for the same recognition problem the question arises how this set of classifiers may be combined into a final decision rule. Several fixed combining rules are used that depend on the output values of the base classifiers only. They are almost always suboptimal. Usually, however, training sets are available. They may be used to calibrate the ba...