Oxford Dictionaries

This sort of thing interests me: the mathematics of language. You can take this poll at http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com (I show the response statistics at a recent date).

Cost of treatment

17/09/12 11:51 [Monday]

I have had thoughts consequent on revising my website and as an aside to it altering ‘no charge’ in my description of the cost to me of treatment over the years to ‘mostly free of charge’. What I mean by the alteration is that in the past when I needed tablets to counter the side-effects of the injections which were the primary means of medicating me I (or in truth my father) had to pay prescription charges. The way I regarded it when I was more angry than I am now (when I was not on the present lightweight régime of Risperdal) was as getting money out of me (or out of my family) through threats. That is, if I did not accept the primary medication I was locked up, and if I accepted the primary medication I could not do without the anti-side-effect medication (and suffered a lot even with it).

I must criticise the NHS psychiatrist who played such a large part in spoiling my life over decades: Anthony Dew Armond. My thinking now, with the success in my case of this treatment with Risperdal I am now getting, is that extraordinary lengths should be gone to to gain the patient’s acceptance of the treatment plan. Armond had a completely different view from this and enforced drug treatment on me by keeping me liable to be detained over a period of years (that is on a Section but having long periods of leave at home), ignoring my protestations about side-effects totally. The conclusion I drew from the experience I had with medication was that I must be super-sensitive and unable to tolerate any dosage however low of dopamine-blocking drugs. This has been proved wrong by the success of my present treatment, and it is thanks to the doctor I had at the time of my detention in 2010 and 2011 and for a few years before - Dr Matthew Kurian - who followed the policy of attending to what I said about the initially higher dosage of Risperdal I was on and reducing it, in other words as I say the policy of doing everything reasonably possible to gain the patient’s acceptance.

Dopamine-blocking drugs have powerful effects on the patient’s mind, indeed in his overall life, as do psychotic illnesses these drugs tackle. A doctor who sees the patient every few weeks or every few months will not be able to see for himself the sometimes devastating effect of the medication, and the only thing to do is trust what the patient says certainly once he has recovered from what may be plain delusions. The far-reaching effects of dopamine-blocking - especially since these drugs affect some people in ways which show more obviously than in some other people - are not fully understood and certainly not fully reported, and the only individuals who know the ins and outs of the effects on them are the patients taking the medication (and they may not realise all the effects which are in truth caused by the medication rather than by the illness or anything else).

So my summary is: once the patent is no longer out-of-touch with reality care must be taken not to ride rough-shod over his possibly weak-egoed objections to aspects of his treatment. Every effort should be made to gain his willing acceptance of the treatment prescribed.

Activation

09/09/12 07:48 [Sunday]

Since I was a teenager I have been very introspective, questioning myself on the reasons I do things or make the choices I do. I’m sure this introspection derives from my brain wiring. But anyway through introspection I have come up with theories about what I call activation, which has to do with the level of activity in the brain/mind being like stimulation but more to do with mental processing than anything physical. What I am wanting to mention first is the failings in generally available theories of personality from not taking activation (or simply rate of activity) into account. Theories of personality which form the basis (for example) of questionnaires which match people for ‘dating’ purposes are based on measuring topics people are interested in rather than their level of activity in interacting with the environment, with other people or with themselves within their own mind, and in this they fall down.

When I was not on dopamine-blocking medication my rate of interaction with the environment and with myself was very high (leaving, actually, little resources for interacting with people except briefly and superficially). On the higher dosage of Risperdal I was on last year my rate of activity was very low: I sat about unable to decide to do anything and this I found unpleasant and it manifested (paradoxically) as anxiety. If I was required to interact (with people or with the environment in the form of things which needed doing in my home) I could not come to any firm conclusions what I ought to do, and to a large degree took no action.

My natural condition is to be more tied up in things within my own mind, and to stop the overactivity along these lines which led me into difficulty around 2008-2010 (not so much withdrawing into my own mind but deriving things from my own way of understanding which led me headlong into sending a lot of correspondence and making as it were a lot of noise and in the process into wasting a lot of money; also misunderstanding the basis of my own condition of mind - introspectively observed - this misunderstanding being really what led to my hospitalisation): to stop this overactivity I now accept that some dopamine-blocking through medication is essential. The thing is it is necessary to strike a balance, so that I am not completely deactivated. As I say, I cannot get away from the fact that what is in my own mind is a large factor in my considerations and my behaviour, and a result of this is that I don’t have a lot to say to other people. Still, with the very low dosage of Risperdal I am currently on - and hope to remain on, and no higher a dosage - I can think of things including things which get said to other people (and things which find their way, at a much lower rate than in the years 2008-2010, onto my blog) so really although the effect of the medication is not ideal - cutting down my mental activity without increasing my interaction with other people to normal levels - still I think it is the optimum that can be achieved.

What originated this diary entry was my reflecting that in the years when I was not on medication life was full of interest and variety, but when I was on the higher dosage of medication life was flat and empty. The way the activity went in 2008-2010 had to do with my being disorganised in most things I did. I did a lot because of the basic overactivation I have stressed - sleeping very little at night: which itself made me disorganised in that I fell asleep at unhelpful times in the day - and observed introspectively that things went wrong (for example in my use of computers). I did not however accept responsibility and understand the reason things went wrong was the racing of my mind: instead I blamed some external force which through hypnotism or through mind-altering drugs being got into me interfered. The upshot was that more activity was generated, and more disorganised activity, as I tried to fight back and counter these hypothetical intrusions from outside myself. As I say, life was full of interest and variety as I dashed hither and thither in what genuinely was confusion but which I thought at the time was a reasonably founded game-plan of opposition.

07/08/12 20:05 [Tuesday]

Looking up the word ‘dis’ in the online OED I came upon the following rather amusing quotation from The Independent.
Independent 11 May 2000: Seething at seeing his life’s work in pesticide research being dissed by the organic lobby, he called in the Advertising Standards Authority.

Character recognition

16/05/12 15:25 [Wednesday]

I have been thinking about character recognition and visual field analysis again. The latest I was doing involved trying to settle on a best resolution, given a visual field, as a prerequisite before getting into the business of recognising objects at all. What I thought was that finding a measure of ‘busyness’ and observing how the measure altered as resolution increased might be the way to go. I see now that if instead of busyness I think in terms of information content, then what is certainly required is an optimal trade-off between that measure and the resolution since as resolution increases so processing cost increases. In other words in the animal kingdom would-be pattern recognisers need to gain maximum information (through recognising objects in the environment, ultimately) for the least possible expenditure of time and effort on processing.

What I have further thought is that the measure I developed of ‘clustering’ should be used as the measure of information content. Having toyed with simply counting black fragments (on the basis that many fragments means many objects being observed) it strikes me that whatever the number of fragments if they are better clustered it means they are better defined and thereby more likely to give up useful information through being recognised. Now I can measure clustering for a field of greyscale and this obviates the need to distinguish black from white. If a pixel at x_i has blackness (inverse greyscale 0 .. 255) b_i then the measure of clustering is

∑b_ib_j.exp -d(x_i - x_j) ²

In effect we are counting each unit of blackness as a separate black pixel.

I am wondering whether to use as a function of resolution giving an estimate of processing cost, ∑b_ib_j. The processing the computer does is adding up a lot of exponentials and processing cost is only saved in cases of b_i = 0, but for animal processing systems I feel they must model each unit of blackness separately which leads to very dark fields being puzzling and headachey.

30/07/12 13:17 [Monday]

About two weeks ago I wrote a program based on the ideas above, but found I needed to alter the measure to be maximised to

∑b_ib_j.exp -d(x_i - x_j) ² / (1/n)∑b_ib_j

where n is the number of pixels (width x height of the rectangular field). The reason is the numerator has a number of terms proportional to n rather than n ² because for each pixel i the multiplication is not by the b_j values over the entire field but only those for which exp -d(x_i - x_j) ² is non-negligible and this value is independent of the width or height of the field (as long as width and height are not too small).

Using this measure to find the best resolution for the field over my sample of cases (ie finding the resolution which maximises the measure of information content in ratio to the processing cost, as above) gives results like the following:

It must be admitted these divisions do correspond well with the natural scale of structures within each image. For the picture of the garden each quarter of it can be seen to be basically light (especially the quarter showing the sky) or dark. For the portion of a printed letter the reason the resolution arrived at is so high (corresponding in fact to the scale of the width of lines making up printed characters) is that the black print shows up so clearly against a very white background.

The question is where do I take this next? The next thing is to analyse each subdivision arrived at of the image, using the same technique of distinguishing light from dark at a natural grainsize. Repeated subdivision will end when cells are found which are not suitable candidates for further subdivision because they vary so little in greyscale across their entire size: this stage will be marked by very low values for the ratio measure defined above because really there will be no information content to speak of within each cell.