Most of Alec’s recent efforts involve thinking about how to teach selflessness. This might seem silly, since selflessness has strong intuitive and emotional components, but walking a path is most often aided by a view of the destination.
Professional Resume: resume
Academic Work: MS in Electrical Engineering, BS in Psychology, and BS in Computer Science, from a mix of Cornell University, Reed College, Portland State University, and Boston University. I have also studied Buddhist Philosophy at Ranjung Yeshe Institute in Nepal and Maitripa College.
Software:
- 2016: Psygraph, a collection of four tools designed to promote mindfulness.
- 2003-2012: MATLAB, where I worked on Scientific File Formats, Image Processing, Digital and Multimedia Signal Processing, and System Objects.
- 1996: ArborRhythms Music Processor, a way of producing MIDI and digital audio with a flow graph that resembles a syntactic tree.
Books, Conference Papers, and Journal Articles:
- 2022: Gnostic Models is a book jokingly entitled “How to Feel by Alec McMansplainer”. On a more serious note, it is a profound analysis of our self that is designed to help us feel better.
- 2020: A Common Framework for Cognitive Science is a (somewhat audacious) article for the Cognitive Science Society that extends Dual Process Theory to cover more ground.
- 2020: The Whole Part, a book exploring the sciences of mereology (parts and wholes) and reference as they apply to cognition.
- 2017: Sustained Attention in Focused Attention versus Open Monitoring Meditation – Behavioral and Neurophysiological Changes. Poster at the 29th Association for Psychological Science Annual Convention, Boston, MA, USA
- 2014: Mathematics of Enlightenment, a poster session presented at the Mind and Life Conference about parallels between Buddhist philosophy and mathematics.
- 2011: Cognitive Set Theory, a book describing a psychological model equating (psychological) concepts with (mathematical) sets.
- 2001: A Comparison of DHP Based Antecedent Parameter Tuning Strategies for Fuzzy Control, a paper presented at North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society conference.
- 2001: Dual Heuristic Programming for Fuzzy Control, another paper presented at the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society conference.
Mostly Unpublished:
- 2021: Is Negativity Bias Half-Empty?, an experiment testing whether absence bias can explain negativity bias.
- 2018: Is event symmetry the result of reverse processing during sleep?, an experiment testing whether sleep is responsible for encoding anticausal memory in our minds.
- 2002: Analysis of the Instantaneous Estimate of Autocorrelation, a paper written at Portland State University that generalizes the notion of autocorrelation.
- 2003: Blind Signal Decomposition: A study in the separation of unknown signals, a paper looking at competitive filters as a means of signal separation, also written at Portland State University. You would probably be better off looking at ICA (independent component analysis) for this task.