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March 21, 2005

Terry Schiavo Euthanasia Case

Has anyone been following this story? It's probably going to be the biggest ethics case this year. Go to cnn.com for the latest. What's your take on the issue?

March 15, 2005

War in Iraq Result of Top-Down Search Failure?

While we're being political, was the war in Iraq the result of top-down processing failures during the search for WMDs?

The other day I was looking for my retractable tape measure. It's yellow and is about the size of a deck of cards. So, I set out to look for these features. Scanning through the flotsam of toys that is our living room, I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw an object that appeared to be my tape measure. As I moved forward, it turned out to be a yellow piece of a toy the same size.

Is this what happened as intelligence agencies looked for evidence of WMDs via sattelite photos -- essentially a complex visual search task? They were looking for and or wanted to find these WMDs, and so any visual evidence (pipes, laboratories, etc.) were falsely identified because of top-down goal settings. Maybe this is stating the obvious, but I thought it was an interesting application of cognition. What do you think?