Back to Athens

I am now safely back in Athens and in the same hotel as last week. As you can see, the Internet is working perfectly, and doesn't seem to be exhibiting its 'reboot after half an hour' behaviour I experienced last time. They did say on that occasion that they were experiencing (unusual) problems, but I tend not to believe such statements as I have heard them too often.

I have first-hand evidence now for Greece being a very unsafe place to travel by car. (I should add though that Konstantinos is actually a very safe driver and I was not worried at all about travelling with him.) I had noticed all along the road there were little shrines built to look like churches and crosses etc. I asked Konstantinos about these and he said that they were where a person had been killed on the road. I then in the next 20 seconds was able to identify about 15 of them, so obviously many people die on the roads.

Yesterday morning I got up at 7.30am after the late night (resulting from the Conference Dinner) and went for a good long walk. Although Stella had proudly announced the previous night that she would join me, I gave it very little chance as the conference had now finished and I predicted that she would probably sleep like a log. In fact she did fail to show at 8.00am and I set off on my own at 8.10am. I was not particularly disappointed either when she didn't show up as I really wanted a long, brisk walk and she likes neither. However, by the time I returned, had got dressed etc. and gone to breakfast, she appeared, so we sat together. Rochel (and later, Nancy) also joined us for breakfast and that is how I came to take the picture of them. Unfortunately, the background was a bit too light, so the picture looks a bit washed out.

After breakfast, I packed, paid for my room and then just sat in the lobby on my computer getting caught up on everything. I downloaded the pictures from my camera and was viewing the videos of the dancing from the last night when Rochel reappeared - this time alone. She was so fascinated by the videos that we transferred copies via my USB key to her laptop. The files are much to big to go in email, so it was good timing on her part.

She and Randy had hired a car to go travelling and one-by-one all the people departed. Jerry and Janet went on the bus, but they are in Athens this week and I will see them tomorrow as Jerry is giving a talk to the Philosophy Department here.

That has reminded me of something I forgot in a previous post, so I will include it here. The final session of the conference was Jerry and the talk was entitled 'Against Darwinism'. Janet sat next to me and visibly squirmed during the question time when - in her view - Jerry ran roughshod over the people making various objections to his position. He had started by saying that there would be no PowerPoint as he was a philosopher and he proceeded to present an argument about why there cannot be a theory of natural selection. It was rather clever, although I don't really have a chance of reproducing it here. (It is reproduced in full in the proceedings though and I will be mailing that back, so you will be able to see it). Needless to say, it was highly controversial and he had apparently been hounded by the press for an interview all day. It was agreed that they could talk to him after the talk and he went off with them for photos and interview while Janet and I waited for him to go to the dinner.

He finally emerged after about half an hour saying that he was too tired to continue, but the reporter said that he needed more time. When we got to the place for the dinner, the reporter once again came up and this time I told him that it was inappropriate for him to be disturbing Jerry at a social event and that he should go away. We negotiated a 10-minute time-limited interview after dessert and Jerry seemed very gratified to have someone prepared to protect him. He is actually a very shy and somewhat socially inept character who really detests social events of the sort we were at, even at the best of times. When the reporter somewhat sheepishly reappeared after dessert, I assured Jerry that I would come in 10 minutes to rescue him. However, the reporter was efficient and let him go in under the time anyway.

After the last of the delegates had departed yesterday, the student team, Stella, a couple of invited speakers who Stella was transporting back to Athens and I, moved to a restaurant for a free lunch to thank the helpers. I did feel that I wasn't really entitled to it, but Svetlana had gone home with her husband, so I was persuaded that I was just taking her place. At about 4.00pm, Konstantinos and I set off (the other students are staying an extra night in Delphi).

You may remember that I had originally planned to celebrate Xenia's birthday last Monday by taking her out to dinner. It didn't eventuate though as a result of a dinner organised by Stella. Xenia and I contented ourselves with the decision that I would take her out tonight. However, we both received contact from Stella today inviting us to join her and some of the remaining invited speakers at a roof-top restaurant at the Titania Hotel. (Have a look at its website: http://www.titania.gr/RestaurantsBars.asp) Naturally it would be rude to refuse, so we are going. It seems that we are destined to not have our dinner together. Jokingly, yesterday Xenia said 'I wonder what will happen this time?'. Perhaps she should have kept quiet!

Today has been a public holiday for banks and Post Offices, but not for the shops. This morning I went for a long early morning walk and then spent the remainder of the morning working on the corrections to my paper which needs to be resubmitted on June 30th. It actually had the audacity to rain during my walk, but I was still plenty warm enough just in a t-shirt and bike shorts. Later in the afternoon, I decided to take a break and walked into an old area called Plaka. The sun was, by now, shining. I hadn't had any lunch, but didn't want to eat too much because of going out this evening. I came upon a stall selling bananas, strawberries and black cherries. It was just what I felt like, so I chose 3 bananas since they looked so good (two for the next two days) and asked for a 'unit' of each of the others. The man took a sort of shovel and put a kilogram of each into two brown bags. Amazingly the bill for all this was just over 3 Euros (approximately $5.00). I sat down in the sun and munched on my treat, but I have made almost no impression on the soft fruit. I will take it with me to the lab tomorrow and it might discourage me from eating the biscuits. I have a real weakness for a particular type of biscuit which is very prevalent here. They look like normal biscuits on the outside, but contain a runny dark chocolate centre and are very more-ish as you can imagine.

Conference Photos

This is a selection of photos featuring people from the conference. My hope to put up videos though cannot be realised as the files are too big, so I will need to wait until I return to Australia to share them.

The top photo is of Stella. The next is Rochel Gelman (left) & Nancy Nersessian (right). Then Rochel with me. (Unfortunatley the light behind made these two photos look a bit washed out, but I wanted to include them anyway.)

Next is Rochel Gelman with her husband, Randy Gallistel. Below Rochel and Randy is Janet Fodor and then two pictures of Jerry Fodor. Next is Gerd Gigerenza. The first student photo is of Svetlana (a PhD student) who more or less took overall responsibility for the whole conference organisation. The other photo shows the rest of the student 'helpers'. From the left are: Xenia, Konstantinos, Dimitri, and Irini is second from right.

Last day of the conference

Today is the last day of the conference. It has a bit annoying that the wireless network that I worked so hard to get working in the conference centre has seemingly been sabotaged by one of the conference participants and started only operating as a peer-to-peer network which wouldn't go out onto the Internet.

Apparently, someone from Italy was asking the IT guys a lot of questions about the network and they tried to avoid answering them, but he must have somehow got to the server and mucked it up. As it is was Friday afternoon before the problem was discovered they couldn't get anyone out from the company (they work business hours only) , so we have been without it. Of course, I was able to go to the Guest House (as I did in the lunch break) but that meant that I couldn't work on composing emails etc during the more boring papers, as I had been earlier in the week. There were papers in every session that I wanted to attend, the day was very full.

I am also rather tired as Xenia and the rest of the student group persuaded me to go out with them the last night. It was actually great fun, although it resulted in my going to bed very late and I decided not to set an alarm this morning. I also didn't walk, but used my lunch break to go out for a walk. The weather today is very hot and sunny and I am actually relieved that it hasn't been this hot all week - I would not have been able to climb the archaeological site in this temperature I don't think.

This morning was interesting. Rochel was the keynote speaker and she was talking at first about simple number concepts and arithmetic. Later in the talk she started to talk about rational number and in particular, fractions. Before long she was mentioning the difference between ordering, equivalence and addition of fractions and whole numbers, making more or less the exact same comments I had made at the start of my talk. She then got to the next slide which said that there had already been evidence of this in the conference and cited: Humberstone and Reeve!! I was taken aback to see my name in 'lights'. After the session, she and I actually missed part of the subsequent address to talk about how much our work overlaps. It seems that she would like me to actually present a paper at Rutgers and would very much like me to go over as many Tuesdays as I am at Princeton to attend a cognitive science lunch followed by a meeting. I am quite honoured that she is interacting as positively with me as she is and I can see that we could actually get quite a lot done together.

In the evening we had the Conference Farewell Dinner. The food was excellent and for the first time since arriving in Greece, I indulged in the desserts. There were baklava and hemispherical chocolate-covered chocolate mousse. I walked back with Janet and Jerry Fodor and Gerd Gigerenza at about midnight, but it was well after 1.00pm before I went to sleep. I will need to catch up on sleep in Athens where I will be from Sunday night. I am travelling with Konstantinos in his car.

At the dinner, we were entertained by traditional dancers who were 3rd generation refugees from 'Asia minor'. I will attempt to upload some movies of the dances and also pictures of the other characters mentioned in the Blog tomorrow when I have a cable connection in the hotel.

Friday at the conference

We have had a curious couple of days weather-wise. As I said yesterday it teemed down with rain several times during the day causing the trip to the site to be cancelled.

Today started cool and with drizzle, but Gerd (and also Robert Young) and I walked to the archeological site anyway. It was a mix of low cloud and sunshine while we were there. It is all on the side of the mountain and I walked over 15,000 steps to climb right up to the running track which was the highest point. The Temple of Apollo was very impressive though and I felt definitely enlightened by the oracle while there! Maybe that is what all the presented of keynotes have been doing before talking. We also visited the museum and then came back in time for Stella's symposium at 12 noon.

This afternoon has been sunny and warm and the temperatures are now predicted to rise into the high 20s.

Rather than talking more about the archeological site, I will include some photos to show it. You can see though that we were in some low cloud for a good deal of the visit.

The day of my presentation

My presentation was on Thursday at 10.00 am, immediately following the keynote address (Gerd Gigorenza) at 9.00 am and in the same (main) auditorium. At breakfast, Konstantinos was saying that he was reading the paper in the proceedings, and I suggested that I talk to him about it and that would help me practice. That is what we did, and from his questions I realised which slides needed more time and explanation. I had put my talk onto the computer before Gerd had given his 'invited' talk. The main auditorium is generally reserved for the invited symposia and special talks. It has the advantage of being the 'default' venue though and thus a guaranteed good audience. This is the second conference where I have been scheduled in the this venue.

I felt that I delivered the talk well and clearly, although I would have liked a little more time. Rochel gave very complimentary feedback about the 'neatness' of the study and made particular mention of the joint competencies of 'ordering' and 'equivalence' of fractions in fraction addition. I had always felt that this was a rather controversial aspect of the rationale for the study and it was one of the things I had dwelt on to try to get the idea across, so I was relieved that she particularly mentioned this. She also talked to me afterwards over coffee, and I felt that she certainly felt that the work added to a field of study of which she is an integral part.

We had most odd and unpredicted pouring rain on Thursday. This basically caused mayhem for the organising committee. There is a caterer who comes in to serve lunch for those who have bought tickets. Although it is a bit overpriced for what it is, I decided early in the week to have the lunch here rather than walk down into Delphi to one of the restaurants (the preferred option for many of the delegates). When the heavens opened as the session prior to lunch finished, all those who thought that they would go out for lunch decided that they wanted to stay and of course they had not bought tickets. Eventually it was solved by the caterers sending out to one of their other outlets and more food arrived, so many people now had to be allocated tickets and money collected.

Then, the planned visit to the archaeological site had to be postponed from Thursday afternoon to Friday afternoon because of the rain. Whereas, I was happy to miss the sessions on Thursday afternoon as they were not particularly interesting, I was not prepared to miss Friday's, so I was one of the many who now requested a refund! However, I was sitting at lunch with Gerd Gigerenza (who I am sure I cited in something I wrote as an undergraduate). He had paid to go to the archaeological site today and also couldn't go tomorrow as he was chairing the session I wanted to attend. We therefore decided to go together under our own steam on Friday morning at 9.00am. He is at the Max Plank Institute and gave a very entertaining talk on Thursday on decision-making based on simple heuristics and gut-feelings.

The conference gets underway

The conference opened on Wednesday and I mainly spent the day listening to the areas of cognitive science that I find most to my taste and largely ignoring the computer simulations that I don't really relate to. I prefer experiments with real people!

I made quite a number of changes to my talk on Wednesday night because, when I started practicing it, I found that I didn't feel comfortable with the flow. Luckily I have my new little printer with me and I was able to print out the new pages for my folder. I once again chose to stay in my room and not go out late-night partying with the others. It seems that Greeks like to rest in the afternoon and then go out for dinner at 9.30pm. This is all very well, but it means that their night is basically divided in two and there are two 'getting-ups'. I prefer my usual routines with a relatively early rise and a walk, so in general I have tended not to join them.

The day before the conference starts

Well, it seems that frequent updating of a travel blog is rather easier said than done. Each day gets busier and busier, but there is a little gap in proceedings and I will attempt to report on the events of the past three days in order.

Yesterday, as you saw from my blog, I was put to good use on the IT side of things. It always annoys me that most IT people are males and when I couldn't get onto the wireless Internet in the Conference Centre, they assured my that they had had no trouble the previous day. In the end I was able to persuade them that the problem was the gateway and my computer was asking for a DNS to be assigned. Of course their computers worked because they would have been configured with the appropriate gateway. In the end he had to admit I was right and while I went back to the guest house (where the connection is on an open gateway), they fixed it and rebooted their systems.

I had a lucky break re my own presentation. In the 'Instructions for Presenters' it had said that we were to present from our own laptops attached to the conference data projectors. However, on Tuesday, Stella had me involved in attaching her laptops to the data projectors so that participants just had to download their talks from USB keys to the desktop to present. Before leaving home I had emailed my talk to myself (in case something happened to my USB key or laptop in the airport scanners) and at Melbourne airport I had checked on one of their desktop machines in the 'Business Centre' that it would run. I discovered that the fraction problem that I had created in Equation Editor was completely invisible! This meant that the first slide said 'Consider the Problem', but there was nothing to consider. I decided that this wouldn't be a problem as I would be presenting from my own laptop, but I realised now that the same thing would happen if the computers didn't have Equation Editor configured. As it is not in the default settings for Office and has to be added separately, it would be unlikely to be on any computer. As a result, I recreated that slide, manually creating the fraction problem using 'draw' for the lines etc. I am so relieved that I was part of the setting-up process as I would have looked very stupid displaying my first slide on the first paper presentation of the conference, when I would have been at my most nervous.

The discussant for my paper is Rochel Gelman. Have a look at her profile on the web, she is incredibly well-known and is thought to pretty much be the guru for 'counting' knowledge and early arithmetic skills. She is also known to be fearsome! When I found out that she would be the discussant, my heart dropped as she has also published in fractions. Anyway, she arrived Tuesday afternoon with her husband Randy Gallistel, who is equally well-known in the area of the development of arithmetic skills, and they were brought down to the conference centre where I was talking with Stella. I was introduced, and then we all set off (with Nancy as well) to walk into Delphi for lunch. Rochel had had a knee reconstruction and was walking with a stick and quite slowly, so I walked with her and the others went on ahead a bit.

First of all, she wanted to know if I was any relation of Lloyd Humberstone!!! I don't know what administrative boards she is on in the New York area (she is at Rutgers) but she said that D's name frequently had come up as someone to lure over to the States and that 4 or 5 universities were discussing inviting him. She was therefore not surprised when I told her that he had been offered some time at Princeton. While I am at Princeton she wants me to make the 15 minute train ride to see her at Rudgers - which is a great compliment to me.

As the day progressed I had a lot to do with Rochel and found that we got on very comfortably with an appropriate amount of leg-pulling. Naturally she is a close acquaintance of both Bob and Brian, but definitely seemed to be interacting with me completely in my own right. We were discussing some of her ideas about the early teaching of fractions. As you know this is a bit of a pet topic for me too. We both agree on the problem with the current teaching methods, but neither of us is really sure about the solution. She has some interesting ideas about using measurement (rather than dividing up pizzas etc.) as it introduces children to the idea of there being a measurement between 3cm and 4cm for example.

During the afternoon there were a few crises related to the arrivals of the delegates. The first was that one of the invited speakers from Japan who was due to be on the first bus leaving the airport at 2.00pm had not shown up. After many phone calls it was ascertained that she had been on the flight but seemed to have dematerialised at Athens airport. Then the suitcase of one of the other passengers had not arrived and they were waiting for that. In fact, the Japanese lady had made her own way to Delphi and while we were desperately trying to track her down, she was in fact sleeping in her room in the Guest House!! It would have been good if she had let someone know. The case had taken its own route from London via Frankfurt and was delivered in fact before the bus left the airport 3 hours late.

Another crisis involved one of the delegates who had got on the bus leaving Athens university. A 'stranger' had been engaging everyone waiting for the bus in conversation and seemed very friendly and helpful. When the bus arrived this character 'helped' with loading the cases into the bus and in the process helped himself to one of the bags. He was merged into a big crowd before anyone realised what had happened. Luckily the suitcase only held clothes and no laptop or other significant objects. Eventually the buses all arrived, but there was much tension for the organisers. Many of the people who had flown many hours and then had to wait while the fruitless search for the missing Japanese lady was completed were understandably rather annoyed and frustrated.

On Tuesday evening I elected not to go out to dinner with the group as I wanted to get an early night in preparation for my talk at 10.00am on Wednesday.