Emotions

I thought the book was fairly short on emotions.  The idea that we can't make decisions without them is certainly fascinating.  I would have expected this to indicated that FJ and TP were more common on the Myers Briggs Type Indicator surveys.  In fact the opposite is true, FP+TJ is 53% of the population.  I'm not sure what to make of the fact that decisions are made because of emotion but those who are guided by logic are more likely to come to a quick decision than those guided by emotion.

Neural Networks

I don't think I've ever really thought about how neural networks work before.  Certainly not about how the ones with actual neurons in an actual brain does.  The fact that they seem to learn everything based on the coordination of inputs without any sort of real feedback is incredible, but it makes sense given how much better we remember something like touching a hot stove versus abstractly learning that stoves are hot.  Even within the project of phishing we've found both in papers and in practice that people are far more likely to learn through exercises where they fall for phishing while reading their actual mail and are told what went wrong immediately rather than some classroom or paper about it.

I was very interested this week in how neurons actually fire.  I also find it odd that feed-forward networks actually learn effectively at all, but it seems like that's the primary way the mind may actually work.  I don't really think that's useful for my project, but it's a really fascinating look at how the mind works.

Visualizing items

In class I was interested that most of the class seemed to pull items out of their memory when asked for something like "What are three trees?" by visualizing trees.  I can't imagine visualizing as a way to pull items out of memory from a list of things like that, but I can only guess from the uniformity of responses that however I have categorized items is unusual.

Unsurprisingly, it seems that security experts use fundamentally different processes for identifying phishing messages from novices.  Novices seem to use context gleaned from individual messages and processed on a per-message basis (pictures look "odd", grammar doesn't match how the person actually talks, request is unusual).  Experts have more strict, but broader rules (URLs match organization sending message)