Mark Peters Garden Page

Related Pages: My Information Page. My Home Page.

Randomly Selected Graphic Design

A 'what you can do with Picture Publisher' image (jpg,40k).

The Pacific Knowledge Acquisition Workshop logo (gif, 8k).

A new improved University crest.

The School logo.

AI Department logo (see also the AI Department home page for the standard form).

Suggestion for the VARlab logo.

1996 School of Computer Science and Engineering Handbook cover (gif, 18k).

Cognitive Science tee shirt and sweat shirt (bad image quality) (gif, 50k).
Cognitive Science Symposium 2-8-97 Poster (jpg, 260k).
Picture Publisher gets me out of the frying pan.

Randomly Selected Fine Art

Fantagma 5, the fifth image in a series created by a recursive function, 1992. This is also the source for the 1996 handbook design (above) (gif, 16k).

One of the many triangular ones. These are all based on a growth algorithm and stem from my first flirtation with cellular automata, c 1976. (gif, 17k).

Another painting (whose title I've forgotten). This is a scan of a photograph that appeared as the cover of the magazine 'Communique' in May 1993. The painting is one of a series based on non-periodic self-similar tiling patterns. I began work on this idea in 1980, working in acrylic on shaped canvas. The painting in this picture was created on computer, printed using ink-jet on film, then photographically enlarged. (Photo: John Dymond). (jpeg, 106k).

What I Did On My Holidays
Into the Heart of Australia. Between Boxing Day, 1995 and January 12, 1996 I drove 9,510 kilometres through the heart of Australia. This is the story of the trip, now fully illustrated. Note: this link now also contains the story of my second trip.

Current Memberships
Australasian Cognitive Science Society.
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.
(Indoor Climbing Gyms too numerous to list.)

Things That Make me Feel Ashamed
The treatment that has been handed out to aborigines, and the ad hominem techniques the government uses against anyone who speaks out on this issue.
The ecological vandalism of agriculture, forestry, irrigation and suburban sprawl, compounded with the tacit assumption that we can destroy everything that is truly (naturally) Australian while hypocrtically professing love for all such things.
Blatant self-interest at the expense of moral and ethical issues such as the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, or greenhouse gas emissions.
The view that people are to be valued primarily for their job-worthiness, and that the purpose of education is to increase this.
Our blindness to the fact that we are sacrificing any hope of maintaining control over our internal affairs by exposing every aspect of society to international market forces.
The patronising and vacuous nature of our media, with only some notable exceptions (eg. ABC, SMH).
Our apathy and tendency to stand back, letting developers, governments, and big business get its way, often at our expense.
Almost wholesale worship of overseas fashions and personalities in preference to principles and people with character.
The embarrassingly obvious small-mindedness and cluelessness of our current political leadership.

Vegetarianism
When people discover you are vegetarian they sometimes demand reasons, as if to see if your position is justified. I'd rather turn the tables and ask if eating meat is justified, but here, briefly, are the four reasons that convinced me I must stop eating meat:

Cruelty. Once I knew the practices of the meat industry I wanted nothing to do with it. I could not continue to tacitly endorse its practices by rewarding it with my business.

Health. Meat-eating is well correlated with cancer and heart disease. This is a purely selfish reason for not eating meat, but also very sensible.

Ethics. What right do we have to hold animals captive, or to treat them as raw material? I believe we have no more right to do this to animals than we have to do it to other humans. You cannot wash away ethical conundrums by just drawing arbitrary lines between species.

Environment. So much environmental degradation, especially in Australia, is due to the raising of stock. Again, if I am truly concerned about our environment, then I must cease to support industries that degrade it.

That was enough to convince me, but there are two other reasons too:

Economy. Meat is an expensive food. It is cheaper to live as a vegetarian.

Humanitarianism. We use almost half the world's grain and fresh water supplies to support livestock. If we stopped farming meat and redirected these resources there are many people now starving and suffering disease whose lives could be considerably improved.

If you have a good refutation for all six arguments, please send it to me.

Other Degrees
Foundation Course in Art and Design 1976, University of Derby, England.
BA (Hons) Fine Art (Painting) 1979, Liverpool John Moores University, England. (Honours Thesis: Mathematics and Celtic Design.)
MCogSc Cognitive Science 1994, University of New South Wales, Australia.

I enjoyed all these courses so much at the time I did them that there is nothing I would rather have done. The Foundation Year at Derby probably still exists, as they have a School devoted to Art and Design, the Fine Art course at Liverpool is still going strong after all these years, though the MCogSc program at UNSW has been succeeded by a MA in Cognitive Science, which encompasses about half of the original MCogSc subjects. There is also now the option of a Graduate Diploma and a Graduate Certificate in Cognitive Science too.

Favourite Periodicals
Noetica, the journal of the Australasian Cognitive Science Society.
Wired, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.
Scientific American, a great source of ideas but slipping recently, I feel.
Leonardo, my favourite art journal.
Australian Personal Computer, for lots of reasons, but especially after Nat Tunbridge wrote so nicely about us (the AI Lab) in the January 1996 issue.
Sydney Morning Herald, news, movies, other good links.

My Family And Other Animals
As far as I know, my only near relative on the Web is my nefarious (though not nefandous, and only slightly nephroid) nephew Carl. Other animals are the cats: Leo (top left, who was killed by a car 29-4-97, aged 4 yrs), Tippi (bottom left), Smokey (right, who died 25-7-95, aged 19 yrs), (jpg, 25k), Fluffy (gif, 48k) and Marmalade (gif, 41k), who took two days to die after being mauled by a dog. She lay in the garden of the house next door, and must have been able to hear us calling her but was unable to move or call back. It must have been an ordeal for her. The neighbour found her alive but, by the time he told us, she had died. So, after two days of searching for her, we missed seeing her alive by no more than 15 minutes. She was still warm and soft to the touch. It was hard to take. This was at 2:30 am 3-2-1996. We really miss her.

My First C Program
This program (source code) takes a binary image as input, creates a Hough transform, smoothes it, selects high value zones, locates peaks within these, and inverts the peaks to construct lines perceived in the original image. (image sequence of 7 gifs, total 18k).

Who They Tell Me I Am
Ever noticed how personality testing systems always divide people up into 2 to the power of n groups? This is a dead give-away in my opinion. You pick a number of opposed traits such as 'aggressive-passive', 'extrovert-introvert', assume they are unrelated to each other, arrange them orthogonally in 'personality space' and, hey presto! you have a personality assessment system that you can market to business consultants all over the world. Totally internally consistent, just like 'Lord of the Rings'. I'm not convinced that the complexities of the human mind are so easily segmented. Neuropsychologists tell us that every case is unique and syndromes are more in the eye of the beholder than the brain of the beheld. Whilst not exactly the same thing, I like the gist of this idea much more.

For what it's worth, then, here are my assessments:

Myers Briggs: XNTP, 50%, 75%, 15%, 60% - midline 'Extrovert'/'Introvert', 'Intuitive', 'Thinking', 'Perceiving'
Myers Briggs (TJ Griffiths variation): An 'Active Reformer'
Belbin: An 'Innovator' and 'Shaper'
DiSC Model: D 13, i -5, S -4, C 1 'Creative' (A classic millionaire's hook)
Honey Learning Style: A 'Theorist' and 'Pragmatist'
Thomas Kilmann Conflict Resolution Mode: 'Competing', with some 'Collaborating'
Littauer Personality Plus: 'Coleric', with some 'Melancholic'

And while we're at it, celestially speaking I'm...

Astrology: Starsign Leo, ascendant Aries, Moon in Scorpio, and a Chinese Rooster (metal, I think). If you are into this kind of thing you can check this out for yourself...

Birthday
2nd August 1957, 1230 hrs GMT, The St. George Hospital, Kogarah, Sydney, 33 58'S 151 08'E.

Gainful Employment
When not busy on my PhD, lecturing, or doing 101 other things, I work as a consultant for a company called Quest Worldwide, whose Australian office is in Chatswood, Sydney. It is a good place to work, full of intelligent, active, and thoughtful people.

Mug
My mug (gif, 33k), which is now to be found in the AI lab, has travelled the world. Made in Korea. A ceramic object. Mine. Viewing by appointment only. (Photo: Maziar Palhang).

Miscellaneous Good Stuff
Greenpeace, an organisation I admire.
The WebMuseum, a good source of fine art images and news.
ABC Radio National, my wake-up call.
Hotmail, free email, permanent and accessible world-wide from any net terminal. My hotmail address is: <mwpeters@hotmail.com>

Activities, Past And Present Arranged According to Cartesian Dichotomy (links to be provided in due course)
NB: Reading and travel not included for the same reason breathing isn't.