In 1879, G. Wilson Hall printed a book in Mansfield called "The Kelly Gang, Outlaws of the Wombat Ranges". It included a song called "Stringybark Creek" which is believed to have been written by Joe Byrne. It described in verse the story of what had happened. The first verse is:<br>
"A sergeant and three constables"<br>
"Rode Out from Mansfield town,"<br>
"Near the end of last October"<br>
"For to hunt the Kellys down."<br>
"So they travelled to the Wombat"<br>
"And they thought it quite a lark,"<br>
"And they camped upon the borders"<br>
"Of a creek called Stringbark."
The song has been recorded many times, including the Australian folk-rock band the Bushwackers on their 1979 album, "Bushfire".
In 1880 a local school teacher's poem was read at the unveiling in Mansfield of the monument dedicated to the three murdered policemen. It was accepted as an honest description of the tragic events.
First Minister
A First Minister is the leader of a government. In the United Kingdom, First Minister was once used to mean the same as Prime Minister. Winston Churchill's famous quote: "I did not become His Majesty's First Minister so that I might oversee the liquidation of the British Empire!"
First Minister is now used to describe the leaders of the devolved governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. See:
North Borneo at the Olympics
North Borneo at the Olympics is a history which includes only one summer olympic game in one country and two athletes.
The British colony of North Borneo competed in the 1956 Summer Olympics at Melbourne in Australia.
This was the only Olympic appearance for the colony. North Borneo sent two athletes who took part in the triple jump. They failed to win a medal.
In later years, athletes from North Borneo competed as part of the team from Malaysia.
Forbes list of billionaires
Forbes list of billionaires is based on an yearly measurement of wealth and assets which is published by "Forbes" magazine. The latest list was released in March 2014.
On the 32nd list of world's billionaires, the gap between the top 1% of the billionaires and the rest continues to widen. A record of 2,208 billionaires were in the ranking and the total wealth is $9.1 trillion, up 18% since 2017. For the first time, Jeff Bezos was listed as the top billionaire due to Amazon's rising stock price that resulted in one person's biggest one year gain in wealth since Forbes started tracking in 1987.
Gestalt psychology
Gestalt psychology is a theory of mind and brain formed in Berlin early in the 20th century.
The idea is that the brain sees things as a whole. The gestalt effect is most clear with sight. We recognise figures and whole forms, not just a collection of lines and curves. In psychology, gestaltism is often opposed to structuralism. The phrase "The whole is greater than the sum of the parts" is often used when explaining Gestalt theory. A better wording is : "The whole is different from the parts".
Early 20th century theorists, such as Kurt Koffka, Max Wertheimer, and Wolfgang Köhler (students of Carl Stumpf) saw vision of objects as all elements taken together in a global construct. This 'gestalt' or 'whole form' approach sought to understand perception – seemingly innate mental laws which determined the way in which objects are perceived.
It is based on the here and now, and in the way you view things. It can be broken up into two: figure or ground, at first glance do you see the figure in front of you or the background?
These laws took several forms. An example is the way we tend to see similar objects, or close together objects, as meaningfully connected. Gestalt has been criticized for being merely descriptive, but it has formed the basis of much further research into the perception of patterns and objects, and of research into behavior, thinking, problem solving and psychopathology.
Gestalt psychology was a forerunner to modern cognitive psychology. It is distinct from gestalt psychotherapy.
Gestalt psychologists were the first to study problem solving in humans and apes. Wolfgang Kohler showed that chimpanzees could solve problems by thought alone; Max Wertheimer studied how diagrams helped students solve geometry problems, and Karl Duncker studied general problem-solving. Generally, both Wertheimer and Duncker preferred the broader term 'productive thinking' to 'problem solving', but it is not used much now.
Max Wertheimer
Max Wertheimer (Prague, 15 April 1880 – New Rochelle, New York, 12 October 1943) was a psychologist who was one of the three founders of Gestalt psychology, with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler.
From 1929 to 1933, Wertheimer was a professor at the University of Frankfurt. When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the Third Reich in 1933, it became apparent to Wertheimer that he must leave Germany. In the end, he accepted an offer to teach at The New School in New York.
In New York he continued to investigate problem-solving, or what he preferred to call “productive thinking". The relationship between the book and his earlier work was this: all the problems in the book except one could be solved by considering geometric diagrams. In other words, they were partly visual in essence, and could be represented and partly solved visually. That thread ran through much of the gestalt work.
Wertheimer completed the book (his only book) in late September 1943, and died just three weeks later of a heart attack. Wertheimer was buried in Beechwood Cemetery in New Rochelle, New York.
The phi phenomenon is an optical illusion described by Wertheimer in 1912, in which the persistence of vision was exploited by the cinema film, applied by Hugo Münsterberg in 1916. This optical illusion is based in the principle that the human eye is capable of perceiving movement from pieces of information, for example, a succession of images. In other words, from a slideshow of a group of frozen images at a certain speed of images per second, we observe constant movement.
Optical illusion
An optical illusion (also called a visual illusion) is one which shows images that differ from normal reality.
The information gathered by the eye is processed in the brain to give a perception. That is normal, but in these cases the appearance does not tally with a physical measurement of the stimulus source.
There are three main types of visual illusion:
The general explanation for most illusions is the way the brain works on sense data to produce a meaningful perception. A great 19th century psychologist Hermann von Helmholtz described perception as "unconscious inferences from sensory data and past experience". Richard Gregory discussed how the brain makes an hypothesis about what's out there, and sometimes the hypothesis does not quite work out. His model of perception is an interaction between data from sense organs and previous knowledge and experience.
Researcher Mark Changizi of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York thinks optical illusions are due to a 'neural lag'. When light hits the retina, about one-tenth of a second goes by before the brain translates the signal into a visual perception of the world. Scientists have known of the lag, and have discussed how humans compensate for it. Some suggest that our motor system somehow modifies our movements to offset the delay.
Changizi asserts that the human visual system has evolved to compensate for neural delays by generating images of what will occur one-tenth of a second into the future. This foresight enables humans to react to events in the present, enabling humans to perform reflexive acts like catching a fly ball and to maneuver smoothly through a crowd. Illusions occur when our brains attempt to perceive the future, and those perceptions do not match reality.