Two general readings on research Methodology

• You and your research (Richard Hamming)   http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html 

All kinds of things you may be thinking of in research: motivation, luck, intellectual ability, age (fame and early success), working conditions, commitment and passion, courage, open-mindedness, selling your work; and also possible impediments to success — I suggest you try to summarize each point while reading, as it contains a lot of pieces.

• Flesh and Machines: how robots will change us  (Rodney Brooks)  http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/books%20&%20movies.html 

Brook’s view of what we can expect from intelligent machines — robots. Do we need just replicate what we are as humans into machines, or do we make specialized machines that do particular tasks well — even better than what we can (hyper-intelligence)?