Help for a NOAA connectionist "primer"

[Michael C. Mozer]

I think NNs are more accessible because the mathematics is so straightforward,
and the methods work pretty well even if you don't know what you're doing
(as opposed to many statistical techniques that require some expertise
to use correctly).

For me, the win of NNs is as a paradigm for modeling human cognition.
Whether the NN learning algorithms existed previously in other fields
is irrelevant.  What is truly novel is that we're bringing these numerical
and statistical techniques to the study of human cognition.  Also,
connectionists (at least the cog sci oriented ones) are far more concerned
with representation -- a critical factor, one that has been much studied
by psychologists but not by statisticians.

Mike