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Today I had a meeting with Indira Nair, the Vice Provost of Education at CMU. I’m not sure what exactly a Vice Provost does, but in this case it’s not important. I’d taken some time to talk to Dr. Nair after the class she gave a guest lecture in, and subsequently followed up with an email. Our short email conversation turned into an invitation to talk to Dr. Nair at some future date, which was/is today.

I wasn’t too sure what we’d talk about, but it turned out to be a sort of informal counseling session on what my steps are to pursue a PhD in my areas of interest (exploring social interaction via mediated communication, etc.). Dr. Nair gave me some names of a few good people to talk to here at CMU, and also some people to get in touch with at UCSD and UofM (go blue). The real way to get things done, she said, is to contact researchers and professors who deal with my area of interest, and talk to them about it. Simple, eh?

It’s that rare sort of advice that sounds so easy and makes perfect sense, it just takes a smarter person to point it out.  She said that usually faculty and researchers are more than willing to discuss their work, or point you to people who would be worthwhile to talk to. Rather than just finding a school with a good department, it’s important to find a faculty member with aligned research interests, someone willing to work with and advise throughout the course of study.

Next steps include doing some more background research on faculty, at CMU and elsewhere, and then getting in touch with them. And luckily, I have Dr. Nair’s “feel free to tell them I sent you”, so I can do so with the backing of a respected academic.

I think I can say that I’ve finally reached a turning point in my education. I realized this during a talk in my Privilege, Responsibility and Community course, given by CMU’s Vice Provost of Education, Dr. Indira Nair. The talk was on the ideas of Identity and Authenticity, discussing the identity the university tries to build for students, the challenges that the university faces by allowing students to bring their own authenticity, and reconciliation of the two in a learning environment. As much enjoyed this perspective on education–one that was certainly interesting–it was actually a short offshoot of the talk about asking questions that stuck with me.

I’d thought about what I was interested in before, I’ve written about it here, but not really in the light of figuring out what it is that makes me ask questions. And what it is that generates questions that are worth my time to explore and try to answer. Leaving students with these types of questions, the ones that interest you, and lead to more, similarly interesting questions, are in a way the goal of a higher learning institution. Anyway, phrasing my questions in the form of what I want to know, here are my goals for further study:

-I want to achieve a lucid and astute understanding of the social interactions that develop friendships and generate trust, of the interactions that lead to social cohesion.

-I want experience and familiarity with the media that can help foster such interactions, and to study how mediated interaction adapts the above interactions to their new contexts.

-I want to explore how these technologies change the way we think of ourselves as individuals and groups, and how new information communication technologies create novel social interactions that lead to meaningful relationships.

I’ve always had an interest in the community fostered by online gaming, I think that a specifically exciting area to study would be to examine MMOs from a sociological standpoint. I’m not sure how much that’s been done, or to what extent, but it certainly bears looking into.

One of the cool blogs I keep up with is Hitwise Analyst Weblogs. It’s basically a collection of their analysts’ blogworthy insights. Some of the results that come out of investigating search data and web habits turn out to be pretty neat, and are often ways of pointing out trends that would be otherwise difficult to spot. Results aren’t just limited to how people search the web, but can explore how people use the web to do whatever they’d like to do.

A great example here is traffic analysis of the NCAA’s March Madness on Demand service at the beginning of the tournament. Heather Dougherty points out in the post that the longest duration visits and highest traffic points were a spike in the middle of the work week (March 19th was a Wednesday). As people are able to catch up with the games at home, on a regular television, MMOD traffic decreases.

I’m sure the datasets available to those at Hitwise prove to be massively useful for finding out all sorts of interesting information with some data mining know-how. Besides the March Madness post, truly interesting data is discussed, and enough information is harvested to provide “insights on how 10 million US Internet users interact with more than 1 million websites, across 165+ industries,” if the Hitwise website tells the truth.

For me, Google Trends does the job when I’m wondering about important things like iPhone hype vs. worldwide fascination with the trainwreck that calls itself Britney Spears’ career. Check it out. There’s no info about duration of visit, and if you bring it down to the last-30-days level you can’t get much detail, but it’s still fairly useful information we’ve got here:

• Mexico and Canada are much more concerned with Britney Spears than the iPhone. Maybe this speaks to where Apple didn’t initially focus iPhone marketing, or, more likely, how much Mexico and Canada love Britney Spears.
• Britney’s highest search share (Google News archives point out that the late November ‘06 peak was probably her divorce) is higher than the iPhone’s highest search share. Important Britney-related news is much more important than iPhone info.
• Spanish speakers care twice as much about Britney Spears as they do the iPhone.

If my informal and untrained analysis of this data tells us anything, it’s that the world loves Britney Spears, especially Spanish-speaking Mexicans.

The other day I was on a crowded bus, heading back from campus. As is normally the case on the post-4:30 trip home, the front was lined with people left and right. Bleak and rainy days make it worse, nobody wants to walk so the buses get even more packed. This was one of those days. I came to that awkward point near my stop where I’d pushed through the standing crowd and made it up to the front of the queue for hopping off, but with nothing to hold on to or stabilize myself as the driver begins to stop, which tends to turn into a thinly veiled shot at knocking passengers off balance.

Well, it worked.

I was reaching for my wallet to grab my pass and the driver slams on the breaks, lets up for a sec, and pumps them hard again, just in case I wasn’t about to fall the first time. Rather than fall forward on my face with one arm reaching into my back pocket, I take a forward-and-to-the-right trajectory, and end up falling onto an old lady standing on the side of the bus. If only I’d gone forward-and-to-left I wouldn’t have hit her, I think there was a middle-aged guy on that side, but I panicked in the mayhem of the fall and leaned right. I didn’t really hit too her hard, so I looked up, embarrassed, and tried to fix the situation with “Sorry, I’m all over the place here, can’t keep my feet under me,” and give her the old can-we-pretend-that-didn’t-just-happen? smile.

It turns out that this was probably the nicest lady I could’ve hoped to bump into; she looks over and gives me a giant grandmotherly smile. She is a beacon of happiness, brightening up this gloomy Pittsburgh day. I have a sneaking suspicion that she wants to reach into some deep, hidden pockets, fish out a handful of Werther’s Originals, then ask me if I’d like one. She shakes off the incident, and we exchange a few seconds of small talk before the grumpy bus driver makes it known that I need to move it (of course he’s angry; he didn’t get me to flat out fall).

After I show the driver my pass and before I’m about to walk off, she says to me “You know, they always say that the elderly end up losing their balance, but I guess these days it’s you young kids too.” I give her a friendly nod and hop off the bus, when I realize what she just said. I’ve been called out on my balance by the friendliest person I’ve ever met on a bus, and also damaged the balancing reputation of “young kids” in general. I’m sorry fellow young kids, but there was nothing I could do here.

An interesting phenomenon discussed a bit ago in my Cognitive Development course was the importance of self-based locomotion in spatial knowledge and awareness. For that course, I’ve actually just received the go-ahead from the professor, Dr. Bob Siegler, to write my final paper on this specific area of children’s development.

A great experiment that illuminates the importance of self-based locomotion is the famous Visual Cliff experiment:

¹

Children are placed on a surface like the one seen here, with glass over a reasonably large drop off and were beckoned by their mothers to come across. The experiment is characterized by some sources as a method of showing that depth perception is partly an innate quality (the same article I got the picture from, for example), as children are hesitant to cross the cliff and show signs of fear such as increased heart rate. However, further research has shown that younger children (who haven’t been crawling long, or don’t crawl at all), actually don’t show any signs of fear when beckoned across the cliff. What’s interesting is that after children have been able to crawl for awhile, maybe 2 weeks or so, they won’t go across the cliff and show signs of fear.

Rather than being something unlocked with age, or some entirely innate aspect of development, it’s actually the experience of self-based locomotion that unlocks childrens’ spatial knowledge enough to fear the visual cliff. Although this may make sense with the title of the blog post and some of my previous discussion, after being presented with the visual cliff experiment results, it took our class quite awhile to piece together what factor led to childrens’ recognition of the visual cliff as a (seemingly) dangerous environment and show signs of fear when beckoned across.

A wonderful experiment that teases apart the importance of self-based locomotion to the spatial awareness required to fear the cliff gave non-crawling children special walkers that allowed them to move about under their own power even though they weren’t yet able to crawl. After about 40 hours of using the walkers, these non-crawling children showed the hesitation and fear associated with perception of the cliff as a dangerous environment. Non-crawling children of the same age without the walker experience showed no signs of fear when beckoned across the cliff.

My paper will go beyond a cursory look at self-based locomotion and explore why it is that moving under their own power allows children to develop spatial knowledge, and is a topic that I’m pretty interested in researching. It’ll probably be in the next few days that I start up the research for the paper, and hopefully there will be some interesting papers with results worth sharing here.

1. Encarta Article on Visual Cliff (& picture source) [↩]

Holy cow. I haven’t blogged in 2.5 weeks or something. Even worse, I’ve barely lived life for the last 2.5 weeks.

I spent my spring break (this past week) sleeping in Ohio, and the previous week and a half before that sleeping in my room in Pittsburgh. One of those weeks was midterm week.

I found out that I wasn’t just making things up though, it was a triple-threat knockout, strep throat, some random virus, and mono to top it all off, no wonder I’m so sleepy.  The worst is going to be getting back into the swing of class after this debacle, and making up my midterms and papers. The most relieving thing ever is an understanding professor who’s willing to give some flexibility after the “hey I can’t come to class, and maybe not the midterm because all I can do is sleep” email.

Oh well, soon I hope all will be back to normal. Of course with mono I guess there will be a lot more uninvited naps, and the constant fear of rupturing my enlarged spleen (I can’t even run, they told me to use an eliptical!), but those are some sacrifices I’ve just gotta make.

The latest Edge talk really blew me away. In super-short summary, Nicholas Christakis, MD, PHD, MPH (Masters of Public Health), talks about studying social networks not by topology, but by the flow of “stuff” through the network. To use his analogy, it’s like studying the physiology of the body as opposed to anatomy. I think that in the most common cases, when discussing social networks, or studying social networks, we tend to pick out the structure, the topology, as the salient feature. Here in the Edge talk, Dr. Christakis discusses specifically the study of the dynamics.

What was particularly interesting was what he and colleague James Fowler studied:  the spread of obesity through the network. I certainly wouldn’t expect something like obesity to move through a network, but the results say otherwise.  Dr. Christakis does make sure to point out, however, that for the cause of obesity’s movement through a network, there can certainly be other factors besides social proximity.

I won’t write much more about it, because if you’re interested I’d say it’s well worth checking out. On a side note, however, there’s one other specific point I found interesting, blockquoted here:

Again, the study of social networks is part of this assembly project, part of this effort to understand how you can then have the emergence of order and the emergence of new phenomena that do not inhere in the individuals. We have, for example, consciousness, which cannot be understood by studying neurons. Consciousness is an emergent property of neuronal tissue. And we can imagine similarly certain kinds of emergent properties of social networks that do not inhere in the individuals — properties that arise because of the ties between individuals and because of the complexity of those ties.

Today in my Philosophy of Mind discussion we were talking about levels of analyzing the brain. Our instructor, Dr. Andy Norman, said what I’ve bolded above almost verbatim as an argument against hardcore reductionist theory being able to provide a convincing account of mind. Then he went on to say that in a wide range of research areas the same problem of reduction occurs where a whole cannot necessarily be analyzed by its parts. Maybe he saw this talk too.

For some reason, design solutions to the plant-water problem keep popping up, but you think that by now people could remember to check if their dying green friends were a bit thirsty.

Yep, the options are ever increasing, as now you can stick an LED into your plants and it’ll flash when the h2o becomes scare (probably obnoxious), fall over when the water’s low (actually pretty cool–possibly messy?) and of course you can even just automate the task. For full disclosure’s sake, I will say that I’ve recently failed to support a houseplant of my own — but I’ll blame that on winter break, he was actually going strong for a good 5 months. Unfortunately, even my last-ditch effort, an advanced method of houseplant-shrubbery grafting seen below, has failed to rekindle my poor friend’s will to live.

Anyway, probably the weirdest and most Web 2.0 solution is the newest incarnation of Botanicalls, the Botanicalls Twitter project. When your plants need water, they let you know via Twitter. In terms of usefulness, unless you’re in a location where you can physically go and water the plant, the message is probably not going to help (e.g., when you find out your plant is thirsty during that lecture you should be paying attention to.)

The idea of hooking up non-human objects to Twitter is pretty intriguing though. I envision a dog collar with sensors and built in wireless capability that allows your dog to unconsciously microblog. Imagine what the feed would look like:

I just woke up and started walking around. about 1 hour ago from collar
I just went to sleep. 2 hours ago from collar
It looks like I probably peed on your carpet. about 2 hours ago from collar

Exciting!

Occasionally I’m called out for wearing stripes too often, but what can I say, they’re so… visually interesting. And that’s not just me talking here, that’s cold, hard science. As I’ve discovered in my Cognitive Development course with Dr. Bob Siegler, the fact that stripes are more visually interesting makes all the difference when testing infants ability to see.

If you’re still reading, you might want to know why we even care about testing an infant’s vision. Infants’ perceptive systems come to near adult-like levels at a very young age, but developing visual acuity is based on experience with the visual world (visual acuity is vision for fine detail, more or less, and important for distinguishing objects from the rest of the visual field). An example: infants who are born with cataracts that prevent them from seeing can usually have them removed within the first six months of life. When the cataracts are removed and contact lenses are fitted, infants’ visual acuity is no better than a newborn’s, but acuity can improve rapidly even within the first hour, and the improvements continue over the following month¹. There is a cutoff time though: if infants aren’t able to see for the first three years of life, performing surgery after that time to restore vision won’t be helpful, as the visual system won’t be able properly develop. Thus, it is important that we know an infant’s visual ability, so parents can make informed choices about surgical procedures or vision correction.

The problem with testing infants’ vision is that you can’t just point them towards a Snellen chart and ask them to read the letters. Instead, judging infants’ vision is based on the preferential looking paradigm; when two objects are displayed side by side, the researcher records whether or not infants are consistently looking at one of them more. If so, they must be able to perceive the difference between the two objects. To test an infant’s visual abilities, they are presented with a field of grey, and a field of alternating black and white stripes. Depending on the spatial frequency of the stripes, infants either perceive the stripes themselves, or just another field of grey. If infants are able to make out the stripes, they will spend more time looking at the striped half of the visual field, because the stripes are more visually interesting and infants would rather look at stripes than a grey field. This lets researchers know if infants can see, and based on spatial frequency of the stripes, and the distance from the stripes, we can determine the level of vision the infants are at.

So, it’s important that researchers can test infant vision, because experiencing the visual world at a young age is key to a properly developing visual system. Plus, when I go out wearing stripes, I know that babies will probably want to look at me.

1. Siegler, R. S. & Alibali, M. W. (2004). Children’s thinking, 4th edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. [↩]

Earlier today Dr. Paul Thagard gave a talk as part of Carnegie Mellon’s humanities lecture series, titled “Minds, Mechanics, and Computers.” My Philosophy of Mind class professor, Dr. Andy Norman, told our class about the talk yesterday, and seeing as it was pertinent to this class and my Cog Sci major I figured I’d attend. From the short bit of introductory email that I’d read about the talk, it was going to discuss some theories of mind, touch on some Cognitive Science topics, and then present an account for the mechanization of the mind.

At first entering I was surprised at how few people were there, but also at how I knew a large portion of the people as previous philosophy or psychology professors or just imporant people from around CMU philosophy and psychology. There were also a few graduate students and a couple undergrads like myself, we were the only ones not in suits or button downs. I guess my Snakes on a Plane shirt wasn’t the ideal choice here, but Dr. Norman got the joke, so all is well.

As the talk starts up, Dr. Thagard sets forth an outline of the talk, and gives a brief history of minds and a quick nod to previous theories, stuff that everyone there already knows. Most of it’s information that I’m even familiar with. Next up he talks about mechanization and a mechanistic account of a machine, as in that of a bicycle. The basic idea is that there are parts (hardware), relations (wheels connected to frame, etc), interaction (moving the chain will make the wheels move) and changes (pedaling to move the chain).

A bit later, he says that the mind operates on multiple levels that are important to us: molecular, neurological, psychological, and social. Combining the 4 basic parts of mechanistic representation of a system across the top (parts, relations, interactions, changes), and these four levels of mind across the left side, he creates a chart and shows what lies in each of these intersections of mechanization and mind functionality (e.g., on the neurological level under the parts heading is ‘neuron’). As it turns out, this is the basic account for the mechanization of the mind that he is trying to deliver. Also in support of his cause, he discusses repeatedly how with fMRI studies we’re now able to isolate areas in the brain for certain emotions and mental states - old news to me, and I’m not any further convinced that this means the mind is a machine, albeit a super-complex one.

He brings up a few slow-pitch arguments against the idea of a mechanized mind, and seemingly bats them out of the park with an authoritative tone and a wave of his hand. Perhaps it’s because my experience with the subject matter isn’t on par with the professors around, but I get confused: I expected an explanation of the idea of this mechanic account of mind, which occurred more or less, but also for evidence as to why this account is the correct one, of which I really see none. The professors in the room seem to understand the topic a bit better, as evidenced by well-constructed and insightful questions at the end of the lecture. And of course, I’m not trying to knock Dr. Thagard here, if you write that many papers I’ll grant that you probably know what you’re talking about.

Perhaps I expected too much or understood too little, but I’m not entirely clear on the the status of the mechanistic account of the mind. All I know is that the goal here is to try and be able to explain the mind in the same mechanistic terms that are used for describing the bicycle, and with the same clarity. I also wonder how consciousness would be accounted for, but I’m not sure if I’m thinking wrong in that it needs to be accounted for, since there was no mention of it in the lecture.

For my first lecture from a visiting professor I’m coming away with some confusion, and also a bit of regret… As I was walking away I saw them pulling out a few bottles of wine and possibly some snack food, I should’ve turned right around and went back to the reception. How expensive is professors’ wine? Do professors actually drink, or is the wine just for show? At least those questions have concrete answers, it’s just too bad I didn’t take the time to find them.