Adventures in Egotism

William Cohen’s blog has a post about a long fascinating thread on a political blog that found out they were being analyzed by algorithms. The community investigates and some attempt to fight back by gathering and posting personal/private information on the researchers.

I found comment #303 particularly interesting,

Tae, let that be a lesson: Blogs are not inert things that can be studied dispassionately! Sometimes they can bite back — jump right up at you through the screen.

And the meaning of sentences cannot be dissected by computer analysis.

I wonder if this will happen more as people gain awareness that they’re being analyzed.

[by way of Matthew Hurst]

I keep another blog called News Mirror where I write about what I read in the news. Today I got ticked off at bad science, maybe prompted by Saturday night entertainment at the iSLC conference this weekend.

On bad scientific reporting and bad quantitative methods.

UPDATE: An excellent tear-down in Slate: Rigging a study to make conservatives look stupid.. This is why I don’t blog much… because to say anything I can stick to takes more attention and mental energy than I have to spare for a blog. Sometimes that censor takes a break though.

Human Nature is a great column in Slate Magazine. The following is from the most recent: (see the original for better formating)

A study says liberal brains “are more responsive to informational complexity.” Test: You sit in front of a computer screen and wait for a letter to appear on it. You’re supposed to tap your keyboard if it’s an M, but not if it’s a W. The experimenters mix it up but give you more M’s than W’s to see whether you get lulled into tapping when you shouldn’t. Results: 1) On M’s, liberals and conservatives responded equally well. 2) On W’s, liberals were twice as likely to be among the more accurate responders. 3) On electrical measurements of the brain area that monitors conflict “between a habitual tendency … and a more appropriate response,” liberals were five times more likely to show brain activity. Unofficial scientist/media spin: Liberals are smarter. Official scientist/media spin: Liberals are smarter, except when circumstances call for a knee-jerk ideologue. Knee-jerk liberal spin: We’re smarter because we have more agile brains. Thoughtful liberal spin: Then again, maybe we have more agile brains because we’re smarter. (Human Nature’s view: Liberals are smart, except when their knees jerk.) To tap a reply on your own keyboard, enter the Fray.

I cringe to think how this is going to play out on talk radio. I hope Liberals don’t reinforce their stereotype as supercilious and arrogant by touting this and denigrating Conservatives. It should be dealt with soberly and not as a partisan matter. (Like so many things that aren’t.)

I just volunteered to review papers in 2008 for several divisions and SIGs of AERA, the American Educational Research Association. It’s a very long list (12 divisions, 3 committees, and 160 SIGs). Below are the SIGs that grabbed my attention.

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These two blurbs appeared in the same issue of ACM Technews (March 21, 2007)…

Girls Ask Alice for Programming Skills
eWeek (03/19/07) Taft, Darryl K.

A program called Alice, originally conceived by Carnegie Mellon’s Stage 3 Research lab, has proved effective in getting young women excited about computer programming. Alice allows those who do not have high-level programming abilities to try their hand at creating 3D computer animated stories, using characters, scripting tools, and pre-existing graphic elements. Originally designed to help build virtual environments, Alice was eventually given a drag-and-drop interface, which has made it an effective tool in introducing both women and minorities to computer programming, according to CMU. A study was conducted to see what impact a version of Alice with storytelling support had on girls, compared to a version without storytelling support, and the “Results of the study suggest that girls are more motivated to learn programming using Storytelling Alice; study participants who used Storytelling Alice spent 42 percent more time programming and were more than three times as likely to sneak extra time to work on their programs as users of Generic Alice–16 percent of Generic Alice users and 51 percent of Storytelling Alice users snuck extra time,” says CMU graduate student Caitlin Kelleher, who developed Storytelling Alice. Using Alice in middle school, where many girls are found to lose interest in math and science, provides students with positive exposure to programming. The program has also been used in colleges and high schools. The program “really seems to be hitting its stride this year,” said IBM Rational division chief scientist Grady Booch, after attending the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education’s (SIGCSE) 2007 symposium in Covington, Ky. To learn about ACM’s Committee on Women and Computing, visit http://women.acm.org
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Now Beauty Is in the Eye of the Computer
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) (03/18/07) Dasey, Daniel

After spending several years refining computer software designed to rate the attractiveness of women, Australian computer scientists Hatice Gunes and Massimo Piccardi at the University of Technology, Sydney, are now looking for commercial partners. The software is designed to quickly analyze a photograph of a women’s face, and immediately produce a beauty rating on the scale of 1 to 10. “Potential applications exist in the entertainment industry, cosmetic industry, virtual media, and plastic surgery,” the researchers write in a paper in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. Piccardi is especially excited about the idea of having doctors use the facial analysis technology to ensure that modifications for plastic surgery patients improve their attractiveness. The program can predict how beautiful humans would consider a female face to be plus or minus 1.5 marks, and the researchers say the margin of error could be reduced with continued development. The beauty quotient of the software is based on 14 facial measurements, 13 related ratios, and images of supermodels, actresses, and more than 200 other women.
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This study controlled for loudness and ringtones, but commuters still found mobile phones more annoying. I suspect it’s partly due to prejudice, but an interesting hypothesis is raised:

Unfortunately, Monk and his colleagues don’t provide the final answer; more research is called for. But the problem seems to be that people pay more attention when they hear only half a conversation. It’s apparently easier to tune out the continuous drone of a complete conversation, in which two people take turns speaking, than it is to ignore a person speaking and falling silent in turns.

“Scientists” have “linked a mysterious, underwater farting sound to bubbles coming out of a herring’s anus.” They call it Fast Repetitive Tick (FRT) and hypothesize that it’s how shoals keep together after dark.

You know you wanna hear it.

Full article from New Scientist.

So be careful when you fart in the ocean; you may confuse a little herring into losing its momma.

Quick, what’s the oldest human custom? Picking your teeth. I said custom, not profession.

New Scientist: Grass stalks fit bill for earliest toothpicks
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Well said.

New clues to identity of first genetic molecule

But researchers could at least explore whether TNA-based biology is feasible. “Szostak could evolve a TNA world,” says Eschenmoser.

A TNA world? Isn’t that a male fantasy?

But seriously, evolving a TNA biosphere would be historic. It would show us just how easy it is for life to spring forth from matter, adding one more notch to the belt for evolution and making extraterrestrial life that much more likely.