thoughtcrumbs : january 2000

Mistyping usernames

I hooked my parents up with IM today. My dad mistyped his desired screenname and hit Enter too quickly, so he's forever stuck with "scuoybab" intstead of "scubaboy." Whoops. Actually, it has a kind of charming assonance to it.

They have a word for that

I want this book about crazy international vocabulary so specific only people studying for the GRE in those countries would ever know the meaning. Apparently Albanians have 27 words for "moustache" and another 27 for "eyebrows." As one reviewer said, "The words themselves offer hundreds of revealing clues to the preoccupations of that culture. A world of bushy machismo and stolid dignity sprang to life before his eyes."

Other fascinating words:

KOSHATNIK (Russian)

A dealer in stolen cats.

O KA LA NOKONOKO (Hawaiian)

A day spent in nervous anticipation of a coughing spell.

MAMIHLAPINATAPEI (Fuengian language, Chile)

A shared look of longing between parties who are both interested yet neither is willing to make the first move.

YUYIN (Chinese)

The remnants of sound that stay in the ears of the hearer

(Thanks, Kiran!)

On returning home

I'm in Portland for a few days. It's my first trip here in five months. Everything feels comfortingly the same, and I grew a little teary-eyed at all of the hipsters at PDX at 11pm on a Wednesday. Pittsburgh doesn't really have hipsters. How I've missed those striped shirts and I-could-be-in-a-band-but-that-would-be-selling-out looks.

On writing journal articles

"You are justifiably proud of your 90th percentile verbal aptitude, but let it nourish your prose, not glut it. Write simply and directly."

"Accordingly, good writing is good teaching. Direct your writing to the student in Psychology 101, your colleague in the Art History Department, and your grandmother. No matter how technical or abstruse your article is in its particulars, intelligent nonpsychologists with no expertise in statistics or experimental design should be able to comprehend the broad outlines of what you did and why. They should understand in general terms what was learned. And above all, they should appreciate why someone—anyone—should give a damn."

From Bem, D. J., "Writing the Empirical Journal Article" (2002).

Articles galore

Feeling a little guilty that a 300-page novel has been over in that right column for more than a month, I started keeping track of what I've really been reading lately: journal articles.

On machine learning

Patrick started a course on machine learning at UCSD this week. He finds it as daunting as the rest of us. In his words:

For the not so mathematically inclined, in this course we extract a crouching cheetah from a photo showing the cheetah against a background, and we learn a different technique every week to do so. (Isn't that useful?) I have one advantage though: I gave a talk about the cat family at primary school, so I can tell my cheetahs from my leopards (if not from backgrounds).

Happy CHI deadline day!

I feel obligated to wear my "You're a seven on my Likert scale" t-shirt.

Secrets

Mail your secrets on homemade postcards to Postsecret. My favorites:

• I fell in love with you when I found out your ex-girlfriend was ugly.
  
• When I get angry I [write] bad words on my toaster strudel.
• I stole your duck and took him to San Francisco.

I only added "Likert" to my spellchecker tonight

Have I really been "Ignore once"-ing it all this time?

Reputation systems for open source developers

Is there an eBay-like reputation system for open source software developers? If you have a newbie developer joining your project, how do you determine how much access to give her?

The closest things look like the member profiles on SourceForge and Advogato. The SourceForge skill lists are self-reported, so they aren't especially trustworthy. (I so wrote the book about integrated Czechslovakian cryptography heuristics.) Advogato has this ambiguous master-journeyer-apprentice-observer certification where anyone can rate anyone else (including themselves), even if they've never collaborated before.

Reputation's a huge motivator for open source developers (Mockus et al., 2002; Stewart and Gosain, 2006). Sellers on eBay care a lot about their reputations, even beyond the financial impact (Resnick and Zeckhauser, 2002). So why isn't there a similar reputation mechanism for open souce developers? Is it simply because money isn't explicitly involved?

Even better than Party Shuffle

I'm listening to songs in iTunes alphabetically by title. Not sure how that happened, but K is a glorious letter, I have to say. Recent titles include:

• Kamikaze - Thompson Twins
• Karaoke - Blanket Music
• Karma - Black Eyed Peas
• Karma Police - Christopher O'Riley
• Karma Police - Radiohead
• Karmic Episodes - Wheat
• Kate - Ben Folds Five
• Keep It in Mind - Ron Sexsmith
• Keep on the Sunny Side - The Carter Family

Somehow I think the next Songsmiths comp will be brought to us by the letter K.

Anybody want lentil soup?

My refrigerator is feeling the love right now, stuffed with a surfeit of leftovers from last night's dinner party. It was a multi-course mishmash of British and Middle Eastern gourmet themed around a couple of movies we never did get around to watching. Everything was sublime, from the company to the conversation, music, and multiple soups.

But seriously—call me if you're hungry. I can't eat dolmas for breakfast more than twice.

Social psychologists gone wild

There's some, er, debate in the psychology world about the extent to which heuristics, or mental shortcuts, cause people to make significant errors in judgment. Plenty of lab experiments (many at CMU) have shown people to make seemingly stupid statistical mistakes, like lottery players who don't pick a certain number because it won yesterday. (For a review, see Tversky & Kahneman, 1974).

But another camp (see Gigerenzer, 1996) argues that laboratory experiments set up artificial, unfamiliar scenarios intentionally designed to trick people. They suggest that heuristics generally serve people very well.

So, a member of Camp 2 (Gigerenzer) came to speak at CMU a few years ago. You'd expect a rational debate among experienced intellectuals. But no. As one attendee described:

It was the best-attended talk I'd ever seen. Like in high school, when someone yells "Fight! Fight!" and everyone crowds in.

Brad Yoder at Starbucks

Elsa and I went to hear Brad Yoder at the Starbucks on Murray tonight. He's got a Willie Porter/Bob Schneider/Elliott Smith vibe, and a strong respect for the proper treatment of Starbucks furniture. ("Those are the indoor chairs. Maybe you could take one of the outdoor ones outside instead?") With gorgeous chord progressions, nimble fingerwork, and particularly clever lyrics, he's definitely my first Pittsburgh fave. It's a rare musician that can capo at the eighth fret and still produce a rich sound.

He has the audience rapport down, too. (It helped that he seemed to know half of them personally.) "This is about a crush from 1991 that I put into a song in late 2004. Regrettable, I know. But I needed the detail."

Bad city; no email for you

The massive power outage in Los Angeles today was apparently caused by human error. My hosting company's there, so I've been without email all afternoon. They promise the messages will trickle through by tomorrow. Maybe.

More on bowling

At some point while bowling the other night, the law of averages came to revenge my series of strikes. Or, as Jonathan put it, I began bowling in binary.

May you get to heaven a half hour before the devil knows you're dead

Observations from the Pittsburgh Irish Festival this weekend:

• Tommy Makem on audience participation: "Don't ever let it be said that your mother married a gipper. Really tear into it and sing this the way it's supposed to be sung."
• Green scrunchies and fried oreos for sale
• The Steelers game on TV next to the cultural stage
• Guy in a utilikilt drinking a latte
• Michael Murphy and the Shannon River Band: excellent. Bluegrassy, Phishy jaunts and some traditionals with tongue-twisting lyrics:
  Mary Mac's mother's making Mary Mac marry me
  My mother's making me marry Mary Mac
  And I'm going to marry Mary
  To get married and take care of me
  We'll all be making merry when I marry Mary Mac

Did I just read that?

"When your professor calls you by your surname and never invites you to see his snake, you should start to suspect that something's wrong."

From Daniel Gilbert's (1994) "Attribution and Interpersonal Perception."

Bowling vs. reading

Apparently the person organizing bowling tonight has no sympathy for P&T homework:

"P.S. Note that the excuse 'I have reading to do' is not an acceptable reason to miss this most awesome event."

I haven't quite finished it yet . . .

But there's a review of Eating Mammals over in Reading.

Smug?

Somebody just said that I look smug in this picture (top right of page). I thought it was more mysterious and confident. Or something. As way of apology, he said "but smug suits you."

Buy CDs, help the Red Cross

CD Baby (who I love) has a gallery of a few thousand albums where the ENTIRE wholesale price will go to the Red Cross disaster relief fund.

A study that couldn't exist

The National Longitudinal Study of Mature Males (Staw and Ross, 1985)

My brother wants to start a funk band

In his words:

You know, a little Stevie Wonder, a little Herbie Hancock. But it'll be better than any funk band before because all the really good ones, like from the seventies, had never heard of Tool.