thoughtcrumbs : january 2000

Automatic speech recognition at its best

Closed captioning of a TV news story—against a backdrop of Vietnamese men riding scooters—"The microchip will be manufactured in Ho Chi Minnesota."

Baby, everything is alright, outta sight

Met some great new friends through Cortney last night; we went to hear Triggers play Club Cafe, an experience that is redefining my belief about local bands populated by guys in their twenties. After years (years!) of patronizing friends' indie bands, it was refreshing to hear a group of guys play with cheery charisma. And talent. Or maybe I'm just a sucker for keyboards. Triggers plays peppy, sing-along-able pop with danceable bass lines, à la Elvis Costello, Dolour, or Maroon 5.

Also went to Soulcialism's third birthday party last night and snagged one of their mix CDs. Resisting the urge to dance this morning. And I've discovered that having the artists' names is not always a good thing; turns out one of my favorite Soulcialism standards is by, as the DJs put it, "Billy Freakin Ocean."

Emoticons in JPSP ;)

It's a good day for the field of computer-mediated communication when emoticons are taken seriously in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Most people recognize the inherent limitations of email; it's a relatively impoverished medium, lacking the subtle cues that, face-to-face, convey meaning. Is she teasing or annoyed?

Hence the emoticon, beloved by adolescents and CEOs alike. (The latter apparently need to be reminded not to include them in professional writing.) People pepper their messages with emoticons to clarify text they think is ambiguous.

The problem is, people don't realize when they're actually being ambiguous. A series of studies at NYU, Chicago, and UIUC show an egocentric bias in email: People routinely overestimate how well they can communicate [1]. Writers cannot divorce themselves from "hearing" their own voice; they assume the audience hears their intended sarcasm or humor, when in fact, it doesn't. Like three-year-olds who haven't developed Theory of Mind, email authors naively assume others interpret the world exactly as they do.

The experimenters manipulated sender-recipient familiarity (friendship didn't aid in interpretation), medium (voice conveys meaning better), and tone (sarcasm, seriousness, humor, sadness, and anger are equally hard to convey), and original authorship (authors wrote and spoke their own humorous messages and those written by comedians. The experimenters get bonus points for that last point—not only did they sneak emoticons into JPSP, but they used Jack Handey's "Deep Thoughts" as stimuli, so they got Uncle Caveman into an academic publication. Bravo. ;-P

1. Kruger, J., Epley, N., Parker, J., and Ng, Z. (2005). Egocentrism over e-mail: Can we communicate as well as we think? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89(6), 925-936. (PDF)

Lekking and necking

Review of Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language over in Reading.

IonSound project

Jen and I went to the IonSound Project's debut concert last night; IonSound is a five-person chamber ensemble that plays contemporary music. The highlight of the evening was Patrick Burke's "Three Allusions," particularly the third movement, in which the musicians played simultaneous major and minor threads, just melting between tones, creating a really pleasant melodic tension. The piece contained second-order allusions: Each movement alluded to a composer who himself made allusions in his music (e.g. "a Stravinskyan approach to the tango, filtered through [Burke's] aesthetic"). The result was a lush, layered piece with great piano texture—experimental, but in the delightful sense of the word.

Also captivating was Jeremy Sment's "Global Life," in which the musicians accompanied audio recordings of people speaking in dozens of languages. Few notes overshadowed the English, Spanish, and Portuguese speakers, making their words easy to discern. But the clarinetist and violinist began a complimentary sing-song over a woman speaking Hindi, and percussionist Eliseo Rael accompanied a speaker in an African language, emphasizing with drum beats the beauty of the speaker's cadence, without requiring that we understand the words themselves.

Feuerzangenbowle, or keeping warm

It was 5° Fahrenheit last night when I walked home. Luckily, Dejana and Nikol ensured that I was nice and toasty (or perhaps, admittedly, -ed) with a traditional German technique: Feuerzangenbowle. Batteries expertly removed from their smoke detector, they doused a cone of sugar with rum and set it on fire, with flaming sugary drops falling into a pot of hot red wine and orange pulp. Nikol reminisced about nightly feuerzangenbowle with her scout troop in the Black Forest, and Dejana mused about more recent feuerzangenbowlescapades involving their neighbor, who was not especially enthusiastic about flaming beverages. I particularly enjoyed being one of two token Americans; dinner guests represented Brazil, Romania, Turkey, Lebanon, Italy, and, of course, Germany. Pics are online.

Vampire bat reciprocity

Logic would suggest that people behave selfishly when resources are uncertain. If I were a hunter/gatherer—or an economist—and didn't know when the next bison would appear, I might be less inclined to share my pile of dead rabbits with my neighbors. (Or, I suppose being a vegetarian I'd be stingy with my portobella mushrooms or something.)

However, large-scale mathematical simulations indicate that communal sharing is the advantageous strategy: Small groups that share are resistant to attacks by selfish competitors and can themselves conquer groups of selfish actors [1]. But the simulations control for too many factors (e.g., they assume all actors have equal strength), so it's satisfying to see this effect in the real world, as well.

Expecially in bats. "Field studies of the much-maligned vampire bat have revealed that they are highly social animals. They spend a great deal of time grooming each other. They have special friends with whom most of this grooming is done. When one of them has a bad night and fails to find an animal from which it can suck blood—licking is really what they do—its friends will regurgitate part of their own dinner for it. Days later, it will repay that debt when its friend has a bad day" [2].


[1] Kameda, T., Takezawa, M., & Hastie, R. (2003). "The logic of social sharing: An evolutionary game analysis of adaptive norm development." Personality and Social Psychology Review, 7, 2-19.

[2] Dunbar, R. (1997) Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Networking, relationships, and greens

From this week's New Yorker: Peter Hessler describes life along a hutong, one of the alleys snaking through old Beijing. It's an example of excellent ethnography, with details gleaned from five years of immersion in the culture. He depicts cigarette vendors and scrap recyclers who peddle through the dense network of dilapidated houses too narrow to accommodate grocery stores, and the competitive knowledge advantage of the bicycle repairman. "[He] keeps his pumps and his toolbox next to the Olympic toilet. In a hutong, there's no better network than one that combines bikes and bathrooms, and Old Yang knows everybody."

And unlike gossipy neighborhood Chinese restaurants, the McDonald's is a quiet "underground" rendezvous spot, with the relative anonymity only Western fast-food service staff afford. Old Yang relays a matchmaking offer to Hessler, who meets a young woman there. "I asked her if she wanted anything from the restaurant, and she shook her head. I respected that—why spoil a date at McDonald's by eating the food?"

And speaking of food, in another article Nora Ephron (really) reveals her youthful obsession with celebrity chefs and her gradual culinary maturation. "Just before I moved to New York, two historic events had occurred: the birth-control pill was invented and the first Julia Child cookbook was published. As a result, everyone was having sex, and when the sex was over you cooked something. . . . This was right around the time that arugula was discovered, which was followed by endive, which was followed by radicchio, which was followed by frisée, which was followed by the three M's—mesclun, mache, and microgreens—and that, in a nutshell is the history of the past forty years from the point of view of lettuce."

Flexibility

Pics from this weekend are up, including Twister mischief and the blues workshop.

Weekend plans

How's this for a weekend itinerary? Typhoid pill acquisition expedition and with bonus surprise Hep A vaccination for Ecuador. Check. Four hours of making the weka dance to little avail. Delightful music-making with Jason and with Heather, whom I haven't seen since we met two years ago. Eating all of Ruth's cookies. Feeling guilty about eating all of Ruth's cookies. Intro blues workshop with Solomon Douglas (who was wearing a PDXLX tee) and dance. Leave wallet at home. Oops. All of that was just today; tomorrow and Sunday have more blues workshops and dances planned, more kiwi bird wrangling, a couple of anti/pro-cupid parties (one with promised chocolate fondue, another with punny colorful invites), maybe the GSA reception at Phipps, ML study group, maybe the Square Cafe show. And some requisite coffee shop reading. But first, sleep.

Guilty pleasure

Saw Match Point tonight. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as Raskolnikov. This makes me so happy.

Turns out baristas don't actually know everything

Overheard behind the counter at a coffee shop on Walnut Street: "You know that 61C cafe over in Squirrel Hill? I thought that meant their coffee was sixty-one cents."

That infectious Steelers spirit

Nanner, nanner right back at you, Dad.

This town has gone insane. Insane, I tell you.

Doggy bakery on Aiken. I particularly like the derriere aimed at the window.


Pastry shop on Walnut.


Because of course you store your terrible towel with your good black and yellow china.


Aspinwall.


Attempting subtlety.

Group affect

So I'm reading this article on group mood while sitting in 61C. Individual moods combine depending on context and body language into a group-level affective state. There is one couple a few tables away, but everyone else is sitting alone. The guy to my left is making flashcards for the bar exam, and the woman to my right is underlining every sentence in a hardback book. We've already established that I'm pretentiously compiling code. The Garden State soundtrack is playing. First that Colin Hay song ("I just don't think I'll ever get over you"). Now the Simon and Garfunkel one ("Only living boy in New York"). Maybe I'm just projecting, but there's some pretty thick group affect going on here. If they don't change the music soon, I think there will be a mass student suicide.

I could've just installed the binaries

But there's something sexy about sitting in a coffeshop generating makefiles.


Maybe I need to redefine my notion of sexy.