Psychology: June 2008 Archive Page
"We think our decisions are conscious," said neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, who is pioneering this research. "But these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. This doesn't rule out free will, but it does make it implausible."
Through a series of intriguing experiments, scientists in Germany, Norway and the U.S. have analyzed the distinctive cerebral activity that foreshadows our choices. They have tracked telltale waves of change through the cells that orchestrate our memory, language, reason and self-awareness.
In ways we are only beginning to understand, the synapses and neurons in the human nervous system work in concert to perceive the world around them, to learn from their perceptions, to remember important experiences, to plan ahead, and to decide and act on incomplete information. In a rudimentary way, they predetermine our choices.
According to the NYT, the person who updated the Wikipedia entry 40 minutes before NBC reported it worked at Internet Broadcasting Services, a company that provides web services to TV stations including NBC affiliates. IBS says a "junior-level employee" changed the Wikipedia entry to reflect Russert's death because he or she thought it was common knowledge. When NBC discovered the entry--and freaked out about it--someone else at IBS deleted the date of Russert's death and changed all of the verb tenses back. And then IBS took care of the employee. NYT:
An I.B.S. spokeswoman...added that the company had "taken the necessary measures with the employee and apologized to NBC." NBC News said it was told the employee was fired."
Fired?
If the employee learned the news because NBC was officially distributing it to affiliates under embargo, that's one thing (the firing would be appropriate). If the employee heard about it unofficially, however, from friends at NBC or I.B.S., then the firing was outrageous.* UPDATE: An NBC exec disputes the NYT report, and says the IBS employee was merely suspended, temporarily. We'll update if we can confirm.
It's one thing for a news organization to decide to delay reporting news of a staffer's death out of deference to his or her family (this makes sense). It's another for the organization to expect other organizations to follow the same policy. And it is yet another thing for someone to deliberately strike accurate facts from a collective record to appease an upset client, which is what someone at IBS apparently did.
Hypertext '08: Social Linking 1: Link Inference
Dynamic Prediction
of Communication Flow Using Social Context (Short Paper)
Munmun De Choudhury, Hari
Sundaram, Ajita
John and Doree
Seligmann
Estimate intent to communicate and the associated delay. Using MySpace, successful prediction of intent to communicate. [This section is a review of related work, so the speaker is going quickly through material that's unfamiliar to me... I'm waiting for the statement of the research question and I'm hoping she'll define her terms... aha! Here are some definitions.]
Intent to communicate -- the probability that a person will engage in some communication with a person in her network.
Delay in propagation -- how long it takes for one person to contact a person in her network on a given topic.
Communication context -- the set of attributes that affect communication between two individuals. Has been established that context is dynamic, relationship between messages, past communication behavior of a person, and response patterns of people in the person's neighborhood.
Neighborhood context, topic context, and recipient context. [That was a detailed slide.. I didn't get to process it before she moved on.]
Chart shows people can be categorized as having a strong tendency to send or a strong tendency to receive messages. People can be generators, mediators, and receptors of information. Also categorizing people according to strength of ties - strong or weak, a value that changes depending on what information is being transmitted.
As near as I can tell, the research looked at the past communications between people, and predicted how likely they would communicate with each other on a given topic, and the time delay. I'm not sure what it means to say that their predictions had only 12-15% error rate as opposed to some other measure by which there were 25%-30% of an error rate... how does the control group differ from the group that presented the smaller error rate? Are we looking at a refinement of an existing method to predict future behavior? That would be such a n00b question that I'm not going to ask it. There are limits to my willingness to parade my ignorance.
Correlating User Profiles
From Multiple Folksonomies (Long Paper)
Martin Szomszor, Ivan Cantador and Harith Alani
Martin Szomszor: The current Web 2.0 direction is towards the user having different profiles for doing different things. We expose a lot of information about ourselves across various sites. Research suggests that lots of us will have lots of different profiles, to help us do lots of different things. Spoke of the popularity of tagging/folksonomy -- people like expressing themselves through the tags they supply. The way people tag is heavily influenced by the way people around them tag.
People tag in multiple sites that focus on different domains that focus on different tasks. Can we use this behavior to find a figerprint that can identify a user across all these different profiles. [What's the application of this research? Targeting ads?]
The research searched for userIDs in Flickr and del.icio.us, filtering out the low-activity sites. People on different sites often used the same tags in different sites.
A slide noted different kinds of tags likely to be repeated -- dates, activities such as "cooking," and events such as "christmas." As people tag more across more sites, the overlap increases.
Due to the free-form nature of tagging, people aren't always consistent ("podcast" vs "podcasting" or "blog" "blogs" or "blogging") even within the same domain. Filter out the overlaps. Discarding such terms as dates, dealing with misspellings and compound nouns; used Google to do this work for them, since Google will suggest a correction when you mistype a word. Then moves to WordNet and Wikipedia, normalizing terms and looking for synonyms.
Little change when uncommon tags were rejected. Biggest change in the results occurs when the dataset is correlated with Wikipedia, checking for acronyms and such.
Compared each individual tag cloud with the group. Most people have a fairly small delicious vocabulary size. Filtering did not really help identify the profiles of users across systems. I'm not sure how to interpret the statistical significance, but it looks like tag clouds are not a terribly reliable way to identify what the researchers feel is the same person using different profiles. Correlating all the tags to Wikipeia did result in an increase in the likelihood that this method would accurately identify the same user on different sites.
Google API was released just after the paper was published; thus there are new tools that help researchers find all their accounts, so there's more data that they can use to re-run the filtering with a better set of data. Other issues -- does "sf" mean "science fiction" or "San Francisco"? A user who uses "second" and "life" as two separate tags is actually referring to the single subject "second life" -- a more accurate study would account for that.
[As you can probably guess from the quality of the notes, this talk was much more accessible to me. I even asked a question about whether the research looks at the content on the other end of the link that's being tagged. No, it doesn't, but it's possible to do so.]
Measuring Social Networks
with Digital Photograph Collections (Short Paper)
Scott Golder
Noted that his talk is more about explicit links. Began with a picture of shoeboxes, the historical photo storage technique. Then added XML tags around the photo, saying that what we'd really like is a system to turn a shoebox of photos into a dataset.
The most important information is the identity of the person in each photo.
Showed a photo from his own wedding, showing a group. People are more likely to take a camera to, and travel to, special social events. We're not capturing people's work networks with the same mechanism that is so useful for capturing someone's social network.
Postcard study -- mailing postcards from Massachusets to Kansas. Diary study -- ask people to record in a diary all the people they talk to. You can have people in a classroom mention names -- who woudl you ask to help you get homework. Large-scale quantitative studies of networks, including e-mail networks. Connections between people in a corporate e-mail network. Trade-offs between a study with large n and a study that provides a lot of info.
You're likely to be in a photo with soemeone you know, so pairs of people in a photo is a good way to build a network.
A photo of 30 people implies a much weaker link between any two in that goup. As the number of people in the photo grows, the amount of weight implied by the link decreases.
This doesn't work for smart album generation. (Promised to tell why later.)
Noted Facebook's photo-tagging feature.
Link strength is useful for predicting who else is likely to be in a photo. Only a few key people were in many photos, most photos had only a few people. Only half of the photos had any people in it at all, and many had only one person. There were few photos with large numbers of people.
The value of being co-depicted with the owner of the archive. Photographer can't also be in the picture with you. Being co-depicted with the archive owner implies some effort -- the photographer hands the camera to someone else. Friends of people in photos with the owner are also more likely to be rated higher.
[I wonder... did the act of looking at a subset of all your photos, and seeing a picture of you with someone else, have an effect on the user's self-rating? What about asking the people in the photos to rank their closeness with the photographer? I asked this question... Scott said he had not considered that.]
A close friend brings a stranger that you don't know to an event, and gets into your archive by virtue of proximity to your close friend. So close friends bring strangers into your network. [This seems tautological... close friends probably also bring people who are close to you into your network....]
A question from the audience -- is the timestamp of a photo important -- if you've been taking photos of the same person for 10 years, wouldn't that show more closeness? [I wonder also, is the archive owner's distance from the photo any indication of emotional closeness?]
Can Blog Communication
Dynamics be correlated with Stock Market Activity? (Short Paper)
Munmun
De Choudhury, Hari
Sundaram, Ajita
John and Doree
Seligmann
This line of inquiry might help us understand the predictive power of online chatter; could be useful to companies intersted in their online reputation.
Looked at stock market motion of specific companies correlated with communication on in endgaget.com. [I wonder... how do the information dymamics of comments posted in response to entries posted on a specific blog differ from the information dynamics of bloggers who choose to create their own blog entry on a topic. Commenters don't drive the discusion the way the original posts do.]
Example -- last year's release of the iPhone. LIkely that lots of people on endgaget will be talking about the iPhone, and when the event actually happens it's likely that the stock wil move.
[Does the dataset note positive or negative comments?]
Characterize people as early responders and late traliers; frequency of communication is loyal readers and outliers.
Presumes that stock market activity is related to blog behavior over the previous week. [But surely at least some of the blog communication will be responding to stock market events... but I supposed that would make more of a difference on a website devoted to business. Well, you have to start somewhere, and Munmun has clearly stated this is an assumption.]
Conclusions -- excellent results coordinating blog chatter with stock motion. "Remarkable predictive power." Future directions -- looking at the predictive power of groups and communities, vocal majorities and silent minorities.
Q -- does the work look at the sentiment of the blog posts? (No, this work does not look at the sentiments )
[Munmun indicated that it was possible to predict whether the stock would go up or down, but I'm not sure I understand how -- if people post more frequently is that a sign that stock will go up? Or if more outliers post, does that mean the stock will go down?]
Continue reading Hypertext '08: Social Linking 1: Link Inference.
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.... Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it's a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking--perhaps even a new sense of the self.The article includes an interesting anecdote about Nietzsche and his typewriter, and also offers a clever interpretation of the death of HAL from 2001.
The Kindergarchy
I always pictured the sisters snickering behind their office doors. "Young Jerz thinks he's hot stuff because he managed to get ahold of a stack of signed hall passes." (I used them to get out of class so that I could work on the sets for the theater productions, but of course the teachers wouldn't have let me out of class if they thought I would cause trouble or fall behind.)
Epstein makes a good point about the role of feelings in literary analysis. I always cringe when a student dismisses a text because "It didn't hold my interest." (Bad book! How dare you challenge my world view or create an occasion to reflect on something outside my personal interests?) Since Seton Hill University markets itself as a caring place, and I chose to work at an institution that would reward me for expressing a personal interest in my students, Epstein would probably see me as part of the problem that he's identifying here.
What do you think... does he go too far? Am I defending the coddled millennials because I identify more with them than I do with Epstein's generation?
The most impressive students I had over my 30 years of university teaching were those I encountered when I first began, in the early 1970s, who almost all turned out to have been put through Catholic schools, during a time when priests and nuns still taught and Catholic education hadn't become indistinguishable from secular education. Many of these kids resented what they felt was the excessive constraint, with an element of fear added, of their education. Most failed to realize that it was this very constraint--and maybe a touch of the fear, too--that forced them to learn Latin, to acquire and understand grammar, to pick up the rudiments of arguing well, that had made them as smart as they were.
So often in my literature classes students told me what they "felt" about a novel, or a particular character in a novel. I tried, ever so gently, to tell them that no one cared what they felt; the trick was to discover not one's feelings but what the author had put into the book, its moral weight and its resultant power. In essay courses, many of these same students turned in papers upon which I wished to--but did not--write: "D-, Too much love in the home." I knew where they came by their sense of their own deep significance and that this sense was utterly false to any conceivable reality. Despite what their parents had been telling them from the very outset of their lives, they were not significant. Significance has to be earned, and it is earned only through achievement.
The War on Photography
Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We've been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.
Except that it's nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn't photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn't photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn't photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren't being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn't known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about -- the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 -- no photography.
