I do not want a computer telling me what other people are feeling, or telling other people what it thinks I am feeling – these emotion indicating glasses do not appeal to me at all. First, even if people only assess others’ emotions correctly 54% of the time, a 64% success rate isn’t that impressive either. It means that over a third of the time, you could be getting the wrong advice from your emotional feedback device. Furthermore, this tells you nothing about why the person is reacting that way. If you say something that makes me react in a confused manner, perhaps you are being confusing, or perhaps you have said something brilliantly illuminating that has made me realize I am now confused about something else entirely. If I am pretending not to be bored while gently redirecting the conversation, don’t we both lose by having my rudeness and your dullness exposed?
I spend entirely too much time already worrying about how people will react to my facial expressions – this just sounds like an utter disaster.
Maybe they’ll scale it down for home use….
So, seems that iRobot has come full circle, taken one of their high power industrial robots, and now attached a vacuum to it;
Streaming Urthe
I am awed by the magnitude of the video streaming task UrtheCast is taking on in intending to stream live HD video from cameras on the ISS. Even though it creeps me out a bit (1.1 meter resolution is pretty good!) I’ll be keeping my eye on this project and how it proceeds. I’m curious if there will be pressure to not show live footage of every region or if governments will press to have some regions blocked from public view. I can’t tell if they intend to make a profit on this project or not – I don’t see anything about cost and it would raise the question for me of how it is decided which commercial ventures get to place themselves on the ISS as compared to using a commercial satellite. In fact, I’m going to have to poke around more to figure out what the merit is of being on the ISS as compared to a satellite.
Fill-in-the-Bubble Anonymity
In the further disappearance of the concept of anonymity, statistical analysis allows individuals’ marks on bubble forms to be identified as corresponding to the same person. That is, someone’s marks on a bubble form can be used to identify them the same way handwriting might (though it still seems with less accuracy). We learn that filling in your bubbles thoroughly and completely is probably the best way to stay anonymous.
The shocker here of course is that a small little mark – filling in a circle – can be unique across a sample of almost 100 surveys. It did bring to mind, though, an experience last fall where some students distributed a two-page survey to almost that many people that asked, among other things, a few questions to be indicated by marking boxes. Somehow, the first and second pages of the surveys got stacked in separate piles. After a short lecture on the role of correlating answers between questions in analyzing survey results, we decided to see if we could put at least some of the surveys back together. We started off with the trivial – only one person used green pen. Three people used red, but one used check marks and the other two used Xs, and the Xs were very different. But, we actually realized that we were able to, with pretty high confidence, match all of the surveys back together. (And, of course, intended to take any correlations found between the first and second page with a very large grain of salt, but it allowed the students to proceed with the assignment.) I would love to have seen data in the paper on human ability to recreate these patterns – was the previous anonymity perceived in bubble forms real, or did it exist only by virtue of the prohibitive effort involved in having people solve the problem by hand?
The paper itself is linked in the weblog entry above and looks to be a pretty accessible read to those with just a touch of background. It has a very extensive discussion section that gets into some really nice content about the places bubble forms are used (e.g. standardized tests, voting forms, research surveys) and the implications of these results in these settings. It is another piece in the trend for easily accessed large data sets and the computational power to do statistical analyses across them thoroughly eating into our ability to obscure who we are.
Thoughts on Thiel and the value of college
This is just the latest article I have seen about Peter Thiel’s scholarships to students to develop entrepreneurial ideas instead of going to college, motivated by a belief that college is not serving these students well.
Listening to the interview and things he has actually said elsewhere, I think that Thiel is focusing on a very small set of students – highly motivated students with specific ideas for projects they would like to take on – and he is saying that these students ought to be encouraged to take a chance on those ideas. I have no issue with the idea that high school students should be more thoughtful about whether they want to go to college and when they want to go to college.
However, the description I usually see, and I think there is a piece of this also in what Thiel says, is that college education isn’t necessary, particularly when the internet makes it so easy to learn skills or even watch lectures from major universities online for free. Why should you pay for college when you can learn without the cost? The quote from Thiel that sums it up for me is “Learning is good. Credentialing and debt is very bad”. And this appears to be a statement not about the twenty most motivated young people in the country, but about the prospects for the mass of young people of college age. As the article puts it, “New York Magazine recently rated the worthlessness of a college degree as ‘one of the year’s most fashionable ideas.'”
So my question is, if Thiel and others believe this, are we going to see companies look more seriously at hiring young people without college degrees for interesting jobs? The tech industry used to embrace the self-taught – will we see a return to that? If credentialing is unimportant, will companies stop listing desired certifications in their job listings? Will Thiel press his counterparts outside the tech industry to do the same? Or are we going to raise the spectre of the uselessness of college, without discussing what it is that college actually provides a student, and based on the example of the exception people who, at eighteen, have enough vision, knowledge and motivation to jump right into starting their own company?
I look at the students that Thiel is funding, and at the range of colleges they have been accepted to, and it seems to me that these are students who have a combination of the personality and abilities, but probably also the right opportunities before college, to develop into people who perhaps don’t need college. It probably took resources, or encouragement, or both. It took them believing that they could teach themselves, and having the skill to do it. And not everybody gets those things by the time they are eighteen, and college can provide them. College isn’t about learning facts that could now be looked up online, or sitting in a hall listening to a lecture that could be streamed to your computer instead. It is, to use a cliche, about developing lifelong learners. That is the essential skill that college imparts.
Also a reasonable test for psychopaths
If you hang out in logic/math/education/psychology circles (as one so often does….) you’ve run into the Wason selection task – give people four cards, each with a destination on one side and a mode of transportation on the other and ask them to flip over all and only the cards necessary to ensure that the scenario described doesn’t involve someone violating the ruled “If you travel to Boston, you take a plane.” The general point is that people are bad (really, epically bad….) at propositional calculus and inference.
Bruce Schneier wrote recently on an interesting twist I hadn’t come across yet: people do quite well at this task when it is framed as catching cheaters. Specifically, they asked people to ensure the rule that “If a child ate dessert, they ate their vegetables” wasn’t broken, they knew exactly which cards to flip over. The results hold across age groups and nationalities. Says Schneier, “The results are the same: people are bad at the Wason selection task, except when the wording involves cheating.”
A debate ensues in the comments about whether the importance is really that it is about cheating, or if it is more about framing the question in a way that makes sense. That is (very informally….) if the travel form of the question seems illogical, people may convert the informal English language into a logical construct that better matches their understanding of the world.
Either way, it’s a compelling example that the context has a lot to do with one’s ability to understand and solve a logic problem.
Review: Eon by Greg Bear
Spring break included finally finishing one of my books-in-progress, Eon by Greg Bear. In retrospect, this was probably not worthwhile. Eon is a mid-eighties sci fi novel set in 2005, when a mysterious asteroid/interstellar spacecraft arrives at Earth at the same time as geopolitical pressures push Earth towards global nuclear war. My concern was not with the timeliness of the plot, though. The book centers around a presumption of technologies to manipulate space-time and reach alternate universes. This would be fine, but a book of this sort needs to decide either to assert that such technologies exist and leave it at that, or to actually create an understandable explanation of how the technology came about. Unfortunately, Eon sits in the uncomfortable middle. The “Stone” orbiting earth is described frequently with what seems like technological detail, but I was consistently unable to piece together what was being described. Putting aside how the physics was supposed to work, even visualizing the environment was challenging and I ended up reading the majority of the book without bothering to figure out what was actually supposed to be happening or how.
If the characters had been more compelling, perhaps I could have forgiven this, but the characters were flat as well. The book opens with a large cast of non-intersecting characters. I hoped that there would be an interesting story behind how these individuals would come together, but ultimately the relationships between the characters were not very interesting. Roughly, they divided into two or three “key” characters that never met or interacted but had the role of responding to the phenomena on the Stone, and a wider cast of characters that were there to reflect on the key characters. It wasn’t enough to counteract the incomprehensible setting. Finally, the last hundred pages of the edition I read, at least, were filled with typos, sometimes more than one on a page.
I’d recommend going back and re-reading Rendezvous with Rama before spending time on Eon.
Be a computer; See the world
This is mostly a note-to-self that I need to watch this documentary on the “female computers of WWII”. Their excerpt alone is interesting, and poking around the site it seems that the film looks at Mauchly’s project and how these women became not just computing machines themselves but then ENIAC programmers. If it is any good it could be a great complement to the Campbell-Kelly and Aspray book we teach in IT & Society.
Save us Penguin! You’re our only hope!
I will admit I was only partially watching the NHL All-Stars game today, but my mouth was hanging open during the second intermission when they unleashed the joint project between Stan Lee and the NHL: The Guardian Project. I don’t know if I’m just behind on hearing about this, but it is utterly bizarre. Who in the world thinks that what hockey teams need are cartoon superheros based on their team names? Given that the sport is about competition between the teams, why is the story line being created seemingly that all these team heroes are going to band together to defeat the evil that is… haunting ice rinks?
I do give some points for the Maple Leafs getting an Ent knock off as their superhero. But then I take those points away for the Penguin basically just being Aquaman but with ice. At least the Shark gets awesome hacking powers….
Underline Shadow Strikethrough
Following up on a recent post, there are more people looking at pros and cons of reading difficulty. The question is being asked about E-readers now – do those wonderfully easy to read screens actually result in us retaining less information? More of those dots are connected in this article, though it seems like the studies to test the question remain to be done.
While not entirely the same thing, I also am being tempted by a new book, Typography for Lawyers, wherein research on the persuasive and emotional impact of various fonts is discussed and recommendations for fonts, layout, formatting, etc. are made for a specifically legal audience. (I found the book via this review which also recommends it.)
And of course there was the recent recent ranting over at Slate about people who put two spaces after a period.