Shadow

And the final verdict is: Study of Reading Program Finds a Lack of Progress, at least not in reading comprehension of grades 1 through 3. There is a slight gain in decoding among 1st graders, and the effect size is small, 0.17. Washington Post quotes:

"It is a program that needs to be improved," said Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, director of the Institute of Education Sciences, the department’s research arm. "I don’t think anyone should be celebrating that the federal government has spent $6 billion on a reading program that has had no impact on reading comprehension."

And 

"Reading First helps our most vulnerable students learn the fundamental elements of reading while helping teachers improve instruction," Spellings said. "Instead of reversing the progress we have made by cutting funding, we must enhance Reading First and help more students benefit from research-based instruction."

The report itself is here, which I am not sure how it differs from previous versions. Key findings are as follows:

1. • Reading First produced a positive and statistically significant impact on amount of instructional time spent on the five essential components of reading instruction promoted by the program (phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension) in grades one and two. The impact was equivalent to an effect size of 0.33 standard deviations in grade one and 0.46 standard deviations in grade two.
2. • Reading First produced positive and statistically significant impacts on multiple practices that are promoted by the program, including professional development in scientifically based reading instruction (SBRI), support from full-time reading coaches, amount of reading instruction, and supports available for struggling readers.
3. • Reading First did not produce a statistically significant impact on student reading comprehension test scores in grades one, two or three. 

This is way better than what I had — when I had to leave my computer in public space, I used to start a screen saver, with a bouncing line of text that said "Motion Sensor Activated; Camera Activated". This one actually reads the motion sensor in Thinkpads.

If I were to steal the notebook, the first thing I do is to close it, rather than lifting it open. I don’t know if this one prevents the computer from going to sleep (better yet, disable the power button is possible). But at the price of $0, it’s worth a try. 

on a second thought, maybe I can just copy this image as my screensaver? 

[Update: I installed it. You can mute the siern by pressing the sound-off button, which is conveniently located on the top of any Thinkpad laptop. ] 

Musatcha.com / Laptop Theft Prevention

 Features

• Locking mechanism uses Windows login
• Visual and Audible Alerts
• SMS alerting function to send text messages to your cell phone

System Requirements
You must have a ThinkPad with the APS feature. The following laptops should have this:
ThinkPad R50, R50p, R51, R52, R60, R61
ThinkPad T41, T41p, T42, T42p, T43, T43p, T60, T60p, T61
ThinkPad X40, X41, X41 Tablet, X60, X60s, X60 Tablet, X61, X61s, X61 Tablet
ThinkPad Z60m, Z60t, Z61m, Z61t, Z61e
Source: ThinkWiki.org
This software has been tested on a ThinkPad T60. Please e-mail me with reports on its success/failure for your particular machine. Support for other machine types is in the works. (If anyone has a Vaio or a Mac that they aren’t using, I would like the opportunity to test with it, if possible.)
You also need the Microsoft .NET 2.0 Framework. If you do not already have it installed, it will automatically be downloaded when you install Laptop Theft Prevention.

Add Your Own Custom Map

Adding a custom map is a very simple process with the latest version of the Google Maps API. The latest revisions of Version 2 implement several JavaScript classes that make the addition of your own custom map layer very simple. This guide is meant to describe how to put these classes together in order to implement the end goal: a custom map layer that users can switch to in your Google Map API application.

More Info

Mike’s custom map tutorial

Tool for easily creating custom maps

Ruby on Rails specific tutorial with detailed steps on how to create custom maps.

 

Pretty amazing … David20Rumsey20Historical20Map20Collection. Not only that sheer size of the collection, nor the fact that he scanned all of these, some of which are more than 1m large. I am more impressed with the fact he published all these without any troubles with copyright. Hey, don’t get me wrong. I am all for it. You can’t cut a river with a sword, nor can you stop the flow of information with arbitrary laws.

The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection has over 18,460 maps online. The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century North American and South American maps and other cartographic materials. Historic maps of the World, Europe, Asia, and Africa are also represented. Collection categories include antique atlas, globe, school geography, maritime chart, state, county, city, pocket, wall, childrens, and manuscript maps. Some examples are United States map, maps New York, California map, Arizona map, America map, New York City map, Chicago map, and Colorado map. The collection can be used to study history, genealogy and family history.

 

New! - Explore the Collection Directory to view the maps by categories.

Read an article about the collection, take a Flash Tour of the collection (requires Flash), or view 360° panoramic images of the collection space. You can also view Japanese Historical Maps or fine art images from The AMICA Library. Browse lists of the collection’s many Atlases.

Read about Cartographica Extraordinaire which features stunning reproductions from the David Rumsey Map Collection and examines history from a uniquely geographic perspective.

That’s not all. See David Rumsey Historical Map Collection on Google Map. That’s truly amazing.on G

A great source of JSON data for mashing.  

LibraryThing JSON Books API - WikiThing. There is a test page here: http://www.librarything.com/api/json.php

And then there’s the RESTful service:

REST
This format is a simple HTTP GET or POST action and expects method information. Requests follow the following format:
http://www.librarything.com/services/rest/[version]/?[method_name]&[arguments as key=value separated by ampersands]&apikey=[your developer key]
example: http://www.librarything.com/services/rest/1.0/?method=librarything.ck.getwork&id=1060&apikey=d231aa37c9b4f5d304a60a3d0ad1dad4
By default, REST requests will send a REST response.
Response formats
REST
This response is an XML block.
Here is an example REST response for the work Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
JSON (coming soon)
This response is a text string in Javascript Object Notation (JSON). 
Although originally designed to be a portable data solution for Javascript most other languages can also make use of the format.
Notes
Limits
You are limited to a maximum of 1,000 requests per day. 

I don’t know when this function was added, but you can now search the web for faces only. Try this: "gary feng" - Google Image Search

[Disclaimer: as of today, none of the faces you see there is mine. In fact, you can’t find me even if you turn the "face-only" thing off. My invisibility cloak fooled Google. Horay!]  

What the Dickens? is a javascript Bayesian classification tool. It loads a corpus as a js file (which is no more than word counts from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Charles Dickens’ roughly half of Great Expectations). It then uses something akin to Divmod Reverend, a Python library for Bayesian filtering. There are parts missing, but it does look very easy.

Doesn’t say the accuracy of eye-gaze location tracking. 

Prize winner in Competition "Best C++/MFC article of June 2008"

CodeProject: TrackEye : Real-Time Tracking Of Human Eyes Using a Webcam. Free source code and programming help
The purpose of the project is to implement a real-time eye-feature tracker with the following capabilities:

• RealTime face tracking with scale and rotation invariance
• Tracking the eye areas individually
• Tracking eye features
• Eye gaze direction finding
• Remote controlling using eye movements

Bob Port lists many interesting papers on this page in support of Rich Phonology, which I know little other than that it seems to emphasize on the richness (high dimensionality) of memory/representation of spken words (or do words exist if we are anti-segmental all the way?).

I am far from qualified to comment on that. Instead, my interest is in the school of thought that the intuition of phonemes/segments comes from alphabetic writing; though I did digress at the end.

I was attracted to the following papers:

Port, Robert (2006)  The graphical basis of phones and phonemes. In Murray Munro and Ocke-Schwen Bohn (eds.) Second Language Speech Learning: The Role of Language Experience in Speech Perception and Production.  Benjamins, Amsterdam. pp. 349-365. 

[Update: I really like this paper and agree with the central notion that segmental representations are just a tool. That’s what I said earlier (below), but Port argued more forcefully. Not being a linguist or a phonetician, my concern was less on what kind of a theory is necessary to describe language, but more on how alphabetic/segmental writing is possible. To reiterate what I was about to say later, the mapping from the [unknown, possibly hi-D] psychologically real representation of speech to a segmental representation cannot be terribly difficult. To this end I find OT useful, whereas Bob Port’s advice to graduate students was basically not to touch it.]

Olson, David R. (1993)  How writing represents speech.  Language and Communication 13. 1-17.   This article is  a revised version of Chapter 4 in his outstanding and highly recommended book: The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. (Cambridge:  1994).   He points out that various human notions of what language is are invariably based on whatever we represent with our writing system.  So the idea that our alphabetical writing is a `cipher’ (one-to-one replacement) from phonemes into graphemes has reversed the true order!  We linguists tend to believe our language is made from phonemes primarily because we use letters to represent speech.

Faber, Alice  (1993)  Phonemic segmentation as epiphenomenon: Evidence from the history of alphabetic writing.  In Downing, Lima and Noonan (eds) The Linguistics of  Literacy.  (Benjamins,Amsterdam) pp. 111-134.  Faber anticipated the argument I am making here over a decade ago.  Her paper has been largely ignored, as far as I can tell.   She argued that languages seem to be composed from letter-like segments primarily because we have all been trained in alphabetic literacy. 

Abercrombie, David (1949)   What is a `letter’?   Lingua 2 , reprinted in D. Abercrombie  (1965) Studies in Phonetics and Linguistics. (Oxford Univ Press, Oxford), pp. 76-85    A quick, historical look at confusion from the Greeks to modern times about whether letters (Lat. litera) are graphic tokens or `speech sounds.’   Abercrombie thought the story was very clear in 1949 — since, of course, he assumed that phonemes were the correct cognitive units. But  it seems to me that he was still very confused himself about these issues.  Neither he nor most other phoneticians were ever able to sort out the source of our vivid intuitions about the segmental structure of speech. 

Nonetheless, an interesting question remains, a paradox of sort: if segmental representation is "unnatural", how does everybody get it?

Well, the unflattering truth is that not everybody does. Some children figure it out pretty much on their own, while others nevery do. The majority of English-speaking children requires years of instructions and drills. 

The twist, however, is that I happen to believe that no amount of drills can make you do something that you are inherently incapable of doing — such as flying or in my case playing the piano.  If we can get 70% children to read something as opaque as the English writing system, I am convinced that that is some sort of natural support built-in for segmental representations. 

To be clear, I am not arguing that speech sounds ARE segmentally represented in our minds. Rather, whatever mental representation we have, we can fairly easily convert to segmental representations.

As to why most language theories hang on to a segmental representation, very simple: it’s because of the symoblic nature of communications. It’s pretty much the only practical way (so far) to talk about language without showing spectrograms or passing a Python Object. It’s the combined result of the symbolic nature of human language, the requirement for replicability of science, and the unavailability of portable computers capable of visualizing hi-D data in the Greek times. Seriously, humans have rich memory representations, but we have NO way of sharing that rich representation with somebody else. For the sake of science, we had to settle on the cheapo substitute — symbols. 

As with connectionist models, the inherent limitation of hi-D models of cognition is not the models themselves, but our ability to communicate what they MEAN. It’s a non-question from a pure engeering/computation point of view: the model does its work; you can try to improve it or throw it away, but often times the most frustrating part of modeling work is to explain to somebody else what certain state of the model "means". That is, you are asked to digitize, discretize, symbolize, verbalize, or segmentalize the hi-D "experience" of the model, and compare that slice of "experience" with somebody else’s model or thoery that has a completely different archetecture and vocabulary.

Pretty hopeless, right? It should also sound familiar, if we imagine each individual speak runs an idiosyncratic hi-D language model in their head. I’d think a lo-D, simplistic theory is a pretty good place to begin a shared understanding. Even with the computing power today, I am not sure we have a solution to the — human — problem of communicating hi-D data/theories.

Coming back to the issue of segmental representation and literacy, there is no question that this is not an easy skill to acquire for some children, even though we have figured out a system to get the majority of kids on the path to literacy. I close with the following question: given the "unnatualness" of segmental representation, should we expect 100% of children to be able to read by 2014, as mandated by No Child Left Behind?

A couple of interesting papers to augment probability with "perception" — I think that’s a misnomer, though.  The "perception" Zadeh talks about has little psychological reality. It refers to words, an expanded collection of modals. The direction of the pursue makes practical sense (as much as gHit counts makes linguistic sense). Is it more than a clever engeering shortcut to a philosophically deep problem?

Information Resourses

Someone beat me to this . NPR provides an interesting API for accessing their stories; this wedget is one that uses the field:date to plot a time line: 

Widgets : Tech Center : NPR

NPR SIMILE TIMELINE
 

Usage Instructions : Determine which NPR stories you want in your timeline by using the modified version of the Query Generator. Adjust the Height of the Timeline as desired, then click the "Get Code" button. Finally, copy and paste the code onto your web page, blog post, etc. 

Provided by John Tynan of KJZZ on October 22, 2008.

Looks like a good tool, but can it do more than pies, bars, and areas? What is the HTML Canvas tag? Can I use it for visualizing eye movements? 

PlotKit - Javascript Chart Plotting | liquidx

Introduction
PlotKit is a Chart and Graph Plotting Library for Javascript. It has support for HTML Canvas and also SVG via Adobe SVG Viewer and native browser support.
PlotKit is fully documented and there is a quick tutorial to get you started.
PlotKit is a complete rewrite of CanvasGraph. It is better structured and supported.
 

Research: Phonics abstracts Farrar, J., Ashwell, S. & Maag, L. (2005). The emergence of phonological awareness: Connections to language and theory of mind development. First Language, 25(2), 157-172. The emergence of phonological awareness was examined in a longitudinal study. Two issues were of particular interest: (1) the relationship between phonological awareness and early language development, and (2) the relationship between theory of mind and phonological awareness. Of interest was whether early language ability at 2 years was related to phonological awareness (e.g. rhyming) at 4 years. Overall, children’s early language ability at 2 years predicted their phonological awareness at 4 years. Also of interest was the relationship between theory of mind understanding and phonological awareness. At 4 years measures of theory of mind were related to phonological awareness. Possible explanations of the link between language, theory of mind and phonological awareness are discussed. Abstract reproduced with permission of Sage Publications Ltd: www.sagepub.co.uk

Fact sheets

• Accountability, Assessments and Transparency
• Public School Choice and Supplemental Educational Services
• A Uniform, Comparable Graduation Rate

Live Event - South Carolina ETV

 On Tuesday, October 28, at 12:00 noon ET in Columbia, South Carolina, Secretary Spellings will issue final Title I regulations to strengthen the No Child Left Behind Act, including requirements that states implement a uniform graduation rate and enhance parents’ leverage in accessing public school choice and supplemental educational services options for their children. This broadcast will be produced at South Carolina ETV and streamed live on this page. 

Am I reading it correctly? So Google is in Amazon’s business of selling books, or even better, fulltext of books. You get 20% preview, and unlimited access after you buy it? 

Will Google come up with something better than Kindle? I hope not. I hope everything will be in PDF, but I might as well be dreaming. 

Google reaches settlement with authors | Politics and Law - CNET News

Currently, users of Google Book Search are able to view snippets of books online. The settlement agreement allows Google to make whole pages of copyright works available to online searchers. Users will be able to preview up to 20 percent of a book and purchase the book if they choose to, said David Drummond, senior vice president of corporate development and chief legal officer for Google. All public libraries in the United States will be offered a free online portal to Google’s digitized collection, said Aiken, and patrons will be able to print an unlimited number of pages for a per page fee. Google will also be offering institutional subscriptions to colleges and universities. Google Book Search services available outside the United States will remain the same, Drummond said.

CouchDB is an Apache project that implements a flexible schema-free database. Most interestingly, it supports JSON API, RESTful API, and a distributed model whereby multiple servers can have independent copies of the same data and can be synchronized bi-directionally.

Planet CouchDB

 Announcing "Relax with CouchDB" by O’Reilly
I am happy to announce that Noah Slater, J. Chris Anderson and I are writing “Relax with CouchDB” for O’Reilly.
The book is designed to guide you gently through using CouchDB with clear but practical scenarios. We progressively showcase key features, starting with simple document CRUD, working through to advanced MapReduce, and culminate with deployment tuning for performance and reliability.
Writing is hard, but Noah and Chris have already proven to be the best co-authors I could have wished for.
The kicker, for me, is that we will be releasing the book under a free license (CCby03) .
We’ve set up a Google Group for feedback where you can tell us what you would like to read. We will be releasing chapters as we write them (open license FTW) and we’d like to get your insights on how we are doing and what we are missing. Sign up now, thanks a lot!
by Jan (jan@apache.org) at October 27, 2008 01:48 PM

Really? 

Do you really believe we are not born to read? Are we born NOT to read? Are we born to speak, then? 

Speaking and reading are both emerging functions from what "we are born with" AND what we have acquired so far. I am no biologist but I suspect most biological functions are emergent, too. 

Review: Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf | Books | The Guardian

"We were never born to read." That is, there is nothing in our genetic makeup that determines literacy, in the way that there is something which determines how we digest, or see, or move.

Exactly a month ago I blogged about Chris’ online game Flitta. If he hadn’t patented it, it’s too late. Picasa Web Albums now has a game called where in the world.

 

Check out photos from around the world and guess where they were taken! 

Looking at the title and abstract, I wonder why this one is published on JEP:HPP

Are phonological representations of printed and spoken language isomorphic? Evidence from the restrictions on unattested onsets.
Pages 1288-1304
Berent, Iris
Are the phonological representations of printed and spoken words isomorphic? This question is addressed by investigating the restrictions on onsets. Cross-linguistic research suggests that onsets of rising sonority are preferred to sonority plateaus, which, in turn, are preferred to sonority falls (e.g., bnif, bdif, lbif). Of interest is whether these grammatical preferences constrain the recognition of auditory and printed words by speakers of English–a language in which such onsets are unattested. Five experiments compare phonological lexical decision responses to nonwords, including unattested onsets, through either aural or visual presentation. Results suggest that both hearers and readers are sensitive to the phonotactics of unattested onsets. However, the phonotactic generalizations of hearers and readers differ on their scope and source. Hearers differentiated all three types of onsets (e.g., bnif, bdif, and lbif), and their behavior implicated both grammatical and statistical constraints. In contrast, readers were able to differentiate only those structures similar to attested English onsets from dissimilar structures (i.e., bnif vs. bdif or lbif), and their preferences reflected statistical knowledge alone. These findings suggest that the phonological representations informing lexical decision to spoken and printed words are not isomorphic. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)
 

A couple of recent articles on eye movements: 

Reading spaced and unspaced Chinese text: Evidence from eye movements.
Pages 1277-1287
Bai, Xuejun; Yan, Guoli; Liversedge, Simon P.; Zang, Chuanli; Rayner, Keith
 Native Chinese readers’ eye movements were monitored as they read text that did or did not demark word boundary information. In Experiment 1, sentences had 4 types of spacing: normal unspaced text, text with spaces between words, text with spaces between characters that yielded nonwords, and finally text with spaces between every character. The authors investigated whether the introduction of spaces into unspaced Chinese text facilitates reading and whether the word or, alternatively, the character is a unit of information that is of primary importance in Chinese reading. Global and local measures indicated that sentences with unfamiliar word spaced format were as easy to read as visually familiar unspaced text. Nonword spacing and a space between every character produced longer reading times. In Experiment 2, highlighting was used to create analogous conditions: normal Chinese text, highlighting that marked words, highlighting that yielded nonwords, and highlighting that marked each character. The data from both experiments clearly indicated that words, and not individual characters, are the unit of primary importance in Chinese reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

and

Eye movements when reading transposed text: The importance of word-beginning letters.
Pages 1261-1276
White, Sarah J.; Johnson, Rebecca L.; Liversedge, Simon P.; Rayner, Keith
Participants’ eye movements were recorded as they read sentences with words containing transposed adjacent letters. Transpositions were either external (e.g., problme, rpoblem) or internal (e.g., porblem, probelm) and at either the beginning (e.g., rpoblem, porblem) or end (e.g., problme, probelm) of words. The results showed disruption for words with transposed letters compared to the normal baseline condition, and the greatest disruption was observed for word-initial transpositions. In Experiment 1, transpositions within low frequency words led to longer reading times than when letters were transposed within high frequency words. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the position of word-initial letters is most critical even when parafoveal preview of words to the right of fixation is unavailable. The findings have important implications for the roles of different letter positions in word recognition and the effects of parafoveal preview on word recognition processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

Ok, can you talk about evolution without reproduction and natural selection?

Guess you can. According to this Newsweek.com quote of UCLA neuroscientist Gary Small, 

 
"Perhaps not since early man first discovered how to use a tool has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically," he writes. "As the brain evolves and shifts its focus towards new technological skills, it drifts away from fundamental social skills."

I’d bet my farm that globally there is a negative correlation between internet usage and reproduction rate.  That can’t be what’s driving this brain evolution. I am also sure that there is a possitive correlation between internet use and life span, again at the global level. But so what, if you don’t have more children?

So is the whatever brain change triggered by internet/technology uses inheretable? In some ways, yes. As it become part of the "natural" environment in which human brains develop, it becomes completely entangled with brain development.

Can we say, then, technology is paragenetic?