Ethan, my 5 year brother, was asked to fetch the newspaper this morning. 

"Oh, brother!" he cried.

"You don’t have a brother,"I teased.

"Yes I do, I am a brother!" he said matter of factedly.  

– guest post by Jessie 

Like many smart kids, Ethan, 4 at the time, sometimes had to be corrected for grammar.

"hey, Ethan, do you say he do or he does?" I hinted.

"He do what he does." he said matter-of-factedly.

Picking among his favorite pants and shorts this morning, Ethan, 5, proclaimed

"I like life because it is interesting. "

Ethan will be 6 in less than a month, and boy, hasn’t he grown intellectually and spiritually.

Yesterday was the last day of school and he came home early. By early afternoon I found him lying on the floor, bored. Then he turn to me and said:

"Dad, you know, you can’t really do nothing. Like I am doing nothing, but I am still lying here."

And just now he was asked to do a chore and he exclaimed "Oh, brother!"

"But you don’t even have a brother," I teased.

"Dad, oh brother means oh my god," he tried to explain. Then a second later he added, thoughtfully,

"Brother means god."

Relaying the Duke Library Hacks blog post on Publish or Perish

Joining this group is Publish or Perish, with a slightly different take on this process.  Publish or Perish uses data from Google Scholar, but it automatically does analysis on the citation patterns for specific authors.  After searching for an author (works best with first initial and quotes, such as “DG Schaeffer”) you can select the papers you want to analyze and you get metrics such as total citations, cites per year, h-index, g-index, etc.  Any analysis done can be exported to EndNote, BibTeX or a CSV file.

The software is available for Windows and Linux and is a quick, light, free download from the Publish or Perish website.  It’s more of a do-one-thing-well software and isn’t full of features, but this makes it easy to use.  It was created by an Australian professor and she includes some thoughts on her site about GoogleScholar as a citation tool as well as an explanation of the metrics used in the software.

You do your normal lit search, and AuthorMapper shows where the authors are on google map.  That’s one of the things on my procrastination to-do list. They did a very good job, including multi-resolution icon representations that, for example, shows an icon for the whole North East US region when you are at a world view, and splits it as you zoom in.

There is a catch — apparently it only searches the Springer database, which, according to its About page: 

Springer is the second-largest publisher of journals in the science, technology, and medicine (STM) sector and the largest publisher of STM books.

When it comes to literature research, the second largest means you are missing a world.

Data.gov can be handy in the stat course I will be teaching in the Fall.  

Seriously, I found this word — unincluded — in a Ph. D. dissertation draft.

… and five 5-year-olds, who were unincluded due to reading ability. 

It was not a joke, at least I wouldn’t find it funny in the middle of the Method section. And no, the author is a native English speaker.

The "word" has, as of today, about 10K gHits, and taking out those related to the band Unincluded, unincluded -lundell there are about 9K. Pretty rare.

Why did they think they needed a keyboard?

My colleague Liz Brannon has a new paper on the sense of 0 (nill, null, zero) among rhesus monkeys.

PsycNET

Empty sets as part of the numerical continuum: Conceptual precursors to the zero concept in rhesus monkeys.

Merritt, Dustin J.; Rugani, Rosa; Brannon, Elizabeth M.

Current issue feed Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Vol 138(2), May 2009, 258-269.

The goal of the current research was to explore whether monkeys possess conceptual precursors necessary for understanding zero. We trained rhesus monkeys on a nonsymbolic numerical matching-to-sample task, and on a numerical ordering task. We then introduced nondifferentially reinforced trials that contained empty sets to determine whether monkeys would treat empty sets as numerical values. All monkeys successfully matched and ordered the empty sets without any training. Accuracy showed distance effects, indicating that they treated empty sets as values on a numerical continuum.

Anybody knows what is the "Batesian" method of eye correction?

Google Trends shows an interesting contrast between the search volume of "reading" and "math". It’s scaled on so that the frequency of "reading" over the years averages to 1.

A few interesting observations:

1. nobody cares about reading or math when the holidays are near. (it’s also possible that the overall search volume goes up during the holiday season, driving down reading/math proportions. But either way, school is out of the mind then)

2. there is a "summer learning loss" for math, but not so much for reading. As far as math is concerned, summer is as cold as X’mas.

3. what about the spikes in reading sometime before the summer? I guess that’s when the end of grade tests loom large. And then another spike right around the begining of the Fall.

E.D. Hirsch Jr. has an op ed on NY Times yesterday (Reading Test Dummies) in which he attacks what he sees as the core problem of reading tests today:

These much maligned, fill-in-the-bubble reading tests are technically among the most reliable and valid tests available. The problem is that the reading passages used in these tests are random. They are not aligned with explicit grade-by-grade content standards.

… Teachers can’t prepare for the content of the tests and so they substitute practice exams and countless hours of instruction in comprehension strategies like “finding the main idea.”

The solution is, of course

Students now must take annual reading tests from third grade through eighth. If the reading passages on each test were culled from each grade’s specific curricular content in literature, science, history, geography and the arts, the tests would exhibit what researchers call “consequential validity” — meaning that the tests would actually help improve education. Test preparation would focus on the content of the tests, rather than continue the fruitless attempt to teach test taking. 

Presumably,

To base tests on what is actually taught in school would not only be fairer to disadvantaged students than the current Kafkaesque system of testing, it would enable such students to gradually narrow the gap in their general knowledge and vocabulary. Eventually, we’d see improvement in the reading levels of all students.

This reform would have another excellent consequence: Teachers and students might begin to demand content standards that are more specific [than the current standards].

He ends with a call that

we need to move from teaching to the test to tests that are worth teaching to.

Needless to say, what are worth teaching are defined and sold by the Core Knowledge Foundation. I actually own a number of "what you X-grader needs to know" books. But it seems to me the purported benefits of aligning (Federal) reading test standards to the core knowledge are just too convenient to be true. Critical evaluations of Hirsch Jr.’s ideas are easy to find in libraries and on the internet, one of the downsides of having an extraordinarily long and productive academic career.

Amongst the hypes of Alpha, I looked back at MIT START, a natural language search engine, and found evidence of … well, what do you call it in an age of knowledge computation?

Here, start with START, and click on one of the pre-defined queries, Why is the sky blue? . And you get the following answer:

START’s reply

===> Why is the sky blue

The colors of the sky result from the scattering of sunlight by the gas molecules and dust particles in the atmosphere. Sunlight consists of light waves of varying wavelengths, each of which is seen as a different color. The shortest light waves appear blue and the longest red. The blue light waves are readily scattered by tiny particles of matter in the atmosphere, but the red light waves travel undisturbed unless they are struck by larger particles.

When the sky is clear, the waves of blue light are scattered much more than those of any other color. As a result, the sky appears blue. When the sky is full of dense clouds or smoke, the light waves of all colors are scattered, causing the sky to turn gray. At sunrise or sunset, sunlight must travel farther through the atmosphere than when the sun is overhead. Light waves of most colors are scattered. Undisturbed red light waves give the sun and sky near the horizon a red or orange appearance.

Source: START KB

Notice the source? Wondered how it was computed? Now google the answer text:

1. START’s reply

   The shortest light waves appear blue and the longest red. … the sky is clear, the waves of blue light are scattered much more than those of any other color. As a result, the sky appears blue. When the sky is full of dense clouds or smoke, the light waves of all colors are scattered, causing the sky to turn gray. …
   start.csail.mit.edu/startfarm.cgi?query=Why+is+the+sky+blue - 3k - Cached - Similar pages -

2. Dear Uncle Ezra - Questions for Tuesday, November 2, 1993 …

   … color….The shortest light waves appear blue and the longest red. … When the sky is full of dense clouds or smoke, the light waves of all colors are scattered, causing the sky to turn gray. At sunrise ….. "When the sky is clear, the waves of blue light are scattered much more than those of any other color. …
   ezra.cornell.edu/posting.php?timestamp=752216400 - 60k - Cached - Similar pages -

And follow the Dear Uncle Ezra link, go to Question 4:

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Question 4 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Unc:
What makes the sky blue?

                                                               Looking Up

Dear Skygazer,
…and gray and sometimes red?  According to T. Theodore Fujita in Volume 17 of the 1990 World Book Encyclopedia, under the entry "Sky":
        "The colors of the sky result from the scattering of sunlight by the gas molecules and dust particles in the atmosphere.  Sunlight consists of light waves of varying wavelengths, each of which is seen as a different color….The shortest light waves appear blue and the longest red. The blue light waves are readily scattered by tiny particles of matter in the atmosphere, but the red light waves travel undisturbed unless they are struck by larger particles.
        "When the sky is clear, the waves of blue light are scattered much more than those of any other color.  As a result, the sky appears blue. When the sky is full of dense clouds or smoke, the light waves of all colors are scattered, causing the sky to turn gray.  At sunrise or sunset, sunlight travels through a denser layer of atmosphere than when the sun is overhead.  The waves of red light travel farther through this layer than do those of other colors.  In such cases, the sun and the sky near the horizon appear red."
        Just think how different the poetry of earth would be if purple or orange light waves were most readily scattered!  Makes me appreciate that calm and elevating blue (which no Ithaca resident takes for granted) even more.

Uncle Ezra 

Copying strings was one of the first computations I learned on the Commodore 64. And there you didn’t need to cite sources. When someone claims that the source of knowledge is computation and the end result is nothing but facts, I am reminded of the founding idea of LISP — it’s all about string manipulations.

This is probably old news, but looks like we will be able to buy out-of-print books from Google sometime in the future.

Three types of books

This agreement helps define how our users may access different categories of books on Google Book Search.

1. In-copyright and in-print books

   In-print books are books that publishers are still actively selling, the ones you see at most bookstores. This agreement expands the online marketplace for in-print books by letting authors and publishers turn on the "preview" and "purchase" models that make their titles more easily available through Book Search.

2. In-copyright but out-of-print books

   Out-of-print books aren’t actively being published or sold, so the only way to procure one is to track it down in a library or used bookstore. When this agreement is approved, every out-of-print book that we digitize will become available online for preview and purchase, unless its author or publisher chooses to "turn off" that title. We believe it will be a tremendous boon to the publishing industry to enable authors and publishers to earn money from volumes they might have thought were gone forever from the marketplace.

3. Out-of-copyright books

   This agreement doesn’t affect how we display out-of-copyright books; we will continue to allow Book Search users to read, download and print these titles, just as we do today.

Alas, I won’t be able to attend this.

Symposium: "Emotions, Natural Selection and Rationality" Symposium

http://business.richmond.edu/news_events/current_events/3-21-09_Econ_Symposium.html

Date: 20-22 March, 2009

Place: University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia

The symposium focuses on how the emotions are related to morality, on one hand, and to rationality, on the other.  The recent discovery of the mirror neuron system, conceivably the basis of sympathetic emotions, highlights the biological basis of moral and rational behavior.  Adam Smith, 250 years ago, highlighted in his book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), how morality is ultimately based on sympathetic sentiments.  On the other hand, Charles Darwin stressed the biological basis of morality.  This symposium brings together scholars in economics, biology, psychology, and other disciplines to evaluate and debate these issues in light of recent discoveries in neuroscience.

Speakers:

Reinhard Selten, Department of Economic, University of Bonn (Nobel laureate of Economics, 1994) and Robin Pope, Department of Economics, University of Bonn, Title: TBA

Paul Zak, School of Politics and Economics, Claremont Graduate University, Title: "The Moral Molecule"

Kevin McCabe, Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science, George Mason University, Title: "Two Neural Systems for Trust"

Daniel Houser, Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science, George Mason University, Title: "Doing and Saying: Does Transparent Leadership Really Matter?"

David Haig, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Title: "On intrapersonal conflict"

Leonardo Fogassi, Department of Neurosciences, University of Parma, Italy, Title: The Mirror Neuron System: How Cognitive Functions Emerge from Motor Organization

Istvan Molnar-Szakacs, UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, Title: The Human Mirror Neuron System – from Actions to Morality

Elias Khalil, Department of Economics, University of Richmond and Monash University, Title: "The Mirror-Neuron Paradox: How Far is Sympathy from Compassion, Indulgence, and Adulation?"

Eric Schliesser, Department of Philosophy, Leiden University, Title: "On the Darwinian afterlife of The Smithian distinction between Natural and Moral Sentiments, and their rationality"

One of those things pop up in your mind after 1:30am:

So far as I know, no computer programming language has a counterfactual conditional statement:

IF_CF (A) Then_Would_Have_Been  B

Logically something like this is pretty straightforward to add: it’s not like we don’t know how to deal with modal logic (well, a lot less but still…).

An easy answer is … well, there hasn’t been the need for it, right? Computer languages are instructions to do things. Interpreted or compiled, the code must be stripped down, transformed, and mapped to physical actions in the trillions of little P-N gates. If all we need is to tell the computer to do something, why do we give it the ability to contemplate the what-if’s and only-if’s?

But why do we need it? We being the language-speaking, plan-making, money-saving homo sapiens who keep thinking "only if I didn’t invest in the stock market." Isn’t the function of language to get the listener to do something — at least by the speech act theory? What is it that we have/need but not computers?

Or, maybe computers don’t need counterfactuals because the logic of counterfactuals can be reduced to regular IF statements? Social psychologists say that the reason we constantly regret — a form of counterfactual thinking — is that it helps us consider alternatives and avoid pitfalls next time. In other words, it’s learning. Well, computers learn, and they do so without regrets. Or do they? Maybe regrets are represented as negative weights in a distributed network, or a new rule prohibiting certain actions. I guess another way to ask the same question is — is there a programming recipe for a counterfactual routine in C?

One may ask "what can a counterfactual statement do for programming?" We would have known if somebody had tried.

One thing I noticed lately as I watch the comments/spams on my blog site is that the spams are getting very personalized. Just today someone left what appears to be a relevant and somewhat intelligent comment on one of my old blog entries, except for the links and email.

Name: Payday Loans | E-mail: paydayloanslady@gmail.com | URI: http://www.checkcity.com | IP: 69.169.144.5
I agree. I don’t see any disrespect or misconception in saying that he probably just spelled it wrong. I don’t think we should just assume that the was a perfect speller and that there’s no way it could be wrong. I agree to spell it “ocean”. That’s how it’s spelled! 
 

Looks like spammers are paying humans cash to spread their URLs, which is sort of a noble thing to do in this bad economy, I guess. Oh well, by posting the links and email here they get what they paid for.  

Tobii Eyetracking Conference for Infant & Child Researchers - Summary - powered by RegOnline

I won’t be able to go but sounds like an interesting gathering.  

Orlando, FL. Dec 23, 2008. 

Jessie woke up this morning, and said she dreamed of the fudge she saw last night at a candy store in Downtown Disney:

"It was only $1.30, and it was soooo yummy!" she said.

Ethan cried: "that’s unfair!"