the world exterior

olympic decisions tomorrow. who’s pumped?

due to a completely random moment of tumblr synchronicity (…tumblrnicity, as it were?) with flawlessfumbles I HAVE DECIDED TO START POSTING AGAIN.

i’ve been pretty busy here in chicago. i’m taking japanese up again, taking a seminar on slavic politics, a course on typology and a course on formal analysis of words and sentences (topics more similar than you might expect.

what’s REALLY exciting, however, is that i landed a press pass to the premier of the new Coen brothers film, A Serious Man. and, to top the whole thing off, i got to follow that up with a one-on-one interview with michael stuhlbarg. apparently, he actually auditioned for the relatively minor part of a yiddish speaking guy in the film’s prologue, and the coen brothers just fell in love with him.

and yet the only thing i can think about is how i want to add this information to his wikipedia article as soon as i can cite my interview as a source…

Here’s another cool experiment I took part in today:

A few of the linguistic researchers decdied to measure adjcetival use between genders. Subjects are given a list of situations, such as:

“A two-year-old waddles up to a dog in the park. You say, ‘that’s so… ‘”

“A female friend is wearing a shirt you like. You say, ‘that’s a… shirt’”

“A male friend… …shirt’”

Etc.

Subjects then choose between: “Nice, “cool,” “cute,” and “adorable” after giving their name and age. The answers are pumped through a computer which spits out the percentage of persons who used certain adjectives to describe particular situations. With this data, the researchers assume, this program will be able to predict what adjective a person will use in a given situation simply by their age and gender.

Personally, I didn’t pick “adorable” for any of the given situations, but I used “cool” significantly less than most people in my age & gender group, tending to opt for “nice” instead.

Anyway, “word-choice” databases such as these can reveal interesting facts about how different sorts of people interpret (or communicate facts about) the world around them.

{tgc, nick}

I had my first MRI today! It was part of an experiment in linguistic memory. The experiment went like this:

After being led to the giant machine (which, by the way, looks like a teleporter from a sci-fi movie), I was strapped into the machine and given a head-mounted, heads-up display. On the display, I was shown a picture of an object, and I would have to subvocalize the word while visualizing the object itself. So, if I were shown a pen, I’d have to subvocalize the word “pen” while imagine, say, writing a letter.

I got a chance to look at my brain directly afterward (it seemed fairly unremarkable to me), but, as an added bonus, I’ll be getting to practice segmentation on my own brain.

The way segmentation works is this: the segmentor (in this case, me) is given a giant Wacom tablet (about 20 inches) and a giant monitor (about 32 inches, widescreen), and a picture of a brain. The segmentor then draws over the CSF (cerebrospinal fluid) and the white matter in a particular area of the brain, leaving the gray matter untouched. This process is repeated over about 20 frames, which run from the anterior to the posterior ends of the cranium. The highlighted images is then run through an algorithm which extrapolates the 20 or so frames into a 3D model and “unfolds” the model, making the actual neural linking visible to the researcher.

Of course, I’m not qualified to examine the end result, but, now that I’ve gone through a day of training and an hour of being scanned, I’ll be ready to start segmenting tomorrow afternoon.

Here’s a cool experiment the scientists at the lab are doing today!

“You [the patient] will be shown 10 pictures of famous people in quick succession. There will then be a 10 minute break. After the break, you will be shown pictures of the same famous persons. You will be asked if the pictures are the same as the ones shown before, to which you must answer “YES” or “NO” by clicking the corresponding buttons on your screen.”

What the scientists are trying to figure out is how closely we pay attention to faces compared to other elements of a photo. If our brain automatically looks to faces, that’s pretty much the only thing the subject will be able to do before the image cuts away. If our brain looks at other things, it shouldn’t be too difficult for the subject to realize that a picture is different from the one shown during the previous interval. However, if everyone just focuses on recognizing Bill Clinton, they’re unlikely to notice that one picture features him wearing a golf shirt and, in the next, he’s wearing a freshly-pressed tuxedo.

First few days in the lab have passed. So far, I’ve been working on a web application that’ll allow lab technitions to view usage statistics in a web browser using 3D graphs and charts. For such a project, I’m learning a programming language called Ruby. Ruby is especially interesting to me, as the lead designer, Yukihiro Matsumoto (or “Matz,” as Ruby developers call him) designed the language to be as friendly as possible to its programmers, using syntax that mimics natural langauge as much as possible.

In an interview, Mastumoto said: “Often people, especially computer engineers, focus on the machines. They think, “By doing this, the machine will run faster. By doing this, the machine will run more effectively. By doing this, the machine will something something something.” They are focusing on machines. But in fact we need to focus on humans, on how humans care about doing programming or operating the application of the machines. We are the masters. They are the slaves.”

Also, it’s worth mentioning that the lab has 36 megabit per second internet. For those of you who’s jaws haven’t already dropped to the floor, that means I can download a gigabyte of information in about four and a half minutes. That’s approximately one, feature-length, high-defintion movie in a little over five minutes. By comparison, I’ve just upgraded my Internet at home to 3 megabits per second, which is the fastest service my provider offers.

I thought I’d take the time today to answer a question I know I’ll have to address eventually. I figured I might as well address it in broad daylight (so to speak).

When applying for the Junior Fellowship, students are told to create their own application. There are no forms to fill out, just an empty page and your imagination. What will you do? How will you do it? What is the significance of the project? Explaining what I’d do was straightforward enough, and my means were hardly out of the ordinary (except for the propeller plane ride). I was surprised to find that explaining the project’s significance wasn’t too difficult, as my “audience” most likely appreciated the importance of linguistic diversity in the first place:

“As the famous (or, to some, infamous) linguist Noam Chomsky once said: “Language is the DNA of culture.” Indeed, the roots of a single word can reveal volumes about the origins of an entire group of persons [I’ve omitted my etymological example to prevent snores] Even when a dead language has a rich literature, without auditory cues we are left with a less than complete understanding of the culture that language describes (imagine if modern humans knew what Classical Latin sounded like!). Ultimately, although a particular ethnic group may be unaffected by the extinction of its language, the loss will always leave humanity poorer.”

So, only one question remained: “What will you learn from your project?”

Well, I’ve mentioned a bit about Manx’s history. Manx went completely extinct for 15 to 20 years, during which only one or two people (such as Brian Stowell and Adrian Caine) learned the language from older, native speakers. No one spoke it to one another, and the adults of Brian’s generation claimed that Manx was “never a proper language.” Starting in the 90s, Brian started offering Manx classes. Only one or two people were interested every year, but Brian never gave up.

Then, one day in 1996, twenty people showed up at his door wanting to learn Manx. The next day, fifteen more. He went directly to a local high school to convince the board to allow him to teach Manx as an elective class. The board, assuming that few children would sign up, agreed. Much to the board’s surprise, only two students in the school didn’t want to learn Manx.

From that day onward, the entire Island buzzed with excitement. Adults who had never heard a word of Manx in their life greeted one another with typical Manx greetings. Brian told me that even the most disaffected of teenage goths (back when that fad still existed) wanted nothing more than to get their hands on a book about Manx. So, naturally, what did I want to learn from my project: “What the hell happened?”

Short answer: No idea. By all accounts, an Island changed it’s mind one night. My Independent Study Project will essentially be a deeper investigation into this phenomenon.

So, if I didn’t learn that, what did I learn?

I learned that there are islands full of friends waiting to be made. I learned that you’re better off predicting the weather from the seagulls than you are from the television. I learned that he places worth visiting are the ones with the “Do Not Enter” signs in front of them. That the world is bigger in some parts of the world than in others. That sometimes, islands change their minds overnight.

Today, I start my work at UCLA’s NPI building where I’ll be writing software in a brain scanning laboratory. So, the Manx chapter of my summer is closed. Of course, my Independent Study has yet to begin, and I’m sure I’ll revisit the Island many, many times in my life. In some ways, it feels like I never left. But for now, thank you for for following along throughout the whole adventure. I’ll be continuing to post updates following the work I do at UCLA, and I hope you’ll all check in from time to time!

Also, for those of you who enjoy pictures, you can check out my flickr!