Passed on without comment from academic uberblog Language Log:

I've been critical of Fitch's article, so I should emphasize one point on which we agree: he is quite correct (if unoriginal) to say that an `adequate explanation for [what he quaintly calls] glossogenetic phenomena must incorporate individual and collective levels of description, and show why they are necessarily related'. I'm skeptical about the likelihood that statistical analyses imported from other disciplines will solve this difficult problem. It's not that statistical explorations of relationships between frequency and lexical replacement and/or regularization, and in other areas of language change as well, should be ignored; they have produced very interesting results in a variety of domains. But errors of the sort that Fitch makes show clearly that new approaches to historical linguistic analysis will be successful only to the extent that they take into account the results of historical linguistic investigations over the past hundred and fifty years or so. Failing to learn something about a field one wishes to contribute to is all too likely to lead to reinvention of the wheel at best, and to a garbage in/garbage out problem at worst.

But the rigor inter-methodological conceit feels so good.

References:
* Fitchifying Language Change [LL]

Previously:
* Disturbingly, Quantitative Analysis May Have Methodological Shortcomings - Blogosphere Edition
* Quantitative Hints Of The Big Other
* Quantitative Hints Of The Big Other

This being the popular song with the lyrics "1234" that isn't currently being used for an iPod commercial, we weren't sure if posting it would bring down the wrath of the hipsters. But this irony-endowed Jimmy Kimmel appearance probably makes it safe:

Here's the original video, which - if not for that Ronson guy - would be the presumptive favorite for best video of the year:

There's a punchline here about a French band confusing dancing with fighting, but it would cheapen the moment.

References:
* Justice "D.A.N.C.E." on Jimmy Kimmel Live 10-9-07 [musickimmel / YouTube]
* Mark Ronson And Amy Winehouse Are Very Good For Each Other [Video]
* Justice - D.A.N.C.E (Version Finale) [Antho05 / YouTube]

Previously:
* The Cute Yellow Thin Wedge Of The Coming Robot Wars [Video]
* Desperate Attempt to Make Michael Jackson Cool Again... Succeeds? [Video]
* Mickey Avalon Embraces Rock And Roll Lifestyle With Something Less Than Ironic Distance [Video]

There's a post up at Philosophy of Memory - one of our favorite blogs and one of our many creepy academic crushes - about efforts to help victims with false memories implanted during recovered memory therapy. One of the more charming excesses of second wave feminism, recovered memory hypnosis seems thankfully to have slipped into disrepute.

But as it spiraled downward, that model of psychotherapy dragged down more legitimate versions with it. Now even talk of repression raises eyebrows and bad memories. The irony is that recovered memory hysteria rested not only on bad social policy and bad neuroscience, but also on bad psychoanalytic theory. This passage from the Philosophy of Memory post is particularly relevant:

Storm’s case is similar to those of many other patients who ­underwent recovered-memory therapy that revealed sordid histories of sexual abuse and demonic ceremonies. Although the scientific literature suggests that traumatic events are rarely, if ever, repressed or forgotten, this type of therapy was widespread in the 1990s and is still practiced today. Only after several high-profile lawsuits did the American Medical Association issue warnings to patients about the unreliability of recovered memories... Recovered-memory therapy relies fundamentally on the notion that some memories are so unspeakable that the mind represses them to protect itself. Decades of research conducted by neurobiologist James L. McGaugh of U.C.I. suggest, however, just the opposite—that one key function of memories is to recall threatening situations so that they can be avoided in the future.

Along with the scientific literature, another theory of mind that denies that trauma can be successfully repressed is psychoanalysis. There are two related issues here, one architectonic and one a little downstream, after the jump.

The Milky Way - a relatively small corner of an unfathomably large universe - is teeming with billions and billions of solar systems. Inside those solar systems, different chemicals have been given eons to form into basic organisms which have had plenty of time to evolve into extra-terrestrial intelligences. Enter the Fermi paradox, coined by Enrico Fermi in 1950: if all that's true, where the hell is everybody? We haven't seen them, we haven't heard from them, and we certainly haven't talked to any of them. There are all kinds of other problems too. We should expect that somewhere in the infinite expanse there is at least one xenophobic advanced alien civilization. By now they should have sent out so-called beserker probes - simple self-replicating probes with a particularly nasty payload - to find and destroy rival civilizations. And yet here we are, blissfully not destroyed.

Three canonical solutions:

(1) Self-annihilation - there is a built-in threshold past which a civilization cannot evolve without something happening that causes it to destroy itself. In Frankfurt terms, it's an overdetermination problem - there are so many things that could go wrong (environmental catastrophe, apocalyptic war, etc) that one of them does. The Fermi paradox is so powerful that, rather than presenting a problem for the way we think about how evolution may work, it's taken as evidence for the very real probability of overdetermined self-annihilation. But this solution assumes that every civilization destroys itself - that in the infinity of the cosmos, there's not a single one that's avoided self-annihilation. Really? Not one?

(2) Digital revolution - Imagine what was happening if ETIs were looking for us on the radio spectrum. We've been broadcasting powerful radio signals for a century or so. In another century, we'll have certainly moved on to something else. Those 200 years are a blink of an eye over the course of human evolution. Maybe we've been looking in the wrong place. The problem with this solution is that it still doesn't explain why we haven't been contacted deliberately by an ETI - why no UFOs and why no beserker probes?

(3) Virtual worlds - Maybe alien civilizations don't contact us or bother us because they've got something more interesting to do than deal with reality. Given the relative paucity of physical experience compared to what's possible in virtual worlds - maybe there's a threshold that civilizations cross where they're able to create such fantastic worlds for themselves that they withdraw from physical reality. After the jump, a video that will creep you the hell out.

You know, we've seen more than a few movies that begin this way. And they always end badly. Always. Here's uber-genius Hod Lipson giving an engaging presentation that was - for reasons inscrutable to us - not subtitled "how I spent my summer vacation ushering in the Age of the Machines:"

At least he's enthusiastic about it. More information is buried in the original story.

References:
* Robots that are "self-aware": Hod Lipson on TED.com [TED Blog]

Previously:
* The Cute Yellow Thin Wedge Of The Coming Robot Wars [Video]
* Neural Nets See Things The Way We Do, Vulnerable To Basic Optical Illusion
* A Peircean Checklist For Conscious Artificial Intelligence

We were going to title this post Redemption!, but that seemed too exuberant. And we're trying to keep things low-key, since we're saving all of our energy for future angry outbursts followed by frantic intellectual activity:

Because angry people apparently rely on heuristic cues when making judgments, anger has been claimed to trigger superficial, nonanalytic information processing. In three studies, the authors found that induced anger promoted analytic processing. Experiment 1 showed that angry participants were more likely to discriminate between weak and strong arguments than participants in neutral moods. Experiment 2 demonstrated that anger overrode dispositional preferences not to process, causing even those low in need for cognition to process analytically. Experiment 3 reconciled these findings with previous work by showing that angry people used accessible, valid, and relevant heuristics but otherwise processed analytically, as indicated by attitude change and elaboration data. Together, these experiments showed that angry people can have both the capacity and motivation to process and that their selective use of heuristics reflects the cue's perceived validity and not the failure to process analytically.

Score.

References:
* yessssss! [Neither Necessary Nor Sufficient]

Previously:
* Social Science Partisan Attacks Critic For Lack Of Social Scientific Rigor
* Anthimeria - Linguists Uncover "Garden-Variety Typo" In Rhetorical Landscape
* Greek Version of Scientific Instrumentalism Was Particularly Instrumentalist

It's going to get harder and harder to make these interesting, since Berkeley and MIT are so far ahead that everyone else is just kind of "why bother." Plus all the lectures went up at the beginning of the semester so there might be a lull now. But nonetheless -

* Berkeley has put up over 200 taped lectures on YouTube.

* That's almost as good as the over 1,800 courses that MIT now has online. Except not quite. American Scientist discusses.

* Lifehacker's roundup of the .edu underground won't be as new to academics as it must be to people who have paying jobs. But there's such a wealth of stuff in that post that everyone should be able to find at least a few new and interesting things.

* If you have any interest in drawing and design - either as a hobby or (less likely) in some professional capacity - Process Junkie has downloadable copies of "the best figure drawing books ever." The collection does look pretty impressive.

Previously:
* What If The Lacanian Gaze Wasn't Totally Stupid?
* Particle Physicists Do It Transparently Through The Rumor Mill (Plus: Promote NCA Open Bar Transparency!)
* Open Knowledge Roundup - Gearing Up For Fall

We haven't done a photo gallery in a while. This set is shamelessly lifted from Kawika Chetron of Cold Water Images.

Blue rockfish (Sebastes mystinus) swimming below a canopy of giant kelp (Macrocystis sp.):

Invisible high five from a green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas):

Sneaky harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) doing a little pose:

They've got more than 100 gorgeous photos in their thumbnail gallery. Click.

References:
* Cold Water Images
* Thumbnail Index

Previously:
* Arnold Pouteau's View Of NYC Is Much Better Than Yours
* Icon Index Symbol: The Things We Can Do - Science Photography Awards Announced
* The Things We Can Do - 20 Years Of Technological Progress

Joan Connelly has a new book out about the role of priestesses in ancient Greece. James Davidson's is not a fan:

For an upbeat vision seems to mean "women like us", "women" meaning "decent women", and "like us" meaning "like modern Western women", wise-cracking, independent, opinionated, stylishly dressed. That means that a lot of women in the modern and in the ancient world are not welcome at this cheerleaders’ party. It is a door policy that becomes especially obvious when Connelly nose-holdingly deigns to touch upon the religious role of the girls who are less than fully decent, the courtesans: "A third area of popular preoccupation merits only the briefest mention. This is the 'myth' of Greek priestesses in the service of sacred prostitution, for which there is no firm evidence". In fact, a lot of evidence, constantly added to, has been adduced to confirm that there were indeed some rather direct links between prostitutes, courtesans and the sacred in the Greek world...

The book opens with a famous image from the inside of a drinking-cup, of a woman carrying a sacrificial basket pouring a libation at a flaming altar. Connelly uses her as a launchpad for discussion of "problems of signification" and the need to be "open to signifiers that have previously gone unrecognized". She neglects to mention that the incense-burner behind the woman is a pretty strong signifier for one particular cult, that of Aphrodite, which may help to explain the scene on the other side of the cup, which likewise passes without mention: men offering bags of money to courtesans and "flute-girls". The cultural bias here is the assumption that sex and the sacred do not mix.

Page Dubois criticizes Foucault on similar grounds, suggesting that "he's not interested in gender, he does not see women in ancient Greece except as wives in the household, another occasion for the master's self-mastery." But the genuine concern of that essay - her appropriation of Foucault's historiography - is perhaps even more relevant to this debate. She wants to use Foucault to warn against the familiarization of ancient Greece: "his work lays the ground for the assumption that life in [Sappho's] world was different, that Sappho's culture was... different from our own." She's more specifically concerned about his on women that ends up "producing woman as a category for ourselves, for ourselves to inhabit as we continually produce it in discourse". The risk now appears to be that academics like Connelly, in an attempt to mine the ancient world for positive role models that contemporary women can look towards, imposes both models and roles on ancient women.

References:
* Connelly, Joan Breton. Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece. Princeton University Press, 2007.
* How to be a modern goddess
* duBois, Page. Sappho Is Burning. University Of Chicago Press, 1997.

Previously:
* Sigmund Freud Head Lollipops. Yes, Really.
* Mickey Avalon Embraces Rock And Roll Lifestyle With Something Less Than Ironic Distance [Video]
* Cog Sci Blog Roundup

Mark Ronson and Amy Winehouse are having a difficult time doing wrong. The talented and circumspect Ms. Winehouse does not make a physical appearance in this video - a cover of the Zutons's "Valerie" - but the female vocals are all her:

Another music video, as we continue to flirt with becoming a poorly written shadow of Fimoculous. But the kids love it.

References:
* Mark Ronson 'Valerie' [icolumbia / YouTube]

Previously:
* Desperate Attempt to Make Michael Jackson Cool Again... Succeeds? [Video]
* Mickey Avalon Embraces Rock And Roll Lifestyle With Something Less Than Ironic Distance [Video]
* Calvin And Hobbes Mural Shows Dedication, Potentially Misplaced Academic Priorities [Video]

The 2007 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge awards were announced last week in Science. That little beauty above is Chondrus crispus, a red algae more commonly known as Irish moss, that was snapped by Andrea Ottesen of the University of Maryland. National Geographic has a roundup of some more winning photographs.

There are a few dozen books to be written about the interplay between visual images and popular support for science. NASA, for one, is very good about using stunning pictures to mobilize public support for space research. But the sublime works both ways. You can generate awe and wonder by going either very big or very small. What NASA can do with overwhelming star systems, biologists should be able to do with snapshots of impossibly delicate bundles of pollen grains.

References:
* Best Science Images of 2007 Honored [National Geographic]

Previously:
* Neural Nets See Things The Way We Do, Vulnerable To Basic Optical Illusion
* IIS Begs Science: Please Stop Making Robots That Creep Us The Hell Out
* The Things We Can Do - 20 Years Of Technological Progress

The Internet is over. You can all go home now:

Sigmund Freud's head yields subtle contours and watermelon flavors when you suck on it. Of course it does. Post tagged 's' for stupid.

References:
* Watermelon Flavored Sigmund Freud Head Lollipops

Previously:
* [Edit]
* Quantitative Hints Of The Big Other
* Watermelon Flavored Sigmund Freud Head Lollipops

And even this would have been unthinkable three or four years before that:

Not exactly Web 2.0.

References:
* DEC - Glimpse of the Future, 1994 [mgrdcm / YouTube]

Previously:
* Amazon Marketing And Its Discontents - Red Bull And... Wait, What?
* Cog Sci Blog Roundup
* Particle Physicists Do It Transparently Through The Rumor Mill (Plus: Promote NCA Open Bar Transparency!)

There are at least two ways that science is circumstantially practiced. One is as a heavily mathematical search to understand the basic structure of the universe and what's in it - what David Deutsche refers to as "revealing and explaining the fabric of reality." (3) The other is as fairly straightforward instrumentalism - the theory predicts something, that something is the case, so the theory should still be taken as sound. The understanding people think that the instrumentalists are incurious and the instrumentalists think that the understanding people are fanciful. At the center of the debate is the nature of theory: do theories have a kind of correspondence to the world or are they crude psychological tools humans need to deal with the world.

But nonetheless, both sides are still dealing with theories. The questions are about what the theories mean and whether there's much more to science than testing them - but it's still about the development of theories. That's just how science is done.

After the jump, evidence that the Greeks may have had a qualitatively different third approach.

We actually agree with a large swath of IRB bad arguments, which is what this little spat is about. But still:

The idea that the "typical journalistic interview or survey" involves great questions of war and peace and commerce and culture, while the typical social-science interview or survey involves dog owners, is, I suppose, a testable hypothesis, though not one that Weinstein tests by sampling news stories and journal articles. Absent such evidence, it is an anti-intellectual slur.

There's an extent to which the ethos of some social scientific scholars - with their occasionally fetishistic insistence on methodological rigor and bureaucratic niceties - deserve an IRB process. But probably not the IRB process that actually exists, since nobody deserves that. See, inter alia: here and here and here.

References:
* James Weinstein's Anti-Intellectualism [IRB Blog]
* Study Finds IRBs Exaggerate Risks of Survey Questions [IRB Blog]
* Roberta S. Gold, “None of Anybody’s Goddamned Business”? [IRB Blog]
* Guidance Creep [IRB Blog]

Previously:
* Quantitative Hints Of The Big Other
* Disturbingly, Quantitative Analysis May Have Methodological Shortcomings - Medical Studies Edition
* Disturbingly, Quantitative Analysis May Have Methodological Shortcomings - Blogosphere Edition

Behold exhibit A in our next "you might be the least productive student I've ever met" meeting with the Adviser:

Of course the Adviser's answer is going to be "yeah, but at least they produced something." Outflanked again.

References:
* Calvin and Hobbes Post-It Note Mural [proctris / YouTube]

Previously:
* The Cute Yellow Thin Wedge Of The Coming Robot Wars [Video]
* Arnold Pouteau's View Of NYC Is Much Better Than Yours
* Amazon Marketing And Its Discontents - Red Bull And... Wait, What?

We've been talking a little bit about the degree to which AI will have to be embodied if it's ever going to achieve something that resembles consciousness. The theoretical question can probably be phrased as "to what degree does consciousness exhaust behavior," but the practical questions are about to what extent an AI has to interact with the environment the way we do to get the tools to simulate consciousness.

Now the gird above is a basic implemenation of White's illusion. When humans look at the squares where the gray lines meet, the perceived brightness seems lighter than the rest of the line. Of course the lines are solid - the illusion is an artifact of trying to learn to differentiate between light and dark. Turns out, digital "brains in vats" are vulnerable to this very very same illusion:

Now for the sting: the brain in question was an artificial neural network (ANN) that only ever existed inside a computer. It was trained to successfully perform on a lightness constancy task. Most excitingly, when trained to discern between overlapping layers, the ANN sees White's illusion (Box E). White's illusion has been problematic to model as the lightness perception goes "the other way" from the stimuli shown here. Thus, the by-product of learning to see lightness and depth is a susceptibility to these illusions. This also tells us something about how animal brains, including our own, work.

If AI's can simulate the results of walking around and interacting in the world without ever having to walk around and interact in the world, then that's one less hurdle toward building something that most people most of the time would agree is conscious (via Cognitive Daily)

References:
* A Peircean Checklist For Conscious Artificial Intelligence
* Seeing things similarly [Auntie Em]

Previously:
* Psychoanalytic Theory - Come For The Answers, But Stay For The Questions
* Cog Sci Blog Roundup
* Pre-Darwinian Empiricism Read Through Peirce

We used to call this the naive, self-congratulatory bench-scientist version of science. But we're becoming inclined to think of it as the Chris Mooney version science:

It has fallen to those of us who oppose the direction the country has been heading to simultaneously champion a way of thinking that would have averted so many blunders and disasters: empirical thinking. Scientific thinking. Critical thinking. In other words, you might say that now more than ever before, we're finally waking up to the fact that the practices of science themselves encode a set of values - a way of approaching the world, understanding it, and acting within it. At its core, it's a world view that is humble about what we know and don't know, flexible about what we do and don't decide to do, and open about admitting past mistakes and listening to contrary opinion.

Patently silly. Humility is neither historically nor empirically science's strong suit. Quite the opposite - circumspection and awe at nature's veiled mysteries are religious values that have been, since the time of Bacon, used to oppose scientific progress. To believe that the scientific method embodies a unique and privileged fallibilistic hermeneutic requires a willful suppression of even basic historical knowledge. Some of this science-religion dialectic has certainly been sublimated into science - many scientists today are certainly driven by awe at the elegance of the natural world. But to suggest that the practices of science uniquely encode a sensibility of humility - that's a gesture of such demonstrably false conceit that it could only work in front of a myopic and politicized audience eager for ideological back patting.

To give you an idea of how surreal the scientific-political landscape has gotten, pro-science forces are now claiming that science is valuable precisely because it's not value-neutral while the advocates of Intelligent Design are holding themselves up as more rigorously scientific than scientists. The pro-science side is closer to the truth on this debate (science has never been what scientists used to say it is and what the ID people - having co-opted that rhetoric - pretend it is now). But the new description of humble and open science is still totally untenable. After the jump, why rhetorical theory makes nonsense of the Chris Mooney version of scientific identity and how empirical controversies bear rhetorical theory out.

On the left, what you needed to store 1GB of data in 1988. On the right, a tiny 1GB SD drive that's already at least three generations old:

So there you have it: over the course of 20 years, 1GB of storage has gone from the size of a Yaris' engine to something smaller than a postage stamp. And hell, a 1GB flash card is actually pretty small compared to what else is out there. Pretty amazing stuff.

There's a rhetorical and political problem underneath the undeniably breathtaking jolt that is this picture: how to explain, anticipate, or - if one is so inclined - resist technological change. For some people that's perhaps the central ethical problem of contemporary technological culture. For others, resistance is a non-issue insisted upon by busybodies who are - for largely ideological reasons - unwilling to acclimate themselves to change and progress. The tension between Burkean frames of rejection and acceptance is probably constitutive of what it means to use symbols - but the sheer material weight of technological progress is certainly not innocent in influencing people to default to one frame rather than another.

On the other hand, we really like having 2gb of expandable space in our Treo. And our camera. And our hackneyed card reader / jump drive. And we're pretty sure that the giant motor thing on the table wouldn't fit in any of those peripherals.

References:
* 20 years of technological progress summed up in one picture [Sci Fi Tech]

Previously:
* Bacteria Seem To Be Doing A Lot Of Thinking These Days
* A Peircean Checklist For Conscious Artificial Intelligence
* The Psychoanalytic Pushback Against Philosophy Of Consciousness